If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Beautiful Sony timeline (thanks, Y):

The Specials meet the Wu Tang Clan (thanks, G):

IMDB’s top 250 films in 2.5 minutes (thanks, A):

Disney characters as Star Wars characters (thanks, G).

Rave 1997 (thanks, G):

It’s completely Daebak – Gangnam Style for the fans in Korea (thanks, M):

Water light graffiti (thanks, L):

http://vimeo.com/47095462

The useless web (thanks, J).

Incredibly camp 1970s German football fashion (thanks, G):

this.

Immediately.

UPDATE: apparently he passed away a few days ago.

So the message is that they’re turning £5 of Clubcard vouchers into £10.

I have to confess I had to watch it a few times before I got that.

Do you know why?

It’s because there was a Furby singing the word ‘Hello’ from that old Lionel Richie song. That kind of distracted me. It still distracts me. The whole explanation is here, including a bit where Matt Atkinson, group marketing and digital officer at Tesco, described this year’s Christmas at Tesco campaign as “a bit different”. He can say that again.

He adds: “We will focus on a single mission; celebrating the things that matter this Christmas, and making them better.”

Call me a thick wanker, but I don’t think the above ad does that.

This whole thing seems a bit strange to me.

It’s Wieden and Kennedy, the UK’s most creative agency, and Tesco, the UK’s biggest brand.

So why does the work feel somewhat uncreative and small?

Here’s another one:

Wieden’s blog sez: ‘Our first ad for Tesco broke at the weekend. It’s a tactical campaign to support their ‘£5 off when you spend £40’ offer.
We’re very pleased to have our first work for Tesco out there.’

That’s quite a humble apologetic way of going about it. Usually the Wiedens blog offers a bit more depth of explanation. Why so quiet? And small?

It’s a bit queer, isn’t it?

A couple of days ago my six-year-old son, who had been watching the movie Grease, remarked that people who smoked looked cool, ‘like they do in Grease‘.

That got me thinking. Grease is a very popular movie, grossing almost $400m on its 1978 release and watched many times on TV, video, DVD etc. since. So how many people have thought, like my son, that the people smoking in Grease were cool, and decided to take up smoking because of that? Then how many of those people have passed on the habit to their kids or contributed to the deaths of others through secondary smoke? Lots, obviously. I’ll generously estimate it at around 100 million.

But is that more than the country of Greece has killed? That’s hard to say, but before our friends in the southeastern corner of Europe decided to chillax for a few thousand years they had an empire that stretched from Egypt to the Hindu Kush. That must have required a fair amount of killing, but then there were only about 14 million people on the whole planet in those days, so perhaps conquering the Middle East and North Africa would not require as many deaths as it might first appear. Then Rome basically put a stop to the whole ‘Greek conquering’ thing by annexing the Greek peninsula in 146 BC, leaving them much less murderous. Although there were various crusades, a Graeco-Turkish war, a relatively small contribution to WW2 and a civil war just after, I don’t think they’ll have managed the 100m of Grease.

But then there’s grease, the substance in which many unhealthy things are cooked. In 2005 there were estimated to be 1.6 billion overweight people and 400 million obese people worldwide. in 2011 a massive 599, 413 Americans died of heart disease and although we can’t attribute all of those deaths to grease, not all grease-related deaths are from heart disease: cancer and diabetes, also massive killers, come into play as well, with all three methods combined leading to over half of all American deaths. Let’s be generous and say that grease contributes to 1/4 of all American deaths (over half a million a year), but that’s less than 1/20th of the world’s population, so even though many Americans have a particularly poor diet, we could safely say five million a year die worldwide from grease-related causes. Obesity rates have been increasing in recent years as a more sedentary lifestyle and a greater availability of poor-quality food have taken their toll, but it would take only 20 years of the current rate to cause Grease‘s 100m deaths. Given that grease has been a cooking ingredient for thousands of years, I’d have to say we have a winner:

1. Grease.

2 Grease.

3. Greece.

Here’s the new ad for Everything Everywhere, which I believe is the amalgamation of T-Mobile and Orange:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4IdlSHI1CMk

It’s an absolute beauty: impeccably written, performed and directed with a strong central idea and a fresh, solid tone of voice for the new company.

(Interest declared: I have spent many delightful days working at Saatchi and Saatchi London, and those spent with Rob and Andy, who made this ad, were among the most enjoyable.)

Hats off all round.

(PS: I’m in LA right now and it says the above link doesn’t work. If you find the same problem there’s another link here.)

The Exorcist as an 80s sitcom (thanks, L):

Hipster The Thick Of It (thanks, T).

Sped up old planes look like toys:

Font Me, I’m Famous (thanks, A).

Men explaining things to female academics in a patronising way (thanks, D).

The history of the world in 90 seconds:

The 32 greatest unscripted movie scenes (thanks, T).

Cassetteboy on the Presidential Election (thanks, L):

In my first job each brief was given to several teams. That made complete sense, partly because there weren’t enough briefs to keep each team busy, and partly because it meant lots more work was generated from which the CD could theoretically select only the creme de la creme.

But it also served another purpose, that of fanning the flames of endeavour with the bellows of competition. When the brief came in the starting gun went off and the object was to be as collaborative and friendly as possible on the surface while doing whatever you could to get your idea to the top of the pile: colluding with account people to harpoon that lead idea they think the client would never buy; telling the other team you love their idea then waiting for the final meeting to casually let slip that it had already been done by the agency across town; keeping your best idea back so no one has any time to try and beat it; having a special quick chat with the CD just when everyone else thinks the decision is done and dusted… Stuff like that.

Which creates a testy atmosphere, but does it create better work? You might think so, after all, the need to bring your A-game and the pressure of the other teams’ possible superiority would surely breathe down your neck to make you put in the extra hours.

Then again, the multiplicity of ideas makes it harder to just choose the best and go with it. Instead the CD and important account guys can make sure there’s something safe in the back pocket just in case the crazy-but-excellent top idea falls upon stony ground. Shit ad gets bought and made and nobody wins, particularly the good team whose best stuff gets harpooned by a turd.

But what’s the alternative? When I started at AMV in 1998 my AD and I were stunned to discover that it was one team one brief. How could that produce better work? Well, AMV circa 1998 was unusual in that it was stuffed to the gills with unbelievably good teams, and that meant that if you gave a team a brief they would respond with a very good ad. No need for competition, no need for dodgy shenanigans. We also presented just the one ad we thought was right. Oh, and the creative department had the last word in what that idea would be. Oh, and I almost forgot: the client would almost always buy that ad. Happy, happy days.

But that set up produced some of the best ads in history. As David Abbott said, ‘Flowers grow best in the sunshine’, and it was like Tahiti at 151 Marylebone Road.

I haven’t been in many places since where it’s one team one brief, but that’s probably got something to do with the current need to give clients quantity rather than quality. The idea that a single team would churn out the volume that clients currently ‘enjoy’ is a bit far-fetched and certainly requires going wide and shallow rather than narrow and deep.

I guess we’ll never really know if competition definitely helps or hinders, but I would say that it certainly fosters a atmosphere of friction, and that can go either way.

What does your agency do, and does it make the ads better or worse?

I came across this link on Twitter the other day.

The post is excellent, but do read through the comments, which develop the subject still further.

The whole thing really made me think about detached I might be from other people, and how much that matters.

Anyway, have a read. It might give you a little insight into parts of life you don’t know about. Or maybe you don’t have much money and it’s nice to know someone has shed some light on how that really feels.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLk3AWskQw0

(Thanks, B.)

Make your life so much easier (thanks, B).

Kanye Wes Anderson (thanks, D).

The ultimate nutshots compilation (thanks, V):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=u7M5U4mPJOQ#!

Shepherd Fairey creates a mural (thanks, D).

Pictures that recreate movie scenes (thanks, R).

Drunk Jeff Goldblum (thanks, D):

The Lamborghini Countach (thanks, D):

Fantastic Tom Cruise and Terry Semel interview about Stanley Kubrick (thanks, A).

Worst typos of all time (thanks, T).

Make something cool every day (thanks, A).