Let’s all spend a few moments watching Natalie Portman swear.

(Via the peerless Cinematical.)

The word is out and the word is (apparently) good.

(Guardian review here.)

I still find it hard to believe from watching the original trailer, but here’s a longer one that has some less crappy-looking bits:

And J.D.Salinger eloquently turns down the opportunity to sell the film rights to The Catcher In The Rye. (‘My mail from producers has mostly been hell.’)

AND…only one of the top fifty movies in box-office history is not based on previously existing material. What is it?

So there’s this campaign, right, and it involves a financial company that bases its idea on a mishearing of its name. To bring this to life, the agency decided to make a spokesperson out of the creature with the misheard name who is not happy at the confusion. They gave him a foreign accent and began to explore all the ways that he could live beyond the initial mishearing. The campaign was a great success:

(Check out 2:27 onwards)

Ready? Let’s all sing along: ‘compare the adverts…dot com’

Occasionally I’ll be reading something about principles of great advertising and I’ll wonder why they aren’t just followed by everyone.

Why don’t clients want ads that don’t look like ads?
Why do they want big logos when all they do is make you turn the page?
Why don’t people want and support clean layouts?
Why do people try to put across fourteen messages at once?
Why do people feel so much more inclined to make the kind of ads that will not stand out or provoke any real engagement?

Well, I think there are several reasons for this:

People who approve ads want to keep their jobs, and it’s much easier to do that with inoffensive beige work than startling, innovative work.
One man’s ‘startling and innovative’ is another man’s ‘inoffensive and beige’.
People don’t care enough.
Time and budget squeezes.
People involved in the process do not know what the fuck they are doing

It is this last one to which I turn today.
I think it’s really hard for the industry to admit, but most people who create ads aren’t actually very good at it. This means that when you are trying to persuade a client to do something, reassuring them that the risk is worth taking because the work will be so good, you might well be wrong.

I recall a TV ad I made where we were going to use an amazing post technique that the director had been developing. The director had great past form in this area and we felt confident about trusting him. Unfortunately, when we got the ad back, the technique was, shall we say, somewhat disappointing (shit). So then we had to go back to the client with smiles on our faces trying to persuade them that this was what we had tried to achieve and it was a cause for celebration, not disappointment. I’d say that the director wasn’t really good enough, but I’d also say we weren’t good enough either. We were unable to deliver on a promise we made to ensure that the technique would be as wonderful as we promised.

Sorry, Client X.

I like to think I’ve improved since then, but looking across the wide world of advertising, it strikes me that, as with every other industry in the world, 90% of us are not that good. Sure, we might be capable of excellence on occasion, but there just aren’t enough people who reliably produce excellence every time they get a brief.

You might be a good art director, but you’re not Paul Belford, Dave Dye or Mark Reddy. You might be a decent copywriter, but are you Tim Riley? Mary Wear? Nigel Roberts?

So many people (and I’m including account people, planners and MDs here) might well produce work that is mainly OK with a few flashes of brilliance on a good day. And yet we are employed to deliver the goods on a constant basis. In theory clients pay us a lot of money for greatness. The fact they they often end up with OK-ness might be why they don’t trust us to create a layout which has never been seen before. How many of us are capable of producing a really good one? No wonder they want their ads to look like ads: better a mediocre ad (they think) than an awful attempt at originality that might get them fired.

When I hear people talk about these principles of brilliance they are almost always people like Trott, Krone and Clow – people who have delivered that brilliance time and again.

But it’s one thing to agree with what they say, and quite another to manage to deliver it. Years of disappointment have led us to this cul-de-sac where you’d have to be mad to trust that your advertising problem would be solved with a work of genius by 9/10 of the agencies in the world.

A quick test: you have a new product to launch and an ad budget of £500,000. You have worked in advertising for a number of years. What’s your next move?

Luke Sullivan from Mediastash.tv on Vimeo.

(Thanks, P. Via Twitter.)

He swears more than I thought he would and he also admits to have a ten year booze and coke problem (although he might have been kidding about that).

Nice to see the Whipple man live (as it were).

And here’s the new Orangina ad:

I guess you either like those or you don’t.

Is that Fallon have lost Sony.

I suppose we can only speculate about what made Sony put the account up for pitch in the first place, but it’s quite telling that the business has gone to the groovy hotshop Anomaly.

By the way, with the loss of Asda last month, the reported billings hole for Fallon is £125million.

That is an agency-changing sum of money.

Let’s see how it changes Fallon.

(Thanks, D.)

Available here.

Sorry if the title of this post gave you the impression that there was actually a way of getting five paper, book-type annuals.

Actually, that would be an interesting piece of research: if you were misled by the title of this post were you disappointed that I wasn’t actually offering free annuals?

If most of you were then that would suggest that D&AD shouldn’t go and make the annual online only. There’s something solid and authoritative about a big old book. Theoretically appropriate.

Last week’s poll suggested that 54% of you would prefer to be shit and rich than good and poor. That was quite close. I was hoping that the question would settle once and for all the age-old question that informs so many of the significant decisions we make in our lives. Unfortunately it wasn’t like that. The answer was vague and inconclusive. I think that says a lot. I once did Robert McKee’s screenwriting seminar (it was very good if you’re thinking of going) and he said human beings are 50% good and 50% bad, because otherwise one side would have won over the other by now. Interesting. Maybe he’s right.

New poll in a minute or two (when I’ve thought of a question).

Ah, and here’s Mashables’ ten best virals of the year. About half of them reached me during their campaigns.

*If you’re on acid.

(Thanks, Mashable.)

Great idea, but some really fine craft too.

Shot by Chris Palmer. I think the team was Toby and Jim@BBH.

(Thanks, Phil.)