If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

I was thinking about my workmates the other day and wondering how many of them went to public school, how many went to state school and what difference it makes, if any.

For those of you who are wondering, I went to a public school called Westminster. It’s right in the middle of London, so we weren’t hidden away in the depths of the countryside, drinking vomit out of each other’s bumholes. Its location made it easy to enjoy culture and booze in quite large quantities, which was nice. I don’t know if there was any great connection to advertising, but Frank Lowe went there (I only found that out in the last few years) and when I was there his partner’s son (Leon Howard-Spinks) was in the year above. Then I went to Watford and I remember at least four ex-public school pupils out of twentysomething people in my year, a much higher rate than the 7% average for the whole country.

I then went to work at AMV and in the first couple of years another two people from my year joined planning and account management (one was Hugo Feiler, now MD at Grey), then another two girls from the year below. That’s a freakishly high average of people from one school to end up at one company (150 people leave Westminster every year), but AMV did have a fair few ex-public schoolers, some of them utter cocks. Was there a policy to hire them (mainly in account management) or was it just a case of like for like, with people at the top having been public school and hiring those people they most identified with (I don’t think David Abbott or Peter Mead went to public school; not sure about Adrian Vickers)? There might also have been a hangover of many clients being public school and the agency wanting to hire people who could identity with them, play golf with them and chat about soggy biscuit etc.

So… lots of ex-public school people in the industry, almost certainly higher than the country’s average, and that means a lower proportion of people who went to state school. So does it make a difference?

That’s a much harder question to answer (partly because I don’t know who exactly did and didn’t go to public school). Certainly, there are lots of very successful advertising people who went to state school (Dave Trott, my old boss Mike Cozens, Tony Davidson, to name but three), but has the over-population of richer, more privileged people changed the perspective the industry has on the people we’re supposed to be speaking to? Or has that education led to greater gains in certain areas?

Advertising is often accused of being out of touch with the people it supposedly talks to. The reason for that accusation is often laid at the door of our greater salaries and London lives, but I’d have thought there’s a case to be made for the greater number of ex-public school pupils adding to that distance. What is life like for a housewife in Warrington on £200 a week? For many people in this industry that’s a question that is only answered by watching an episode of Supernanny or My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (and obviously that answer is both wrong and without substance).

Of course, many ex-public school pupils have created some quite brilliant ads (hello, Jeremy Craigen), and maybe their golfing presence in account management has smoothed the path of several D&AD winners, and maybe our different perspective on life has added some unexpected ways into advertising problems. So maybe the pros and the cons cancel each other out.

Or maybe not. What do you think? Are you from public school or state school, and what difference do you think it has made?

‘People’ seem to love this ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ekr05T9Iaio

It doesn’t do much for me. Unlike, for example, Yeo Valley, it doesn’t say anything about anything.

I’m sure you’re already tired of the client comment, ‘You could stick any logo on the end of that’, but in this case it’s true. Was there nothing to say about 3? Really? That’s a shame, but that’s my take from this ad.

‘Silly stuff: It matters. Keep on internetting.’ Thanks for the tip. I was going to fill my laptop with yoghurt and chuck it under a bus, but now you’ve explained why I should continue ‘internetting’ I’m fully enlightened.

What was your client’s name again?

Meanwhile, here’s the sequel:

Here’s a VW campaign that’s makes Lemon and Snowplough look like two of the greatest ads of all time.

I know they’re two of the greatest ads of all time, but it’s usually the job of Cillit Bang and Go Compare to really emphasise that.

Here, one of the most awarded brands in advertising history has decided to try the old ‘give five dicks our product and see what they get up to’ thing.

I’ve seen this done for many, many brands (I think it won a Pencil for some guys in 2009), and it never fails to depress me with its combination of laziness, dullness and familiarity.

“We want to engage and activiate key target groups with our new digital campaign and tell individual product stories that people can identify with and enjoy sharing with others”, Giovanni Perosino, Head of Marketing Communications at Volkswagen, explained. “The tour made by our six trendsetters will become a story about summer, freedom, adventure and lifestyle – and the Beetle Cabriolet embodies all of those.” 

You could literally replace the words ‘Beetle Cabriolet’ with Nokia 357G, Canon Eos, Pepsi Max, Maybelline or pretty much anything and it’d work just fine.

‘Have you ever wondered how the trendsetter who does twatty things drives to his twatty things? This one drives a Beetle Cabriolet’. 

And if you want proof of how insipid this idea is, see how long you can spend watching this without thinking a negative thought about the people who produced it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpD0omgjVio&feature=player_embedded

UPDATE: oh, shit. There’s a reading list.

The making of Pulp Fiction.

Get John Bonham drumming on your tracks (thanks, J).

Wonderful Accidental Partridge Twitter feed.

Classic novels as movie posters (although many have already been movies).

How green screen works (thanks, P):

http://vimeo.com/60019489

The chewing gum man (thanks, J):

http://vimeo.com/45435491

Best places to read in the whole world (bookshelf porn ahoy! Thanks, T).

Fine art equivalents of David Lynch’s hair (thanks, T).

Very amusing celebrity dickslips (thanks, J).

Problematic camera angles.

I was chatting to a an ex-colleague the other day. We were reminiscing about the good old days when we both worked for AMV in the late 1990s.

Our memories might be a tad fuzzy but we both recalled it being an amazing place to work, both creatively and in new business terms. It used to suck in accounts like the Death Star’s tractor beam, one blue chip household name after another sliding irresistibly through the door.

We went on to wonder what an agency has to do to get into that position and why it doesn’t happen so much now.

I likened it to Prada vs M&S. When an agency is on a brilliant run clients will treat it like a visit to Prada, hoping against hope that they can bask in the reflective glow of utter excellence. Please let us be your client, they pray, wringing their hands like Uriah Heep. A late-nineties AMV ad campaign, much like a 2002 Mother, a 2005 Fallon, or a 2011 Adam and Eve would be like a Prada suit, conferring some kind of status upon the wearer no matter what the quality (although the quality would invariably top-notch; that’s how they get in that position in the first place).

But there are by definition very few Pradas (if we were all Prada none of us would be), leaving the rest of the field to be taken up by the odd Hugo Boss and a great many Marks and Spencer’s: decent enough, but pretty much indistinguishable from each other, and certainly unable to inspire the kind of obsequiousness of the top agency on top of its game. So that leaves the clients thinking (and behaving) like they are shopping in M&S: it ain’t a privilege, and the general feeling is that they’re doing you a favour by pointing their cash in your direction (which they are, at least a little bit).

In the old days, when great advertising was a bit of a mystery, and the ads were better, more agencies were held in Prada-level regard. Now that we’ve all accepted ads aren’t as good as they used to be, and relatively easier to make (changing a font now takes roughly 1,000,000th the time it took in 1974)  there’s much less respect for what we do. To a client it must seem as enjoyable an experience as buying that cheap suit, and just as likely to get their give-a-shit gland throbbing. If you produce amazing, that’s how you get treated, but average work begets average love, and whether work is genuinely average or merely perceived to be that way, it doesn’t really matter.

There is, of course, a solution: lots and lots of truly incredible work (just as long as we don’t all do it at the same time).

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

She’s lovely, isn’t she?

Makes Anne Hathaway seem like an android sent to win acting awards while humblebragging herself into a stupor.

And just in case that wasn’t enough…

I support Arsenal. Although we haven’t won a trophy since a somewhat undeserved FA Cup in 2005, I don’t have a big problem with these trophyless years. We had seven ridiculously good years under Arsene Wenger, so now the bar has been set very high indeed, leading to dissatisfaction that we don’t win the league on a regular basis.

Rather than digress into a post about whether or not we should be annoyed at having no trophies for eight years, I thought I’d suggest a reason why it’s happened that doesn’t seem to get discussed in the media.

Arsenal’s barren patch has coincided precisely with our move to Emirates Stadium. It was a move that had to happen if we were to continue to compete financially (and by extension on footballing terms) with the biggest clubs in Europe, but it has also come at a price as far as the team’s performance is concerned. I believe there are three main reasons for this:

The first is physical: the new stadium separates the fans from the pitch in a way that didn’t happen at Highbury. This means that the effect of the crowd is lessened and the home advantage we used to enjoy has been reduced.

The second is historical: the old stadium had years of familiarity behind it. People stood or sat with people they knew, the players understood how to work one of the smallest grounds in the top tier, and it was ours in a way that Emirates is taking time to match. For the first years of Emirates’ existence we might as well have been playing in an away stadium with greater support.

The last is the most important: the support. Highbury held around 38,000, whereas Emirates holds around 60,000. The new supporters are not going to be the most hardcore fans (they would already have been going to Highbury), so we now have another 15,000 or so (I’m leaving out away fans for simplicity) of the lesser fans. Now, I’m not saying that these are uninterested people, especially as I’m one of them, but there is an obvious and constant dissatisfaction from the spectators whenever anything goes wrong. Is that down to the dilution of the level of fandom or just the fact that the team isn’t playing so well? Within that point is the added corporate and neutral fans: there are now a lot more expensive tickets sloshing around for people who might just want to see an entertaining game of football, but are never going to sing about Arsene Wenger’s magic hat, or even give a chorus of ‘Red Army’.

A friend told me he was once watching a live game that we were winning by some margin at half time, but he was surrounded by a large group of foreign people who didn’t cheer any of the goals and killed the atmosphere dead. During the break he decided to leave and watch the rest of the match in one of the local Arsenal pubs, which he enjoyed much more.

I also imagine that many of those extra fans are people who have watched only since the great years of George Graham and Arsene Wenger, so they won’t have lived through more than the odd season where we weren’t at the very least in the top four. So they expect greatness, but it’s not a God-given right, and intolerance of errors does a great job of bringing the team’s confidence down. Do you want the crowd on your back for misplacing a pass that could have been great, or would you prefer the silence that accompanies a safe tap to a nearby teammate? It won’t make the difference for every decision, but it might just reduce the momentum enough to turn a win into a draw or a draw into a defeat.

I know Highbury wasn’t the loudest stadium on earth (indeed, it was nicknamed The Library), but when I sit watching games, a lone singing voice in my block, I do wonder what effect we’re having on the confidence of a team that drops the ball, sometimes literally, with alarming regularity. Very good new signings arrive and soon begin to display those signs of nervousness. How can two men who have 100 caps each for Germany be so prone to mistakes and lack of drive? Where is the Vermaelen of old? And why has tippy-tappy around the 18-yard line followed by an ineffective cross become the norm?

Sorry if you’re not into football (if that’s the case I’d be surprised that you got this far). If you are I’d love to know what you think, and has anything similarly inadvertent happened to harpoon the confidence of your club?

You had one job… (thanks, R).

Small error on news programme (thanks, J):

Another fine Amazon takeover (thanks, S).

Wonderful writing and animation (thanks, A):

Yoko Ono’s letter to Mark Chapman’s parole board.

All the meteors that have fallen on Earth since 2300 BC (thanks, L).

A shitty guide to making trippy music (thanks, J):

Classic albums re-imagined as books.

Wonderful ad for a smart mop (thanks, J):

Great online comedy about a dope delivery dude (thanks, C).

Sensitive nipple massage (not what you think. Worse. Thanks, J).

Jim’ll Paint It (not what you think. Better. Thanks, P).

Here’s an interesting new idea:

If you could be arsed to sit through an entire 53 seconds of explanation, it’s a scheme whereby you make a video of something people would want to watch (that might in turn showcase your talents), then you charge people a donation to a charity to watch it.

Sounds like an excellent way to enjoy yourself, impress/entertain others and help the needy.

Where’s the downside?