If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

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.

Marvel’s worst comics.

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.)

What the fuck is my Twitter bio?

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’.)

And other excellent lessons in this great post from Hiut Jeans.

Here’s a salutary and sobering story from the sharp end of the industry.

I guess there are a couple of points here:

The first is the obsession with the ‘importance’ of advertising. I know exactly how that feels. For years I obsessed over D&AD annuals, knew every piece of work by every half-decent team in town, and could tell you about every director from every production company on the planet. As much as something can be your life, advertising was mine, but what I didn’t know back then was the tighter I held on to the industry and its whistles and bells, the more it slipped out of my grip. I don’t mean that I didn’t do some good ads, or have a comparatively successful career; I mean that I was focussing on the wrong thing. I was, occasionally, a bit of a dick, and I fully believe that that by taking a step back from advertising I’d have been better at it.

But what the hey… I had a good time and no one got (particularly) hurt. Eventually I relaxed, stopped caring so much about the tiny things that really didn’t matter (hello, Creative Circle Bronze!) and focussed on doing proper work whose objective was to solve a client’s problems. I think that by obsessing over those minutiae less and less I gave myself the room to focus on what actually mattered, both inside and outside work.

Ultimately that’s bordering on the inevitable: you can get up a real head of steam when you start something off, but maintaining the same degree of enthusiasm for the following decades is neither easy nor healthy. Continue to do the best work you can, by all means, but I believe that keeping an eye on the context and the rest of the world is essential to making that happen.

The second point is the one about other halves:

I met my wife (we’ve been married 13 years) when I cast her in a commercial. We got engaged after five days and married after six months. Back then she got drawn into my obsession and ended up working in several production companies, eventually becoming an executive producer. So she ‘got it’. The thing was, after about ten years she became disillusioned with the industry and gave up her job to look after the kids. And she’s never been happier, nor have I and nor have the kids.

So what am I saying? That the path to happiness lies outside advertising? Not at all. But the sense of perspective that my wife and I both found around the same time made me better at my job and her better at being a mum. It’s difficult to be sure of something that never happened, but I’m certain that if I had maintained the awards minutiae drive I’d never have got to the point I’m at now, and I love the point I’m at now.

Where are you? Did an obsession leave you in a crappy place? Has your other half suffered through your dedication to something that ultimately didn’t matter? Have you ever stood at the crossroads of a Cannes Gold and a successful marriage?

What The Fuck Is My Wearable Strategy? (Thanks, W.)

Beautiful shots of Tokyo commuters (thanks, J):

A nice song to get you going:

Incredible paintings made in Excel (thanks, J).

Amazing Vimeo thing on beauty (thanks, D):

Do you want some? (Thanks, S.):

Fight club minus Tyler:

Lovely stories in the YouTube comments section (thanks, C).

Man does the Butterfield Diet (thanks, J). For those unaware, here is the Butterfield Diet:

Great fake underground signs (thanks, L).

Discarded Rolling Stones fan mail (thanks, S).

Size without size, but also with size.

Clever, well-written, funny.

I hope the public will enjoy the animatic pisstake as much as we all will.

A shirt that instantly squeezes your fat into muscles.

Here’s a great talk from Stewart Lee about the nature of stand-up comedy and how it changed so profoundly at the end of the 70s (thanks, J):

If you have the full 54 minutes, it’s all worth a watch. For the rest of you, you can skip to about 5-6 minutes in (his actual talk ends at about 34 minutes; questions follow). This is where he explains that UK stand-up comedy used to be a bunch of men in suits and bow ties standing in working mens clubs and telling the same 1000 jokes again and again, like they were a series of much-loved songs performed by skilled covers bands.

Then, following the American model of pioneers such as Lenny Bruce, the ‘alternative’ comedians came in and started writing entire shows that weren’t about one-liners, shows that could sustain a narrative thread for a couple of hours, shows that were entirely a constructed artifice (a subtler version of the kind of thing done by Al Murray).

The detail is fascinating, including how certain kinds of government benefits made it easier to spend a few years developing your act.

As a dissection of the growth and practicalities of the creative process it’s well worth a watch.