If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

I’ve been thinking a bit about social media lately, and it strikes me that the whole thing is exactly like a men’s changing room (swimming pool or gym rather than clothes shop).

Now, I must admit that it’s been about fifteen or twenty years since I was last in one but I have a feeling they haven’t really changed much. They all smell of bollock and are inhabited by one of three types:

1: Mr Sheepish. This bloke is very shy and reserved. He wants no one to see his lower portion so he might well shower with his trunks on and put his pants on under a towel. In social media terms he either doesn’t get involved at all or he joined Facebook a couple of years ago but never updates his status. He doesn’t see why anyone would want to share what they’re doing with all and sundry. Can’t some things just remain private? However, although he doesn’t want anyone to see his business, he does like a sneaky peak at the photos of his teenage daughter’s friends on their diving holiday, just to see that they were behaving themselves (and to inspire an unfathomably guilty wank).

2. Mr Average neither tries to hide nor makes an exhibition of himself. Getting changed is a largely functional process that gets him from the outside world to the pool and back again. For him, social media is good to keep in touch, share a few pics and maybe organise a party, but he’s not much of a Twitterer (just follows Stephen Fry, Lady Gaga and his boss) and he’d never go as far as Four Square because he doesn’t actually want everyone knowing that he’s down the pub when he should be working on a spread sheet about yellow fat marketing.

3. Mr ‘Coo-ee! Get a load of my cock!’. This is the chap who behaves exactly as he does in the office, but with his genitalia on full display. Whether chatting to friends or demonstrating karate kicks, he’ll do so apparently unaware that his meat and two veg and flying hither and yon in a most unseemly fashion. In social media terms this is the guy who signed up to Twitter when the rest of us thought it was as sad as voluntarily watching Love Actually. He went through Bebo and MySpace, perhaps even creating a wang-out avatar for Second Life, and now ‘Likes’ everything from Vin Diesel to Cif, joins ten Facebook groups a week and updates Foursquare when he goes from the bathroom to the kitchen.

I’ve never been in a woman’s changing room, but I’ve seen a few (Carrie, Porky’s, Bring It On etc.) and imagine they are pretty similar places, just with more tits and fannies and fewer penii.

Advertising’s been going for a long time, so long in fact that it’s often called the world’s second-oldest profession.

But even if we discount the early years of BBDO Pompeii and DDB Londinium, there’s now been a good half-century since Bernbach’s creative revolution kicked in. Since then, we’ve been able to see how the greats have scaled incredible heights: from John Webster to Juan Cabral, Tim Delaney to Tom Carty, David Abbott to Dave Trott, the list of people who have shown us the way forward and tickled the public’s balls is long and distinguished.

So why is it that we’re not getting any better at it? When Webster was telling the country to Watch Out There’s a Humphrey About, or Follow The Bear he didn’t have nearly as many previous greats to learn from and progress; he was just feeling his way in the dusk. But now that we’ve seen the kind of things that can work and the ways to success you’d think we’d all be creating even better stuff than he did.

And are we?

Are we fuck.

I do understand that no one has bettered Hendrix or quite reached the peaks of Citizen Kane, but this is advertising. Hundreds of briefs get answered every day with the benefit of the knowledge of what has gone before, but the overwhelming mountain of dismal dross out there would seem to suggest that either the lessons never get learned or they are not actually learnable (or we’re all a bit thick).

I suppose it’s the unending quest for the new that leads us to discard the old with an indecent lack of respect. Perhaps the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater – warm charm being rejected at the same time as the odd overused filmic technique.

But whatever the reason, I get the distinct impression that very few people in the industry are sufficiently aware of what’s gone before to be able to have a crack at surpassing it.

Instead, we just start from scratch over and over again, leaving the greats of the past further and further behind.

What a stupid bunch of cunts we are, eh? (Smiley face made of punctuation).

What does a trillion dollars look like? (Thanks, K.)

The well behaved tyre:

Have you just had sex? Would you like to sing a song to mark the occasion?

Surprisingly funny commentary about food that hasn’t been put back in the right part of the supermarket (thanks, J).

Sammy’s Space Savers:

The worst, most depressing rapper of all time:

A real redneck toy:

How have you lived this long without a 20″ canvas of Paul Ross, particularly when the reviews are this good?

Make a Christmas dinner that makes the Man vs Food guy look like Karen Carpenter:

Incredible animation for you to rip off (thanks, J):

While flicking through The Sun I came across the strangest, funniest, most fucked-up collectible doll ad I had ever seen:

Here are some details that take the insanity just a little further (click to enlarge):

And here’s the truly wonderful copy:

UPDATE: I’ve been sent this several times in the last day or two. It’s things real people never say about advertising or something, and it’s pretty funny.

Jesus fucking Christ, Charlie Brown…(Thanks, Ad Contrarian.)

‘It’s a look at marketing that serves true human needs.’

‘Creativity is most powerful when it creates humankind acts, not just advertising…They activate and amplify the human purpose’

But

‘Creativity is not an option anymore.’

‘A human brand purpose is what rallies people and creates brand populism.’

‘People are living their lives at the speed of real time.’

‘The incredibly vast digital landscape we now operate in opens up infinite canvases for brands to create value in people’s lives.’

‘To engage people, brands will need to balance complete clarity and consistency of meaning with breathtaking spontaneity of behaviour.’

Has this much wank ever been committed to a film outside of Handjob Boogaloo 6?

UPDATE: More utter, utter, utter, utter wank (check the explanation of why it’s called Humankind and weep).

And Humankind? That sounds really fucking familiar:

The sonnet where every line is an anagram of the title, and the whole thing rhymes.

The 50,000 word novel that doesn’t use the letter E.

The 224-word palindrome poem.

A six-word story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

The man who wrote over 1000 books.

By the way, my favourite palindrome is, ‘ret tebh cums if lah dnoces eh ttub, but the second half is much better’.

If so, you’ll enjoy this (thanks, G).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bj-HOzHarMU&feature=player_embedded

And now the endline has gone back to making sense, this one’s a real winner.

Funny thing, time.

As far as it relates to advertising it can stretch and contract to become virtually meaningless.

For example, any team with a just a day to answer a brief will gripe and moan about just how ridiculous that situation is. How can they possibly curl out their 24-carat shiz with so little time?

But then you hear of many a story where an entire pitch has been scrapped at 2am with just a few hours to rethink, redraw and re-stick the new drawings to an acre of polyboard.

So how long is best?

Legend has it that Terry Lovelock came up with ‘Heineken Refreshes the Parts Other Beers Cannot Reach’ after he had come up with nothing during his first six weeks on the job. In exasperation, Frank Lowe sent the workshy fop on a holiday to Marrakesh with instructions not to come back without a D&AD Gold-winning campaign. After a few days in Morocco, Terry duly obliged, and the rest is advertising history.

I once brought up this story during a conversation with Jeremy Carr, suggesting that the longer one had on a brief the better. Jeremy disagreed, saying that at some point the whole thing just goes round in circles and you end up wasting time that could be better spent executing the darned thing (I get the impression that in Terry’s mid-seventies day there was a whole lot more wiggle room to answer a brief, so the execution time may not have been unduly compromised).

I now think that work expands to fill the time you have to do it. If you’ve got an hour, there’s a good chance that your brain will go into panic mode and offer up something as good as you’d manage in a day or two. Of course, that’s not always the case, but with deadlines contracting and six-week briefs now few and far between, you’ve either got to adapt to work with what you’re given or go and find something less onerous to do.

But what this really comes down to is time’s relationship with money. As we all know, one equals the other, so with the jackboot of capitalism crushing all before it, a few more hours/days/weeks are now more likely to be thought of as a whimsical indulgence that simply gives creatives more time down the pub. The idea that it might actually result in better work is not something enough people care about. In the vast majority of cases the 6/10 will become 5/10 and practically nobody will notice.

May I leave you with a poem I wrote twenty years ago on this very subject?

Time is friend to nobody,

It’s only there to blame.

It elongates to piss you off

And shrinks to do the same.

Jew Got Served:

Fascinating interview with Scott Rudin, producer of many great films, including The Social Network and True Grit.

The other 100 greatest movie insults of all time (thanks, DaD).

The greatest Premier League goals of all time.

If only someone would come up with a blog about lesbians who look like Justin Bieber… (Thanks, J.)

Anger is illogical (thanks, A).

Josh Groban sings the Tweets of Kanye West (thanks, S).

Photoshop Handsome video by Everything Everything (thanks, B).

Fascinating visualisation of last year’s US box office (thanks, K).

And joyously wonderful art made of Captcha words (thanks, A).