If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Apparently, tonight’s Campaign Big Awards are going to give TV Ad Of The Year to this*:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idLG6jh23yE

Now, leaving aside the question of financial doping (I think if you gave quite a few creatives £27m – the rumoured final budget, including £3m on post – they could probably create something pretty good for Nike), I have a slight problem with this.

The ad is from W&K Amsterdam (although I believe the creative team were from W&K London), so what is it doing winning the TV section of the Campaign Big Awards, an award scheme that must surely be UK-based?

Well, a quick check on the CBA website explains that ‘The Campaign Big Awards celebrate the best creative advertising that has appeared in the UK. Yes, many of the entries will be from UK agencies, but agencies from around the world can enter work that has been published, displayed, or transmitted in the UK.’

Why on earth would you create an award scheme to celebrate the best creative advertising that has appeared in the UK?

The BTAAs has overseas category for work from UK production companies that appeared abroad (helping Trakto/Partizan to some good wins), but that was just one award out of the others that were there to celebrate the excellence British advertising.

Campaign, the UK’s only significant ad mag, is about to celebrate the advertising of Holland.

Why?

Fuck knows, but for me it’s just going to emphasise the paucity of the UK’s creative output in the last year.

Rather a strange thing for Campaign’s award scheme to do.

*My information about this result could be wrong. If so, apologies. My point about the awards still stands.

Comedy, analogy, randomness, sexiness, product demo…

There are many ways to skin an advertising cat, but how many of us reach into our knife drawers and slide out the blade marked ’emotion’?

It’s a tough one (as I said to a planner last month, ‘Which emotion are you talking about?’ I think the English language, oddly, has yet to create a word for the swell of feeling that we all get when we see that photo or watch that movie or book that transexual dwarf for that birthday party), but if you can get it right, it can persuade in a way that’s beyond the surface of the other methods.

But then its success does depend on a response which is about as subjective as it gets: one man’s heart-swell is another man’s damp toilet seat. We can all laugh at the John West Bear, but how many of us will find the same touching moment touching?

With that in mind, here is a new ad from NZ that has emotion in spades:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvwMPGwUSO8&feature=player_embedded

Does it float your monkey or fart in your lift?

This is how they have attempted to rehabilitate basketball star LeBron James:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdtejCR413c&feature=player_embedded

(Thanks, L.)

Now imagine the same ad but with Wayne in the starring role.

If we could get round his guaranteed inability to act I think it could be quite fun:

‘Should I pay less than £200 for a pack of smokes?’

‘Should I stop shagging granny whores?’

‘Should I urinate in the loo instead of the street?’

‘Should I apologise to Ryan and Paul for implying that they’re a pair of old wankers?’

‘Should I give the first shit about Colleen’s handicapped sister?’

‘Should I play well for any of the teams dumb enough to pick me over the past six months?’

‘Should I play better or continue to complain when people boo my boo-worthy performances?’

‘Nah. I’m Wayne and when it comes to whatever the fuck I want to do, I just do it.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVjTBHEnj04&feature=player_embedded

I’m always amazed when Star Wars characters turn up in ads, but on top of that, this is a great, unobtrusive way to show the range of electrical crapola that CPCW flogs, just in time for Christmas.

Well done Steve (creative) and Sam Brown (director).

The only thing missing would be C3PO, who is quite obviously gay, on all fours with a **** in his ****, being ******* by ***** and *****.

Slightly random, I know, but here is the next chunk of my Hall of Fame.

(There is an overall point to this that I will come to eventually, but for now I’d be interested to know how well – or otherwise – you think these hold up.)

1997:

Others from the same year include Levi’s ‘Kung Fu‘, Guinness ‘Statistics‘, Ford Puma ‘Steve McQueen‘ and Supernoodles ‘Dog’, but they’re not quite brilliant enough for the ITIABTWC HoF.

At some point in the future: classic ads from other years.

New Massive Attack video (Thanks, D).

Stephen Fry on Wagner (thanks, C).

Gangsta Lorem Ipsum.

Lame-mongous from Lynx:

More desperate than Desperate Dan after ten years inside.

And to round things off, here’s the quote of the day from The Situation:

No matter what T-shirt you select, whether it’s fitted, graphic, sequined, bedazzled, crew-neck, deep-V, wifebeater, or what-have-you, it’s about being proud of who you are. If you want to bust out a deep-V that’s safety-cone orange because you think that’s your color, then wear the hell out of that fruity shirt so everybody in the club knows that nobody owns it like you do. Set the trends, don’t follow them. I wear what makes me feel good because I’m at the tip of the spear—the cutting edge of fashion that’s fresh to death. When I see something I like, I grab it. My only system when I shop for fresh apparel is my own primal reaction to what I see, the moment I see it. When I enter a store, I trust my eye to zero in on what’s mint. That’s the single most effective system I have for knowing when to pull the trigger on a purchase. If I find myself hemming and hawing, that’s a clear indication that the garment in question is not destined to make my rotation. I walk away from the rack because I’ve failed to make a connection to those threads. On the other hand, if I know from the moment I see it that that particular piece is going to make me look awesome, I trust my instinct completely and it comes home with The Sitch.

I couldn’t have put it better myself.

I have no idea who advertises Wispa, but I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt, that none of the people tasked with approving this ad have even a basic grasp of English grammar.

Everyone involved, please write out 100 times: 'Its' means something belongs to it; it's is the abbreviation of 'it is'.

And don’t even start me on those cuntpipe triple exclamation marks.

Or the colon abutting a parenthesis.

Or the ham-fisted attempt at winsome neologism.

And where’s the comma or ellipsis that should come after the ‘Mmmm’?

Come to think of it, this could be the worst ad, grammatically speaking, that I’ve ever seen.

UPDATE: it seems that I missed the fact that this has been taken, bad grammar and all, from a Facebook contribution. I therefore retract my suggestion that the people involved have a poor grasp of grammar. They do, however, have a strange idea of what makes a good ad.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4a4wq9PU_A4

I think the performances are good, but I’m sure I’ve seen random people doing film lines somewhere before.

And if they’re bringing new films to London, why is London quoting old films?

I don’t know if you’ve seen a film called The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, but if you haven’t, you should.

It portrays the life of a British officer who has trouble squaring his sense of honour and fair play with the merciless nature of Britain’s opponents in WW2. The upshot of it is that if you choose to play fair your opponents will fuck you, stick you in concentration camps, fuck you again and kill you (perhaps then choosing to fuck your corpse). The film was a brilliant piece of propaganda, making it clear that The Hun would not play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules, so if we wanted to win, we’d have to fight fire with fire by sinking to their level.

Bear with me here, but I think that the same situation is occurring in international advertising awards.

Although scam ads are certainly a part of the current UK ad scene (anything from Scambient ads to 2 minute directors cuts that run once on Granada Men and Motors +1), we are actually complete fucking amateurs when compared to the rest of the world.

Some agencies in other countries do the following: let you work on normal clients from 9 to 5 but make you work from 5 to 10 on scammery; mark out an entire floor plus photographic studio for creating scam; employ some teams to create nothing but scam; do ads for clients they don’t even have; do ads for Guinness that are actually ads for Irish bars and ads for Wonderbra that are actually ads for lingerie shops; take August off from their real clients to do their year’s scam ads all in one go; do adapts of international business but otherwise do nowt but scam; eat dogs and horses.

And in doing so they either fit within the letter (but not the spirit) of the rules, or accept that no one really checks up on them because certain award schemes quite like having the cash for the entries and can’t really be arsed to Miss Marple their way through an investigation that just results a big fucking headache.

So the UK doesn’t win the really big international prizes (or at least hasn’t for a few years).

Of course, I’m not saying that all the other award winners are scam (the reasons why UK advertising currently lags behind that of our overseas brethren is a whole other post), but when it comes to picking up the other prizes, we hamper ourselves by generally playing by the rules.

For example, why not create a bunch of complete and utter bullshit like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgHHX9R4Qtk

So we can either maintain our sense of honour and accept that we bugger our chances of more Lions, or we can get with the international cheating programme and pocket some more prizes.

I vote we set up a special clearing house agency for cheat ads. It can be called Fuck You Johnny Foreigner and it can be staffed by a bunch of brilliant account dudes, who will sell your generic ads for nose hair trimmers, superglue, hot sauce, dog food, animal charities and shoe polish. All agencies will chuck in some cash to pay for the staff and all the DPSs in Cement Mixer Monthly and the UK will top the Gunn Report every year.

Who’s in?

From Mr. Trott on Twitter.