If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Campaign magazine has been the UK ad industry’s rag of choice for as long as anyone can remember (years ago someone – I think it was John Hegarty – ran an ad for it with the line ‘when was the last time someone stole your copy of Marketing Week?’).

In the twenty-or-so years I’ve been a reader, it’s changed a great deal, generally with the ebb and flow of the industry itself. When things were a bit more fun and glamorous in the 90s Campaign was equally so, reflecting the position we thought the industry was in as a purveyor of million-pound Levi’s ads that the public swooned over.

But even in those days it was generally considered to be little more than the perfect way to occupy the time it took to do a Thursday morning dump. Yes, everyone read it and by default gave a shit (pun intended) about what was in it, but to a great extent that was because there was no decent competition.

But in the last decade or so it’s been particularly poor. Last August I wrote a post about its insane run of front page headlines that mentioned pitches and speculated thus:

1. Nothing interesting is happening in advertising beyond these pitches. Possible, but surely someone has started up an agency in this time. When did 101 start?  What’s Beta doing now?  What about when Farah Ramzen left AMV? Wasn’t that a big enough story for the front page?

2. Campaign doesn’t consider anything but account moves to be significant enough for the front page. Maybe. I mean, it is a really awful, lazy, dull, unambitious, craven excuse for a magazine. It’s just possible that they can’t be bothered to do anything other than regurgitate press releases.

One of the two.

A commenter pointed out that it was indeed mainly made up of press releases from firms who used this PR company, which coincidentally was run by the husband Campaign’s then editrix.

So far so shite, but sometime recently, perhaps this year, it seems to have been taken over by people who, while they may not exactly be Woodward and Bernstein, do seem to have added a bit more meat to a few of their articles and opinions.

I confess I don’t read it every week, but it just seems to have a touch more substance these days (aside from the ridiculousness of doing a radio Private View).

Perhaps it will continue to improve. I’ll keep an eye on every third copy and see what happens.

Keane, ‘Hopes and Fears’ (Oh Little Town Of Bethlehem).

Mumford and Sons ‘Sigh No More’ (Much Ado About Nothing).

The Doors (Huxley’s The Doors of Perception).

Agatha Christie ‘The Mousetrap’ (Hamlet).

Hemingway, ‘For Whom The Bell Tolls’ (John Donne, No Man Is An Island).

Steinbeck ‘The Grapes Of Wrath’, (Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory Of The Coming Of The Lord).

Faulkner ‘The Sound And The Fury’ (Macbeth).

TV show, ‘London’s Burning’ (nursery rhyme London’s Burning).

Sting, ‘Nothing Like The Sun’ (Sonnet CXXX).

Huxley ‘Brave New World’ (The Tempest).

Hitchcock’s ‘North by Northwest’ (Hamlet).

Ray Bradbury, ‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’ (Macbeth).

‘Where Eagles Dare’ (Richard The Third).

There are loads of others, but I’m a bit jetlagged so I’m off to bed.

Fighting figures beautifully smashed (thanks, T).

The subplots of Back To The Future.

A day with a Russian Billionaire (thanks, G):

Great/awful business slogans (thanks, J).

How not to break a window (thanks, J):

The Pixar connection theory.

Geeks vs nerds (thanks, A).

Japanese posters of David Lynch films (thanks, T).

Colbert roasts Chevy Chase (thanks, G):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taPTqd8g7yg

Brilliant Korean Photoshop trolls.

Obscure actors: where are they now (thanks, G).

David Attenborough narrates gang fight (thanks, J):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1Adi2Hbj78

Another fine advertising blog.

Guns in space (thanks, G):

Russia vs Trucks (thanks, J):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZzuw-lQ_yQ&feature=player_embedded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMzgl0nFj3s

The first few times I saw that I stopped watching after 30 seconds, assuming it was an ad for Pedigree Chum.

Then I saw it in the cinema (no escape) and finally understood.

Or rather I didn’t.

You see, I don’t get what being ‘more dog’ has to do with a mobile network.

‘Click on the link, Ben! Visit the website!’

Sorry. If the ad doesn’t make me do that, I don’t do it. That’s how ads do/don’t work.

I think it’s very well shot though, and the script is pretty good.

In my old age I’ve come round to thinking that the only thing that really has any significance is the degree to which something is or isn’t workable.

You want to have a long and happy marriage? Are you doing things that will make that work?

You want to win a D&AD Pencil? Are your current circumstances likely to make that work?

You want to go to sleep? How does what you’re doing make that work?

It’s as simple as that. Either you are doing what works for what you want to achieve or you aren’t.

If not, change your behaviour until you’re doing something that make your aim more workable.

I think that way happiness lies.

I could reprint the whole thing, but it’s already appeared in Campaign, so here’s a link to its reappearance on the Coy-Com blog.

Mark Denton wrote it as his ‘View From The Top’ ten days ago. It’s funny, perceptive and painfully true.

It’s also brave.

That’s because hardly anyone in UK advertising ever dares to even consider nibbling the hand that feeds them, let alone doing what Mark did, which was to hold up a mirror (albeit a funny, charming one) to an ugly side of the entire industry. Yes, it’s about production companies but its main thrust is the way agencies, and by extension clients, have been complicit in the degradation of what we do. For the last ten years little things like respect, politeness, fairness and decency have been gently shuffled off the table like so many irrelevant crumbs and this article points that out with a wit whose subtlety is somewhat out of character for its author (the sense of humour, however, is delightfully Dentonesque). It’s also clear to anyone with an IQ in double figures that those behavioural compromises are symptomatic of a far more debilitating disease; one that has done its best to send the quality of advertising sliding gently downwards for years.

Fortunately Mark’s words touched something of a nerve and have since been discussed by the APA and the IPA. He has also been besieged by supportive emails and phone calls from as far away as San francisco, Sydney and Thailand (suggesting this problem is international), along with complimentary shouts in the streets of London. Agency producers have rung up to apologise and, most heartening of all, the quality and quantity of biscuits laid on at meetings has increased immeasurably.

Wonderful. I hope it also leads to more substantial results that bring permanent changes to the ridiculousness of the pitching process (by the way, I’ve recently heard that Blink will no longer pitch for jobs. Further much-needed bravery…)

I found myself cheering Mark’s words louder than most because I have friends on the production company side of the UK ad industry. It’s no exaggeration to say that I’ve spent much of the last decade hearing their increasingly strong and reasonable complaints about how much more they are being asked to do and how much less they are being paid to do it.

Yes, the job is a ‘fun’ and ‘interesting’ one when compared to most alternatives.

Yes, it can be very lucrative.

Yes, it’s not digging ditches.

But the hoops production companies now have to jump through for an ever-shrinking share of an ever-shrinking pot are the inevitable consequence of an industry that is having the fun and money squeezed out of it at an alarming rate. I’ve written before about the sliding wages (here’s a post from almost exactly three years ago) but I don’t think I’ve mentioned the knock-on effects of that belt-tightening on the other parts of the business.

I think the money side of it and the way that affects the end product is one thing, but the constant ridiculous demands that agencies make on production companies? How did that happen? The number of treatments required at all stages of the pitch is a ridiculous drain on resources that would be far better applied elsewhere. They started off as one small addition then gradually took over to become the colossal norm, but as Mark says, it’s a Google Images/Flickr/Instagram contest, where some unfortunate work experience lady (I generalise, but not that far from the truth) is asked to trawl through pictures of chimps and helicopters on the off-chance her selection will beat another bunch of chimp and helicopter pictures. How did we cope in the past, when there were no treatments, when you could tell from seeing a director’s reel and having a chat with him/her that he or she would be able to do the job?

The abrogation of responsibility in this industry is amazing: people who used to be able to make a decision based on their brain’s interpretation of some useful information now require their hand to be held as some poor sod spoon feeds them every last eventuality of what might occur. And what does that do to the creative process? It fucks with the magic: button down everything and nothing can fly.

Then there’s the other point that I’ve mentioned so many times: the less fun and pleasurable this industry becomes the fewer bright people it will attract and the worse the work will become, making the whole thing even less attractive. If I were starting out in the 60s and I saw how enjoyable advertising looked and how rich it could make me, as well the extent to which it could be a stepping stone to even more glamorous industries, such as movies or literature, I’d be in here like a shot. But the more of those benefits we remove, the less tempting it all seems to the next generation and the faster the downward spiral.

As Jesse J so perceptively put it, these days it’s all about the money, money, money, and anything that gets in that way of that will soon die an ignominious death.

We used to work in an industry where this couldn’t even win a Cannes Grand Prix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zff9hVH3ptY

Now this wins five:

I rest the case I’ve been making since 2006.

What’s in Prince’s fridge? (Thanks, A.)

Kid celeb grammar police (thanks, C).

Headline of the year (thanks, T).

The dancing accountant (thanks, J).

Pick a lock with a drink can:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mpF2tWgHND8

Man sings five octaves on the piano (thanks, B).

Most perfectly timed photos ever (thanks, B).

Last words of the executed (thanks, J).

Best case study video of all time (thanks, J).

Which rappers lie most about their wealth?

America really does have talent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=37sjxLl_gi8

Royal baby A-Z.

New wearable computer also sucks your dick (thanks, J):

Andy Mathieson is the guy who made(under Paul Belford’s excellent design) my Whois site and my portfolio site.

He’s just redone his own site and it’s spreading like wildfire. It’s had over three million hits in a week and continues to blaze its way through Twitter.

Check it out then you can see the excellent work he’s done for lots of other clients and maybe make use of him yourself.

Just a reminder: that is the star of The Godfather, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Heat etc.

He can’t be that poor.

Is he that poor?

Al, if you’d said how tight things were we’d have had a whip round. We owe you. We have loved you.

Sea of Love, Donnie Brasco, even Scent of a sodding Woman.

HOOOOOO-AHHH!!! That’s what you said to win your Oscar.

I’D LOVE SOME CASH!!! That’s what you said a few months ago.

Sniff…

Oh, hang on, he’s already sunk a long way lower than that: