If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

A couple of weeks ago Jose Mourinho, manager of Chelsea and massive, massive arsehole, described Arsène Wenger, manager of Arsenal and person I’d like to be my genial uncle, as a serial failure. This was in response to Monsieur Wenger suggesting that people who blatantly downplay their chances of winning something they can obviously win do so because of a fear of failure. Jose (a man who likes to blatantly downplay his chances of winning something he can obviously win) took huge offence at this (even though it’s true) and went on the attack.

And he had a point, actually: Arsène, by one obvious measure (major football trophies) is a ‘serial failure’. He tries to win four of them every year and, since 2005, has not managed it.

But, looking at the bigger picture, one could point to the fact that Arsène laid the groundwork for the modern approach to football in this country: proper diet and fitness, state-of-the-art training facilities etc. He also built a club, being instrumental in Arsenal moving to a new, much bigger stadium, giving them a better chance to compete financially for the future through their self-generated income. He has also discovered, bought and sold many players at a huge profit to allow this development to occur. So by some definitions, those that Mourinho could never come anywhere near because he’s an immensely unpleasant and insecure mercenary prick who only wins trophies by spending hundreds of millions of pounds (in fact, he ought to thank Arsène for inadvertently changing English football into the kind of thing billionaires want to invest in), Arsène has been very successful indeed.

So there are many, many definitions of success, a fact worth bearing in mind when you’re wondering if you’ve managed to achieve any.

For example, you might have gone a fair way into your career without snaring that elusive Cannes Grand Prix or stint at Wieden and Kennedy, but is that failure? It is if that’s what you were attempting to do, but what if the processes that led to those targets left you a bitter, distant spouse, or deeply unhappy as you realised the extent to which you had overvalued such aims? Can we define that as ‘success’? As the man in this TED talk says, you can lose when you outscore somebody and win when you’ve been outscored. For him success comes through peace of mind as a result of knowing you did your best and remembering that life is about the journey, not the destination:

I’d suggest that only if climate change has been reversed and world peace has been secured by my own fine deeds would I consider my time here a success. Then again, I set quite high standards for myself.

What about you?

Wonderful Dickens Cider advertising (thanks, D):

Famous movie sand sculptures.

Murderers’ last words (thanks, J).

Hidden London (thanks, J).

The Ramones on Regis and Kathy Lee (thanks, V):

Bad decisions.

50 Cent dubbed over a Jehovah’s Witness trying to get deaf people to stop masturbating (thanks, D).

Not quite sure how to describe this, but it’s cool (thanks, D):

Behind the scenes when Cuba Gooding Jnr. won his Oscar:

Vom-tastic! How hot dogs are made (thanks, N):

One of those maps that gives you an idea of the scale of space.

Everyone should have a favourite Lamborghini. This is mine:

Game of Thrones, 1995-style:

And, of course, a masturbating Cheeto (thanks, T).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkHMEYjejK0

Definitely the worst PPG, anyway.

Here’s a fascinating article about the impossible dream that many advertisers sell their consumers.

I would attempt to paraphrase its essential point, but it’d be easier and clearer if I just did this:

Adverts wouldn’t work as well as they do if they didn’t operate with a very good sense of what our real needs are; what we really require to be happy. Their emotional pull is based on knowing us extremely well. We are creatures who hunger for sexual love, good family relationships, connections with others and the feeling that we are respected. Adverts understand.

Yet, armed with this knowledge, they are unwittingly extremely cruel to us. For while they excite us with reminders of our buried longings, they refuse to do anything sensible or sincere to quench them adequately. They show us paradise, then don’t sell us anything with whose help we might reach it.

Of course, ads do sell us things. Just the wrong things in relation to the hopes they arouse. Calvin Klein makes lovely cologne. Patek Philippe’s watches are extremely reliable agents of time-keeping. But it’s hard to see how these products are going to help us secure the goods our unconscious thought were on offer. A watch, or a bottle of scent – however excellent in their own way – don’t have the answers to our true dilemmas. Our troubles are so much bigger than these products seem to understand.

I won’t reprint the ads – click on the damn link – but I think it’s a fascinating idea that we use an unobtainable perfection to sell an obtainable but pointless nicety. Did the people who came up with that communication dynamic do it consciously or did it just seem like the right thing to do at the time? Now that it’s been so successful, and requires so little from the product it’s selling, has it become more prevalent? How do you feel now that you’ve read that? Like you’ve been had? It makes me aware of how we are all consumers, whether we like it or not. What have these ads done to me?

So far so interesting, but it’s the last paragraph that really catches the eye:

The people who work in advertising know in their hearts that they’re usually arousing longings they can’t fulfill. It’s why many of them, particularly the most talented, suffer crises in mid-life. They know their genius has been devoted to making images of happiness that the products they’re selling can’t generate. Struck by the inauthenticity of their lives, with some cash in the bank, many of these ad people tend to leave the field and try out something new: they do a philosophy degree, start a bar, or travel around the world in search of meaning. We invite them to return to work to spearhead a new kind of advertising: one that not only identifies what makes us happy, but also helps us to have a better shot at actually being so.

Ouch.

Here’s the link (thanks, D).

Only two of them apply to me (12 and 15), which makes me wonder if there might be others which are more accurate.

1. You’ve plugged your own work on Facebook.

2. You accept that posters are now called OOH.

3. You mentally critique the copy on tubecards.

4. At least three dogs regularly spend the day in your office.

5. On slow idea days your first port of call is Fffound.

6. You’ve spent more than ten minutes in your entire life thinking about what a brand might be.

7. You’ve stopped trying to start conversations about ads at dinner parties because you know no one cares.

8. You’ve seen lots of really amazing digital ideas (in award books).

9. You’ve gone through the three stages of scam ads (I’d do one to give myself a leg up/They disgust me/I don’t care anymore).

10. You’ve heard the word ‘ideate’ so many times it no longer makes you want stab people who say it.

Actually, maybe those are just 10 signs you work in advertising in 2014.

Any others?

I was following an interesting discussion on Twitter the other day. It brought up the observation that the invention of the camera resulted in people dressing in more flamboyant ways in order that their appearance might be equal to the composition of something as significant as a photograph. Then people just accepted the idea of being well dressed and as a result the Dandy (interestingly-dressed person) was born. Yes, people dressed in elaborate ways many years before the invention of the camera, but this new invention gave far more people a more substantial reason to take care of their appearance.

Today the camera/Dandy relationship is mirrored by social media/opinionated person, or in a more negative light, social media/troll. Just as the camera demanded we fed it with decent imagery, social media demands that we keep it stoked with interesting things to read. Unfortunately many of us don’t have interesting things to say all day, so we might then feel the need to exaggerate our opinions somewhat so that they might prove worthy of being broadcast to hundreds or thousands of possible readers. You can’t just shrug your shoulders at something on Twitter. In order to be ‘interesting’ you have to load up the blunderbuss with swear words and vitriol (or effusive praise that will often include an inappropriate use of the word ‘genius’) and let fly at all and sundry.

The conversation in which I came across this point was about football, where every player is now ‘shit’ or ‘genius’, no matter how they played last week. If they were not at their best today they must now be deemed ‘shit’ until the next game, when they play slightly better and become ‘genius’ again. Considered opinion and reasoned debate are not what fuels Twitter (or newspapers, which seemed to realise this phenomenon quite a while ago); if you have a loudhailer you must use it to its greatest effect. There is no point in telling everyone you know that you ‘quite like’ the new Coen Brothers movie; you must love it or hate it, otherwise why did you put finger to keyboard, you tedious dullard?

I recently gave a talk to my agency about honesty in advertising, where I started by pointing out the essential dishonesty in being a person in 2014: wearing make up or clothes that suit you, combing your hair, spraying on perfume or brushing a little dandruff off your shoulder… they’re all ways of disguising the real you, or to put it another way, lying. Then you go onto Facebook and tell everyone about the great restaurant you just visited, or cool country you flew to on holiday, just so they all know how rich, tasteful and interesting you are; perhaps you added a link to a great TED talk or showed us an inspiring quote from a famous philosopher, clearly demonstrating your kind intelligence. What you didn’t do was update your status with, ‘Had a terrible bowel movement this morning’ or ‘felt mild antipathy towards an old lady who walked slowly in front of me’. You present only your good side, the side that will make everyone think you’re nothing but attractive, cool and fascinating, instead of mediocre, mundane and tolerable at best. And there’s nothing wrong with any of that, but it might be worth being aware of what we’ve become, and the fact that it’s happened with an almost total lack of self-awareness.

I’m interested in where it’s all heading. To paraphrase The Incredibles, if everything we do is interesting the surely nothing is. Will we have to keep on showing off harder and harder until climbing Mount Everest with Jay-Z and Beyonce while munching Heston Blumenthal’s Kendal Mint Cake is the only thing worth a mention? Will the ever-greater scramble to the heights of experience leave the everyday so mundane that we won’t be able to stand it? Will the black-and-white nature of assessment and judgement squeeze the equivocal to death?

I’m just glad this is literally the greatest, most genius blog post ever written.

Really fine Photoshopped tattoos.

A map of the internet (thanks, J).

Food porn index (thanks, J).

Black guy and white guy try to break into a car with mixed results (thanks, D):

Photos of soldiers before, during and after war (thanks, C).

Man draws a penis on his wife’s whiteboard every day for a whole year (thanks, J):

Creatures of adland (thanks, J).

Johnny Rotten on Judge Judy (thanks, J):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ2Xb4wgCL0

Amazon reviews for labia dye (thanks, R).

House of Carbs (thanks, D).

Fun cake recipe (thanks, T).

18 ways British people say ‘fuck you’ (thanks, J).

Global internet porn search terms in a kind of ticker tape stylee (thanks, J).

Diamond engagement rings are a fucking scam (thanks, L):

And if you still haven’t seen this, it’s some Dutch ravers dancing to Benny Hill’s Yakety Sax:

By far the best Kickstarter project I’ve ever seen (thanks, D).

Fucking hell! It’s spiral water! (Thanks, A.)

Here’s the latest ad from Save The Children UK.

Someone mentioned it on the blog the other day and asked if I’d do a post on it.

So here it is.

Maybe I missed something, but I’m not sure what the big deal is (if indeed there is supposed to be a big deal). Is it because it’s showing a birth on TV? I guess that could be a bit too much for some squeamish people. Maybe it’s because they’re kind of suggesting the baby is dead? (Too much for some other squeamish people. Or maybe the same squeamish people. Squeamish is a great word, by the way; almost onomatopoeic.)

Otherwise, it’s kind of meh. Babies die during the birthing process, both here and abroad. It’s a terrible shame, but it’s nothing new.

Or am I just being a heartless bastard?

Last night I gave a talk to the splendid people at Drive Forward, an organisation that aims to get people who have been in care into work.

I told them how I’d got to where I am today and they listened attentively, asked lots of great questions and were a really smart and polite audience.

At the end, Martha, the director of the organisation asked if I knew anyone who could help them with a bit of help with a line and a visual for their organisation.

I said indeed, I know 2-3000 people who read my blog every day. A few of them are bound to want to turn their skills from selling cakes and washing powder to making a real difference to an organisation that does an awful lot of good.

So now the ball’s in your court: are you (ideally) a team with a bit of free time, perhaps even a few hours, who could help Drive Forward? If it gives you the same warm, fuzzy feeling I got from doing my talk I can promise it’ll be very worthwhile. Email me at bwmkay@gmail.com if you’d like to have a go and I’ll put you in touch with Martha.

While I’m here, I know there are a few CDs and MDs reading this post (assuming you made it this far). If you’d like to give a break to a young person who’s started life in care, you can also get in touch. A lot of the people I spoke to showed a real interest in getting into the industry, so whether you could sponsor one through Watford or take someone on as work experience, again, you’d be making a real difference.

Thanks for reading this. I look forward to reading your emails.

(UPDATE: about ten minutes after I put this up, a kind team stepped forward and offered their services. Big thanks, Ben and Adam. If any of the rest of you would still like to help, do get in touch and I’ll ask Martha if they might need anyone else’s help.)

(Thanks, W.)