Last week I was listening to this episode of Marc Maron’s excellent WTF podcast, featuring an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F59SVVlPdy4

It’s a great listen if you want to find out how the director of Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood came up with that kind of stuff. There’s also a very funny story at around the 53 minute mark, if that’s what floats your boat.

Anyway, the thing that stuck out most to me was a little passage from PTA:

My favourite movie of all time is The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. I must have seen it five or six times and thought, ‘OK’. And then, whatever it was, when I came across it at just the right time, at just the right moment… And I went ‘Holy shit’. My life opened up and I thought ‘This is the best movie I’ve ever seen, and that’s when I was writing There Will Be Blood. I just watched it over and over and over again. These movies are moveable feasts, in other words, you catch it on an airplane, you catch it on your  phone: where are you going to see it? It’s out there and it exists and it’s going to be something different all the time.

Marc replies:

I think that’s a movie, not unlike Pynchon, or not unlike a great piece of literature, that as you evolve, or music, that when you go back to it it speaks to you differently

I entirely agree. When I mentioned this to my wife she reminded me how our perspective had changed on the the film Brief Encounter. When we first saw it we thought it all seemed like an exciting affair for a married woman in austerity Britain; a couple of years later we saw it again and the guy who was making the affair happen seemed like a really rapey bastard, changing the tone of the entire story.

But there are countless examples of music tracks that only spoke to me after I either listened to them many times, or grew a bit older and was able to appreciate them with more experience. For example, the album 2001 by Dr Dre remained on heavy rotation for years because every few months a new track would become my favourite. The art somehow met me further down the road when I was ready for it.

And of course the opposite can happen: who hasn’t cajoled their friends into watching ‘this great movie I saw last year’ (usually a comedy), only to find yourself sitting there while tumbleweed blows through the living room because Cameron Diaz’s jokes seem roughly one millionth as funny as they had done the first time around?

Obviously that means you must now revisit every artistic expression you’ve ever seen thus far, just to check if it really is shit/great.

Here’s a comment from one of last week’s posts:

It got me thinking: was the brief easy? 

No idea. I suppose the people involved would know, but even then there is a massive set of variables that alter enormously the degree to which a brief is or is not ‘easy’.

Let’s take the Last Minute ad as an example. The brief might have been, ‘Show how LastMinute.com is the best way to have a dirty weekend’, in which case the leap from brief to solution does not seem to be particularly large. But even then, you could answer that brief in many, many ways: are LM the kind of client that likes to push the boundaries and get a bit saucy, or are they quite staid, requiring a great effort from the agency to get them to buy edgy work? Is this indeed the ‘first thought possible’ or was it a desperate 2am solution after weeks of rejection? Was there even a brief? Was this in fact done on spec? Had it been sitting in a drawer for several years after being declined by twelve other clients? Was the initial solution more elaborate, only to be pegged back by a tiny budget and a minuscule lead time? Was the creative team a pair of wet-behind-the-ears newbies who needed a lot of support, or a pair of grizzled veterans who can turn this kind of stuff out in their sleep? Did the agency have to wait until the boring client was on holiday before slipping it through her more broadminded substitute?

Then again, the brief might have been, ‘Show how adults 24-35 could use LM.com as their primary resource for a city break’. Then the question of genesis gets trickier: did the creative team spot the potential diamond in the rough? Or was it the CD? The client? The planner? Did that take weeks, facing a great deal of resistance from various personnel who did not fancy a tough/embarrassing chat with their prudish client? Was this the umpteenth incredibly dull brief on the same subject, leaving all concerned immensely grateful to an inspired creative for finally pulling something funny out of the bag?

And those are just some of the questions that could have made this easier or harder. What about the mood the creative team was in? Was the AD going through a divorce? Had the copywriter just been turned down for a dream move to another agency?

Etc.

When I was judging the Press section of D&AD in 2005 we unanimously awarded the Silver to this campaign:

In a sea of turgid shite it made us laugh, and it was pretty unusual for a car ad.

Anyway, after the results were revealed someone from VW’s agency told me that the idea was basically handed to the team by the planner during the briefing, with the implication that the award shouldn’t really have been given for such an easily-reached solution. Well, none of the jury knew how hard it had been to come up with that campaign; we just saw it, liked it and awarded it.

So no one can ever truly know how tough a brief really is. Those 90″ Nike brand ads are probably just as tough to generate as a really good 25×4 ad for 15% off carrots at Tesco. Which is the harder brief? Fuck knows, and at the end of the day no one in the public gives a toss, so it’s best not to worry about it.

Theo from Artsy writes:

Hello,

My name is Theo and I work at Artsy. While researching Paul Strand, I found your page: “www.ben-kay.com/2012/08/its-nice-that-its-nice-that-have-featured-my-bookshelf/“. Great content, by the way.

I actually worked on Artsy’s new Paul Strand page, and I think it would be a great resource for your readers. Our newly designed page includes Strand’s bio, over 20 of his works, exclusive articles about Strand, as well as up-to-date exhibition listings – it’s a unique Paul Strand resource.

I’d like to suggest adding a link to Artsy’s Paul Strand page, as I believe it would benefit your readers.

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions on how we can improve the site. I look forward to staying in touch with you about future opportunities.

Best,
Theo

“Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you.”
-Paul Strand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLYDSVvOzXw

Then again, I do have a mental age of 12.

(Thanks, S.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkWlxuGxxJg

It was shot entirely on an iPad.

Hats off to a great team who put this together.

Damn Gaslamp Killer aint just “in” the ipad commecial he is IN THE FUCKIN IPAD COMMERCIAL. Tight!

Top grannies (thanks, J).

Best Guardian Soulmates ads (thanks, J).

Amazing Russian Mafia gravestones (thanks, J).

Top dad (thanks, J).

Superbowl ads remade in Lego in 36 hours (thanks, A):

Naughty kids get old man hair cuts.

Delightfully insane 90s commercial spoof:

Standing on the precipice of the future (thanks, A).

Ace banana art (thanks, J).

I only ask because I think I’ve seen things happen every which way:

Brilliant scripts made into bad ads.

Nothing scripts made into great ads.

Throwaway briefs that won pencils.

Great budgets, good clients and the best director in town fucking up something so badly it didn’t even run.

Leftfield nonsense making the whole planet laugh.

Leftfield nonsense leaving the whole planet cold.

Risks failing.

Risks succeeding.

Experienced creatives being 100% sure of decisions that turned out to be completely wrong.

Happy accidents.

CD interventions that saved ads

CD interventions that destroyed ads.

Client comments that everyone fretted about for ages, then implemented with no detrimental effects.

Client comments that turned so-so ads into award-winners

Dead ads brought back to life by sound engineers, editors, Flame operators, assistant producers, junior account people, planners or spouses.

Etc. etc. etc.

So what combination of circumstances are we trying to achieve to create repeated success? After all, surely that’s what we’re aiming for.

Are we just playing the odds that suggest the more the CD gets involved, the more numerous the improvements? That deeper preparation and harder work will lead to better results? That collaborating with those who have the best track record will be most likely to bring excellence?

Or that a good CD will step away and just let talented people get on with it? That loosening things up and leaving them to chance is the only thing that will create real magic? That taking a chance on a newbie will bring an essential freshness of perspective?

Perhaps we need to take a step back and say that none of the above are guaranteed keys to top work; more that the best thing you can do is develop a good sense of when to take which path – when to hold and when to fold.

The paths to greatness are many, varied and, if you try to work them out, contradictory.

So don’t bother. Or bother a lot.

Whatever works.

I now live in a country where people actually say ‘Happy Super Bowl Day’ to each other as a greeting.

I love that, and wish people in England would say ‘Happy FA Cup Final Day’ to each other on the appropriate date.

I also live in a country where the ads that run during this game are heavily scrutinised by all sorts of people who should probably have something better to do with their time.

Anyway,  I thought I’d post a few ‘spots’ (we say that over here as well) that caught my eye for various reasons.

First up is a massive, throbbing turd. Mercedes have created a strange story where both of the main characters are massive bells. That ain’t easy. What’s even harder is getting lots of people (CDs, clients, directors etc.) to keep that vision consistent all the way up to its $9m media spend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF–p4Dkv_Q

By contrast this one is excellent: a great idea that seems to have far stronger legs than I expected, married to a great execution with a fine, expensive twist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqbomTIWCZ8

Here’s a lovely bit of perceptive piss-taking (marks off for feeling strangely dated, as in it feels like it’s making a point from the first dot com boom):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZnUG0EFPkU

This one seemed to light up Twitter with utter revulsion. I think it’s an interesting idea, but its depressing tone was entirely out of place for the occasion, and the message seems to be, ‘If your kid dies in an accident – something that’s quite common – we’ll give you some cash. Hope that takes the sting out of things’. No, not really. Odd that the people involved thought it would go down well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKUy-tfrIHY

Finally, if you’d like to spew rich, pungent vomit through your nose and mouth for the next three hours, watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCmh8cBjUeM

When I first met my wife her dad came round to visit. Somewhere in the living room lay a copy of The Sun newspaper, which, for the unenlightened, is a tawdry tabloid rag that I read every single day from 1987 to around 2004. Now, my father-in-law used to be Head Of Music at the BBC and ran the English National Opera, so he was understandably somewhat aghast at the idea that his only daughter might soon marry a (hold your nose) Sun reader. So when he noticed it and mentioned it I told him that I kind of had to read it in order to have some idea of the mindset of the people to whom I hawked various products. He accepted this explanation, apparently considering my behaviour to be some kind of noble and necessary sacrifice.

But, dear reader, my explanation was a was a barefaced lie. I mean, maybe it had that effect, but in truth I just liked reading the sport section (always read it from back to front) and the showbiz stuff, neither of which, in those days, were much better provided elsewhere. So, Dennis, in the unlikely event that you’re reading this, I fibbed. Sorry. I just enjoyed reading it (until it began to bore me, then disgust me, sending me into the loving arms of the Guardian).

Sorry for the long intro, but that story reminds me of the skepticism I experience when I think of how well qualified us ad folk are to sell things to the rest of the people in the countries in which we live. Even if we grow up under quite average circumstances, anyone who works in the industry for more than five years will undoubtedly become much richer and far wankier than the most of the target markets we aim at. And if that’s the case, how do we really know what the fuck we’re doing?

Although I think a bunch of us enjoy Britain’s Got Talent or I’m A Celebrity.., does that really balance out a working day where you discuss the relative merits of Nadav Kander vs Mark Seliger? Do the visits to the cinema to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier provide some sort of cultural tipping of the scales against watching a movie like Amour? Can you claim a well-rounded cultural education to be a better fuel than a constant diet of the ITV dramas and Jordan novels that entertain many of the people we try to persuade to do things?

And does it matter? Anyone living as an artist is likely to have a somewhat different set of influences to someone who runs a launderette, or mends boilers (not that I’m denigrating either of those valuable jobs), and anyone who has been a successful advertising creative has had to battle through their newly-acquired riches and wankiness to communicate with the ‘masses’. And if a lifetime spent in a less creative occupation were the key to advertising success then we’d have tapped into that resource a long time ago.

But perhaps reading The Sun would help (in most agencies I’ve worked where it’s one of the daily papers it’s usually the most-read). Perhaps going round the National Gallery once a week would help. Perhaps a love of the work of Simon Cowell and Simone De Beauvoir needn’t be either mutually exclusive nor mutually detrimental. I suspect the best creative people like a bit of MacDonalds mixed in with their foie gras, and it’s that collision of disparate influences that helps you to strike gold.

Whatever the truth is, I’m off to watch a really shitty Cameron Diaz ‘comedy’ – for professional reasons, of course.

This film about archery will blow your socks off (thanks, P):

How to fall asleep in one minute (thanks, D).

The essence of marriage (thanks, A):

Calm yourself by looking at balanced rocks (thanks, S):

Yoko Ono sings the Good Life theme (thanks, T):

If you’re not watching Bob’s Burgers, you’re letting the best in life pass you by (thanks, J).

Ang Lee on Ingmar Bergman.

Louis CK has a new $5 stand-up special out and it will make you weep with laughter (especially the bit where he stimulates a rat’s anus to orgasm).

Real life Street Fighter:

Alternative landmarks of Philadelphia: