The last book I finished this week was Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton.

Unfortunately, the only thing I really learned from this was that I shouldn’t take a dead man’s book and shove it out in the shops without making sure it’s really finished. The book is slighter than even a book of this nature ought to be. Entertaining but kind of empty, a bit like eating a sponge finger.

That aside, you voted Grrr as your Gold Pencil of Gold Pencils. However, it was so close between that ad, the iPod and Surfer that I declare it a tie.

Well done to everyone involved.

Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent to the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and the strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them.
(Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy)

I liked that idea of the importance of play. I must admit, I’d never thought about it before, but that notion of why play seems intrinsically more appealing than work must have its deep and fundamental reasons. It seems that the elements of competition, testing yourself and risk are something we respond to instinctively, but why?

I suppose the chance to find out if you are better at something than someone else is attractive so that you can possibly realign your self perception in a more positive way.

Then the testing of ones own skills could turn out well because the uncovering of some new ability would be a good experience.

Last there’s the risk. I think this is the most compelling one. Life is nothing without risk. Unless we put something up against what we are then it is a meaningless action. (Odd that addiction is often defined as pursuit in the face of consequences when risk must be the same thing.) We cannot improve without the chance of failing to do so. Every time we try to lift a weight we risk being it being too heavy. Every time we create something we risk its rejection by others. Every time we tell a joke we risk it falling flat.

I suppose it then follows that the greater the risk the greater the possible success.

If you had already reached this conclusion before reading this blog then I’d like to know if it affects the way you live your life. However, if like me this idea had never made itself clear before this week then don’t you find it interesting how the love of and need for risk is inherent?

Go and take one today.

Oh, you probably already have.

(Thanks, B.)

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Do it with all the money you saved not drinking in January.

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xxx

I’ve just finished reading a few books and all of them taught me something, or at least put something I was already aware of into perspective.

The first was My Shit Life So Far by Frankie Boyle. It’s an interesting read. I laughed out loud an embarrassing number of times, then gave it to my wife, who did the same. I also found some odd similarities between Frankie’s life and mine. Although ostensibly we are really quite different, as children we both spent a lot of time in dull parts of the grey sock that is Scotland, then we both went to the same university, and we’ve both seen Beastmaster far too many times. That aside, it’s a bit of a patchy read with gags mixed in with story and general musings in a way that sort of dribbles off a bit as you’re waiting for him to get famous.

Anyway, the part that really made me think was when he quoted Noam Chomsky as saying that capitalism can’t have everything its own way or it will create a hell that no rational person would want to live in.

The reason I found that so interesting is that I often wonder how advertising became a job that can demand your time so arbitrarily. Most of us, in theory, work a normal day. However, if evenings and weekends are ‘required’ then that is taken as a reasonable situation, despite the fact that it might double your working week for no further financial or temporal compensation. With margins shrinking and agencies trying to get as much as they can out of an ever-shrinking and more miserly client base, it seems that getting 35% more out of your workforce for free is a way to make it happen.

‘Looks like we’re going be in on the weekend’ is a phrase that just gets dropped into Friday afternoon conversations as if everyone subject to that decision has nothing better to do on Saturday and Sunday. I have heard of many bosses who impose that condition while not coming in themselves. Why should they? They had plans on the weekend. But it’s OK for the rest of their staff to work through.

If I was to guess why that might be the case, I’d say that there’s an feeling in ad agencies that the work (especially the creative work) isn’t really that hard. Of course, it’s not toiling down a mine or running an emergency hospital in Darfur, but then how many jobs are? The world has reached a situation where there isn’t enough work to go round, so tasks that used to be performed perfectly well by a few people are now littered with extra hands. This contributes to the situation where certain jobs are more sought-after, and therefore people consider that those lucky enough to do them ought to be grateful for the opportunity. To a certain extent this is true, but nobody makes footballers do an eleven hour day followed by the entire weekend, and their job is pretty tasty. Likewise musicians or novelists. They need time to recharge their batteries, but then so do we all.

I think that this culture, which, by the way, is only going to get worse, is helping to contribute to a less happy and less productive workforce. And a less productive workforce produces work that is less good. So it should work harder to compensate (you can measure hours but you can’t measure talent) and the whole circle goes round again. In addition, with many companies now publicly listed, the only bottom line that really matters is the financial one.

There’s nothing wrong with working hard, even working evenings and weekends, but I find it only really ends in a good result when it’s a matter of choice. When you really want to put the hours in to crack a brief for your own pride or career, then that never feels like a chore or an imposition. Autonomy is the key to happiness, and the key to better work. Arbitrary lengthenings of the working week to feather the nest of someone much richer is the key to resentment and misery.

And that’s why you can’t keep giving capitalism everything it wants. It will end up with shit being produced by depressed people, all for the sake of another few pence in the dividend.

Why would any rational person want that?

Ben and Matt have left Wiedens for BMB.

Interesting. I won’t speculate on the reasons why, but they had been at W&K for a while and BMB is definitely in the ascendency. Draw your own conclusions.

But what I want to know is this:

1: They are described as a ‘star team’. I think they are about the closest London has to one at the moment. Can you think of others? In my day (mid-late nineties), you couldn’t move for Star Teams: Steve and Vic, John and Nick, Tom and Walt, Richard and Andy etc. It was first names only and they were genuinely really fucking good year-in, year-out, whatever the medium. Who does that describe these days? Some are ‘up there’ but beyond the Juan Cabral of a couple of years back, are there any stars in the current firmament?

2: Is it difficult to look up whether a team actually did an ad? These guys didn’t do Grrr.

3: This always happens in January. Why? I think you get a bit of negotiation stuff at the end of the previous year then no one wants to announce in December because everyone’s on holiday. Also, budgets may be renewed when the year begins, freeing up a bunch of cash for new signings.

Anyhoo, it’s nice to see a bit of love and status for the maligned and marginalised creatives of the world.

Anyone else fancy moving to keep up the momentum?

Did you know there was a real Avon Barksdale?

It doesn’t exactly look like it’s up to the standards of The Wire, but maybe it’ll find its way onto the Discovery Channel.

(Via Cinematical.)

(And that, my friends, was my 500th ITIABTWC post in its current location.)

Here’s the new print campaign from Diesel:

I found them here, by the way.

It’s a category where there’s nothing to say, so they’re saying it loud and clear: taking a stance with an attitude that’s going to get noticed and talked about that feels 100% Diesel.

The slightly ironic thing is that you have to be just a little bit smart to get them.

(And let’s not forget that W&K’s motto is ‘Walk In Stupid’.)

There’s a Guardian Online forum thingie where we can all bore each other into submission.

(Thanks, S.)

These days clients, particularly big clients, like a mood film.

I’m sure you have all come across them, but for the uninitiated they usually consistent a bunch of stock footage edited together with titles or a voiceover in such a way that a client or their new campaign/positioning is somehow encapsulated for easy digestion and a nice warm feeling in Mr Client’s tummy.

They tend to be loved by clients for five reasons:

1. They are cheap.
2. You can screw around with them forever. A film with no narrative that is composed of lots of interchangeable bits of film and V/O is there to be pulled apart and rearranged until absolutely everyone involved is happy. Or at least not sad.
3. They are usually two minutes of ‘stirring’ guff about one thing only: the wondrousness of the client.
4. They spoon feed those stricken with even the lowest IQ so no one can fail to understand them.
5. They are cheap.

So you make one of these puppies and the client fucking loves it for the reasons mentioned above, then the bad thing happens: the client loves it just a little too much. They want to run it on TV as your ad (for the reasons mentioned above). When faced with a budget of £500,000 and a delay of three months to make the real thing, some of them reasonably ask the question: ‘why don’t we just run this one that we all love that won’t cost us a bean?’

Hmmm…

That’s a tricky question to answer. After all, they can be good, like this one for AOL.

Then again, they can be…um…less good, like this one for Renault:

Or this one from BMW:

The good/bad news in these straitened times of client arselicking and no money is that they are here to stay.

How you persuade your client not to run one (if you are so inclined) is up to you.