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.
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):
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):