Never mind David Cameron, I just think it’s about time the British public shoved a rolled up copy of The Sun back into the ageing, puckered anus of Rupert Sodding Murdoch.
With that in mind…
Thanks to Naughty Creative for pointing this out (oddly, I got the Twitter alert from Media Guardian and, despite a general propensity to watch any old crap to kill a minute or two, I just thought, ‘Oh, that sounds like rubbish,’ and ignored it).
It can be seen here.
I think my instinct was right. It’s one of those boring old ads where a city of people becomes amazed at something. They start smiling and snapping it with their camera phones – you know the drill. This time they’re watching really large banks of Samsung 3D TVs that show some 3D stuff that’s is, quite frankly, dull. This time, however, it also has the indeterminate gloss of pan-Euro nothingness that makes its (apparently) genuine ‘thrills’ look fake.
NC also pointed out that the credit for ad goes not to any creatives from the agency (CHI), but the Marketing Director:
‘Samsung’s campaign has been masterminded by the electronics manufacturer’s marketing director, Mikah Martin-Cruz, the executive behind the famous “Paint” and “Play-Doh” commercials for Sony’s Bravia TV.
“The campaign really captures the spirit of 3D TV and brings to life the amazing experience the technology can deliver,” said Martin-Cruz.’
I wonder what he did to mastermind it. Perhaps he wrote this piece of shit. Congrats, Mr. Martin-Cruz, you’ve made a vanilla blancmange of an ad. You may be ‘the executive behind the famous “Paint” and “Play-Doh” commercials for Sony’s Bravia TV,’ but that smacks of those movie trailers that say, ‘From the Executive Producer of Bridget Jones’s Diary’. Why would this connection cause you to give a shit? And anyway, weren’t there other clients behind ‘Paint’ and Play-Doh’? And didn’t Juan Cabral chip in with a few suggestions?
To be honest, all this article does is make Mr. Martin-Cruz look like a bit of a desperate twat, a little toddler jumping around with his hands in the air because he’s done a really smashing poo.
Well, congrats, Mr. M-C, a poo has been done and now we all know who’s responsible.
(Via The Grumpy Brit.)
Why do people make these things? Really? I have no idea why people would willingly, enthusiastically want to look like giant, grade-A, 24-carat, nailed on fuckwits. Isn’t life hard enough without going out of your way to make people across the word look at you and think, ‘What a humongous bell-end. I’d sooner eat a crack baby than spend a millisecond in the company of that utter prat’?
If any of you are gearing up to make one of these for the summer, or perhaps you’re thinking ahead to Christmas, just remember that you are exactly what Bill Hicks had in mind:
By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising…kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I’m doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan’s little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: ‘There’s gonna be a joke comin’ up.’ There’s no fuckin’ joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself…borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something…rid the world of your evil fuckin’ presence.
But whoever you are going to vote for, today is the last day to register.
Go on. Emmeline Pankhurst didn’t chain herself to that horse (or whatever she did) just so that you could play GTA 4 instead of deciding who’s going to run the country.
Or maybe she did.
She was, after all, a very strange girl.
Here is a selection of the posters I saw on a journey from Belsize Park to South Kensington on Saturday:
Questions: have the agency concerned seen the incredibly, incredibly, incredibly fucking famous campaign known as ‘Got Milk?‘, that has been pumping out of Goodby’s for years? If so, why have they so blatantly stolen such a well known campaign? If not, do they not check out any advertising from around the world? Did they perhaps do it in conjunction with ‘Got Milk?’? If so, why not use the endline and art direction? And is there nothing Ramsay won’t plug? Tampax? Paedophilia websites? AIDS blood in a can?
Next:
By that they mean, ‘Go and see something with your grandkids BEFORE YOU DIE, YOU OLD FUCKER.’
Last, but not least:
‘The new busy’? What the fuck is that? To me it looks like the new busy is a colossal ringpiece. By the way, these ads are everywhere on the tube, but I have very little idea what they are on about. And as for how they relate to Microsoft/Hotmail – dear reader, I am stumped. However, I could not give the first shit. To me, Microsoft is not a company I choose to make part of my life. They make Word, don’t they? Or do they? Who cares? Fuck off you boring bunch of dweebs.
Last Saturday I went to see the play Enron, which, surprisingly enough, was about the Enron scandal.
It was good, but some parts were great.
The section that impressed me most was at the end where the disgraced Enron CEO, who got 24 years in jail for being a giant shitwhistle, tried to justify his actions.
He showed a graph that demonstrated how the bubbles, ie, the foolish overreachings of the human race had ultimately paved the way for its greatest successes. One example was the first dotcom boom, where we all rushed headlong into an explosion of interest and investment that couldn’t possibly be sustained. After the inevitable crash we got web 2.0, a much safer and more sensible development of t’internet which Enron’s author argues would not have been possible without the first, overly aggressive kick up the jacksie.
Of course, this is just another iteration of the concept of groundbreakers; men and women who show us the way by pushing the envelope too far. They didn’t know how far to push it because the parameters had yet to be set, but without the pioneers there can be no progress.
Which brings me, with a weary sense of inevitability, to advertising.
To progress in any way, the industry must be prepared for failure. It must be ready for things to go wrong so that we might learn by them and move forward with the knowledge we have gained.
But in more straitened times no fucker wants to do that. For the sake of the fee everyone wants to stay tucked very nicely within the envelope thank you very much. The aversion to risk, which leads to the truncation of progress, is currently all-pervasive, and it would be interesting to see where the next boom of anything will occur.
I find it interesting that this fallow period has followed directly the all-conquering Gorilla.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression that all over the world clients are currently asking for their own Gorilla, yet would never approve one in a million years (legend has it that a client didn’t really approve Gorilla. They had to wait for Fallon to make it off their own backs and get a positive response from YouTube to be convinced that it would work).
And there’s the problem: we all need to be complicit in moving things forward or the best intentions of one part of the process will be met with a brick wall from another.
Will we see another ‘boom’ that forces progress anytime soon? Well, since Martin Sorrell is so fond of making absolutely fucking cock-eyed predictions that never come within a barge pole of reality, I might as well do the same: the next truly great ad will happen in 2012, and it will be for Brain’s Faggots.
Mark my words.
Properly laugh-out-loud funny 5 second films:
Best promo since Windowlicker:
LOOSEWORLD x Waverly Films: Reggie Watts in F_CK SH_T STACK from LOOSEWORLD on Vimeo.
3-D fun (thanks, P).
Will iPads be really cool? Of course they will.
And my favourite Tiger Woods spoof (thanks, L).
A sound engineer once told me that he was working on an ad with Fred&Farid® when he said something along the lines of, ‘What do think of this mix, Farid and Fred?’
Before giving their opinion, the premier grenouilles de publicite replied, ‘Uh, (name of engineer, who will remain anonymous), not Farid and Fred. Never Farid and Fred. Always Fred and Farid.’
Leaving aside the – ahem – continentality of this assertion, it does throw up (deliberate turn of phrase there) the issue of name order, how it happens and what it means.
I’ve given this an entire crap’s-worth of thought and have come to the conclusion that it is a bit random, but maybe if we look at some examples we can see if there’s any method behind the madness:
Tom and Walt: London’s original team-as-brand. Would ‘Walt and Tom’ have worked as well? Yep, but running ‘Walt’ into ‘and’ is a little bit trickier for the tongue than running ‘Tom’ into it.
Richard (Flintham) and Andy (McLeod): This one makes no sense at all. It gives you ‘and And’ to say. Andy and Richard would be much better. Too late now (unless Richard and Andy at BBH want to try reversing their names).
Nigel and Paul: To be honest, I can’t remember if they were Paul and Nigel or Nigel and Paul. When I worked with Daryl the order often swapped and I think that happened with N&P too.
Shit.
I think, against some pretty stiff competition, this is the most pointless post I’ve ever written.
I should really have just deleted it and let you all speculate as to the wisdom of hiring Jonathan Burley at CHI and who’s going to replace him at Leo Burnett.
But I thought you’d prefer something, however shit, to read.
And people love a Fred&Farid-are-ponces story, don’t they?
If any of you have ever shown a script to a creative director, or a portfolio to a critting team, then you’ll be familiar with that chunk of time when the work is perused and all conversation stops.
It’s an odd moment that I don’t think I’ve encountered anywhere else, but it never seems to get less awkward.
So here, for your more joyful life are some things you can do to occupy yourself during the wait:
1. Whenever Daryl and I did a crit we’d swap the portfolio for an awards annual and suggest the team flick through it for a few minutes. They seemed glad of the distraction and we preferred not to have them trying to decipher every cough and mumble for positive or negative signs.
2. Be like Hannibal Lecter: create a palace in your mind that you can walk round when things get too much for you or you’d simply like to visit somewhere nice. He did it when children were misbehaving near him on a plane; you can do it in a CD’s office. And it needn’t be a palace. Why not recreate your favourite brothel or maximum security prison for violent sex offenders?
3. Count awards. CDs tend to have awards; invariably, that’s part of the reason they’ve become CDs. Have a look and see if they’re the kind that are worth winning, or simply a couple of dozen Mobiuses or Regional Addys. This is very handy information because it allows you to to work out whether to take his opinions seriously or simply laugh in his face.
4. Pretend you’ve received an important email on your iPhone then play Angry Birds or Bejewelled 2. If you don’t have an iPhone just excuse yourself to the toilet and read The Sun for a few minutes. Don’t worry – they’ll wait for you to return.
5. Stare out of the window. There should be at least one in every CD’s office so take a look through it, plan your route home and see if the traffic looks like a bit of an arse.
6. Talk to your partner just loud enough to be heard by the CD then make sure you say something complimentary about something in his office (‘Wow! He’s got a box-set of The Wire! What impeccable taste!). The CD will then like you a little bit more. Possibly enough to give you a placement or pass your script.
7. Scratch yourself, but make it subtle.
Hope that helped.
Other suggestions welcome.
However, really sweary ones about people you hate at CHI will be rejected, just like the fifteen I received yesterday.