If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

D&AD has puzzled me again this year:

1. What’s with the half-ceremony with no Black Pencils thing? Many of you might not even be aware that the Silvers were handed out on Thursday evening to an audience of… no idea. Way to make what is already a damp, damp, damp, damp, damp, squib of an award scheme just a little bit damper.

2. Some rather odd awards/non-awards. I’ll just concentrate on two because they’ll help me make further points: in TV, John Lewis, winner of all best ad at the BTAAs and Creative Circle ends up merely ‘In-Book’. Look, I understand that different people have different opinions, but come the fuck on. Surely even a foreign person can tell how good that ad is (for the avoidance of doubt, that sentence is supposed to be tongue in cheek). What really happened on that jury? What bets were called in? Who did the people of Adam and Eve unwittingly piss off? Who has pictures of who with a donkey and a tub of Swarfega? I think it’s clear that a jury who awards that essentially a Bronze is wrongheaded in some way. And I guess the composition of that Jury might go some way to explaining what has happened here: Nick Bell is a legend, Paul Shearer has produced some UK classics, Lizie Gower’s production company has churned out many of this country’s recent greats, Mark Tutssell might be away with the fairies, but he used to have form… But the others? I think each of them falls down on the criteria of either quality or UK-ness or both.

The second is Walls. I know five Golds at BTAA doesn’t mean as much as it used to, but it’s usually a 100% indicator of inclusion in the D&AD annual. This year, zilch. Again, I have no fucking idea how that happened. It’s funny, different, original work for a big brand that stands out like the testicles of the dog in the ring case. Please can someone on the jury stop by here and explain that decision?

3. I hear D&AD is trying to be even more international. Oh shit. It really is fucked now. Cannes owns that scene and here’s why: good speakers, good weather, more prestige and more publicity. If D&AD wants to compete on that territory it will fail miserably. In ten years it’s gone from seeming superior to Cannes to acting like its desperate kid brother.

Does any of the above matter? Of course not. If they want to collapse and slip away to nothing, that’s their business.

Brilliant use of Twitter from Smart Argentina (thanks, P)

Michael Barrymore being John Barnes in a most offensive way (thanks, J):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKnL54cBjbA&sns=tw

Amusingly inappropriate digital ad placements (thanks, J).

Cage performs Cage (thanks, P):

The worst things in the world (thanks, P).

The digital executioner (thanks, J).

Thou shalt not commit logical fallacies (thanks, W).

The greatest sandwich ever made (thanks, J).

Hot women with beards (thanks, J).

Gram of Thrones (thanks, J).

Ross Geller invented Dubstep (thanks, J):

What I really like about this ad is its elegant density: it manages to cram so many product messages into such delicate images that you just have to take your hat off to it then lick the screen for a bit.

It says: Audi have made cars for ages; Audi made innovative cars that were (are) ahead of their time; Audi persisted with their innovations despite ridicule; Audi drivers are just that little bit different, in a good way; and Audi make really bloody tasty cars now.

All in a very beautiful piece of film.

Incidentally, my 6-year-old son saw an Audi estate this morning and thought it was the most amazing car he’d ever clapped eyes on. He’s seen Ferraris and Lamborghinis, so I’ve no idea what hallucinogens I’d accidentally added to his Weetabix, but there’s a fan for the future.

(Interest declared: it was done by my friends Mat and Ian at BBH.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibaKFb33a10&feature=player_embedded

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

Change any site to Comic Sans (thanks, J).

OMG!!!!!! Apparently the sinking of the Titanic actually happened!!!11! (Thanks, G.)

Awkwardly self-erotic sporting moments (thanks, J).

25 best Draw Something drawings (thanks, E).

The heartwarming tale of Caine’s arcade:

A very beautiful kilometre of paper (thanks, K):

http://vimeo.com/37796909

Rory Sutherland on Influence (thanks, J):

Stunning wind map (thanks, K).

Inventive, funny, gets you to spend several minutes with the ad/brand.

That’s most of the boxes ticked.

(By the way, when I was at Watford in 1995/6, Tony dismissed any campaigns for Tippex with the sage words, ‘It’s a dead product’. This isn’t an attempt to prove him wrong – broadly speaking, Tippex is still fucked – but it’s funny how well it’s stuck around.)

I spent some of the Easter weekend reading Tina Fey’s biography, Bossy Pants. It’s not particularly interesting (no mention of Mean Girls?), but it chimed with my wish to write a post about the expression of opinions regarding quality.

Here are two quotes:

It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good.

There is one other embarrassing secret I must reveal, something I’ve never admitted to anyone. Though we are grateful for the affection 30 Rock has received from critics and hipsters, we were actually trying to make a hit show. We weren’t trying to make a low-rated critical darling that snarled in the face of conventionality. We were trying to make Home Improvement and we did it wrong.

This second one in particular made me think of a comment Gout-Legs left here a while ago. It was something like, ‘Better to do something good for a thousand people than something shit for a million’.

So what should we aim for? Good? Amazing? Amazing at the expense of the possibility of good? And what is ‘good’ anyway?

Possibly-annoying fact number one is that there is no ultimate empirical measure of quality in anything. One person’s incisive genius is another person’s deliberately obscure recherché joke. Is 30 Rock ‘better’ than Home Improvement? Of course it… is… isn’t… depends who you ask. Are ‘cleverer’ jokes better than someone falling flat on their face? Have you ever read a Booker winner and thought ‘hmmm, that was rather amusing’, but actually laughed at something more obvious by Terry Pratchett? What about whether Kanye is better than Springsteen? You’ll find at least a million people who will sit very firmly on either side of that argument.

So if there’s no real good or bad, why do we insist on saying there is?

Well, we all have an opinion, and it tends to feel better to express it in absolute terms: ‘The Godfather is the best film ever made’ is more robust than ‘I think The Godfather is the best film ever made’, but it’s less true. And where does that leave opinions on advertising? When it comes to evaluating sales messages we’ve long since left the world of empirical measurement. Even effectiveness awards rely on a series of measures that have been chosen and created to suit the paper that has been submitted.

We can try to evaluate ads based on how well they achieve their goal, but then what is that goal? This campaign was awarded by D&AD in 1999. I have no idea of the extent of its impact in the ‘real world’, but I do know that it spawned many, many ads (lots of them award winners) that turned an abstract concept into a person or creature, perhaps setting us off on the current wave of analogous advertising that has included Balls and Gorilla. So does that make the ESPN commercial one of the greatest of all-time? Did it inspire an entire übergenre of worldwide advertising? How could we know for sure?

We can’t. We also can’t know exactly how much more Guinness was bought because of this:

But it won the Grand Prix at Cannes, The One Show and the Andys, so it must have been the best of the year. Except that D&AD chose not to award it for best ad, instead giving the prize to Sony Balls, which fell far short of Evolution in the Cannes judging. Then in 2000, Guinness Surfer won an unprecedented two Golds at D&AD, only to fail to win the Grand Prix at Cannes and The One Show.

So there really is no definitive measure of quality in advertising. A bunch of people can have a different opinion to another bunch of people. And it’s the same in absolutely every single thing on earth: killing thousands of people with a bomb is bad, unless it brings about the end of World War 2, and even then, millions of people will still think it’s bad; press freedom is good, unless it goes a bit too far for our liking and people start to feel harassed, and Spurs and Chelsea are shit, unless you’re mad. From morality to ads, choice of pet to choice of political party, kindness or lack thereof, none is better or worse than the other.

You may still think that there really are final criteria for evaluation of goodness; that Dylan really is better than Steps; that Milliband must be an improvement on Mugabe; that sunshine is nicer than swearing. But there aren’t. You can only like what you like and do what you’re proud of.

Everything else is is a brain-numbing waste of time.

Which is quite pleasantly liberating when you think about it.

Further reading: moral relativism and moral absolutism. Interesting Seth Godin post that Ant left a link to.

Short doc on visionary Michael Wolff (thanks, C).

Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges on what makes a great story (thanks, D).

Should be a lovely ad for Cillit Bang (thanks, Cam):

Play a guitar with your piss stream.

David Lynch ‘Crazy Clown Time’ vid (NSFW) (thanks, L):

Star Wars Kinnect is even worse than Attack of the Clones:

Worst book covers/titles ever (thanks, P).

Scottish underwear ad involving massive gonads (thanks, A):

All the best bits of The King’s Speech again and again and again:

There’s a website for everything nowadays (thanks, C).

Why stupid video games work so well (thanks, P).

Andy Warhol paints Debbie Harry on an Amiga (thanks, P):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oqUd8utr14&feature=youtu.be

Breaking Mad:

Utterly amazing daytime fireworks (thanks, J and L):