If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

A nothing brief leads to a lovely ad.

That’s how it’s done.

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

It’s quite funny, parts of it aren’t badly shot and hats of to the company for doing that to themselves.

Great article on creativity here (thanks, T).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=q8bQXgvuYwU

It’s because I don’t recognise any of the Liverpool players (I know a few LFC fans read this, so apologies to them).

The odd thing about that is that I’m quite an obsessed footie fan and I recognised all the Man U players, so it’s not as if I only recognise those who play for Arsenal. That leads me to believe there will be quite a few people in my boat, making the ad a bit of a waste of money (cheap production budget, I s’pose, not counting the fees to the clubs).

Then I see the punchline at the end and it makes even less sense. (Massive apology again, LFC fans.) Liverpool and Man United aren’t even vaguely equals anymore, so the thrust of the ad, which kind of suggests that they are, is fucked, really.

But whatever the oddness of all that, it pales into insignificance when placed beside this unholy steamer:

Seriously? Turkish fucking Airlines? Seriously? I mean, seriously? (I wish it were possible to italicise a bit harder. Hang on… Seriously?)

WTF?

Well, I guess they’re better known than they were before this somewhat odd piece of poop hit the airwaves.

Job done?

UPDATE: as I have no idea what Turkish Airlines is trying to accomplish, if it is just to seem big and legit, then job definitely done. These ads are even running on billboards in LA, so that might well be the case.

The best lists of all time (thanks, J).

Sign up here. You have nothing to lose but your reasons for being pissed off that someone else won.

If you walk down any street you’ll see a whole load of things that only exist because people want them.

Bookies, pubs, charity shops, Argos, McDonalds… Some might have a Crabtree and Evelyn or a Pizza Express or several interchangeable coffee shops.

In fact, people don’t just want them, they want them enough to justify an ongoing business.

And beyond those retail establishments we also have drainpipes, yellow lines, cars, people, dogs, houses, windows (I could go on, really I could: paving stones, bouncers, litter…). And they’re all there because people want them to be there.

Some human beings enjoyed the idea of backing up their differences of opinion with money, then at some point since then enough people agreed that this was a good way of spending time to justify entire multi-million-pound chains of bookmakers.

Other human beings liked to be able to drive up the street without parked cars getting in the way, so a bunch of them got together and arranged for people in charge to paint yellow lines next to the kerb and fine people for parking on them.

Still others came across dogs and quite liked their yappy warmth, or their ability to fetch stuff, so they trained them to be domesticated. Then so many other people liked this idea that they spent millions of pounds breeding them into types that would be most likeable, covering a very wide definition of that word. Then pet shops were created and here we are with loads of people owning loads of dogs.

They want them.

I find this interesting because I regularly catch myself dismissing all sorts of things as being ‘shite’ or ‘rubbish’ (e.g.: X-Factor, Adam Sandler movies, lots of types of trainers etc.). But the truth is they only exist because people like them, and if they’ve come to my attention, we’re probably talking millions of people. So they’re not shite or rubbish; they’re just some stuff I don’t like. But they exist because an awful lot of people disagree with me.

That doesn’t mean I can’t try to justify my dislike for them, but it does help put that in perspective sometimes (hint: especially when you’re a London media twat writing an ad for washing powder that needs to tickle the fancy of a housewife in Warrington).

Happy New Year!

Oddly named shoes, well reviewed (thanks, W).

50 years of Bond titles:

British person problems (thanks, A).

The Boat Race vandal being interviewed by the Taxi Driver Artist:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ou4TP2JXOw

Two young/new creatives called Rob and Joe sent me this the other day.

I hadn’t really thought about agency names for a while, so looking at that chart reminded me about all the fuss over Mother’s nomenclature. Back in the mid-nineties, when Mother was born, we all had a big laugh at an agency calling itself something other than the names of the founders. What tits these Mother people are! we guffawed as the siren notes of Roll With It wafted through the stench of stale Stella. Obviously since then we’ve stopped laughing at non-name names and embraced them with nary a raised eyebrow, an occurrence that is thanks in no small part to the massive success of the aforementioned Mother.

Now agencies (particularly those started by a couple of digi no-marks whose names mean nothing to anyone other than their immediate family) have fully embraced the opportunity to think of a word that sums them up, or doesn’t sum them up, or sounds nice, or sounds fucking stupid, leaving us with the reverse situation where the trio of names has become a decidedly odd way to top the agency stationery. Look at Adam and Eve, an agency that could quite reasonably been called Priest and the other two whose names I’ve forgotten (Golding, maybe?), but instead they went biblical on our asses and I still don’t know/care why they chose those particular words (why not Sodom and Gomorrah? Cain and Abel? Jesus and Barrabas?), but it’s worked, and there they are shoving poor old Doyle, Dane and Bernbach to the right hand side of the little plaque outside the office.

I can tell you from the one opportunity I had to name an agency that possibly less goes into it than you might have thought. We were given a few days to name what became Lunar BBDO and we went through everything from Cream to The House (an early press release had us named The House before some other company in the world of media told us we couldn’t use it. That’s the real problem: all the good names have been taken. I think Cream had also gone). Lunar was a last minute suggestion that we all liked, then like any good ad agency we post-rationalised the fuck out of it to pretend it was a very deliberate decision (Lunar… tides… change… the influence of the moon… blah blah blah). As time went on we realised it didn’t really matter at all, and as long as you don’t call you place Savile, Glitter and West, no one will really give a shit anyway.

As Jeremy Bullmore has so sagely pointed out on many occasions, things give names meaning, not the other way round. So spend a billionth of a second on the name and the rest of the time on making great work. That way your name will be cool, whatever it is.