A while back I wrote about the fact that most of us are clients.

When you hire the next person along in the production line (director, photographer, illustrator etc.) you do all the things that you despair of in your own client (I’m talking to/about creatives here).

You might second-guess the person above you, you might impose strictures that may not result in the very best work and you could well get them to go back and do it again.

In return, they behave like you do: going off and making the thing they want to make instead of listening to you, having frustrated arguments with you through a third party and generally using someone else’s money to create something they like even if it doesn’t coincide absolutely with the agreed brief.

Then you see a client behaving in the same way as you and you simply cannot believe how immovable/ungrateful/implacable they are.

Of course, this happens to greater or lesser degrees, but show me a creative who says he has never behaved in the annoying way that his client does and I’ll show you a fibbing cunt.

Anyway, rather than just repeat an old post, I did have a new point to add which struck me this morning: the chain of production stops with the client. That may sound obvious, but it’s actually a bit odd. Although some of them might have to suffer for a real dog’s dinner of a campaign that results in their company’s factory being firebombed, most of them can just chuck something out there without having to point to an actual upswing in sales. There are so many other factors involved (distribution, pricing, retail space etc.) that advertising cannot being expected fully to succeed (or fail). You can always blame crap results on something else, which is why clients like to make the safe MOR campaign: there is barely any risk of the 1/100 chance of making a true stinker. Tick the boxes and cross the Ts and no one will fire you; spunk a million on a Facebook page celebrating dog poo that gets 14 fans and someone might well hand you your P45.

So whatever decision a client makes, unless it’s pretty darn crazy, it’s going to be right. They even get to research what they put out so that if something does go wrong they can point to what that roomful of mouthbreathing plebs said and plead due diligence.

So they never really have to answer to anyone, which is why we are their bitches, all day long and twice on Thursdays.

Enjoy!

Hang on, don’t switch to Redtube just yet. This is going to be immensely fucking interesting.

I just read in Private Eye (and other places) that BP have bought certain search words and phrases on Google so that when you type them in you get BP’s version of how well the clean up operation in the Gulf of Mexico is going.

You’ve got ‘oil spill’.

‘Gulf of Mexico’.

And ‘BP are cunts’.

Oh. They haven’t bought that one. How odd.

This is (as you know) called ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ or SEO. I guess it’s another way rich people/corporations can control the flow of information. Thank god they can have more power. I was getting worried there for a moment.

But it kind of makes the whole thing bullshit (by ‘kind of’ I mean ‘completely and utterly). If you are the number one search result, great; if you are an ad, fine. But why put the two together? It would be like sticking a massive ad that looked like a news article above the headline in your daily paper and hoping people would think it was the actual story.

This has now extended to the trending topics on Twitter, which yesterday had the ‘sponsored trending’ topic of Toy Story 3. To me that translates as: nobody’s really talking about TS3 so we bought our way onto this list hoping that you are so thick you’ll think an ad is a ‘real thing’.

Well, why not? It works for product placement, advertorials and all the mentions of Sky TV in The Sun.

Funny how no one really seems to mind being treated like a complete effing idiot.

Or do we?

I was reading this post by ‘Hey Whipple’ author, Luke Sullivan, when it occurred to me that my first creative department was also quite good (not as good as 90s Fallon, but good in its own way).

When I started at Y&R in 1996 my boss was Mike Cozens. He was a very good CD, turning boring old Y&R into the agency that produced this (by Ewan Patterson and Graeme Norways):

He had two D&AD golds from his time at CDP and TBWA, then did a lot of BBH’s best ads of the 80s. He also had a great phrase: ‘Stick it on the wall and see if you can beat it.’ The nicest way of saying ‘that’s shit’ I’ve ever heard.

Also in the department was Paul Catmur. He did the wonderful Dime Bar ads with Harry Enfield, but has since moved down under to CD Pencil-winning work in a variety of agencies:

Another team who got together there was Richard Denney and Dave Henderson, who went on to make the odd decent ad at Saatchi and Saatchi:

And then there was Lee Goulding and Leighton Ballet, who did this ad which was big and awarded and well-loved (I have since reconnected with Lee during a stint at Lowe last year. A thoroughly good bloke):

And Ben Carey, who went on to become half of the huge-selling, D&AD-nominated Benrik team.

Also, Richard and Andy who have been doing some of the better work at BBH in recent years:

That wasn’t all, but that’s all I have clips and links for, so sorry, Anita, Rob, Majella, Sam, Martin, Andy and others.

Anyway, this is a long way of saying that I wasn’t as good as them, so I deserved the sack for playing ping pong on my desk (among other things).

I forgot there was an advertising thing going on in the South of France.

Then someone sent me an email that mentioned it and I felt this thing explode inside me, like the fart of an arthiritic, palsied, neophyte fairyfly.*

Um… So there’s some nominations for some UK agencies for some ads.

I’m sorry, I can’t be arsed to write any more.

(I wonder if there’s a twelve step ‘recovery from advertising’ course. Step six: realise that there is nothing less important in the world than the C***** *********** ******.)

*The smallest animal on earth.

Well, as the saying goes, you can’t.

That is, of course, complete and utter bollocks.

It’s quite easy to tell what’s inside a pink book with an illustration of a pair of high heels and glass of champagne on the cover, especially if the title is ‘shopping and tediously unsuccessful attempts at relationships.’ Or a white book with a a faded black and white image of a sad little boy under the title ‘But Uncle Clarence, that’s my winkie’.

I don’t recall many things I ‘learned’ during my degree, but one of them was the fact that around 95% of our communication is non-verbal. Clothes, accent, demeanour, lardiness, expressions etc. all tell you much more than the mendacious shite most of us spew on a daily basis. I learned this around the time political correctness was actually going mad. One of the girls in my seminar then whined about the fact that this simply leads to prejudice, or the assessment of people before you really get to know them. Well, I had news for her: prejudice is practiced all day, every day by every single one of us. Can you imagine what life would be like if you assumed nothing about anyone you ever met? It’d be a fucking nightmare and you’d never get anything done.

Anyway, that relates to a conversation I had recently with the MD of an ad agency. I told him that I thought his agency’s appearance was consistent with his agency’s work. Just like my son is turning into a small version of me (tough shit), an agency and its ads will take on the characteristics of those who run it.

Look at your own place. Is it middle of the road and dull in appearance? What are your ads like? It it a bit groovier? Does that translate to the work?

Most people think Wiedens and Mother are amongst the most creative agencies in town. Well, they look that way too. That’s because they are creatively led and independent, so if someone wants the staff seated around a giant table or a reception that looks like an endearing art installation-cum-bike rack, then that’s fine.

This also helps to select the clients. Some would run a mile at such an unconventional approach to interior design, but then they’d probably run a mile at the correspondingly unconventional approach to advertising.

It’s the all-important first impression; a great big speech bubble saying ‘this is the kind of place we are. If you like it, come on in. If not, maybe you should fuck off to Euros’.

See? Judging books by their covers is a common and useful process.

And it’s one of the reasons I can’t stand Tony Parsons. The other is the aching shiteness of absolutely everything he writes.

View any website like you’re at a World Cup game. Or in a giant bottle being chased by a giant wasp.

(Thanks, L.)

I love the fact that there is a new Video Band. Duran Duran were a great Video Band. Radiohead, Jamiroquai, The Chemical Brothers… All great Video Bands. Now OK Go seem intent on joining them:

Guardian Roulette.

HOW TO WRITE A THRILLER
By Ian Fleming (1962)

People often ask me, “How do you manage to think of that? What an extraordinary (or sometimes extraordinarily dirty) mind you must have.” I certainly have got vivid powers of imagination, but I don’t think there is anything very odd about that.

We are all fed fairy stories and adventure stories and ghost stories for the first 20 years of our lives, and the only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money. But, to revert to my first book, Casino Royale, there are strong incidents in the book which are all based on fact. I extracted them from my wartime memories of the Naval Intelligence Division of the Admiralty, dolled them up, attached a hero, a villain and a heroine, and there was the book.

The first was the attempt on Bond’s life outside the Hotel Splendide. SMERSH had given two Bulgarian assassins box camera cases to hang over their shoulders. One was of red leather and the other one blue. SMERSH told the Bulgarians that the red one con-tained a bomb and the blue one a powerful smoke screen, under cover of which they could escape.

One was to throw the red bomb and the other was then to press the button on the blue case. But the Bulgars mistrusted the plan and decided to press the button on the blue case and envelop themselves in the smoke screen before throwing the bomb. In fact, the blue case also contained a bomb powerful enough to blow both the Bulgars to fragments and remove all evidence which might point to SMERSH.

Farfetched, you might say. In fact, this was the method used in the Russian attempt on Von Papen’s life in Ankara in the middle of the war. On that occasion the assassins were also Bulgarians and they were blown to nothing while Von Papen and his wife, walking from their house to the embassy; were only bruised by the blast.

So you see the line between fact and fantasy is a very narrow one. I think I could trace most of the central incidents in my books to some real happenings.

We thus come to the final and supreme hurdle in the writing of a thriller. You must know thrilling things before you can write about them. Imagination alone isn’t enough, but stories you hear from friends or read in the papers can be built up by a fertile imagination and a certain amount of research and documentation into incidents that will also ring true in fiction.

Having assimilated all this encouraging advice, your heart will nevertheless quail at the physical effort involved in writing even a thriller. I warmly sympathise with you. I too, am lazy My heart sinks when I contemplate the two or three hundred virgin sheets of foolscap I have to besmirch with more or less well chosen words in order to produce a 60,000 word book.

One of the essentials is to create a vacuum in my life which can only be satisfactorily filled by some form of creative work – whether it be writing, painting, sculpting, composing or just building a boat – I was about to get married – a prospect which filled me with terror and mental fidget. To give my hands something to do, and as an antibody to my qualms about the marriage state after 43 years as a bachelor, I decided one day to damned well sit down and write a book.

The therapy was successful. And while I still do a certain amount of writing in the midst of my London Life, it is on my annual visits to Jamaica that all my books have been written.

But, failing a hideaway such as I possess, I can recommend hotel bedrooms as far removed from your usual “life” as possible. Your anonymity in these drab surroundings and your lack of friends and distractions will create a vacuum which should force you into a writing mood and, if your pocket is shallow, into a mood which will also make you write fast and with application. I do it all on the typewriter, using six fingers. The act of typing is far less exhausting than the act of writing, and you end up with a more or less clean manuscript The next essential is to keep strictly to a routine.

I write for about three hours in the morning – from about 9:30 till 12:30and I do another hour’s work between six and seven in the evening. At the end of this I reward myself by numbering the pages and putting them away in a spring-back folder. The whole of this four hours of daily work is devoted to writing narrative.

I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used “terrible” six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.

I don’t even pause from writing to choose the right word or to verify spelling or a fact. All this can be done when your book is finished.

When my book is completed I spend about a week going through it and correcting the most glaring errors and rewriting passages. I then have it properly typed with chapter headings and all the rest of the trimmings. I then go through it again, have the worst pages retyped and send it off to my publisher.

They are a sharp-eyed bunch at Jonathan Cape and, apart from commenting on the book as a whole, they make detailed suggestions which I either embody or discard. Then the final typescript goes to the printer and in due course the galley or page proofs are there and you can go over them with a fresh eye. Then the book is published and you start getting letters from people saying that Vent Vert is made by Balmain and not by Dior, that the Orient Express has vacuum and not hydraulic brakes, and that you have mousseline sauce and not Bearnaise with asparagus.

Such mistakes are really nobody’s fault except the author’s, and they make him blush furiously when he sees them in print. But the majority of the public does not mind them or, worse, does not even notice them, and it is a dig at the author’s vanity to realise how quickly the reader’s eye skips across the words which it has taken him so many months to try to arrange in the right sequence.

But what, after all these labours, are the rewards of writing and, in my case, of writing thrillers?

First of all, they are financial. You don’t make a great deal of money from royalties and translation rights and so forth and, unless you are very industrious and successful, you could only just about live on these profits, but if you sell the serial rights and the film rights, you do very well. Above all, being a successful writer is a good life. You don’t have to work at it all the time and you carry your office around in your head. And you are far more aware of the world around you.

Writing makes you more alive to your surroundings and, since the main ingredient of living, though you might not think so to look at most human beings, is to be alive, this is quite a worthwhile by-product of writing.

As an Arsenal fan, I’ve read Fever Pitch far too many times. It contains many fine lessons, but the one I always remember is that there is no such thing as destiny.

The passage that mentions this talks about an Arsenal defender called Gus Caesar. He was basically a figure of fun (and target of boos) for Arsenal fans and was recently voted number three in a poll of the 50 worst players ever to grace the top flight. But, as Hornby points out, he was almost certainly the best player in his school by a long way, then one of the best in his district and county, then got in at Arsenal, making a bright enough start to be selected for England U21s. Unfortunately, though, he was prone to errors, including one which cost Arsenal the 1987 League Cup. He barely played for the Gunners after that, leaving on a free transfer a few years later, ending his career playing for teams like Colchester.

Here’s the passage from the book:

“To get where he did, Gus Caesar clearly had more talent than nearly everyone of his generation… and it still wasn’t quite enough. […] Gus must have known he was good, just as any pop band who has ever played the Marquee know they are destined for Madison Square Garden and an NME front cover, and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years away from the Booker. You trust that feeling with your life, you feel the strength and determination it gives you coursing through your veins like heroin… and it doesn’t mean anything at all.”

The reason I mention this is because there is also a flipside to that.

Even if you appear unlikely to set the world alight as a youth, there’s no reason why you can’t do it later in life. Plenty of people have had their most productive periods when they found the time and place that was right for them to flourish.

Nothing’s been decided yet. Just because you’ve failed, doesn’t mean you can’t or won’t succeed.

In fact, I believe the above passage illustrates the career trajectory of Mr. Hornby himself. I don’t suppose that in his most depressed days of the late eighties that he thought he’d be an Oscar-nominated, multi-million-selling author.

Much of the best talent in UK advertising over the past fifteen years has emanated from one agency’s creative department during one throbbing great purple patch. The department in question may not have produced their best work at this time and place, but they did pretty well and mostly went on to real greatness.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mid-Nineties Leagas Delaney:

Dave Dye
Sean Doyle
Paul Belford
Nigel Roberts
Tony Barry
Tony Davidson
Kim Papworth
Rob Burleigh
Dave Beverley
Steve Paskin
Tom Hudson
Will Awdry
And, of course, Tim Delaney.

I have heard tell from some of the above that Tim would often dash off a Pencil-winning corker then tell you to go and make it.

That would be a hell of an environment to learn from.

And they had brilliant clients, such as Adidas, The Guardian and Pepe Jeans.

The ad I really wanted to show from this era was the Pepe Jeans ‘How To Talk To Teenagers’ ad, which was shot by the Douglas Brothers. I seem to remember a car being dropped from a crane. Alas, I can’t find it on the Net.

I guess the sad post-script to this is that many of the people above went on to greater things, yet Leagas Delaney itself seems to have shuffled off that grey corner of Adland where once-great agencies go to die (the corpse of Simons Palmer has a gravestone next to CDP). Maybe things have moved on and there is no place for a ‘strong’ opinion that puts the work first.

I heard that Tim once had a commercial edited but was rather disappointed (fucking furious) to see the somewhat crappy result.
‘What’s that?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ said the editor, ‘I just cut your script.’
‘But I don’t want you to cut my script. I want you to cut me something brilliant.’
The ad was supposed to be a 30″, but the editor returned with a 60″.
‘Fantastic,’ said Tim. ‘We’ll tell the client they’re running 60s.’

Do I even need to write, ‘Could you imagine that happening today?’?

I’m currently freelancing at Wieden and Kennedy in London.

I’ll write a more complete post about what an enjoyable experience that is at some point in the future, but for now I thought it might be good to tell you about this morning when Dan Wieden came to give a talk to the agency (surreptitiously taken photo above).

He has an air, that I have only seen once before, in David Abbott, of a very successful, very contented man. This might be due to the fact that he is very successful and very contented. And loaded.

The talk consisted of plans for the future and praise for the London branch of the network, which he said came up often as the most creative office in W&K.

I’m not sure I’m supposed to give any of the details, but I think I can say that he’s not looking at the future. He’s looking at the future beyond the future.

Whatever his plans are, and those of his worldwide MDs and ECDs (John Jay, Worldwide ECD, was also there), I left with the impression that he knew it would take a great deal of effort to get to where his next vision wants to go, but that he will definitely get there.

It’s a very creative place.