Guy Maddin’s The Heart of the World:

And I’m not very fond of Kevin Spacey (he just plays the same snidey, supercilious shitcake in all his movies) but this is genius:

(Thanks, J.)

And if you’re still bored, how about the greatest long tracking shots of all time?

Or checking out Scorsese’s top movies of the nineties?

And if DHM wants to know where to take the Smooth Radio print campaign, here’s a suggestion.

Still need to waste time?

OK, OK…One last thing…

You can’t still be bored? You are? Jesus…

OK, this has to be the last one: the best performances of the 00s.

And the real, absolute last, last, last, last, last one is this clip from a sitcom I was watching the other day where a man went mad selling energy drinks to old people in a cafe. I wondered how it happened, then I found this clip on Cinematical (it’s got Spike Jonze acting in it):

PS: I forgot this:

For the first time in 29 years.

Can someone explain what’s going on there?

BMW does excellent, award-winning, brand-building brilliance through WCRS for 30 years, then this festering abortion is foisted on us by another agency in TEXAS:

…and suddenly WCRS have to fight for the account.

What’s that like? That’s like a loving and faithful husband who does nothing but good, surprising and interesting things for his relationship, helping both himself and his wife to grow better together. Then, after about thirty years, the wife runs off with Fred FUCKING West, who writes ‘WIFE SUCKS SHIT’ in human excrement on a billboard, and far from it being an experience that makes her see the error of her ways, she makes the husband beg to take her back.

Something not quite right there.

Vote for and watch the ad contenders here.

Did anyone else forget the decade was coming to a close?

I was just sitting here minding my own business when suddenly I couldn’t move for decade-based reviews.

Anyway, here are my top ten advertising blogs of the decade (they’re based on the scientific measurement of whether or not I read them on a regular basis):

1. Scamp. Ah, I remember Scamp. It was where all the shit hit the fan. Simon and his magic fingers, playing us all like a fucking viola by innocently throwing an ad into the arena and seeing if it got mauled to shreds or frottered to oblivion. Happy days.

2. Dave Trott. I always, always, always come away from one of Dave’s two blogs feeling cleverer, sometimes with a story about heroin and the New York Dolls; other times with an exploration of Bertrand Russell.

3. The Ad Contrarian. I love the fact that an unanonymous (try saying those two words with a mouthful of frozen peas) agency head puts his always-correct-yet-always-provocative opinions out there for all to see.

4. I Am The Client. This is a new one, but I have to say that it’s the one that makes me jealous. Brilliantly written, funny, sad and poignant with swearing that makes The Thick Of It look like Blue Peter. It tells a great story with perceptive, incisive, hilarious characterisation that actually made me go back and read the entire archive.

5. Rory Sutherland’s. Always brilliant, but he doesn’t post enough, so marks off for that.

6. Sell! Sell! A righteous mix of new things you haven’t seen and ad opinions from the moral high ground.

7. DHM Murmurs. Lovely agency, lovely people. Arsenal fans. Good to see a decent agency blog. Odd, when you think about how agencies like to proclaim themselves to be digital, yet they don’t even get themselves out there in this fairly simple format.

8. Escape Pod. Look! You can read the wisdom of a Cannes Grand Prix winner who made an ad that you defintely did an impression of. Now Vinny Warren has an agency that produces really good work ten years on from that.

9. Welcome To Optimism. Unlike DHM’s, WTO isn’t so much a dissection of Adlife as a dissection of W&K. The insight this must give to all the people who are gagging to work within its painfully cool walls should be commended. How Neil finds the time to update it, I have no idea, but it might explain why Wieden’s is one of the least respected agencies in the world (smiley face made out of punctuation).

10. The Toadstool. Perversely I sometimes feel like looking at things from a more businesslike and American perspective. I can’t explain why. At least this blog allows me to do that and enjoy myself.

There are loads of others that I love for a week or two then forget about then rediscover and kick myself for missing out on, then forget about again, so their quality is not in question but if they don’t stick, they don’t stick.

Good luck.

In the meantime, you can buy someone Dave Trott’s book.

(I bet this comes out really small:)

I haven’t read it, so I can’t really recommend it, but I read both his blogs and it’s got the best bits of those plus some other stuff.

As Dave would say: Enjoy!

(He wouldn’t say that at all, by the way. It’s just a little joke between me and whoever was reading his twitter feed a couple of weeks ago.)

UPDATE: I have now bought my copy and am all excited, like a ten-year-old who knows a Go-Go Hamster is on the way.

Being a bit thick about these things, it’s taken me a couple of years to realise this is the latest version of Heineken Refreshes/I Bet He Drinks Carling Black Label/Withabix campaign.

But the interesting thing there is that we’ve now had three classics and one good-but-too-young-to-call-it-a-classic campaigns out of essentially the same idea: ingest our product and be improved to the nth degree.

I guess if you strip that back even further – our product will improve you -it’s probably the strategy behind loads more brilliant campaigns (The Economist for one).

Proving that there’s no such thing as a pot calling bird in the glass houses.

Or something.

(By the way, also in this list would be Berocca, as this hamster ad is kind of a moving extension of that press ad they did a couple of years ago where the hamster and the research professor swapped places. Ten seconds searching on t’internet failed to dig it up, but it got in D&AD a couple of years ago.)

Here’s the new Dixon’s Ad from M&C Saatchi. Excellent bit of writing, Mr. Dicketts (bigger here):

And here’s a link to a cool web thing called Ommwriter (thanks, C.) that makes writing even more of a pleasure than it already is.

Some Googlefun (Thanks again, the same C).

I’ve said this on Twitter and Facebook, but if you’re not with me on those, please check out Zombieland. It’s a thing of hilarious, wonderful beauty:

Finally, according to last week’s poll, more of you than I expected have done an ad you’re proud of this year. Congratulations. By the time you read this there might be a new question.

(Can I just say before I explain why I dislike this ad that I wouldn’t normally be so negative because I usually have no idea what factors impacted on the ad behind the scenes. However, with house ads most of those problems do not exist, so if they’re crap they deserve everything they get.)

1. For an ad with what appears to be 1000 words of copy, it’s really badly written. Examples include:
We think there are three things. In reality there are dozens obviously.
You should totally come in and talk.
If you don’t have anything to do with advertising, and found this copy of Marketing on the tube or somewhere…
It’s not like specialising in goldfish or helicopters or something
But enough with the trendcasting already.
Like everybody knows…
Fucking hell. It reads like it was written by a twelve-year-old, or aimed at one – two scenarios that seem unlikely to say the least.

2. Hypocrisy: ‘To a lot of people, a lot of advertising is tedious and self-aggrandising…’ This ad refers to how dull it is (‘We don’t mean to be boring’) and if it thinks it’s being amusingly ironic, I’m sorry to say that’s about the only point it makes that is absolutely correct. Self aggrandising? ‘We believe in creating…content that is genuinely helpful, informative or entertaining. We believe this kind of output represents the future for our industry‘. I think that counts as enhancing or exaggerating one’s own importance, power, or reputation.

3. What the fuck does the headline mean?

4. The ‘funny’ attempts at world-weary exaggeration at the beginning. Neither funny nor perceptive, and boy do they go on in a way that suggests that whoever wrote them is really fucking pleased with him/herself.

5. Unfounded exaggeration: ‘…we’ve gradually created a management team with a broader range of experience than any other in London.’ Come on! Who seriously believes that? London: the fucking capital city of one of the most advanced nations on earth, home to companies whose staff might just be a little more experienced than this lot.

6. ‘Our recruitment motto is this – beware the agency guy who says he has twenty years’ experience’. Great to have a recruitment motto that can’t possibly apply to more than 10% of your job applicants.

7. There are more, but I’m getting tired. Read through the copy yourself and you’ll find something either false, dumb or wrong presented in a way that’s false, dumb or wrong. But one last thing: Rapier? if I were choosing an agency name I’d discount all suggestions where one of the syllables is ‘rape’.

If that’s how they do their own ads, imagine what they do when they have to work with client comments.

Something better, I’d imagine.

Well, it can’t be worse.

Who paid for it?
Whose idea was it?
Is this where promos are heading?
Does anyone else feel a little dirty watching this?
Is that dirtiness connected with the relentless commerciality or is it to do with the crapness of Fiddy?
Is this the first instance of advert placement as opposed to product placement?
Does it matter, as promos are just ads anyway?
How many ads can one piece of film take?

Etc.

And if you have a moment, why not vote for the worst ad of the year?

This is the one that made me puke the furthest:

(Via the wonderful Cinematical.)

I’m not much of a fan of sensationalist metaphors, and raining polar bears that land in bloody splats around a US metropolis to represent the weight of the greenhouse gases you produce on an average European flight is definitely a sensationalist metaphor.

Visceral polar bear innards spread across cars and pavements as the ursine quadrupeds make their unfortunate arrivals to get me to give a shit about the payoff. The problem is, I’ve no idea what that payoff really means. I’ve taken a few European flights in my time and so, I’d imagine, have you, almost certainly on planes that were quite full. So we’d all find it reasonable to believe that millions of these flights have happened so far. Now, truthfully, is your daily life any different for that? Does 400kg of greenhouse gases really matter? If so then why are we not all dying under a cloud of sulphur from all the kajillion tonnes that must have been produced since the Wright Brothers had their little brainwave?

I understand that the polar bears have been used to demonstrate the animals that are suffering because of the proliferation of greenhouse gases, but they’ve rather oddly chosen to make a point about how much the gases weigh. Is the metaphor direct and physical or la-di-da and figurative? Why give me a double metaphor? I’ve got enough on my plate trying to work out why a polar bear that lands from 30,000 feet makes such a small impact. They should be going ten feet into the pavement, exploding in a mile-wide spray of furry nipples and giant white arses.

I think they’ve used a sledgehammer to crack an incomprehensible nut. And, ironically for this client, I would deem that a huge fucking waste.