If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

It’s not perfect, but I like the way that it takes the hoary old chestnut of your real life being infected by film and recasts it as a paranoid nightmare.

If you only read one advertising blog, read The Ad Contrarian.

If you read two, add one or both Of Dave Trott’s.

If you read three, read mine.

But if you’re desperately searching for a fourth*, my friend Hugh Todd, one of the CDs at JWT London, has just entered the fray.

I recommend him not just because he’s a ridiculously good bloke, but because he’s been there and bought the T-shirt at some great places with great bosses: Mid-nineties BBH under John Hegarty, Saatchis under Droga and Granger, JWT under Nick Bell and now the same place under Russell Ramsey. He’s also won loads of awards, judged D&AD and projected Gail Porter’s arse onto the Houses of Parliament.

So expect some good shiz.

*UPDATE: obviously, Sell! Sell! and Vinny Warren also have excellent blogs. That’s why they’re also on the blog roll. Read theirs before mine.

There’s a link to the Ad Contrarian’s blog just to the right of these words, but if you’d rather consume Bob Hoffman’s wisdom in a collected, arranged form that costs a very small sum of money, buy his book.

If you’re in the UK it costs £2.18, and for that you get pearls of wisdom such as these:

1. After 100 years in the agency business, I still have no idea how to create great ads. It’s a code I haven’t cracked. But I do know how to sell them. Get your real creative leader together with their real decision maker, and get everyone else out of the fucking way.

2. We have been told by new age charlatans that “we’re all creative people” and that all we have to do is free ourselves from the artificial restraints of our society and culture and all our creativity will flow forth.

Bullshit.

3. Next time some digi-dork vomits up the old “no one watches commercials anymore” line, smack him in the head from me.

So it’s a compendium of rare, brilliantly written sense in this crazy old business of ours.

What more could £2.18 buy you?

My friend, the photographer Oli Kellett, has produced an entire history of the fake country of Vodkovia.

It’s full of amusing stuff, particularly the shop, biogs and national anthem, but above all it has some rather excellent photography and design.

And here’s Oli’s explanation:

‘The idea for TEAM VODKOVIA started in the spring when you couldn’t walk past a billboard without seeing an Olympic athlete looking down on you.

I just thought it would be fun to invent some people who where specifically matched to the event they would participate in. Brave New World Style.

We started thinking about athletes and events and I was sending idea through to Kai at The Operators who was letting me know what was possible with retouching etc. and chipping in his thoughts.

Eventually we settled on 8 athletes and spent a long weekend shooting them in a studio in North London.

At about this point I thought how I would get them out to creatives and Art Buyers and this Top Trump inspired idea came up so I started thinking about biogs for each athlete. I got in touch with a couple of Graphic Designers and a writer and agreed that this had the potential to go bigger. It could become a country who was participating in the Olympics for the first time.

There are more plans for the Team in the new year as well as a State visit from the president with Mr Cameron.’

Why not waste a few minutes there?

For those of you who live outside this sceptered isle, and those of you that live here but prefer to live lives unencumbered by the ‘news’, this last week has seemed to me like a fairground mirror held up to the nation.

First we had a the second week of the Leveson inquiry into press intrusion. This has provided some interesting opportunities: to sympathise with Hugh Grant and JK Rowling; to marvel at the irony of Sienna Miller complaining about the paparazzi then leaving the court only to be besieged by paparazzi, and to consider the phrase ‘privacy is for paedos’ and its myriad implications.

From where I was sitting, it made those of us who buy tabloids look pretty darn shabby. I no longer buy them but I’ve definitely been complicit in the process that led to everything heard in that court. I realise that the tabloids went too far  in their acquisition of stories, and if we’d had the choice none of us would have asked for Milly Dowler’s phone to be hacked, but the supply is created by the demand. You put a story about EU law amendments out there and no one gives a shit, but give the British public a nice juicy story about a pretty girl (it has to be a pretty girl) abducted by a paedophile and we’ll keep buying the papers till we’re broke. And pictures of celebs walking down streets, and scoops about professional sportsmen drinking alcohol, and stories about what consenting adults do in their bedrooms…

I know it’s not the whole nation, but there are millions of Brits (and people in other countries) who lap this shit up and they are as culpable as anyone else. The grotesque thing is that most of them are watching all this unfold with an accusatory finger pointed firmly in the direction of the press. It’s always someone else’s fault so string ’em all up.

Then we had the furore over a man saying a not particularly funny joke on TV:

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

This caused 5000 people to complain to the BBC and the Prime Minister to feel the need to pass comment gently condemning this misguided attempt at humour.

I thought the best quote to invoke here would be Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s, ‘I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it’, but then I realised the problem started way before that.

The man was being humorous (I’m going to stop using inverted commas for words like that; let’s just accept that someone somewhere found it funny), so he didn’t even mean what he was saying. Any vaguely intelligent human being must know that Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t really think the strikers should be shot in front of their families. He’s a well-known humourist whose schtick is chucking out incendiary right-wing opinions that many people in this country actually agree with. He just did it again, so why the big deal?

Well, for a start, we as a nation love to cut people down to size. Jeremy had been getting too big for his boots for years, so any chance to stick the boot in was going to be welcomed by many. Second, this was an opportunity to magnify a dispute between left-wing liberalism and right-wing conservatism: look at the great big, nasty bastard; he epitomises all that is wrong with this country and its unelected coalition government (Cameron is also a friend of Clarkson). Third, it happened on THE BBC. Now, for those of you unaware, the BBC is sacred (this is an attempt at humour) and therefore it must not be sullied by mean spirited jokes or naughty comedians ringing up grandparents to tell them they’ve had sex with their granddaughters. You can tell naughty jokes on the other channels (hang on… isn’t Lee Nelson’s Well Good Show on BBC3?) but heaven forbid you do it on the Beeb, because it is funded by our license fee, which is basically tax. This means that people can say that they haven’t paid their license fee to hear Jeremy Clarkson say people should be shot and feel very self-righteous when they do it.

Dave Prentis of Unison said the unions were consulting on taking Clarkson to court and called on the BBC to sack him. The TUC general secretary, Brendan Barber, said the jibe was “more than silly”. He added: “If it was intended as a joke it was in pretty awful taste.”

“If it was intended as a joke”? Mr. Barber, I’ll just have to confirm this fact to anyone who hasn’t noticed, but you are evidently a fucking idiot. Call for Clarkson’s sacking and take him to court if you wish, but why make publicly clear that you are utterly fucking stupid?

Anyway, the upshot of it all is that if you want to look at the above stories from a different angle you can find a whole new set of arseholes leaping about in the background, and it doesn’t look pretty.

Rule Britannia.

Supercool graphic tribute to Drive (thanks, P):

You park like a cunt.com

Schwarzenneger’s six rules (thanks, S):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuJ4hbkLiY0&sns=fb

My fucking name is… (thanks, J).

Opening sequence of Bunraku (thanks, P):

Morrissey gets a job (thanks, W).

The meme of the junior art director (thanks, K).

I’m using this brilliant bunch of top ten film lists to choose my Christmas presents (or just order them for myself; thanks, K).

Amazing speech:

Three things Rick Elias learned when his plane crashed (thanks, SG).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytx2jU2MyWg&feature=youtu.be

When I started in advertising, some of the best work around was for Nike. They had the best strategy, the best stars, the best budgets etc.

But then someone explained to me that working on Nike is a bit of an arse: you do it well, you’ve just done another good Nike ad (easy); you do it badly, you’ve actually managed to fuck up one of the greatest briefs on the planet.

It’s a lose-lose.

And that’s the problem with working on Old Spice. They set the bar so unbelievably high with ‘I’m on a horse’, that all the following ads with look a bit crap in comparison.

The above is a fine example: it’s better than 99% of the ads that get made but I bet most of you couldn’t care less.

I’ve only put it on the blog to illustrate this point, and the further point that even when it looks quite tasty, this business can be a real arse.

(I had to do a video because WordPress is refusing to let me put pictures up. If anyone can help me with that, please let me know.)

In case any of you are curious about this sort of thing, the Russian publisher has left out the dedication at the front and the acknowledgements at the back. Not sure why, but it does make me wonder what else they might have left out, after all, the book does feel a bit thin (although it has a pleasantly hard cover).

Anyway, I’m putting this up here in the vain hope that any of you are in Russia or read Cyrillic. Is Instinct readily available over there? I understand that Ozon is the Russian Amazon, and it is listed there, but whether or not it’s selling or liked, I have no idea. So if you wouldn’t mind popping down to Waterstoneski (or, more likely, WH Smithovitch) and checking it out I’d be most grateful. Bullshit five-star reviews on Ozon are also most welcome, as are genuine ones.

Meanwhile, here’s a synopsis of the plot to whet your appetite:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiJ4T3E-NM8

It’s one of those beautiful bits of film that makes you cross your fingers and pray that the punchline won’t let it down.

And then the punchline doesn’t let it down.

Brilliant direction; brilliantly simple idea.

Thanks, 101.