It’s an interesting new take on the age old problem of advertising rubber johnnies, and as a product demo it’s pretty darn fine.
Good music and nice direction means it’s definitely the best ad I’ve seen since last week.
I follow a Twitter account called Advice To Writers. You’ll be stunned to discover it provides snippets and links of advice to writers.
One such snippet slips into my conscious thought almost every day: the writer’s only responsibility is to make the reader turn the page.
I find that interesting because something else I’ve thought of many times is the refrain, ‘The Da Vinci Code was such a piece of shit, but I couldn’t stop turning the page’. Many people read that enormous bestseller and felt somewhat ashamed of themselves for finding it addictive. Dan Brown fulfilled his sole responsibility with incredible skill but what he got in return was a whole load of dissatisfied customers who thought he had another responsibility to write with elegance, verve and originality.
I see both sides: you can’t get millions to rattle through your novel without being very good at writing, but managing simultaneously to disappoint so many readers is a bit of a shame (see also: 50 Shades of Grey etc, which I have yet to read). I suppose the Catch 22 is that you can’t have millions of people think you’re shit at writing unless you’re very good at it.
This comes up often in advertising through the advice of Bill Bernbach: ‘If no one notices your advertising everything else is academic’, capitalism’s equivalent of ‘If a tree falls in the wood‘. It’s impossible to argue with that, yet the people responsible for so much of today’s advertising obviously don’t really believe it, or aren’t prepared to do what it takes to create ads that really stand out.
The statistics of how many commercial messages bombard us each day versus the number we notice are stunning, and yet clients, CDs, account handlers and yes: even creatives, are prepared to add to the gallons of beige paint that cover our planet disguised as adverts.
I wonder if there’s a correlation between those who read and deride Dan Brown and those who happily create advertising that is unseen and not heard.
A few weeks ago I was browsing Facebook when I came upon a status update from my brother. It read: ‘If Britney Spears can get through 2007, you can get through today’.
I thought it was vaguely amusing and it fit within Twitter’s 140 character limit, so I tweeted it.
It was then retweeted 4538 times and favourited 1716 times.
To put that in perspective, if I write a Tweet and it gets retweeted more than ten times I get embarrassingly pleased with myself, and pat myself on the back for managing to distill some part of the essence of human existence into 20-30 words.
4538 times is obviously way beyond that. It is an indication of something that his hit the spot for a lot of people (4-5000 retweets suggests a lot more people who read and liked it but didn’t bother to RT ). But here’s the thing: I didn’t write it (obviously), and I had no idea that many people would give a shit. It’s still being retweeted weeks later.
So what I’m trying to say is that I have no idea what people on Twitter really like (other than the kind of cod-philosophical stuff you can put on a tea towel), but I am happy to be a conduit for my brother’s genius.
Raquel Welch space dance (thanks, W):
Random Bond generator (thanks, T).
YOLO (thanks, J):
The Smiths lyrics as Penguin Classics (thanks, T).
Brilliant fake tube signs (thanks, T).
Haunted Toaster (thanks, J):
Cockney Romney (thanks, A):
The power of creativity (thanks, T).
The best thing ever is 40 seconds into this (but watch it from the start. Thanks, AA):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS1uDnIPTvo&feature=fvwrel
And as I was watching that, I saw a link to this (7,238,455 views):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrBj3u5dPgM
Last week Seth Godin wrote the following blog post:
Sometimes, we can’t measure what we need, so we invent a proxy, something that’s much easier to measure and stands in as an approximation.
TV advertisers, for example, could never tell which viewers would be impacted by an ad, so instead, they measured how many people saw it. Or a model might not be able to measure beauty, but a bathroom scale was a handy stand in.
A business person might choose cash in the bank as a measure of his success at his craft, and a book publisher, unable to easily figure out if the right people are engaging with a book, might rely instead on a rank on a single bestseller list. One last example: the non-profit that uses money raised as a proxy for difference made.
You’ve already guessed the problem. Once you find the simple proxy and decide to make it go up, there are lots of available tactics that have nothing at all to do with improving the very thing you set out to achieve in the first place. When we fall in love with a proxy, we spend our time improving the proxy instead of focusing on our original (more important) goal instead.
Gaming the system is never the goal. The goal is the goal.
I think that’s an amazing bit of thinking. He’s taken something we all do, day after day after day, and turned it on its head. Using a set of scales isn’t always an innocent way of finding out whether or not you’ve gained a pound; it’s often a malevolent method of displacing your self-perspective.
The real kicker is that it’s the things we really want to measure that we just can’t: happiness, attractiveness, beauty, worth, impact, meaning.
I remember reading a quote from the Rachel Papers: that’s the trouble with having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions. Defining the abstract is often like trying to catch a sunbeam (or a raincloud) in a jar. It’s intrinsically without firm definition and subject to unpredictable change. You might be happy about work but unhappy about your relationship. Does that make you happy or unhappy overall? What if you feel really attractive until you speak to your controlling and insecure boyfriend?
But we generally feel a a need to be in control of things (that’s the reason behind many cases of anorexia: the amount of food you put into your body is something that’s down to you, unlike how that bully makes you feel, or why your mum’s ill), so these proxies are just an attempt to do the impossible, and in the end they end up doing more harm than good. If you measure how attractive you are by the amount you spend on clothes then you’re going to marginalise other things that might be more important to that attractiveness, and you’re going to place far too much importance on the label in the back of your jumper.
I see Seth hasn’t offered an way of making sure we focus on the goal instead of the proxy, but the first step to finding a cure is being aware that you have a problem.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEpQ8O1BAgU
I suppose that’s because it makes mum look like a brilliant hero of Christmas, the person who brings it all together, choosing trees, wrapping presents, cooking dinner etc.
While dad is portrayed as some idle twunt who doesn’t lift a finger to make the big day happen.
Sexist indeed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TA6YW1MXWxU&feature=player_embedded
(Thanks, B.)
They’re a mixed bunch, aren’t they? Some longer, nicely observed; others a bit quick and light. Then there’s the Furby one (?).
It’s almost like a mashup of Boots (everyday observations) and Marks and Spencer (lots of famous songs).
And here are the posters (also a mixed bunch).
Guy Fawkes Night is over and that can mean only one thing: as far as the UK advertising industry is concerned, it’s Christmas.
Let’s start with Morrisons:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk1F1uynims&feature=relmfu
A real departure. Quality writing and direction. I only question the British public’s inclination to lap up something on the negative side. Yes, there’s a good reason for all the doom and gloom, and it makes a refreshing change, but will we take this reminder of Christmas’s shortcomings in the right way, or not? Who knows?
And then there’s M&S:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvtQslFoTOw
I think it feels a bit generic, leaning into Littlewoods territory. Where’s the proper pizzazz? Where’s the big song? Where’s Take That?
Sainsbury’s and Tesco, it’s over to you.
My son is learning guitar.
He’s six, but he’s having a good go at Back In Back, Sunshine Of Your Love and Behind Blue Eyes. When his lessons are over I step in and have a try at what he’s learned, which gives me a clear idea of each and every note that goes into Seven Nation Army or Come As You Are.
That’s a fascinating process and makes me really aware of how every song that feels as if it just rolled naturally into position is actually the result of a deliberate creative process. Even if it just happened via a spontaneous jam session, the decisions were made to place each note in a particular order and keep them there, and if you multiply every note by every length, pitch, volume and instrument you understand that the intro to Hey Joe or the riff from Heartbreaker survived a mind-boggling range of alternatives.
As a writer I’m fully aware that every word I write has been selected from 171,476 possibilities (and any number of neologisms) and could be anything: gerund, goitre, ocular, cattle, marmalade, calamity, oleaginous, fester, smile, nimrod, piece, serendipity, Africa etc., which again means that the existence of something like Catch-22 is verging on the miraculous.
I guess this is one of the reasons why we marvel at the creative process and deify those responsible for its successful outcome: it’s like herding infinity.
Ah, Christmas is somewhat upon us, and you know what that means: yes, the new John Lewis ad:
Old favourite sung by an up-to-date young lady? Check.
Heartwarming story involving a gift? Check.
Dougal Wislon? Check.
Cute kiddie? Check.
Very good ad? Check.
I preferred last year’s, but that’s like saying I preferred something very good to something also very good; A Mr. Kipling bakewell tart to an interesting copy of Private Eye, perhaps.
But never mind what I think, what do you think? Thinking is so important.