If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

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.)

There’s an Innocent campaign out and about at the moment. It consists of a bunch of lines that all end with ‘and’. These are the only two I remembered to photograph, but I think they give you the idea:

Questions, questions…

1) I guess the strategy is contained in that first execution; something about a ‘chain of good’, but I don’t really buy that. So you buy an Innocent smoothie and good thing happen beyond the vitamins you ingest? Or maybe the vitamins are part of the chain, and you get fewer colds, miss fewer holidays, enjoy yourself more, die happier…? Is that it? Then what’s the parking man got to do with it? Is it also metaphorical ‘good’ that is unrelated to the smoothie? Who knows? But I think the substantial scope for confusion isn’t much of an asset for an ad campaign.

2) How big was the media spend? I saw three executions. How many did you see? It does look like the campaign will improve if you see more of it, but I can’t say I was blown away way this continuation device. Ads that absolutely require you to see many of them are making life pretty hard for themselves, and if the satisfaction level is this so-so, is it worth it?

3) ‘Parking man’? Is that supposed to mean ‘traffic warden’? Are they not called traffic wardens anymore? When did that happen? Why are we separating by gender when most jobs (flight attendant, actor) are seeking to make themselves as gender neutral as traffic warden was?

Then again, I suppose I noticed the work, and talked about it, and blogged it, which is more than most posters get me to do.

But I won’t buy an Innocent smoothie because it’s basically a bottle of sugary water.

I was reading Campaign last week when I came across an article headlined ‘Fear and loathing in adland’ (interesting note: when I tried to Google said article so that I could copy and paste bits for this post it turned out many such pieces had been written already. Lazy headline writing, or huge amounts of fear and loathing?).

It suggests that ‘years of conditioning have made us all scared. To allow brave, bold work to happen, we must change the old world order’. Apparently we’re all a bit frightened because of the recent recession, but we shouldn’t be because things are much better now (financially). But the problem is more endemic because we’re all conditioned into hierarchies and the fear that goes with them from our schooldays. We then enter the same hierarchies in the workplace where we’re ‘structured like the army’ (oh dear. Where do you work, sir? The answer, surprisingly, is Karmarama. Yes, folks, you read it here, or in Campaign first: Karmarama is structured like the army. Poor sods) with ‘hierarchies and job titles’ (yes, they’re quite unique to the army, aren’t they? Greggs must also be ‘like the army’ with its job titles (assistant/manager) and hierarchies).

It continues: ‘One person’s opinion matters more because they’ve done it for longer and have a bigger job title. They then apply their strength to dominate and put down other in the group’ (oh dear again: Karmarama sounds like a surprisingly unpleasant place to work). ‘In advertising it all goes back to the domination of the celebrity talent. The opinion of the few mattered more than the others and they were to be obeyed at all costs. This cultivates a seam of fear throughout an organisation. People are scared to talk in meetings; they worry about looking stupid and being shot down by their more experienced bosses…’ Well, I don’t know about you, but I grew and learned under more experienced people. I don’t recall them seeking to dominate so much as doing their job unbelievably well (I’m taking about you, Andrew Robertson, or you, Paul Belford/John Gorse/Dave Dye/Nick Worthington/Paul Brazier/Malcolm Duffy/Tom Carty/Peter Souter etc.) and inspiring me to try to do the same. They were almost all very nice guys, and if occasionally I was worried about showing them an ad then that fear was what drove me to make sure it was good enough to come up their standards. That way, amazingly, the work improved. Yes, James Denton-Clark, managing director at Karmarama and author of the article: fear can breed better work, as can ‘celebrity talent’. Think back to the days when the people I mentioned dominated the industry, or go back further to the days of such ‘celebrity talent’ as John Webster and Dave Trott, Neil Godfrey and Tony Brignull, David Abbott, John Hegarty, DAVE BONAGUIDI and NARESH RAMCHANDANI FFS!!! (the blokes who started Karmarama)… all big industry celebrities, and during their prime the best advertising this country has ever produced appeared on a regular basis.

James continues: ‘To display competence is now to deliver ideas that can thrive in this connected community’. OK, point number 1: that’s always been what ‘competence’ in advertising has meant. And point number 2: who wants competence when excellence is available? James says that ‘it’s the ability to nurture and see them through to completion that matters and is what brands now require of us’. Again, when was that not what brands required of us? All those half-finished ads littering the TV screens in the 90s were quite the bugger, weren’t they?

Apparently ‘the people increasingly qualified to have an opinion on this are not necessarily the most experienced’. But they might be. I’m sure there are some people out there who became worse at their job as they went along, but it can’t be that common, surely? ‘Competence is therefore shifting away from the established towards the native’. Again, that word ‘competence’. Here James could be right: listening to people with no experience and dismissing those who have a few years under their belt will probably result in competence rather than excellence. Look at the work these days and compare it to what was done up to 2007. The standards have fallen for many reasons, but I think that the lack of celebrity talent and the prizing of the views of any old Tom, Dick or Harriet over people who might possibly know more than them could certainly be two such reasons.

James then says we ‘must not be scared of breaking down the old order of things’. Well, here’s some good news for him: it’s already happened. The old order is gone, replaced predominately by bland people and equally bland work. James, you’ve already got your wish and it’s turned out really badly.

He also says that ‘more importantly, as individuals, leaders and skilled discipline experts we need to take a close look at how we behave’. Hang on… ‘leaders’? People who lead? That sounds quite hierarchical to me. And what about these ‘skilled discipline experts’? Why do we need them when we’ve got the placement creative to tell us how to kern the typography or prepare the pitch deck? We then have a quote from Jim Collins, who says that ‘companies that succeed are led by people with a paradoxical blend of humility and professional will.’ Yes, that describes Steve Jobs to a T. Ever so ‘umble he was…

I dunno… Overall this reads like the attempted revenge of someone who worked for a few (celebrity) bastards in the past and now wants us to know that the meek are having their day. Unfortunately, that day is producing shit advertising.

You can complain about unpleasant people all you want, but the truth is, many of the most talented people in this business were not arseholes, and in my experience were happy to listen to the carefully considered opinions of those supposedly beneath them. We’ve lost the cachet, the glamour, the opportunities and the rewards that used to make this industry attractive to the very best creative thinkers in the country. Is fear the issue? Yes, but unfortunately it’s the current mealy-mouthed worrying that’s the problem, not the legacy of dominance of the brilliant talent of the past.

Yesterday I received the following email:

Hi Ben,