If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

(Thanks, B.)

Last Thursday I had the great pleasure of spending an evening at The Groucho Club in the company of Sir John Hegarty (I know! Who stuffed me into a Delorean and sent me back to 1985? Well, it was Lisa Batty of IPC magazines. She organises a book club and last week’s was John Hegarty’s).

John spoke and we listened and asked questions and drank booze and ate those mini hamburgers that don’t have any calories. Here are the best bits of wisdom I can recall:

When John was at art school his teacher said that when a picture wasn’t working the worst thing you could do was give up, turn the page and start again. You had to keep at it until the picture worked. The teacher then paused and said, ‘I suppose I’m also talking about life’. That’s a great lesson. Most of What Sir John said came down to the message ‘Never, ever, ever give up’, and that story was a brilliant illustration of why you shouldn’t.

When he was taking tennis lessons he had real trouble getting his backhand right. He could swing a mean forehand but no matter what he did he couldn’t get his backhand going. Then one day he hit a perfect one: great position, smooth shot, right down the line, at which point his teacher said, ‘Right, we shall now move on to the overhead smash’, to which John replied, ‘Hang on, I’ve only hit one good backhand.’ His teacher turned around and said, ‘If you can do one, you can do a thousand. We shall now move on to the overhead smash’. The point is to have belief. Like a lot of creative people, John had a sneaking suspicion that he only had a finite store of, say, 500 good ideas, which would eventually run out. But they don’t run out. If you can have one, you can have 1000.

Then he told a story about this Levi’s ad:

Apparently, the original music for this was ‘It’s A Man’s World’ by James Brown, but when it was laid to picture it made the male model look like a really bad actor. The thing was, John just thought the performance was crap and nothing could be done about it, but then someone found out that an ad in Belgium was using that song (the Levi’s ad was due to run in Belgium) so they had to try another one, which ended up being Mannish Boy by Muddy Waters, a track that looks like the entire ad was choreographed to match. So brilliance can come from the most unexpected places, particularly when you’re working with film, which always relies on the existence of a bit of magic that you can never fully control.

There was much other great wisdom, although we disagreed on (or never quite explored) the issue of creatives no longer making a name for themselves as they used to in the days of Tom and Walt, Steve and Vic, John and Nick etc. I suggested that as creatives were not given the opportunities to be as famous today (for many reasons I’ve explored in past posts) other methods could be used to gain that notoriety, including blogs such as this. John quite reasonably argued that it should be the work that makes you famous. I agree, but these days it just doesn’t happen, so when the world zigs, zag (I can’t remember who said that). You could knock it out of the park like Cabral, but there hasn’t been one of those since his last good ad (five years ago!). The odds are stacked against us. Get your advantage where you can. It’s worked for me and Trotty.

But thanks a million John, for the amazing career of great ads (so far) and being truly inspirational and very pleasant company.

How to choose the perfect board game.

Why is it dark at night (thanks, P)?:

600lb or 169lb… Who will win?

What would you have done? (Thanks, T.)

Liam Neeson, The Musical (thanks, C).

Amazing hand lettering of Subterranean Homesick Blues (thanks, C).

Your brain on dope (thanks, P):

Gandalf Europop Nod (thanks, J):

‘The best TV show ever’.

Cartoon Network 20th anniversary (thanks, P):

Ikea got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one (thanks, T).

Human flesh meat market.

Songified presidential debate (thanks, P):

Emile Heskey on the Rod Hull and Emu show (thanks, R):

Jonathan King’s somewhat apologetic song about Harold Shipman.

Hand shandy on Cathay Pacific (thanks, P):

It can be found here.

I don’t know anything about why they made it or what it’s trying to achieve, so I’ll just say what I think of it as a Facebook user and ad blogger.

I like the writing because it has an unusual rhythm for an ad. However, it’s also somewhat obvious and presents ideas you’ve probably already come across. The universe is vast and dark? We want to connect with people? No shit. So then I need a reason to care about Facebook, which I already use, and already know why I use it. It’s not because it’s like a chair or a bridge or a chipmunk’s balls, it’s because I can keep up-to-date with some of the things my friends are doing and play Wordscraper with my parents. The only people who need Facebook explained to them are the very small number of people who use the internet and don’t use FB. But I don’t think this ad will tip them over the edge into being users because it doesn’t particularly convey the FB experience of time wasting trivia.

On top of that I have written before about the strange prevalence of analogies in advertising but rarely have I seen the technique used quite so brazenly. Facebook is like a chair because…

Hang on. Facebook isn’t like a chair.

It says:

‘Chairs. Chairs are made so that people can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit on a chair, and if the chair is large enough they can sit down together. And tell jokes or make up stories or just listen. Chairs are for people, and that is why chairs are like Facebook.’

That is bullshit. Facebook doesn’t allow you to sit down and take a break. It is the break. That’s like saying football is like a chair, or Eastenders is like a chair. This feels like a creative chucking out an idea before the other creative says, ‘Hey! Doesn’t work. Choose some other analogy so we can go to the pub’.

‘Doorbells, airplanes, bridges. These are things people use to get together so they can open up and connect about ideas and music and other things that people share.’

Yes, people do use those things to do that, but that’s not their only use and that’s not why they were invented. You could well add oxygen to that list, or food, or dogs.

‘Dancefloors, basketball.’

You see… anything, really. Including…

‘A great nation is something people build so they can have a place where they belong.’

Fucking hell. Is Facebook really likening itself to a great nation? And I’m about 99.9985678977% certain that’s not why a ‘great nation’ gets built. That happens through a process of struggle, violence, disagreement and greed and in the end the finished article always pisses off an enormous bunch of people. That sounds closer to Facebook, so they’re right about the comparison but they chose the wrong reasons.

This ad is obviously not an attempt to get non-Facebook users to use Facebook. If I were a betting man I’d guess it’s some sort of image building exercise intended to make people think the somewhat contentious social media site is nothing but a soft, warm duvet of goodness. It’s big and great and helps the world, and anyone who thinks it’s just for sharing funny videos of cats is seriously missing the point.

Why?

Dunno.

Maybe it’ll fool Facebook shareholders into forgetting how much cash they’ve lost, but I doubt it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=JGskDRV4t0g

I like the killer fact at the end.

I like the fact that it all makes complete sense.

I don’t like the fact that it’s a bit too long. That may seem like nit-pickery, but you want people to get, and give a fuck about, this message. Every single person that stopes paying attention because of the extra shots of kids counting their fingers or whatever is a failure that could have been avoided. Sure, those extra shots might make more people give a shit, but I doubt it.

Find out more about this fine cause here.

Here’s a doc about his new exhibition at the V&A.

He makes a wider point that because most things are shit, there are lots of opportunities to make things better.

Great attitude.

From the Olympic Torch to the new Routemaster, to those windows he did for Harvey Nichols fifteen years ago, the guy is hands down the best designer out there.

And I love the fact that his work seems British in a way that you can’t quite put your finger on, but you can’t help having affection for.

Steve Harrison (see posts passim for mentions) said an interesting thing to me when he came to speak at my agency (he said more than one interesting thing but I’m only going to refer to one). He mentioned the phenomenon of weekday frequency of social media posts, i.e. many more posts occur during a working day than a weekend.

So why is that? Well, obviously we all have better things to do on the weekend than tell our friends what we’re eating or what we think of the new Muse album. But during the week it’s much harder to stop us finding even the most mundane thing so interesting that we decide to tell all our friends about it.

I’ve often thought of this blog of nothing more than a diverting manner in which to pass a few minutes, on a working day or otherwise, but I am fully aware of the way readership figures tend to slump on Friday afternoon, picking themselves up like a a coke-fuelled middle manager on Monday morning. So you’re all just killing time when you could be working, but you’re much less likely to sacrifice any of your precious leisure moments to do something so pointless.

(By the way, a few years ago I checked my analytics on Christmas Day (at that time it was an almost Pavlovian reaction to opening my laptop; now I have no idea how many people read my blog and haven’t checked my analytics for years) only to find that 100 individuals had come seeking a post or comment with which to pass the tedious hell of Yuletide.)

So what does all that tell us, other than the somewhat predictable fact you’re all bored at work but not so much on weekends? Well, I think it’s interesting that social media is just something that’s slightly more attractive than work, but much less so than the rest of your life. It’s a low-level pastime that barely competes with reading a copy of Heat in a doctor’s surgery. Its attraction is not immediate and necessary; it’s adequate and tangential, and I suspect that much of what gives it its appeal is its easy access and consumption – right there, a mere click away from that spreadsheet/catfood script/great American novel you’re ‘supposed’ to be getting on with. It’s the medium as much as the content, providing us with a simple way to dip in and out of fuck-all, every single minute of the day.

But have you ever wondered if that has anything to do with the creative dip advertising is currently still suffering? I do like those John Lewis ads, but there hasn’t been anything truly great since Gorilla, a dry patch that has coincided quite neatly with the rise of social media. In those heady Facebook-less days of the nineties and early noughties there were multiple great ads each year. Now many creatives are either surfing the net for vaguely second-hand inspiration or just killing time. Does that prevent the brain stretch that a long think about a problem in a vacuum brings on? Does it lead to earlier, less interesting answers to briefs? Or is it just one more of the many factors that have contributed to this status quo?

Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I sincerely thank you for choosing to fuck up your career with a visit to at If This Is A Blog Then What’s Christmas.

The truth about honesty (thanks, P):

Billie Joe Armstrong is not happy at having one minute left (thanks, E):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJoKTf8ZoOE

isbarackobamathepresident? (Thanks, P.)

Breakbad Mountain (thanks, J):

Art lessons (thanks, P):

Hollywood’s waning creativity (thanks, G).

Two kinds of people (thanks, V):

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo (thanks, Z).

The man with the biggest balls on earth (thanks, S).

Words of advice for young people from William S. Burroughs:

And TS Eliot on creativity (thanks, P).

Street ghosts (thanks, J).

Artist takes every drug known to man then draws a self portrait after each one (thanks, J).

Man has sex with couch abandoned in street.

LA album cover locations (thanks, A).

And what would your life be without Samurai Cop? (Thanks, W.):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v1J_QhxivY

Here’s the new Skittles ad:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j22SfSS9x7c

I’ve been trying to put my finger on why they’re not as good as ‘Touch’:

Or ‘Piñata:

or ‘Sour’:

It’s down to character. All three ads have the same weird situations, but there is a deeply tragic story in ‘Touch’ and ‘Piñata’ and a really dark dynamic to ‘Sour’. 30 seconds of proper story, rather than a vaguely amusing premise and nothing more.

‘Funny’ is one thing, but situations that you can relate to, that touch you more deeply, are something else.

Whatever else it does (not much), it makes you like the bus company and the people behind it. They look like they have a sense of humour, instead of the po-faced jobsworthness that many bus drivers have in the UK.

If I was in Denmark and I needed to get somewhere and there was no other form of transport available, I’d definitely take the bus.