If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

This is a fascinating documentary made by Tom Shadyac, the director of Ace Ventura, Liar Liar and Bruce Almighty. He went looking for the answer to why we’re here, interviewing many interesting people along the way.

The answer he found is that we’re all connected in ways we may not even be aware of, so if you don’t give much thought to the way you live your life, here’s an opportunity to spend 80 minutes doing just that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMj9N5Io0ts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QVd7ULdh4w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg72DjcvlyE&feature=fvwrel

I’ll ask again: why do people do things like this?

And thanks to L for reminding me of this:

The Surrender Monkeys have owned the interweb this week with this little gem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sC1CLnmtQFo&feature=g-logo

Sean Bean dies in every movie (thanks, L & E):

This’ll tee you right up for the morning (thanks, J):

What’s the fucking job number? (Thanks, J)

Five seconds of every US Number One since 1993 (thanks, P).

A photographer recreates Banksy’s stencils (thanks, P).

Fantastic vid for Kanye and Jay Z’s No Church In The Wild (thanks, P):

http://vimeo.com/43051867

Samuel L Darth:

Advertising moment gifs (thanks, A).

This is the letter Bill Bernbach sent when he left Grey to start DDB (which later became Adam and Eve DDB). All I can say is plus ça change:

Dear colleagues,

Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too, and I don’t mind telling you I’m damned worried. I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance, that we’re going to follow history instead of making it, that we’re going to be drowned by superficialities instead of buoyed up by solid fundamentals. I’m worried lest hardening of the creative arteries begin to set in.

There are a lot of great technicians in advertising. And unfortunately they talk the best game. They know all the rules. They can tell you that people in an ad will get you greater readership. They can tell you that a sentence should be this short or that long. They can tell you that body copy should be broken up for easier reading. They can give you fact after fact after fact. They are the scientists of advertising. But there’s one little rub. Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

It’s that creative spark that I’m so jealous of for our agency and that I am so desperately fearful of losing. I don’t want academicians. I don’t want scientists. I don’t want people who do the right things. I want people who do inspiring things.

In the past year I must have interviewed about 80 people – writers and artists. Many of them were from the so-called giants of the agency field. It was appalling to see how few of these people were genuinely creative. Sure, they had advertising know-how. Yes, they were up on advertising technique.

But look beneath the technique and what did you find? A sameness, a mental weariness, a mediocrity of ideas. But they could defend every ad on the basis that it obeyed the rules of advertising. It was like worshiping a ritual instead of the God.

All this is not to say that technique is unimportant. Superior technical skill will make a good ad better. But the danger is a preoccupation with technical skill or the mistaking of technical skill for creative ability. The danger lies in the temptation to buy routinized men who have a formula for advertising. The danger lies In the natural tendency to go after tried-and-true talent that will not make us stand out in competition but rather make us look like all the others.

If we are to advance we must emerge as a distinctive personality. We must develop our own philosophy and not have the advertising philosophy of others imposed on us.

Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling.

Respectfully,

Bill Bernbach

(Via ad-aglance. Thanks, S.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=cQMFyJ3FRGQ

(Thanks, D.)

(Thanks, Adliterate.)

This seminal ad came out the year I started in advertising. We all loved this, were jealous of it and read many, many briefs where some lily-livered client requested their own Blackcurrant Tango then wouldn’t touch your attempt at it with a ten-foot pole (possibly with good reason).

Funny to look back on it and see how charmingly naive the ‘fashions’ of the day were. Remember, these are advertising people; they supposedly give a shit about the latest trends and are able to afford them. But just look at what they’re wearing, particularly the guy in the red shirt and waistcoat who seems to be the director.

Do those of you born on the late eighties/early nineties regard this as I regarded the seventies? Quirky, dated and alien?

Anyway, for those of you who haven’t seen what Pencil-winning genius 1996-stylee looks like, check this out:

Sacha Baron Cohen’s fantastic remix of The Next Episode:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bw2Fz-SCmfg

Chalk warfare:

Pentagram’s beautiful 40th anniversary film (thanks, P):

History of hip-hop (thanks, B).

Best pen tapper in the world:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP_aV_SdJLc&feature=related

Remember this ad where a woman with no hands makes breakfast?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IH_-yXdyfQ

Well, here’s the heartwarming story of a man with no hands who can roll a blunt:

Better with a beard.

Gilbert Gottfried reads Fifty Shades of Grey (thanks, J).

Bill Murray’s drunk tour of Moonrise Kingdom (thanks, J):

How to measure the universe (thanks, P):

Get stroked in the morning (thanks, J):

Weak men pay this man to abuse them (and it’s funny):

http://vimeo.com/42209600

Questions:

1. Given the rumours that abounded regarding the terms of WPP’s legal contretemps with A&E (apparently, after leaving RKCR/Y&R, one of them was caught soliciting clients before he was supposed to), does this mean Omnicom owns a slice of WPP? I find that very hard to believe, but it’d make things fun.

2. The new agency is called Adam and Eve/DDB, kind of like AMV BBDO (the smaller, more creative name comes first). It seems like an oddly supine position for a giant like DDB to take. I’m writing this before various details are revealed in tomorrow’s Campaign, but I’m intrigued to know what positions the management of A&E will take at DDB. Will Ben and Emer be the new CDs of DDB, the agency they left to join A&E? DDB London (as it used to be known) is currently without a CD, so it makes sense.

3. Does the receptionist have to say ‘Hello, A and E DDB,’? It’s like a sweet little poem.

4. How long’s the earn-out?

5. Will this get in the way of Emer writing another children’s book? I hope not.

UPDATE: some of the questions are answered here. All looks good (Ben and Emer=ECDs).

Regular reader ‘P’ has just Tweeted the five best Facebook advertising campaigns.

As the post points out, none of these have anything to do with Facebook’s regular advertising, by which I mean those messages along the right-hand side of the screen that promise to ‘reduce your belly in three days with this one weird tip’. If my own experience is anything to go by, regular Facebook advertising is of virtually zero interest to any of its users, who happily update their statuses, play Wordscraper and share photos without paying any attention to the ads.

Here we are, a good decade into the era of proper, well-thought-out internet advertising that makes money for a great many supposed experts, and it feels very much like the entirety of the accumulated wisdom has resulted in something which at best is ignored, and at worst is hated.

Take YouTube ads, for example. Have you ever done anything other than click them off, silently cursing the way they invade your precious clip of a breakdancing child? The long ones you can’t switch off are the most annoying. Large companies pay good money to put a 30-second message on a clip (which always feels like it lasts a minute) that either pisses you off or causes you to look at something else until your real clip is ready.

And that’s part of the problem with advertising on the net: you’re never more than a click away from another site you’d rather spend time on to avoid being bored by an ad.

The Ad Contrarian goes into all this in far more detail than I do, but has it really not occurred to any marketers that advertising on the main internet sites is something that can actively damage the perception of their brand? The unfortunate fact for them is that we all started on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube when they were free, so when ads come in we feel that something good that we really liked has been ruined/violated by the introduction of unwanted interruptions. If they were free once, why can’t they continue being free? And as for the brands that want to access all your information in return for the opportunity to watch a clip, well they just seem creepy and aren’t exactly offering very much in return for such riches.

Going back to the top of this post, it’s clear that the only things that really work in these environments are ‘ads’ that offer some kind of reward in the form of entertainment, offers or information. But that’s as it’s always been: we like things that contribute to us. The rest will be ignored, whether they’re on TV, on posters or online.

And since this was the status quo in 2002, I’m just a little surprised that I’m still able to write about it in 2012.