If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

There is an ad agency in London that has won D&AD pencils in each of the last six years, including a Gold.

It doesn’t pitch unless it can do great work for the client.

It doesn’t have solid creative teams.

It wins awards in print and TV.

It doesn’t appear to give the first fuck about the Gunn report.

Its biggest client produces many things that you have enjoyed over the past 30ish years.

Any ideas?

and what about this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r725j0GiZJM

(Not sure why those links aren’t working. Will try to fix.)

And these:

Then there’s the Lost trailer shot by David LaChapelle, ‘ENDSFRI’, the Jamie Oliver trails, the cockle pickers poster, Iraq: The Bloody Circus, The entire More 4 launch, the Shameless posters etc. etc.

On the one side this confirms my assertion that if you want to win awards, get a TV station or a newspaper for a client. They have products that people are already interested in, so half your job is done. On the other side, I think 4 Creative make what they do look much easier than it is. The work is genuinely fucking good and I don’t see that kind of quality coming from the agencies of any other TV stations, especially not so consistently over such a long period of time.

Hats off.

The following is a piece I wrote for my friend Will Humphrey’s blog, Adgrads (If you click on the link you can see quite a large picture of me, you lucky fucking bastards):

Ten things about advertising that you might not know:

1. Planners are currently in the ascendancy. For various reasons, the creative product isn’t nearly as important as the work that goes on behind the scenes. Sometimes this work is specifically aimed at improving the creative product but more often than not it is arse-covering, unnecessary bullshit. But these days people are very fond of arse-covering unnecessary bullshit because…
2. People make most decisions out of fear. People want to remain in their jobs so that they can feed their kids and pay their mortgages and that means they do not necessarily want to do things that might lose them their jobs. Unfortunately this means that decisions tend towards the middle ground where perceived safety is at its strongest. Marketing managers approve ads that won’t get them fired; account handlers sell ads that are less likely to require expensive, time-consuming persuasion; planners will create strategies with the scared marketing managers that will sound like every other strategy going around town; creatives might write exciting ads but they won’t argue that hard for them. Result: vanilla flavoured blancmange with a glass of skimmed milk on the side.
3. Martin Sorrell is as good at predicting the future as Stephen Hawing is at the flying trapeze. However, when he speaks, most of the business world listens and the newspapers report what he says as if it’s a pronouncement of the truth. It’s laughable. And pathetic.
4. You might well meet your other half in the industry. Advertising is full of bright, ambitious, somewhat appealing people, and people who like the company of bright, ambitious, somewhat appealing people. If this looks likely, go with it. Forget all that stuff about not shitting on your own doorstep or whatever the proverb is. Get in there.
5. There’s a famous film saying from William Goldman (if you don’t know who he is, be ashamed and look him up): nobody knows anything. The same applies to advertising. When you join the industry people will talk as if they are very certain that their opinion is 100% correct. When you leave the industry you will do so stunned at the number of times those people (almost certainly yourself included) were wrong. There is nothing you can do about this except weep.
6. It’s going to take a metaphorical earthquake for the British public to like the people who work in advertising. The perception of slick chancers corralling people into buying things they don’t need with money they don’t have is one that is here to stay. If you want to be loved, become a nurse.
7. Advertising has very little absolute effect. By this I mean that it has been proven that advertising will not make you buy something you would never otherwise buy. Instead it makes you switch brands. This means your job will effectively be as cheerleader for the brand you are advertising. You should either try not to care about this or make sure you want the companies whose products you advertise to succeed.
8. People in advertising take cocaine. People in all sorts of businesses take cocaine but the fear of point 2 can be tempered (some believe) by sniffing white powder up their noses. Unfortunately it’s just papering over the cracks in their empty lives (just kidding!).
9. You might well travel the world, meet famous people, see things for which you are somewhat responsible on billboards and TVs (and computers – whoopee fucking doo!). This will give you a fizzy little thrill in your tummy and make mummy and daddy very proud. Whether or not they work out what the fuck it is you actually do all day is another matter (they never will).
10. Do things for love before you do them for money. This is a truth about life that’s easy to forget. If you forget it you will end up having a miserable ten hours a day that you hate, then you think that the fun you have with the money you earn will make up for it. You will be wrong.

I dunno, it’s just so bloody meaningless.

Fruit loves this sticky, sugary drink that is vaguely fruity?

I don’t want to be the logic police, but I have no idea why fruit would love a fruit-based drink. Surely it would hate it. It’s like showing a picture of a human who ‘loves’ a drink made of pureed human.

And that fucking picture of the smiling fruit. A visual like this might be quite nice if it managed to capture a normal piece of fruit that had been shot at a certain angle to make it look happy, but this is just fruit with a smile cut into the peel.

And even if fruit does like This Water, why should that interest me, or persuade me that it’s worth trying?

I know…I know…I’m just being a pedantic wanker, but nothing about this poster makes even the slightest bit of sense or contains even a single appealing element.

Just another ad that treats passers-by like retards. Thanks for that.

Meanwhile, this is fun.

When a film director makes a film that doesn’t turn out to his satisfaction he can swap his name on the credits for that of Alan Smithee. This of course means that no one knows who was responsible for the piece of dogshit and the director can go on to his next project with his reputation intact (look how many big names have done it).

I think in practice that wouldn’t really work these days. Pre-buzz means that we all know who made a film, and if it’s too small for a bit of hype then we probably haven’t heard of the director anyway.

But what if the same process could be applied to ads? I know of at least one very large production company and a quartet of award-winning creatives who have discussed doing such a thing, and from their point of view, you can see the benefits: in the old days (ten years back) there was no Davidreviews to highlight the makers of even the shittiest commercials. In other words, you could hide a turkey. Nowadays, however, creatives have no such privilege and all are shackled to their gobbling birds for eternity (and not in a good way).

This is why the Alan Smithee/pseudonym idea is such a good one: sweep that shit under the carpet and pretend it never happened.

But…

But last week I read an interesting sports blog that suggested there should be such things as ‘passports’ for all footballers. It didn’t mean the kind of thing certain South Americans are prone to losing at inopportune moments, but instead referred to the idea that every single injury a player has should be detailed by an independent source, kind of like a car’s log book. That way, when a team buys a player costing, say, £30m, they would then know if they were buying a congenital injury risk (or even a genital injury risk). I know they all have medicals, but if you were trying to get a dream job with a £3m signing-on fee and a huge wage, would you detail the exact pain level of every single twinge or would you simply repeat ‘never felt better, Doc,’ at every opportunity?

So what I’m saying is that when we start to hide our involvement with shit work all we are doing is lying about how good we really are. One award-winner can plaster over a couple of years of dire/mediocre crap, giving a false impression of the goods available.

But then (and here’s how we come full circle to the world of advertising), I suppose that’s what most of us do for a living. The very idea that we would be completely legal, decent, honest and truthful when selling ourselves is laughable.

If we have an opportunity to spin a communication in the most positive way available, we will take it.

Otherwise, how could we possibly call ourselves admen?

It is genuinely a-fucking-mazing how advertising jingles and lines can stick in your head.

When did I last hear ‘see the face you love light up with Terry’s All Gold’?

Or this utter classic that broke the fourth wall of advertising creation with aplomb (check the John Peel VO):

Then there were no words but you could always hum dah dahhh da-da-dahh-dah (by the way, the Milk Tray man taught my wife stage fighting at RADA and his name was Terry King, which is a real 80s man’s name. You never really meet many Terrys these days, do you?):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0ya5kh4_ZM&feature=related

Then there’s this execution of a long running campaign that appears to have been made during the Yankophile, hyper-colourful, fucking-hard-to-watch-without-getting-a-headache early nineties:

Where did Banjos go?

What about this work of genius, bumming ‘Bobby’s Girl’ into oblivion without thought or mercy:

And this ad whose music appears to have been based on The Message by Grandmaster Flash (I recall very clearly a schoolfriend recreating this entire ad when I was about 10. I think Hofmeister was weak enough for him to drink):

I knew (and still know) all the words to this (why don’t they serve beer in ‘jars’ anymore? Bollocks to those branded glasses):

No song, but the unforgettable chocadooby-popsquabble:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOFRIWx5F9c&feature=related

And finally, by far the most oft-repeated ad of my schooldays. And university days. And at Watford. And in my office today:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgYP1d5nN2o&feature=related

A very senior creative at an agency I worked at once gave me a very useful piece of advice: when writing a script, don’t write the dialogue.

This makes sense for a few reasons:

First, if you don’t write the specifics, there much less to object to. If a client/CD/cleaning lady doesn’t have an exact turn of phrase to pick apart, he/she can just imagine the best dialogue for your scene and let the script go. For example, writing ‘She explains why she hasn’t got a car and they agree to meet later,’ will make your life a bit easier than:

Woman: I left my car keys in the anus of a forlorn giraffe.

Man: Literal bummer.  Shall we get together at the apex of the vernal equinox?

Woman: That sounds like a really, really, really, really, really, good idea.

The first method is also easier to read out without getting all choppy and losing the flow.

Another reason why this is a good thing to do is that it leaves room for later development. Someone might say something good in casting, or the director might have a good suggestion. If your dialogue isn’t buttoned down then changing it won’t be a problem. You can’t have a client saying ‘But I prefer the way you had it before’ if there is no before. Also, according to Jonathan Glazer, the wiggle room is where the magic happens. If you pin everything down then there’s no room for the happy accidents that make good things great.

A third reason is that writing good dialogue is not easy, so you don’t want to get all bogged down doing it while you’re trying to get your script structure right. Have a go at the dialogue by all means, but you might want to leave it until later when you’ve properly sorted out what goes where.

A fourth reason is that you might have more important things to do. If you spend ages nutting out every little detail and your client/CD/cleaning lady bins the script, you’ve wasted a lot of time that you could have spent playing Red Dead Redemption or searching the less salubrious parts of the Worldwide Web. Or doing some other work.

By the way, none of the above applies to radio ads which need to be buttoned the fuck down before you go in. You can still have wiggle room, but very few actors/VOs like to be told to make shit up on the spot. And the same with headlines. Writing ‘Witty headline goes here’ very rarely works, and I’ve got the P45s to prove it.

And I love the funny old human race.

I like movies. I like them a lot. Unfortunately, I look at them in the same way I do advertising: the products of an industry that has seen better days.

But I think I’ll leave that particular whinge alone for a while.

I just wanted to witter on about some of the ways in which movies have lost their magic that have nothing to do with their inherent quality.

In the 80s I was known at school for being the guy who saw all the movies. This was due in some part to the fact that I was the first person to get into a ’15’ on his own (and it was Rambo of all films – 1985, I was eleven) and the same with an ’18’ (Fatal Attraction – 1988, I was fourteen). Neither of these were down to me appearing to be incredibly mature or tall for my age; I was simply the cheekiest little bastard who thought it was worth a try, even against the most ridiculous of odds. If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

So I saw pretty much everything that came out, sometimes seeing four different movies in the cinema on the same day. But the big issue in those days that no longer exists was the massive gap between a film’s American release and its appearance in this country. Four to six months was routine, and if you were waiting for a big American hit to arrive, that was sheer torture.

I would follow the box office grosses in Screen International and wonder about the nature and quality of such blockbusters as Three Men and a Baby and Beetlejuice. As there was no internet, and consequently no opportunity to watch the movie’s trailers at will, these films would be built up in my mind to legendary status, my imagination running wild, conjuring up the two hours of celluloid that lay behind these strange and mysterious titles.

If I was really lucky I might get a chance to have a holiday in America, whereupon I would inhale as many films as possible so that I would not have to experience so many excruciating waits when I got back home. On one New Year trip to Boston, I think I dragged my poor mum to a couple of films a day, including such ‘classics’ as Home Alone, The Russia House, Green Card and The Godfather Part Three.

Anyway, as I mentioned above, all the info you could possibly wish for is now within easy reach on the Worldwide Web, and that is also the reason why there is a much smaller gap between a UK and US release: downloading and the attendant piracy means that studios need to cash in ASAP before the hooky versions spread across the world.

On one side it makes everything that much more convenient and available, but on the other, the magic seems greatly diminished. If this was 1989 I think I’d have exploded during my six month wait to watch Inception, but in 2010 I saw it at the same time everyone in the US did. Cool, but somehow less cool.

There’s a scene in the Bernardo Bertolucci move The Dreamers, where Michael Pitt explains that he always watches movies in the front row so that he sees them before the rest of the people in the cinema.

Delightful bullshit that might explain why I was in the front row for Inception.

I have written the odd post decrying the current state of advertising. I have lamented what I considered to be slumps in its quality, financial offerings and ability to satisfy to the extent it used to.

But an article in this weekend’s Guardian Magazine has made me think that I could be aiming my blame in the wrong direction.

The above article explains that the demise of our industry is just one symptom of a bunch of wider problems that are fucking over the entire middle class:

The increasingly competitive nature of middle-class life and the decrease in job security; Margaret Thatcher’s opening up of the classic middle-class professions, such as university teaching, to market forces; the slow decline of the great state and corporate bureaucracies; the downgrading of middle managers by new business ideologies. These shifts, conclude Gunn and Bell, have left “few if any areas in which middle-class people work untouched”.

Stephen Overell, associate director of the Work Foundation, says that “In the middle-class workplace, employees’ autonomy and discretion have collapsed dramatically compared with 20 years ago. Software is standardising work. There are more procedures and guidelines, more surveillance. People at the top end are doing OK, but the rest feel that their working lives are getting worse.” Middle-class employment, you could say, is becoming more like that long endured by the working class.

Does that sound familiar? Added to that is an overall job insecurity, a requirement to work harder for less money and an inability to afford things that were readily available to people in similar jobs in the 90s.

I spoke to a freelancer recently whose day rate equated to the salary he received fifteen years ago. And of course, that salary would have bought far more in 1995.

So it’s not just advertising.

And although I was right, I was wrong to suggest it was our industry that was heading down the lav all on its own.

For those of you who agree that advertising is not what it once was, the alternatives are not much better.

Where is the real fun? Not in the same place as the real money.

Is this a long-term trend that is shunting the vast majority towards harder work and less pleasure/job satisfaction? Have too many industries with excess money been found out and made to tighten their belts in order to satisfy the principles of sequential capitalism?

Then again, what right do any of us have to a fun job with tons of cash?

Buddha says that life is dukkha (suffering, change and being dependent on other things).

I guess we’ve got to suck that one up too.

A single, solitary, not-even-very-good thing for the weekend: