It’s well shot and really quite compelling.
Having something so everyday all exposed as it enters space is an intriguing thing to be shown.
The payoff was fair enough.
I’d watch it agin if it came on the telly.
Only question: will people think ‘Toshiba’ afterwards?
(Thanks, Vinny, via Twitter)
Oh, and yesterday someone suggested I blog about how bad the Christmas ads are this year. No need when Charlie Brooker’s about.
This is his worst of the lot.
By the way, I did social psychology at university.
One day I was in a lecture about some kind of psychological thing or other and the lecturer started telling us about animals and facial recognition. The gist of his talk was that most animals don’t really recognise themselves when they look in the mirror.
The exceptions (as far as I recall) are higher primates, such as chimpanzees. They can recognise themselves when they look normal, so to see how far this ability went, the experimenters tried adding clothes to make the chimps look a little bit different. The lecturer explained that one chimp was given a big pink hat to wear and when he looked in the mirror, he failed to recognise himself.
So the guy behind me puts up his hand.
‘Yes?’ says the lecturer.
‘Are you sure he didn’t recognise himself?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well maybe he just looked at himself in the mirror wearing a big pink hat and said, ‘It’s not really me, is it?”
The peerless Social Media Guru and All-Round Good Egg Alan Wolk has brought us The Hive Awards:
‘The Hive Awards started as a pipe dream, about a year ago, when I was looking at web award shows and realized that none of them rewarded things like user experience, content strategy or even coding. At least not on any significant level. What’s more, the awards that were being given out seemed to go to big, high profile sites in glamor industries. Which is not to say that those sites weren’t deserving, just that they didn’t seem to reward all the people working in the trenches, what I called the unsung heroes of the internet.’
God, something that encourages people to make the Web better in ways that might actually make a real, practical difference. Thank you. At effing last.
We all spend hours on the interweb, so l think a bit of support for anything that improves that experience has to be A GOOD THING. Enter today if your work’s eligible.
The second plug is for my Facebook group that I’m going to use to expand my novel online (join today!). There you can see the cover art along with the strapline, which is wrong, but they had to put something on for now. For some reason my publisher thinks I ought to be able to come up with a better strapline. So far he’s wrong.
I’m kind of feeling my way in the dark at the mo, so any suggestions for any improvements will be most welcome.
I’m voting for Starburst ‘Bus Station’ because I’m a little lad who loves berries and cream:
UPDATE: a few people have mentioned this:
I absolutely fucking love that ad. When it was on telly I used to rush in from the kitchen to watch it. I heard from a Cannes Grand Prix-winner that it didn’t win as many awards as it should have because it has no humour in it, nothing to puncture the portentous tone. Fuck it. I think it’s up there with the best.
I was thinking about my first-ever ad the other day, then I realised that it’s just possible that some of you might recall it.
It was for Le Crunch apples and featured some schoolkids wittering on about the fruit in a faux-sophisticated way (‘They tempt the senses like a concerto of sunbeams’. How the fuck did I ever get that past a client? Or my CD for that matter). The last lines were, ‘Ah, no rest for the wicked. What have you got?’ ‘Colouring in.’
Although I wouldn’t say it was that memorable per se (no one’s put it up on YouTube and for obvious reasons I didn’t keep a copy), it ran for three years, usually in the mornings from about 1997-1999.
Do you remember it? If so, would you like to tell me how shit you thought it was and how it nearly put you off going into ‘the business’ altogether?
And on that subject, would you like to confess to making any shitty ads in your past, perhaps providing YouTube links by which we can judge you?
Go on…it’ll be cathartic.
I promise.
‘How do I get rid of people at the end of the night?’
Give them some low quality chocolate?
That’s not an ad, that’s a…what’s the opposite of an ad?
When I get a correct one I’ll stick it up
UPDATE: here’s a link to it.
And here’s the original post:
Here’s a new poster for Labour that perfectly does the first essential thing any political ad must do: be newsworthy (although they might well be ignored by all of Murdoch’s papers):
Beyond that I have mixed feelings because I can’t help thinking that all of today’s visible politicians appear to be craven, opportunistic little shitwipes.
And don’t get me started on the oily heap of unpleasantness that is Peter Mandelson. How many chances does a man get to be a corrupt little cunt before he’s not allowed back into high office? The man’s such an unprincipled bloody wanker that he’d work for the Tories if Labour lost the next election.
Anyway, that aside, George Osborne is just as bad. Didn’t he hang around with Mandelson and that Russian oligarch on that yacht?
And the fucking expenses scandal….Fuck off the lot of you. Really, just fuck off.
Can someone make up a version of this poster that features every expense-fiddling politician in the country?
OK…OK… Count to ten…and breathe…Think calm thoughts…
If this is real (and I hope to God it is), it’s the funniest thing I’ve read in ages.
Oh, and the ‘where would you like to work’ poll is being won by obvious favourites New York and London, although a hell of a lot of you would like to work at 180 or Wiedens Amsterdam (unless I’ve got the wrong end of the stick and it’s Ogilvy Amsterdam you’re after).
Have a good weekend. I know I will. x
