If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

I could try to explain, but I would never get within a million miles of this excellent post (thanks, T).

It does make me wonder why football isn’t more like rugby: no talking back to the ref, sin bins etc.

Then again, it’s partly the infuriating inconsistencies that make it so gosh-darn interesting.

I am one of the world’s premier shit photographers. I have been to some of the most incredible places on earth and captured them in a way that would make Stevie Wonder recoil. I have no eye and I compose with absolutely no skill at all.

Except when I use the Hipstamatic app:

I’m not saying those shots are great, but they’re way above my usual standard.

Thanks, Hipstamatic.

When I started at AMV way back in the last century, a creative took me aside and explained that no good ads have ever come from analogies. I think we agreed that the classic ad with the tortoise making love to an army helmet to denote some form of compatibility was the only one (shit; I can’t even remember what that was for. IBM?).

Anyway, fast forward to 2011, and a huge proportion of the major UK ads of the 21st Century have been analogies: Balls, Gorilla, Cake, Mountain, Running Through Walls, Twisted Levis etc.

Why? Well, I’d guess that it could be a consequence of globalisation, where a visual analogy can be understood, no matter where the viewer comes from. This then extends to advertising awards, where the effect has been exacerbated by the increase in mixed-nation juries (incidentally, the analogy virus doesn’t seem to have extended to the US where the great Skittles and Old Spice work have been straight product benefit stories).

But then I was reading a story in today’s Sunday Times about the new Adam Curtis documentary series All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace (best title, ever. Fact.), which starts tonight on BBC2 at 9pm.

Apparently, Adam eschews all forms of analogy, believing that they are not a good method of explanation.

And that got me thinking…

Analogies are kind of odd when you look at them closely: I’m not going to demonstrate that a chocolate bar makes you happy; I’m going to show you how a gorilla enjoys drumming to suggest such a thing. I’m not going to show you how loose our new cut of jeans is; I’m going to show people running through walls to imply this. I’m not going to tell you why a TV set has amazing colour; instead I will give you the impression of this by chucking thousands of bouncy balls down a hill.

I suppose they provide an opportunity to be more interesting than the proposition might otherwise be, but if Cog, T-Mobile Dance and Skittles Touch don’t need to do that, why do so many others?

Is it a sort of patronisation? Here’s the proposition all chewed up and easy to digest.

Is it a sort of laziness? I can’t make a chocolate bar interesting, but I can make a drumming gorilla really cool.

Is it a sort of genius? I can make a car ten times more memorable by making it out of cake (bit of a leap, that).

Of course, almost all great art contains an element of analogy. If your book, movie or song is about exactly what it appears to be about, then it’s unlikely to be thought of as any good. Which begs the question, why has advertising taken so long to adopt this, and why are so many great ads not analogous?

It’s for Wall’s sausages and can be found here.

Charming, funny, memorable and bang on target.

Nice one, Saatchis London (interest declared: I’m currently freelancing there).

I’m in Lagos to learn all about the region for an advertising brief, so I’m currently enjoying a crash course in all things Nigerian.

The one word I would use to describe the people of Lagos is relentless. They are all proudly out to get whatever they can, working really hard to make sure that when the big chance arrives, they are ready to take it. If you take your foot off the gas for a minute, someone else will step in and grab what you missed.

That might sound intense, and indeed it is, but with the population growing by 2000 a day, competition is fierce. It is also by far the richest nation in the continent, responsible for 60% of Africa’s GDP, so if you want to make it over here, you need to go to Nigeria, and, more specifically, Lagos.

For a microcosm illustration of this, check the traffic situation: if there is no traffic, a journey might take five minutes, but in rush hour it can take an hour or more. Unfortunately, rush hour takes up most of the day. People get up at 4am because it means they can get to work in an hour. If they got up at 5, the same journey would take three or four hours and they’d be late. But in the traffic, if you give an inch of space, the guy next to you will grab it. Most of the roads don’t have lanes, so it’s a bit of a free-for-all. Quite scary, but quite exciting, and their faith in god seems to see them through:

The other thing is that in some ways they are miles ahead of us in advertising terms. The conventional stuff might not be as sophisticated as ours, but Guinness actually made a movie based around their brand property several years ago, and this year they’ve managed to persuade Argentina to come and play a friendly with Nigeria in its home stadium, where Nigeria have not played for ten years. Find me a western client and campaign that has done anything that seismic.

So it’s pretty darn amazing; a country where the average wage is $4…

but the people are relentlessly optimistic:

Fascinating.

Posting sporadically.

I don’t just do a writing course.

I also do a course which has resulted in my Water project (don’t forget to check the blog. There is now an app on the way:

Thanks to Hayden Stainsby for this. He's an absolute effing star. As is Crystal Lee who is doing the design work.

…along with a top TV/Online/Cinema commercial. The very good people at Academy, particularly George and Lizie, are fully up for supporting Water Water Everywhere. Hats off to them).

So the course is called the Landmark Forum, and other projects that have come out of it include Fight Club, The Matrix and Pret a Manger.

In the first stage you sit in a room for three days with 150 other people. From there on in it’s quite difficult to describe, but you can check out this pretty accurate explanation in The Observer (more articles in Time, Wall Street Journal, New York Times).

The second part is broadly similar, but involves putting what you’ve learned in the first part into a wider context.

Then in the third part you choose a project that involves one of your communities (you have different communities, such as ‘neighbours’, ‘work colleagues’, ‘family’ etc.) and see it through for about three months (although if it goes beyond that, great).

So I’m about 2/3rds of the way through part three, and it’s been absolutely fascinating, with far more benefits than I can outline here. Several very high profile people in advertising have done it; in fact, at least three very successful agencies have been founded as a direct result of people completing its curriculum.

Anyway, I just wanted to share it because if you haven’t done it before I think you’d get a lot out of it. The website is here, but it’s a pretty poor indication of the reality of what you get on the course.

The other reason I’m mentioning it on this blog is that I get the impression that some people who read ITIABTWC aren’t exactly sure what they’re doing now, why they’re doing it or what to do next. If you’d like some clarity on that, have a look at the website and think about doing the course.

Alternatively, this Saturday there’s an introduction that I’ll be attending because it’s part of my project. From 10am to 1pm the other 55 people on my course will be explaining why they’ve done the Forum and what they’ve got out of it (here is an independent survey of what those benefits are). If you’re free at that time and want to come along (whether you know me or not), just drop me an email (bwmkay@gmail.com) and I’ll make sure they save you a seat.

xxx

Ball dropping fun.

Iconic films caught in the moment (thanks, P).

How to be a Playboy Bunny in 1968 (thanks ALS).

More Lonely Planet fun, this time with Michael Bolton (thanks, ALS):

The films of David Fincher:

Brilliant promo for Ratatat (thanks, A):

http://vimeo.com/13177086

What’s Osama bin watchin’? (Thanks, N.)

Inception, explained in desktop files (thanks, K):

As you might have worked out from the title of this post, I’m doing a writing course.

It’s online and is run through Chuck Palahniuk’s website (he doesn’t ‘teach’ the course himself, but it is run by a Chuck approved guy called Mark Vanderloo).

Every week we get a lecture to read, then we get an assignment that leads to the writing of a short story (between 1000 and 5000 words) that we hand in on the weekend to be read and critted by the other people on the course.

I have to say, it’s been a real eye-opener. Last week’s assignment asked us to pretend to be someone else for half a day, interact with other people as that person, then write a story as if you are that person. Fascinating. I went to Camden Market and pretended to be an Italian tourist. Gelled my hair up, laughed at stupid T-shirts etc., then I wrote a frankly disgusting story (I would put it up here for you to read, but my mum reads this blog. Then again, she’s probably read worse from me. If you want to read it, email me). It was incredibly liberating and made me come up with something I would never otherwise have thought of.

This week is dialogue, and I’ve spent the morning eavesdropping on people in cafes, writing down their most interesting soundbites and weaving stories out of them.

I heartily recommend it to any of you who want to stretch your writing legs a bit.