John Cleese has made dozens of excellent ads but not many in the last twenty years.
So it’s good to see him back with this lovely spot shot by Tom Kuntz:
Great editing, direction and performance to make what could have been a big fat nothing into something really very good.
It’s a big one this week. I’m off on holiday for a bit, so may not be posting. If your office life is a little dull, maybe you should ration this stuff like wartime chocolate:
Trailer for Drew: The Man Behind The Poster (thanks, P):
Here’s a social experiment: is Wank London funny? (Thanks, J):
Parisien apartment opened for the first time in 70 years.
The art of logo design (thanks, P):
The Humpy Awards (thanks, W):
A brief history of title design:
How Hitchcock got people to see Psycho (thanks, P):
Lego The Wire (thanks, C).
135 shots that will restore your faith in cinema (if you ever lost it) (thanks, C):
The Thick Of It’s nicknames:
Fantastic swimming pools (thanks, D).
Batman’s wonderful toys (thanks, P):
I’ve just been reading Steve Harrison’s excellent biography of Howard Gossage, Changing The World Is The Only Fit Work For A Grown Man (great title, and true).
(This is not a proper piece of film. It’s just the only way I can show the cover without uploading a picture, which WordPress won’t let me do).
It’s a rollicking good read, letting us briskly into the mind of a truly fascinating man.
He always did things his way, keeping his agency small to maintain quality (love to see anyone really brilliant trying that these days).
He developed interactivity in the 50s, always adding a coupon to his ads, even if it was just to ask the reader what was on their mind.
He created stunts fifty years ago that would put today’s efforts to shame. One of these involved inventing Beethoven sweatshirts to promote a beer. There had till that point never even been pictures on sweatshirts, but the demand for these was so great that it generated too many orders to cope with, along with thousands of press reports.
He also introduced us to wide scale environmentalism, first saving the Grand Canyon, the creating Earth Day.
My favourite part involves a story of a customer competition to name new colours for a shirt. Some of the suggestions were ‘Come And Get Me Copper’, ‘Medi Ochre’ and Statutory Grape’.
Top man, top book. Give it a read.
Last year I freelanced at 4 Creative for a month. Happy, happy times: great work, lovely people and an agency that is also a production company and (sort of) a client.
The CD at the time was Tom Tagholm, who also directed many of their best ads. He’s left to direct full-time, but is still producing absolutely brilliant work for them (the embedding is disabled because of some music rights hoo-haa).
It makes having a missing limb seem, well, cool.
Great track (Public Enemy), and brilliantly shot.
It feels like the ad Nike should have made.
Hats off.
After the sporty girl, party girl etc. campaign, Lynx has come up with another very well made ad with a strong central idea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRB0i9-AUQs
And Kiefer Sutherland.
Here’s Sarah Silverman offering to rub her groin on the groin of a man who wants to donate $100m to Mitt Romney:
It’s funny, but not as funny as The Great Schlep. Obviously it has lost the element of surprise that made TGS so fresh, but it’s also more gratuitous. Instead of offering some kind of solution to the issue (however many people actually schlepped), it’s just a slightly ridiculous bit of comedy styling.
Perhaps it’s an incredibly perceptive indication of the way the US political landscape has changed in the last four years. In 2008 many of us were praying Obama would get in (remember the alternative: being one old man’s heart attack away from President Palin) and the rush of hope that went with him was palpable.
This time the support for Obama has become somewhat jaded because he hasn’t delivered every single last thing he hoped he would, the swine. But he does seem to be much, much less of a crazy asshole than Romney, so fingers crossed he doesn’t need that guy’s $100m, because I don’t think he’s going to get it.
But thanks for trying, Ms Silverman.
Ever the innovator, Creative Circle has just released its 2012 Annual in the form of a magazine.
As you can see from this flick through, it is jam-packed with the wit and wisdom of many superlative creative types, including Dave Dye, Mark Denton and Nick Gill (and me):
I assume everyone was given the same brief I was, i.e.: write whatever you want but make it between 200 and 2000 words. That’s quite a peachy brief if you like to write, so you’ll find some great insights from some great people (and me).
I believe it’s available here, so grab one. It’s ridiculously cheap for what you get, and you can probably expense it anyway, so no excuses.
What happens when you drop acid and interview Danny Dyer? (Thanks, J).
Name 10 things that aren’t Skrillex:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z1RRslsFxA&feature=player_embedded
Steve Wonder drum solo. Bullshit is that guy blind (thanks, E):
Very funny mapping stereotypes (thanks, D).
Lots of space shuttles taking off and looking groovy (thanks, G):
http://vimeo.com/27505192
Legal analysis of 99 Problems (thanks, P).
A clam eating salt off a table:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Qp1nrhJAX3I
Celebrities close up (thanks, P).
Illustrated A-Z of unusual words (thanks, K).
If you missed this in the comments section of the HBO post here is an excellent GoT rap (thanks, C):
Movie truth in posters (thanks, L).
If you work in an advertising agency, chances are most of your time will be spent trying to differentiate your client’s product from its virtually identical competitor.
Thanks to free market capitalism, if anyone comes up with a great innovation for their product that people like, it will be replicated by a competitor as quickly as possible.
Think about how much difference there is between a Nike trainer and one from Adidas. Or the distinction you have managed to perceive between the acceleration of a BMW and an Audi. The cleaning power of Persil versus Ariel. The taste and nutrition of Yeo Valley and Rachel’s Organic. The benefits to your cat of Whiskas over Kit-E-Kat. The refreshment of Becks and Kronenbourg*. The facilities and interest rates offered by HSBC and Nat West. The ease of use of Go Compare and Confused.com.
In the public’s eye there is no real difference between the products themselves, so people in advertising are employed to take something which doesn’t really look good to a consumer and make it look much better. Or, to put it another way, they have to spend their days putting lipstick on a pig. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s actually very helpful for the consumer to have something with which to differentiate the almost-identical things he or she wants to buy (the alternative is to be paralysed by the tyranny of choice). But for most days of an ad agency’s life it will be doing the equivalent of setting fireworks off near its clients’ products and shouting, ‘Hey you! Look over here!’ at passers by.
I can’t help wondering if this is what has given rise to the supremacy of the creative ‘idea’. Long before I started in advertising, creatives would be encouraged to look somewhere around the product for something distractingly entertaining to elevate it above its peers. Another breakfast cereal? Better invent a Honey Monster. Another pint of bitter? Better attach it to a no-nonsense person. Bar of chocolate? Drumming gorilla.
Perhaps advertising ideas are just necessities born from homogenisation.
Some brands create moments of utter beauty to take the lipstick to a whole new level of exaggerated distraction (how safe is a tiny little Polo?):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEVvlyHQVjs
Of course, this is why we have brands, those formless, abstract essences of one company that supposedly distinguish it from another. But it’s funny when you think about the extent to which billions of pounds and millions of people are employed in the art of applying make-up to farmyard animals.
The very rare times that a product is amazing and persuasively attractive in its own right, as well as somewhat unique, you’ll most likely see that reflected in advertising as a form of well-crafted product demonstration (e.g. Dyson). Everyone else proves the maxim that if you don’t have anything good to say about yourself, say it about something else (that’s not really a maxim; I just made it up).
*Of course, there are slight differences in taste between beers and between chocolate bars etc., but I would argue that the taste must be incredibly close, otherwise the ads wouldn’t concentrate so much on anything but the product.
Scamp is posting again in a slightly different format.
So why’s he back? Well, I think the post explains it, but there’s anything else you need to know about creative advertising’s foremost blogger, here’s a bit of bumph:
Scamp, the advertising blog run by Australia-based creative Simon Veksner – formerly the No.1 ad blog in the UK and one of the most-visited advertising websites in the world – is re-starting after a 2-year hiatus. Launched in 2006, Scamp was the first advertising blog to be written by a creative, and its witty commentary on the latest ads and advertising trends, plus a regular series of ‘Tips For Young Creatives’, made it a must-read for the creative community in the UK, and highly popular worldwide. The ‘Tips’ section of the Scamp website was turned into a successful book, called ‘How To Make It As An Advertising Creative’, but Veksner shuttered the blog in 2010. “There was a conflict between writing a feisty ad blog, and working as a creative director in a big agency,” Veksner explained to Campaign Brief. “But now that I have set myself up as a creative independent (Veksner left the Deputy ECD role at DDB Sydney earlier this year, having moved to Sydney after a 4-year stint at BBH London) I can speak with the independent voice that a good ad blog requires. Having said that, I am not going to be writing daily news and gossip this time around, but will be aiming for a more in-depth, once-a-week post – of dubious usefulness – every Monday.”
Welcome back, Scampy-poo. It’s been kind of lonely without you.