On Sunday evening Lego bought the entire ad break and remade some commercials in a Legoesque fashion:
Interesting.
Almost as interesting as this, done in 2012:
(Thanks, P.)
I await the Ex-Lax ad break, featuring popular commercials made out of animated poo, with bated breath.
I’ve seen all sorts of people get paid all sorts of amounts in the creative side of advertising, so I thought I’d detail some of the routes to mad cheddar that I’m aware of.
1. Move agencies. This gives many people the opportunity to lie about what they earn, then get paid a bit more than that. Of course, being poached to work in a new agency is the best situation, as the poaching agency will pay more to entice you, but that’s not the easiest situation to engineer. The agency of your dreams may be full, or they may not like your particular style of work, so if you want the money you may have to go somewhere you’re less attracted to. It goes without saying that the less appealing agencies will pay a premium to get in good people because they have to compensate for the fact that they’ll be working on worse briefs and duller clients. So a general rule of thumb is: the worse the agency’s reputation for creativity, the more they pay. But now the more fashionable agencies don’t really produce much better work than the others I’d have thought that this premium isn’t what it used to be (perhaps a kindly reader could enlighten us on this point).
2. Win awards. Even though awards and cash don’t correlate exactly, shiny prizes can lead to a raise from your current boss or bring you the chance to move agencies (see above). Many places that cast around for new creative staff quite reasonably look at who has done the most famous/awarded recent work, but within that the person doing the hiring has to look at other factors: was this a world-class ad at the beginning of a career (take a chance on potential), the middle of an otherwise unsuccessful career (possibly a fluke), or part of a consistent track record of excellence (reliable greatness=expensive)? Was it over-awarded in a shit year? Is it too edgy for this agency? Then again, how much do people care about awards these days? They have become a very devalued currency so I’d suggest that a D&AD silver today is not worth the same relative bump that it was ten or twenty years ago. There are now so many awards and the standard is so much lower than it was that a big award may not lead to a great increase or move. There are definitely people with more awards than me who are on less money, but that’s partly because they may not be promotable as CDs, either through inappropriateness or disinclination. Suitability to one job does not always indicate suitability to the other.
3. Get on well with your CD. OK, here’s a massive secret that I’m going to let you in on… come closer… turn the TV down… OK, ready? If your boss likes you, he or she is more likely to give you a raise (this applies to all jobs). That ‘liking’ may come from you doing good work, or it might come from you being mates since college whose kids go to the same school, or anything in between. Bosses give more money to those of whom they think well, and there are many ways for you to do that. Think about what they are (examples that are generally true include being enthusiastic, positive and not very racist) and give them a go (without being too transparent and crawly, otherwise you’ll have the opposite effect). Some people I worked with were certainly the ‘CD’s pets’ and it always stood them in good stead for decent briefs and raises.
4. Get another offer. This is a tricky game to play. You might genuinely be offered a job elsewhere, fret about whether to take it, explain the situation to your boss and get a raise. But you might equally pretend to get an offer and play a DEADLY GAME OF BLUFF with your boss to try to get a raise. Many’s the time I’ve heard of a team telling their boss that they feel they can’t turn down another offer (genuine or otherwise), only to be met with the response, ‘Oh, that’s a shame. Bye’. If you want to try this one out you should be prepared for it to fail. I once got a good raise by getting an offer that never became 100% official, but the agency felt they had to match it anyway. If they hadn’t matched it I’d almost certainly have stayed for no raise.
5. Be valuable to your boss in other ways. I can tell you from my own perspective as a raise-bestowing CD that I can be impressed by my department for many reasons aside from their creative output: providing leadership; showing initiative on improving the way the agency works; winning pitches (doesn’t happen at my place); cracking the tough briefs in a way that may not win awards but might make an awful account more attractive to work on; keeping an entire account running so smoothly that the CD barely has to pay any attention to it, and many other methods. Another team who were my contemporaries a while back did little outstanding work, but they kept a big client ticking over, were always positive and everyone liked working with them (they did win a few awards too, but nothing major), so they were on twice as much as me (I think they also leveraged an outside offer). In addition, our boss was always telling us to emulate them, so it was clear that whatever they were doing was working.
6. Then there’s the random stuff: I know my blog and novel have contributed to the positive way I’ve been perceived. They speak of attributes that come not directly from advertising, yet can be applied to the industry. If someone writes an industry blog almost every weekday for eight years, or writes a published novel then they obviously have a decent work rate. You can also see how good their writing is and whether or not you agree with their opinions. Thanks to the blog I’ve become better known in the industry, and with the value of awards plummeting, that is as good a benefit as any.
Aside from having photographs of bosses in compromising positions with farmyard animals, the above methods are worth a try. At the end of the day I suppose you have to ask yourself how much you need to be paid to justify what you spend your day doing.
One former boss of mine once said that he paid everyone the least he could get away with to get us to stay and work for him. That seemed harsh at the time, but now it makes perfect sense. Why would you pay more? Then again, he also predicted that my then art director and I would end up on 70 grand with a couple of D&AD pencils to mark how we got there.
Wrong on both counts.
George Michael, Morrissey and Tony Blackburn going through the week’s culture (of May 1984) (thanks, V):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5wfQ74_avw
12-year-old boy writes insightful book on how to understand women (thanks, J).
19 penises to visit before you die (thanks, P).
Danny Dyer’s reflective Haikus (thanks, J):
Liked The Wolf Of Wall Street? Here’s Jordan Belfort’s success webinar (thanks, J):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grRVyc_i8-0
Fucked up Japanese game show gifs (thanks, D).
All Jesse’s Yos, Yo (thanks, J):
Ultimate wake up pranks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIyQn9jRjP8
More Pornhub comments on stock photos – this time with Valentines (NSFWish and thanks, T).
Creationists ask questions of non-creationists.
Ice T accidentally recorded a Dungeons and Dragons audiobook (thanks, S).
What’s it like getting a record contract? (Thanks, C.)
Han Solo’s incestuous realisation (thanks, P):
I made this ad in 1999:
I remember when the brief came in. My art director (Paul) and I wanted to do what John Webster had done and create something the kids would copy/sing in the playground. So we decided to do a funky cartoon that would be a reworking of a kind of Hong Kong Phooey-1970s New York vibe, with The Theme From Shaft changed to some stuff about a dog that eats popcorn.
We finished the animation with a lovely bloke called Andrew from Hibbert Ralph and went through quite an elaborate re-record of the music, with proper musicians who had played on many big, famous tracks.
Then the people from Walkers said that maybe we could get Isaac Hayes to re-record his singing part for PR value, an idea that Paul and I were very taken with. For me, the thought of Isaac singing my rewritten lyrics was both slightly embarrassing and ridiculously thrilling (he was very famous at that time for his part as Chef in South Park), but definitely a story to put on a blog fifteen years later.
So off we went to New York, to record in some classic studio in mid-town, and – yes! – there was Isaac singing about Sundog Cheesy Popcorn. As part of the PR deal he had to be interviewed by a lady from the Daily Star, but he sat with us for ages, telling fantastic stories of how he shagged Lady Windemere back in the 60s.
So that was fun.
Unfortunately the ad worked brilliantly, so everyone went out and bought the popcorn and realised it tasted like testicle sweat.
Nothing makes a bad product fail faster than good advertising.
Next week (if I remember): the time I nearly got into massive trouble when I shot a Walkers press ad with Victoria Beckham.
(All the credits are under the clip.)
I wonder if they had to get permission from all the icons involved, and who exactly owns Tom Hanks’s portrayal of Forrest Gump, anyway?
And there’s a credited editor. What did he do, exactly?
Questions, questions…
Digital… digital… digital…
How did it come to this?
I know there are some really great examples of online advertising, but like those of the offline variety such examples are few and far between.
But fucking hell… how did the ad industry mess it up so badly – and why does it continue to do so.
Let me start by stating the ghastly, obvious truth: nearly all digital advertising is either ignored or clicked off the second it is possible to do so.
The first category takes into account all the banner ads and pop-up that populate the pages and videos you were actually looking for. When did you last click on one deliberately in an attempt to find out more? My own personal research (sample size: 1) comes up with a single occasion last year. That’s right: out of all the thousands and thousands of paid for digital ads that have appeared on the pages I’ve browsed only a single one has ever caught my attention. Your own number might be higher, but if it’s in double digits chances are you can’t count. And the bloody things are supposedly targeted at you carefully enough to hit the kinds of bullseyes a TV ad can only dream of. I occasionally shop on the Matches clothing site; as a result I am inundated on a constant basis by further messages from that company. Amazingly enough I actually find this too be both irritating and creepy. How odd of me. Imagine if I popped into Tesco for a Twix only to be followed around by the representatives of that chocolate bar until I agreed to buy another one. The mentality behind all this seems utterly deficient in one way or another. The mind boggles at the degree to which the reality has fallen short of the intention.
The second category includes all that delightful ‘pre-roll’ stuff, which appears just before the YouTube video you want to watch. Have any five seconds ever seemed longer than the ones that count down before you get to that vintage Neil Young clip? Have you ever failed to click on that option within a nanosecond of being able to do so? Possibly, but again I’d hazard that the occasions that has happened are fewer than 10. And that’s also fucking crazy: does no one involved in any of these think that the first five seconds are utterly critical? Do they not think about making those five seconds slightly more compelling than the usual first five seconds of an ad? After all, let’s be clear here: these are almost always TV ads that have simply been placed online. But that’s a very important change of location: the mindset of the viewer is completely different; the 5-second mechanism is like a ticking time bomb that will destroy your ad; and the interruption will most likely leave your brand hated (get in the way of my TV show? No problem. Do the same with my video of a Russian man falling over in the snow? Fuck you, you piece of shit). Don’t those circumstances make the ads worth a reappraisal? Millions of people are paid millions of pounds to create things that are loathed by the exact same people they want to please. As they say online: WTF?????
Last week Vic of Sell! Sell! tweeted the following: 90% of online ad clicks are generated by people trying to close them out of the way of their dodgy football stream. #madeupstat
To me that sums the whole thing up perfectly: hoodwinking, annoyance, interruption, bullshit…
And that’s where our industry has positioned the greatest advertising medium to arrive in the last fifty years.
If Google were a guy (thanks, D):
Unretouched Disney princesses.
Fake masturbation warning letters (thanks, B).
Documentary about In The Mood For Love’s cinematographer:
Scorsese:
http://vimeo.com/82146303
More funny Amazon reviews (thanks, D).
A brief history of sampling:
Can someone fix the red-eye in my pic? (Thanks, B.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g9wXBkdWEg
Here’s Soda Stream’s new Superbowl ad:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxq4ziu-wrI
It’s been banned because Scarlett says, ‘Sorry, Coke and Pepsi’, so now it’s gone viral.
So far so blah, but I would like to point to out to any of you who don’t already know, that SS is far better for the environment than bottled water, and much more convenient.
Simply fill it up with filtered tap water and you have carbonated water for less than one thousandth the cost of any of the branded bottles. You also save the many ‘food miles’ that transporting millions of litres of water requires each year, so everyone’s a winner.
(Except the grammar police. As a Detective Constable (or ‘pedant’) in that austere organisation I must point out that it’s ‘fewer bottles’, not ‘less bottles’.)