Occasionally I get asked how I have time to write a blog, a book and whatever ads need doing on a particular day.

The short answer is that I just get up and, at some point, do them all. I also read two or three newspapers, change nappies, have three meals, watch a movie, chat, email, play some Scrabble on Facebook, stare out of the window, Tweet, read other blogs, waste time on The Superficial and Hot Chicks With Douchebags, watch a TED lecture, play half an hour of Bejewelled 2 on the iPhone, get dressed, have a shower, enjoy five or six trips to the lav, buy some food, watch The Daily Show, read Rolling Stone/Private Eye/Q, listen to some Led Zeppelin, play with my son, put him to bed, pretend to talk to my daughter just to stop her crying in my face, read some of a book, comment on a few blogs and, well…a whole bunch of other things.

Maybe I am a little more constructive with my time then some people, but I still manage to fit plenty of wastage into an average day. Plenty.

But then I do a few things that produce a visible result. This blog is a daily (weekdaily, that is) demonstration of how I use my time. It probably doesn’t take as long as you think, but then I’ve written about 1500 posts in the last four years so the practice has made the process quicker and easier. Same with writing ads: they don’t take as long as they used to and the results are (I hope) better. The book writing takes as long as it takes, but if I didn’t have one that was about to be published it might appear that I was wasting my time noodling around with that.

I have a theory that if everyone applied themselves, and circumstances allowed, we could probably all do our day’s work in about three hours. However, things always seem to get in the way. Those things may be helpful little spongey things, like finding YouTube videos to be inspired by (nick) that make the three hours easier, but usually they’ll just be time wasting bollocks.

There are six billion people and rising in an increasingly automated world. They can’t possibly all have enough proper constructive work to fill a day (or eight hours). So we have lots of jobs that aren’t strictly necessary and therefore involve time-wasting. For example, if you have a planner at your agency who takes a month to go back and forth with a client and come up with a strategy that a monkey could have thought up in ten seconds, then that’s time wasted right there: both client and planner are doing something unnecessary for their money. Ditto creatives who have to do all the cannon fodder that gets shot down by a client who has to see 3/4/5/6/7/8/9 routes before he can dither about for a few days picking the one least likely to get him fired. Ditto CDs who now have to go to dozens of client meetings because the account handlers are shit at their jobs. The same with editors who have to produce another cut because of some shitbrained and unnecessary changes that the client’s wife just thought of. Then there’s account handlers who have to go back to the client for the eighth time because of some CHRISTING FUCKING INSANITY THAT COULD BE AVOIDED IF ONLY THE PEOPLE CONCERNED HAD EVEN A THIRD OF A FUCKING BRAIN CELL AND A LITTLE MORE COURAGE THAN A MOUSE THAT’S ABOUT TO BE SPLAYED OPEN AND ELECTROCUTED IN A COSMETICS LAB.

Anyway, the bottom line is that too much time is wasted in stupidity, inconsistency, fear, arse-covering and just plain old ‘being a cunt’. If you can avoid as much of that as possible you could find the time to write a blog, play with your kids or watch a box set of Deadwood. Or, if you run an agency and decided to remove all the wastage, you could probably manage with half the staff.

But then there’s be more unemployed.

So maybe agencies are just benevolent work homes that keep the jobless figures down and potential alcoholics off the streets.

It was quite interesting yesterday.

First he talked about the recent news that kids are being used as brand ambassadors. Like me, he didn’t think this was a big deal as he assumed that it had been going on for a while already.

Then he talked about Kraft’s recent takeover of Cadbury:

‘…the consequent, regrettable job losses are not because of a sudden lapse of conscience at Cadbury; from the day its stock was floated, it didn’t have a conscience, any more than a circular saw has a soul or a great white shark a sense of irony.’

Exactly. It’s amazing how we think that corporations are in business for anything other than money (I guess a very few are in it for something else, but money drives about 99.99999999999999999999999999999999% of them). Businesses know we like to anthropomorphise them and they like to exploit this through a process known as ‘branding‘. This is essentially a way of making a soulless, faceless entity appear to have a face and a soul, and we all lap it up day after day.

He goes on to talk about all those Books for Schools/Playgrounds for Poor Areas schemes, pointing out that their only function is to make more money for the corporation, and that maybe we shouldn’t participate in them:

‘”Well, wouldn’t that be a shame for schools?” you might say. Not really. Companies would have to woo us honestly, with better services or lower prices, and would be unable to cream off enough to sling a few coppers in our education system’s begging hat. But customers could always spend their saving on schools, directly or through taxation, rather than via the purchase of 2,000 creme eggs, 4% of the value of which would go towards a basketball hoop.’

I wrote a post about that in this blog’s previous location. The strange, complicated and ultimately wasteful relationship that we have with brands is an odd kind of insanity, yet most of us can’t stop ourselves participating in it.

And as people who create ads, we don’t only participate, we engineer.

Did you know you were doing that?

Do you care?

The excellent list of the most deserving Oscar winners (can I show myself to be a pseudy wanker by saying that I’m delighted to see the inclusion of ‘Sunrise’ at number two?)

Cassetteboy Jeremy Kyle:

(Thanks, A. Via Twitter.)

And Princess Diana tweeting from Heaven.

Another questionable selection.

If I think of anything better I’ll stick it up over the course of the day.

Someone has compiled a list of what they believe to be Nike’s best commercials.

I disagree with a bunch of it.

First, Y2K (their number seven) is my number one.

Then there’s the omission of Tag:

:

And Parklife:

And the grandaddy of all those ‘lets have an unusual game of football’ ads, Good vs Evil:

Actually, there are loads that didn’t make the list, like that one where all the posters kick the ball across the world.

But different strokes for different folks, eh?

UPDATE: off topic, but you can now watch the making of that brilliant Old Spice commercial.

Here’s the new Visa ad:

It’s full of many lovely touches that make it obvious that someone very good directed it (take a bow, Chris Palmer).

I love the guy getting thinner as he goes on.

And the fact that it doesn’t get African/World-Cuppy until you’ve had a chance to get into it.

Nice one Saatchi and Saatchi London.

As an addendum to yesterday’s post, I thought it might be interesting to talk about the ingratitude of clients who get work for free.

(I should just say that I am writing this a few minutes after watching Season 2, Episode 7 of Mad Men. If you’ve never seen it or don’t recall, it’s the episode where Peggy has to make a poster for the local church dance. She does it as a favour but in a brilliant scene the two old ladies on the church committee are as picky and demanding as a massive paying client.)

Having experienced this in many guises (work for friends, internal work, work for charities, ‘favours’ etc.) I try to avoid it (unless it’s a charity I really believe in, or a client I can trust not to be a prick). This is because the hoops you have to jump through are no less than with a paying client, but you can’t help feeling that you are putting forth a kindness that ought to be appreciated.

If you are going to make the effort to do a bunch of work for someone for nothing then, assuming you haven’t gone crazy with brief, you should have that work accepted. The rebriefs, nit-picking and dissatisfied sighs are, frankly, really rather rude and I’m surprised at how often they appear (this may be due to the quality of my work of course).

So, no more.

But this reminds me of a piece of advice one of my bosses once gave me – the title of this post.

And it’s true. You do something for free, it is immediately stripped of the value it has in the most common measure we have, and that means it is stripped of most of its value.

Shame, really.

Giving stuff away is one of life’s great pleasures.

Last night I sat down to write a post entitled ‘Spare a thought for the client’.

It was intended to be an attempt to look at the client’s job from a different perspective so that we might empathise with them a little more instead of simply dismissing them as…now, let me think…what’s the word again?…Oh yes: Cunts.

I met an ex-client during the Christmas break and he explained how it’s actually a massive pressure having to show your ad in front of a 3000-strong sales team who basically think that you wrote it and directed it. Then there’s the MD, who may not share your enthusiasm for spending another 100k just because ‘it’s Frank’.

So I kind of wrote the above then spent ages trying to think of other tough things clients have to go through.

Reader, I failed.

Clients don’t have it hard. Of course, I expect they have all the little political bothers that most people have in most jobs, but really, it’s a piece of piss.

You get to make five agencies stick their tits in a blender just for the chance to spend 50k showing you how good they might be, then you appoint your mate, spend three months with some twat from planning to work out your strategy (something that you can usually boil down to ‘sell more of what you sell’), then you can insist on as many creative ‘routes’ as you like because no one’s going to fire you unless you’ve buggered their spouses on YouTube (and even then it’ll be 50/50), keep making changes until your tasteless, pea-sized excuse for a brain is satisfied, get the account team to sort out your dry cleaning, kid’s birthday party and dinner at The Ivy, fiddle with the ad some more, put the resultant dog’s dinner on air then claim you’re a genius when you get a 0.8% sales lift in a ‘very tricky sector’.

So you’ve got to show the ad to a bunch of grinning loons in the Slough International Conference Centre? Big fucking deal.

I’ll admit that some clients are really good – the ones who do the job properly.

But most are a bunch of bollock-brained shitmongers who don’t know their arses from the Eiffel Tower.

There are of course exceptions.

Can’t really fault this (thanks to Tom Kuntz for shooting it and G for recommending it):

And there’s this track that I’ve been constantly listening to for the last two weeks. Sort of Phil Spector meets gangsta rap (thanks to A for sending it to me):

Also nice (thanks, W. Via Twitter).

Proper Toy Story Three trailer.

That’s it. Sorry. Pretty crap.

More crap next week.

x

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It’s the way the Daily Mail suggests that it gets its inspiration from fascinating moments around the world, or even that it cares about such things.

Because, even without resorting the usual reasons to hate the Daily Mail, it’s fairly obvious that it couldn’t give the first fuck about the important things going on in other countries, never mind the wanky bits of fun.

(By the way, when I looked this up, I found that the ad seemed to be six months old, although I saw it for the first time last night.)

Golly, I’m really enjoying this week on the blog. Loads of good comments and a thorough debate of the issues that will end up making the usual difference (fuck all).

But never mind. There’s still much fun to be had gazing at our respective navels while the other people at the agency slide a glass-encrusted baseball bat up the anus of creativity for good.

Off the back of a few of the comments, I did start to wonder just how good creative departments really are.

Do we have dozens of sleeping giants kept down by the general malaise that is currently choking the industry?

Or do we have, as it appears on the surface, more of the um…less giant people who wouldn’t know how to execute Surfer or Balls even if you handed them the finished script?

Do the conditions make the geniuses or vice versa?

And on that point, how good do you think you are?

Try this simple test:

You are the marketing wonk at Charlie’s Chocolates. You have an ad to make and half a million to production to make it. What do you do?

Let’s leave aside the logistical difficulties of doing two jobs at once and ask: would you make your own ad, or would you farm it out to someone else? If so, whom?

Do you think Trevor Beattie is a populist genius who will really make your brand famous? Do you think a smattering of Silburn would give you a John West Bear or ”Ave it’? Perhaps you would like an ad with a glossy fashion vibe that you’d love Tiger to produce?

So (and remember, no pedantic comments about the practicalities): you or A.N. Other?

(If you’re not a creative you might still fancy yourself to do the business, but if you don’t, feel free to nominate someone to do it for you.)

(Oh, and go and see Dave Trott speak.)