A friend (thanks, C) sent me this compilation of little film spoofs that was rejected by MTV:
I liked it and put it up here.
Then I looked up Fatal Farm on Google and found this:
…which I also liked (and blogged).
Time wasted: 4 minutes and 12 seconds.
Here’s an article from today’s G2 entitled ‘Why this is the summer of the bad advert’:
This summer was looking bad enough without the onset of the worst advertising of all time. The eye-stabbingly terrible spot for Car Spotter – a service you text to find out how much your car is worth – is the clear winner here. A shabby man is loading shopping in to his boot, another man asks, “How much is your car worth?”, the first man says he doesn’t know and that’s basically the end of the ad.
Sadly it’s not alone. There’s that Churchill Insurance dog, the grimly forgettable confused.com and gocompare.com not to mention Dragon’s Den’s Peter Jones fronting a moneysupermarket.com campaign that’s so good the client started shortlisting alternative ad agencies a week after it broke. Even the previously passable CompareTheMeerkat campaign has started to eat itself, with a tediously unfunny “bloopers” spot. When these ads try to be witty and knowing – the Pot Noodles High School Musical skit is another example – they become even more annoying than they artfully admit to being.
When did our ads become so awful? Once, I’d actually ask my brother to call me when the ad break started. These days I’m thinking of swapping cable for satellite just to get Sky+.
Could it be the recession? Perhaps. Ad budgets are falling and redundancies are sweeping the industry – but recessions are historically fertile for British adland. Levi’s agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty launched during the early 80s slump while Tango’s HHCL was founded amid the ruins of Black Wednesday. Indeed, the early 90s and Noughties downturns meant young, cheap talent produced ads such as Ray Gardner berating the French on the White Cliffs of Dover for Blackcurrant Tango or the epic scope of 2001’s 10-part ad-length thriller for BMW starring Clive Owen.
Does it really matter? Yes. The UK ad industry helped launch the careers of scores of writers, actors, musicians and directors including Ridley Scott, Stiltskin, Alan Parker, Fay Weldon, Salman Rushdie, Brad Pitt, Justice, David Puttnam, Peter Carey, Alec Guinness and Dorothy L Sayers.
Unless the industry raises its sights a little higher, however, that particular wellspring of culture looks set to disappear into a puppet meerkat’s swollen belly.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t bother to put it up. I mean it’s so tit-bleedingly mediocre it makes me want to sit on the business end of a Magimix just to remind me that I can feel something:
But there’s an extra element to this puppy that I feel is worth pointing out.
The people responsible have GONE ALL DIGITAL by creating an entire YouTube channel for the campaign, allowing you to watch various (usually webcam-based) high-jinks from the Mint People.
This is what happens when the number 360 is bandied about like wraps of gak at the 1988 Saatchi and Saatchi Christmas party.
Fill your boots, or lean your face into a hedge trimmer.
The choice is yours.
This is supposed to be the ‘game-changing’ (wonderfully hateable phrase, that one) new movie from James Cameron:
Doesn’t do much for me, but then I’m a big fan of Aliens, and this looks like a cross between Titanic and The Abyss.
Really odd and poor performance from Brad, Spike phones in his direction, the payoff is a crashing disappointment and Softbank? Crazy name, crazy (and shit) ad.
As advertising’s 422nd most authoritative copy-based blogger in the North London area, I’m often asked what my favourite headline is.
Well, they’re like children (other people’s children, obviously), so asking me to single out one amongst the many mewling, puking ankle-biters is an almost impossible request.
Anyway, it’s a Waterstones headline that Nigel Roberts wrote in 1998 (part of a campaign that won a Pencil for Copy in 1999):
Why learn from your mistakes when you can learn from someone else’s?
The reasons why it’s so good are manifold: it articulates an elegant truth that I had never seen anyone bring to life before; it’s a classic sentiment that will be appropriate forever; it makes you think about something that affects virtually every single thing you do, but does so in a way that feels warmly gentle rather than harshly didactic; it is 100% appropriate to the client and its products, but at the same time applies to millions of other instances of the benefits of learning; in the space of twelve words, it actually encourages you to read more.
Thanks, Nigel.
Others that spring to mind?
This is a doggy bag. It contains a dead doggy. (RSPCA, David Abbott 1989).
A table for two? Certainly you old trout. (Linguaphone, Tim Delaney 1987).
Somewhere in this picture 2nd lieutenant Eric Heaton lies dying (Imperial War Museum, Indra Sinha 1985).
’66 was a great year for English football. Eric was born. (Nike, Giles Montgomery, 1994)
The loneliest place in the world is the edge of a conversation (The Economist, David Abbott).
Of course, there are hundreds of others.
If I were Scamp, I’d ask you for your own suggestions.
First, I have had the glorious privilege of reading the sequel to e, called e2 (that’s supposed to be e squared but I have no idea how to do that on a keyboard).
For those of you who didn’t work in advertising ten years ago, e was/is a very funny novel set in an ad agency that was written entirely as emails between the characters. It took the piss brilliantly and I’m delighted to say that the tone continues in the second book where the principal characters now work at an agency called Meerkat360, which is just the kind of multimedia fuckwit factory you might imagine it to be.
Buy it soon and read it on the bog.
Next, we have the Radio One ads that were shelved because they looked too expensive for the BBC to put out in a recession.
There are only two on the link, but they don’t look that pricey to me. Or that good, really. Especially the King Arthur one. I’m not sure it’s possible to make someone look much more like a prick than Scott Mills looks in that ad, but if it can be done, I hope they’ve done it to Fearne Cotton.
Then there’s this amusing ad for Quilmes beer. Postmodern booze ads are nothing new, but I like the way they’ve created something you can enjoy that has 55 packshots and ten mentions of the brand.
OK, I’m really on holiday now. No wi-fi and a lack of enthusiasm about posting with the iPhone keyboard.
So I wondered if I could find an answer to that post I wrote a couple of weeks ago where I outlined the inexorable demise of advertising creativity.
Oddly enough, since then, two copywriters I have a great deal of respect for have suggested to me that they might be leaning in the direction of alternative careers. They would both be a great loss to the industry but their cases serve to illustrate my point to a tee.
So, can advertising do anything to keep them? Does it care? Does any of this matter?
Here are a few possible solutions that range from stupid to a bit less stupid:
1. CDs/ECDs on the same level as MDs. Most CDs/ECDs get hired/promoted by a suit. This immediately puts them in the submissive position where their voice will never count to the same extent as that of the suits. If the MD hired them then, in the back of their mind, the ECD knows he can fire them. I think Nick Bell at JWT was a good case in point. Brilliant creativity and a department who thought he was the absolute shit (that’s what the kids say when they mean something is good), but this clashed with the business side, so what gave? That’s right: the creativity. MDs need to hire CDs and say ‘Right. This is ground zero. We are all together. One man, one vote. All equal. Let’s make some fucking good ads.’
2. Stop pandering to arsehole clients and their need for quantity over quality. We all like to think we’re getting value for money, but fifteen ‘routes’ on a brief is mindless fuckwittery. If any department in London was capable of producing even five equally good, world-class answers to any brief, I would eat my arms. What happened to the kind of courage of convictions that led to the presentation of one route that the agency fully believed in and fully stood behind? Now it’s all about aiming at the target with a shotgun and hoping you don’t get fired. So you end up with agencies that make money but no good ads; nothing to be proud of; nothing to make the staff skip to work with a spring in its step; nothing to improve what’s on TV channels and poster sites; nothing to stop non-advertising people hating this industry and the cunts they think work in it. Sack up everyone! Risk the loss of a client. What’s the worst that can happen? Would you rather be small and good or big and shit? (That’s oversimplifying to make a point, by the way.)
3. Think twice about open plan. I have a theory that OP is a form of revenge on creatives. Why should we have offices (even the juniors FFS!) when all we use them for is to find a slightly quieter place to read The Sun with our feet up? And if Mother and W&K are open plan then there’s no possible argument against it as far as a possible lack of creativity is concerned. I think Mother and W&K are special cases where they are creatively-led agencies which work differently on all sorts of levels. The OP agencies don’t continue the emulation of Mother by getting rid off account men, and they don’t copy W&K’s half-agency/half-art gallery model. Nah, the whole thing is the taking down of creatives by the exact distance of a peg or two. Almost all the best ads in history were created in an office. Keep them.
4. Presenteeism. “Going already?” “Yes I fucking am. I have a family who are more important to me than a 25×4 ad for 16% off asparagus this weekend. Besides, if I don’t live a life, what do I put into my work? And when did this turn into being a lawyer? They earn ten times what ad people do, and that pay is compensation for the hours worked. AND I still think about the briefs I’m working on when I’m on the tube, in the shower and watching the football. Just because I’m not at my desk, doesn’t mean that I’m knee deep in class As and professional minge. So yes, I am going already. It’ll mean you get more out of me, but you just can’t see beyond that fact that someone’s having half an hour more time outside this building that you are, you sad fucking wanker.” “Oh. OK. Er…see you tomorrow then. You lazy bastard.”
5. Pay. Sorry, I know this probably applies to all departments, but the relative pay of a creative has plummeted in the last fifteen years. In the late eighties, it wasn’t that odd for a senior creative to be on £100,000 (a Seymour, as it was called). In 2009, it’s still not that odd. And I’m not saying anyone should be ungrateful about that, but in 1989 that could buy you two flats in London; now it’ll get you about two fifths of a fairly so-so one. The money is leaving and it doesn’t take Martin Sorrell to realise that that means the appeal is dwindling, and will continue to do so. If the job is becoming shit and the pay is too, why would anyone with a lot of talent and dozen alternative careers choose this one? THEY WOULDN’T. THEY FUCKING WOULD NOT. THEY WILL NOT. THEY WILL GO ELSEWHERE. THIS IS OBVIOUS. McFLYYYYY! McFLYYYYYYYY!
6. Globalisation. Shmobalisation. The Ad Contrarian has written a great post explaining how the only market in the developed world where Pepsi beats Coke is the one where they produce specific local advertising and not repackaged, globalised shit. Coincidence? Of course not. As TAC says, the more specific an ad is, the better and more effective it will be.
7. Give a shit. If you read this and you work in advertising, ask yourself if you really care whether the ads are good or not. If you’re not sure, try this simple test: who is John Webster? If you can’t answer that question, and then beyond that realise why I’ve asked it, give up now. Choose another job, another career and another way of spending 9 hours of 200 days a year that you actually care about. Otherwise, you’re going to look back at the empty hours that hollowed you out and cry about what you could have done instead.
I never said it was going to be easy. My money is still on the longish, slowish death of whatever parts of this industry we think are worth caring for. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
Gandhi said ‘be the change you want to see in the world’.
I’m not sure, but I have a hunch he was referring specifically to the UK ad industry circa 2009.