If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

MRI scan of a banana (thanks, A).

Supposedly Awful first lines of novels that I actually kind of like.

Amazing short (thanks, L):

The most amazing thing on Google Maps.

Robot or drug? (Thanks, J.)

Where are you, imaginary girlfriend? (Thanks, J.)

Penis firework (thanks, R):

Male novelist jokes (thanks, T).

Cassetteboy vs The News (thanks, J):

Cute animals are really fucking evil.

The most powerful photos ever (thanks, G).

Wear a creative diving bell.

The Hoff sings the Fresh Prince theme (thanks, J):

Man digitally recreates his dreams (thanks, R).

Brilliant pictures from Russian dating sites (thanks, D).

Cats in tights (thanks, J).

The other day I was looking at this poster:

It’s nice and clean, and stopped me enough to read it and give it some thought.

But I wasn’t thinking about the cheating cyclist; I was thinking about the freedom art direction has over copy.

It’s often said that great art direction is about the creation of a ‘new page’ – a layout no one has done before. This is intended to grab the consumer’s attention by standing out from the other things he sees and intriguing him enough to engage.

But that’s not quite the same as the copywriter’s job.

Yes, the writer also has to grab and intrigue, but that must happen after the art director does his job. If the layout doesn’t bring the reader in then the consumer will never even get to the great writing. If your eyes scan the landscape then it’s the art director’s job to draw them in so that they hopefully read something like this:

But writers don’t have all the colours of the rainbow and all the images in history (including new ones yet to be seen) to assist them. Instead they have the rearrangement of those 26 letters and however many words (yes, including the odd neologism).

You could rearrange the familiar into the unfamiliar in a bid to pull the rug out from under someone’s thoughts:

Or you could shock (brilliantly):

But in the end you have to use language, which is already familiar, to attempt to create the same power of originality as art direction.

And that’s what I mean by not working in the same way.

Creating a verbal version of the new page (the new sentence?) is something of a given. Despite the clichés that infiltrate copywriting, even quite poor ads will have a sentence you’ve never seen before. The problem is that it’ll still be boring, or arranged in a familiar structure.

To have newness you need to establish a tone of voice you’ve never read before:

Or use an unexpected tone for a famous client:

So the principles of copywriting and art direction exist in similar territories but those guidelines are used in very different ways to create different processes and achieve different effects.

Maybe that’s why the best ones are usually different people.

Here’s a new Sony ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2DdtkDK7w0

Ah… that takes me back…

Ads with massive pillow fights, or water pistol fights, or entire towns covered in foam or paint or whatever.

Seems a long time ago.

But this ad makes me realise I really don’t miss those days.

Which got me thinking: have I moved on, or have we?

Do these big, costly wankathons belong to a bygone era, or is that just a particularly unimaginative one?

Could we handle more ads with colossal budgets if they were attached to decent ideas, or would it be like the richness overload of a foie gras wagyu stilton burger after a year of living on dry toast? Could we really appreciate the kind of ostentatious vulgarity that makes us look down on oligarchs?

And will we ever find out?

Dilbert artist’s success advice.

Small boy=Jack Nicholson (thanks, B):

Working in ad agency=being a human centipede (thanks, A).

Funeral selfies (thanks, A).

Composites of literary characters.

Penis church (thanks, J).

3rd pic in this attempt to sell a home is somewhat questionable (thanks, N).

Music procrastination a-go-go (thanks, C).

David Attenborough vs Miley Cyrus:

And… (thanks, L. By the way, the eagle-brained amongst you will note that this is a picture. Yes, I can finally post still images again. Thanks, A):

So fuck it, here’s another one (thanks, C):

I just joined Linkedin.

I know! It’s like 2007!

I joined because a colleague kept telling me that he was trying to reach 500 connections, at which point your profile just says ‘500+ connections’. That could mean a million, but more likely means 501.

So I thought I’d see how easy/difficult that is.

Before then I’d always pooh-poohed LI because if I thought of it at all, I thought it was the businessman’s networking site.

It could still be that, but I seem to have found a lot of non-businessman friends on it.

So what now?

Do you use it a lot? How do you do so? Is it helpful to you? Or is it just a load of old crap?

Please let me know…

Here’s an entertaining and interesting interview with Russell Brand that was doing the interweb rounds last week:

And here’s the capacious essay which expands upon these thoughts.

I have a great deal of admiration for Mr. B. I’ve seen him do stand-up three times in the last year and he’s always been very intelligent and articulate (I think he’s on tour now if you want to find out for yourself). I even liked Get Him To The Greek.

But this isn’t about him.

It’s about us.

Here’s how I see the world:

We’re ruining it to the point where it’s going to be uninhabitable. Whether physically, through the consequences of environmental damage, or in terms of quality of life, where the iniquities of privilege are detroying the existences of the vast majority of the people on Earth.

I also feel either powerless or apathetic about how to improve that.

Even though I think about it every single day – are we just heading for a version of The Road, or waiting to drown much of the planet in rising sea levels, or pissing people off so much that at some point they (we?) will rise up and lead us (them?) into martial oblivion – I can’t quite stir myself to make a difference (aside from writing this post and hoping it will do some good, but simultaneously believing it will do no such thing).

I read about the rich screwing the poor every day, but I do it on one of my iPads from the bedroom of my Primrose Hill flat next to a wardrobe full of Prada clothes. I’m definitely part of the problem, which might be why I don’t want to do anything about it, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a great deal of enthusiasm from the rest of society. I’d happily reduce my wages to increase those of somebody else, but only if we all do it. Selfishly I don’t see why I should knock my salary down to the average if someone else is going to continue earning £1m a year.

And obviously that attitude will never help anything. Sorry about that.

But what will cure the world? What will reverse the damage? What will save us?

I suppose I’ll just continue to think none of it really applies to me until it’s right there in front of my face and I have to confront the fact that my grandchildren will grow up in an unliveable Hades that used to be a green and pleasant land with plenty for all. Or maybe, just maybe, I’ll do something to stop the snowball rolling down the hill…

Or maybe you will.

If you’re still wondering about what it all means, have a listen to Mr. Sagan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=923jxZY2NPI

Some Brand analysis.

Gawker’s take on it.

Interesting development.

Evolve Society’s take on it.

For and against voting.

Daily Mail unhappy about this.

Daily Mirror ditto.

The Audi ad from a few years ago (famous, won awards, pretty sure it’s in The Book etc.):

The new Honda ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UelJZG_bF98

The strangely hypnotic local news announcements of Mike Myers’ impending baby (thanks, V):

I can’t really explain this but I laughed a lot (thanks, J):

The most ridiculous Yugoslav album covers of all time (thanks, D).

Brilliant drug advice (thanks, J):

Design jargon bullshit (thanks, D).

Erotic pictures of Hitler and Eastenders people (thanks, J).

Inadvertently dirty animation (thanks, J).

Grayson Perry’s wonderful Reith lecture (thanks, J).

What different countries lead the world in (thanks, M).

Odd footy endorsements.

Brilliant photo recreations (thanks, J).

Amazing pictures of dogs shaking their jowls (thanks, C).

Goes well with the random shit from earlier in the week: how to toilet train your toddler (thanks, J):

Butthoven’s 5th (thanks, J):

*Colonel Abrams’ version, not BOC.

If you had to go for the supremacy of one, which would you choose?

Would you rather have a great idea poorly executed or a dismal idea brilliantly executed?

For me it’s the latter every time.

I’ve written before about how there are plenty of idea-less ads that have turned out to be absolutely brilliant (e.g.: Whassssuuupp, Can I Kick It?, almost any headline-visual-body copy press ad…), but if a dismal execution has been applied to a great idea the result is always poor.

How many times have you read a script that doesn’t look like much, only to see its flawless execution elevate it to the greats? That’s where the good stuff happens. The idea is only the very beginning of what is usually a very long process of collaboration. Look what a great typographer, photographer, DOP or director can add to something so-so (as far as Jonathan Glazer is concerned, you need to allow a third of the ad’s creation to happen at the shoot so that the unexpected moments of genius can be allowed space to shine).

Of course, greatness most often occurs when idea and execution are both at the top of their game, but all the great planning, dialogue and conceptual nuance can come to naught if the execution is shite.

I watched a documentary on Sir John of Hegarty the other day. He told a story about this ad:

On the surface a great idea that would have worked brilliantly in the 80s Levi’s campaign. But when Sir H first saw the cut he was aghast: the music was poor and it deflated the whole thing. He was crushed at the utter failure and fell into a huge panic about what to do next. Then they changed the music and a classic was born. 1-0 to execution.

The same thing happened with Sony Paint, where a crappy intial track was swapped for a music-less version, which then won best ad at the BTAAs. When it came out I recall Graham Fink writing in Private View about music being 50% of the final ad’s success. If that’s the case then the idea can only responsible for less (much less) than half the quality of the finished film.

Execution: it’s not just there for the nasty things in life.

A sort of roundtable-type chat amongst some top US CDs.

There’s an interesting point made around the 16:00 mark where one of them says that the biggest jump is from CD to ECD (or the equivalent; in the UK can more like the jump from senior or ACD to proper hiring-and-firing CD). That’s where you really change from from being on the pitch to managing from the sidelines; enabling the people in your department to be brilliant at the hands-on part of the work instead of doing that yourself.

That’s definitely true. It’s where the essence of the job shifts the most. Your job, and where you draw your satisfaction from, is the advancement of the people in your department. Until you have no interest in getting the credit for yourself, you can’t really CD/ECD, otherwise the friction will get in the way of the work, the dynamic and the motivation of your staff.

I remember when I first CDed I hadn’t yet got that out of my system, so when I contributed (a decent amount) to the work of my teams I felt the need to be credited for that. Overal that worked out fine, but my partner and I fretted over it for ages and I’d really rather not have gone through it. The team left not long afterwards, and although I don’t think my want/need to have credit was the reason, I don’t think it helped.

The point made around 26:30 also makes a lot of sense. It’s not what you said, or how you said it; it’s about how you make people feel. It’s the soft stuff.

But for me it comes down to one word: workability. That covers a lot of stuff, but at the end of the day it’s about what you have to do to achieve your goals. Is the action you are taking in service of that goal? That question can include morale, happiness and satisfaction as much as it does quality of output. By definition it all makes a difference, so you have to take it all into account. Thrashing your teams to the point of misery might help you get a short burst of good work, but it might compromise the long term quality by reducing future motivation or the inclination to put forth future effort. Prizing ‘creativity’ over the overall needs of the agency, that might be unrelated to that specific goal, could also compromise the overall workability.

Of course, there are no set rules for what route or practice will increase the workability, and working that out that, as much as anything, is the job.