If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Martin McAllister has, like a few others of you, dipped into the world of the app to feather his nest, stretch his legs and widen his horizons:

It’s called Your Amazing Family Circus, and Martin says, ‘It’s an interactive kids story book that takes your family’s faces, runs them through filters before adding them to the illustration, and adds their names to the story. Surprisingly there’s nothing else like it in the app store.’

That is a surprise.

I was stunned.

So much so that I went to check that this ridiculous claim was actually true. Could there really be no other face-transplant-family-story-circus apps out there?

Fuck me. He’s right.

Get in on the ground floor before the inevitable thousands of copycats pile in.

(Unsarcastically: nice one, Martin. It looks like a cracker and I applaud your gumption.)

I think if you translated it into Russian it’d sound like Putin warning gays not to come anywhere near their straight, manly, masculine, non-gay country.

How’s he going to cope with the figure skating costumes?

Have you ever noticed how a film can be brilliant the first time you see it but crap the next?

How a much-loved restaurant is off-par for no discernible reason?

How track seven on your favourite album goes from being a mediocre also-ran to a heavy rotation favourite?

I’d guess there could be many reasons for that, some of which would be down to a change in you; after all your tastes change in clear and obvious ways (from The Spice Girls to P.J. Harvey, perhaps), so why not to less obvious extents? You might be able to point to the moment you were given proper buffalo mozzarella to eat, which led to your subsequent forsaking of Dairylea, but other alterations are bound to be less obvious. Could a line from a poem or an article in a magazine begun a deep loathing of San Sebastien or a lifelong devotion to Gloria Gaynor? Difficult to tell, but it sounds plausible.

I think there’s also something external that makes us like or dislike things more or less: the moment. Take Charles Dickens: the man was a critical failure in his day, but he has since been reassessed as a literary giant. Is that because the words changed? Obviously not. It’s because the environment into which the books were released has altered, allowing once tepid opinions to become mass enthusiasm.

The 1944 winner of the Oscar for best picture was Going My Way. It beat Double Indemnity. Which has become the ‘classic’? Which have you heard of? Why did everyone go crazy for the Seabreeze in 1999 and the Apple Martini in 2002 but no more? You could cite fashion, but that doesn’t explain the undurance of the gin and tonic or Martini. Maybe there’s a particular time when people collectively accept or love certain subjective things.

Are the successful merely better, or did they appear before us at just the right moment? When that seems clear and obvious we call it capturing the Zeitgeist, but surely most of the time we have no idea when or why it happens. People can often find explanations in retrospect, but no one really knows what the Zeitgeist is or when it changes, so all we can do is make attempts to capture it (and often fail).

But that must have a massive impact on advertising. Would the Meerkats have been loved in 1976? Will they still be gracing our screens in 2036? And if not, would that be because the scripts have run out of steam or because the moment has been lost? I suspect we’ve all got favourite ads that were neither publicly loved nor awarded. Does that mean that they were bad, or just mistimed? And is the essence of that timing the essence of producing great art? Of course, no one can predict what the Zeitgeist will demand fifty years from now, but perhaps certain fundamental principles endure.

So next time your ad falls flat on its face, it could be that it’s simply ahead of or behind the times, destined to be reassessed in the decades to come.

Or it could be that it’s, y’know… shit.

I guess we can never be sure.

Stunning bird’s eye photography (thanks, V).

More good infographics than you can shake a stick at (thanks, R).

Amazing timelapse of LA (thanks, S):

Discarded drug baggies (thanks, J).

Simpsons early (good) writers chat about the show (thanks, B).

Lenny Bruce speaks at UCLA in 1966 (thanks, T):

This is typography, motherfuckers (thanks, B).

Nice little cartoon (thanks, L).

Watch the Batmobiles race (thanks, V):

Funniest tweets of 2013 (thanks, J).

Pornhub comments on stock photography (NSFW. Thanks, D).

Jerry Seinfeld Reddit (thanks, T).

Truth (thanks, P).

Have fun guessing who the statues represent at the world’s worst wax museum (thanks, J).

Fuck up your mind as you learn about time (thanks, T).

When I were a lad all round here were campaigns: series of ads with common features and a common idea that continued to build a deep, long-lasting message for a brand.

There was Peter Kay’s No-Nonsense John Smiths ads, Good Things Come To Those Who Wait for Guinness, and the majestic years of Economist Red-On-White poster work, to name but three.

Happiness Is A Cigar Called Hamlet and Heineken Refreshes The Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach rubbed shoulders with Stella’s Reassuringly Expensive and Levi’s feature-based run of classics.

Now all of the above have disappeared (some temporarily resurrected then killed again), and as I look around I see very few actual campaigns where you know what structure the next one will follow and then the point it will make.

It seems we have campaigns that either manage but a few executions (Sony Bravia Balls, Paint and Bunnies; Cadbury Gorilla, Eyebrows, Airport) or campaigns that feel like a series of very tenuously connected one-offs (the current Ikea work, John Lewis, Old Spice). Obviously there are some examples of great work within those examples, so perhaps we don’t need campaigns as such, but I’m interested in why such a successful advertising form, one that built on years of affection and interest as each execution went by, has seemingly bitten the dust.

Is it because clients leave their jobs after a short time, only to have their successors look to make their own mark by starting from square one?

Is it because the talent is no longer strong enough to support years of quality?

Is it because clients are now happy that their brand is a simple word (‘progress’, ‘love’, ‘thrive’), from which executions can spin off in myriad directions?

For a good example, look at Lynx/Axe: it started off with a solid idea from which dozens of great ads can and did spring (spray this on yourself and become attractive to beautiful women). Then it went a bit odd:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhgU0euVL_s

A great ad, but now the idea is: keep up with a demanding girl.

Then even odder:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4Iwgl2hbd8

idea: you won’t get laid if your competition is an astronaut.

So bang goes the central idea, replaced by some other stuff.

But no one else seems to mind, or even seems to have noticed.

I just can’t help wondering if it’s another ingredient in the current ad malaise.

Here’s a follow-up to that moms-help-you-out-or-something ad for the 2012 Olympics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57e4t-fhXDs

It’s very well made, and the idea’s a good ‘un, but I really wanted to see this alternative angle:

Open on lots of shots of moms putting plasters on little kids who have been hit, and consoling others for being bullied.

This gets worse as the kids grow older until we see moms visiting older kids in hospital after they’ve been beaten up with baseball bats and knives. Or perhaps we see a mom finding her son hanging from his bedroom ceiling. Maybe there’s a mom identifying her son’s body after he’s been tortured to death or another after he’s been sodomised with beer bottles then set on fire.

Endline: We decided not to sponsor the Winter Olympics because Russia practices and preaches institutionalized state homophobia.

Fuck Russia.

Signed, P&G

Just a thought.

How about it, P&G?

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

It’s the touches.

I mean, the idea is lovely, but it’s the executional details (eg: the mom hiding behind the cleaner) that must have come after the initial idea that really make this wonderful.

That campaign is a tough act to follow, but they keep doing it.

You know where the hat is going?

That’s right: off.

UPDATE:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW7Fmi8_kfU

Welcome to 2014, a year in which Faye’s comet will reach perihelion and Russia will demonstrate its hatred of homosexuality by staging the calendar’s campest event: The Winter Olympics.

That aside, I know what you’re thinking: it’s been three/four/five days and I need a fucking drink right fucking now.

Either that or you’ve promised yourself this will be the year in which you achieve something significant or memorable outside of your expected daily tasks. Perhaps you intend to reduce the extent to which your abdominals resemble a hundredweight of uncooked bread dough, recreate the Bayeux Tapestry out of liquorice, or resign, go to work for Amnesty and actually make some sort of positive contribution to planet earth.

Whichever it is, you’ll need a little fillip, and that’s where the 157th most influential advertising blog in the world comes in.

Here’s a little video I watched the other day of a conversation between Tim Ferriss and Neil Strauss, which not only contains absolutely all the essential tips, helpful websites and effectiveness strategies you need to write a book, but also many pieces of advice that can apply to any goal you might have taken on:

See you in 365 days with your tasks completed…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8nJKWJTsUg

Sorry about that.

To balance it out, here’s Coppola and Lucas discussing Kurosawa and Kagemusha:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLPV3nUyTvwwrDy2K-Bj3TSLJ1EoZMeV5T&v=S_f9E-qd6Os

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

And a chat with Scorsese and Coppola:

Michael Caine teaches film acting:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjqkQlvCs-M

Quentin Tarantino, David. Russell, Ben Affleck, Ang Lee, Tom Hooper and Gus Van Sant chat film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAK3aUq25fo

Woody Allen on Parky:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldBQ4icOzWk

Hitchcock Masters Of Cinema interview:

Scorsese interviewed at Brown University:

And the only thing that matters to any of us is love: