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):
I’m too much on holiday to fanny around with all the YT links, so just read all about it here (thanks, J).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBss83reqaU
Creature London’s first work after winning the account against Mother and BBH. Directed by Alex & Steffen at Rokkit.
I have been in touch with Dan from said agency, but I forgot to ask him this question: why do Adidas spend a fortune on some of their ads, and not quite such a fortune others, such as this one.
I suppose the big brand stuff is more worthy of dinero, but does that mean Creature won the whole account, or just the specific trainer briefs?
And if so, why?
Maybe someone at Creature or Adidas can answer these questions.
Meanwhile, what do you think of the ad?
Awkward high-fives (thanks, JM).
Hitchcock’s definition of happiness (thanks, B):
Movies as code (thanks, P).
Best website ever? (Thanks, W.)
Starburst themed seizure? (Thanks, J.)
Twitter in the shitter (thanks, J).
Casually racist ad from the 1970s (thanks, A):
Worst album covers of all time (thanks, JM).
Best Facebook photo comments of all time (thanks, JM).
Obama is sexy and he knows it (thanks, B):
It’s one of those ones where the script is beautifully simple and the direction so good that you can just sit back and enjoy it.
Creatives: Martin and Martin (interest declared: friends).
Director: Vince Squibb (interest declared: I don’t know him that well, but we’ve met a few times and I found him to be a throughly nice bloke).
If you want to be an advertising creative there are many ways in, but by far the easiest and most efficient is through the colleges.
The biggest two are Watford and St Martins, followed by Bucks, but there is another one you might be less aware of that’s producing some very good prospects.
A few weeks ago I did a Skype crit with Lincoln (read all about it) and the results were excellent. Being somewhat skeptical and a bit of an arsehole, I wasn’t expecting much, but the overall standard was very good. In fact, one idea was so wonderful that I’m going to get it made. That’s right: made, as in produced, and I didn’t even have to come up with it because Chloe Middleton and Matt Parsons did it for me. Ka-Booom!
Thanks, guys.
Some more facts about Lincoln:
– past grads work at BBH; JWT; Ogilvy, DLKW Lowe; Karmarama; Dare; DDB; Albion; VCCP; Creature; Saint etc.
– consistently successful D&AD and YCN student competitions (won D&AD Student Awards Advertising category last year)
– past visiting speakers include Rory Sutherland; Dave Morris; Alex Taylor; Mandy Wheeler; John Hegarty; Tony Davidson; Martin Lambie Nairn.
So go there.
Or give someone from there a crit. Or a placement. Or a job.