If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

If you work for a top 30 agency, I’ll bet you a fucking ton of cash that there’s someone pretty high up in your creative department who has never done a single piece of advertising work that you have either heard of or respect.

It might be a talentless chap or chapess who blagged his way into CD-ing a digital agency when they were desperate for anyone half decent (although as I understand it, for the most part ,that is still very much the case) and then kept that role when your agency bought their place. Now he’s a CD of Top 30 Place Who Were Gagging For Some Digi Creds, despite being fairly shit at the C part of CD.

It might be a happy, smiley fella who has popped over from some shop in the States where he was Head of Experiential Communications. Now, having designed a shop front for Wankado and Son that won a Silver Andy and a Copper Mobius award, he’s pretty hot shit. Even hotter shit is his headhunter, who has managed to convince Top 30 Place Who Want To Look Like They Are Forward Thinking/Cool that they need this guy.

It might be a useless cunt who has never done a good ad in his or her life but is really darn good with the clients and has worked out exactly which anuses to lick at Top 30 Agency Who Couldn’t Really Give A Fuck About Whether Or Not Their Ads Are 9/10 Or 6/10, and now here he is: boss of a bunch of people who are far better creatives than he.

In the three categories above there are many, many people who are now climbing to the top of the creative depts of big agencies. Good God, I’d love to name names, but that’s the great thing about this: I don’t have to. We all know about the American ‘designer’ who became a CD on a big account at a big agency before being found out and moving on to a few more agencies where the same process happened. Every one of us has encountered a some nimrod who can spout the right digital buzzwords in the right ears to cover up the fact that he’s done no good ads. And we’ve all been down the pub when our friend from another agency explains in stunned disbelief how their cracking idea has been blown out by a retard who’s never even heard of John Webster.

But the real question about this is why? Aside from the reasons I have suggested above, this phenomenon is both a symptom and a cause of the general Fucking Of Creativity that is undeniably going on right across the world: creativity itself is less important, so promoting client-friendly uncreative people is the current move for an MD to make. Equally, the more these berks maintain client retention while simultaneously producing creative work that no one really cares about, the longer they will keep their jobs and the harder creativity gets fucked.

The title of this post will be familiar to anyone who had worked in a proper creative department (by that I mean one staffed mainly by people who have been regulars in The Book). Whenever anyone got too big for their boots or received an undeserved promotion the rest of the department would ask, ‘But what’s he done?’ That was because everyone rose and fell on the back of one thing: their work. The ads they made. The shiny baubles they won for those ads being appreciated by their peers in award schemes that held more sway than the current batch.

Now, if you have three Pencils, they could be for Digital Crafts Cinematography, Writing for Design and Live Action Special Effects. Now, that doesn’t mean your three ads are shit, but it does mean that your award shelf looks the same as the guy down the hall who has won best 60″ TV ad three years running.

So what does it matter? It doesn’t, and everyone knows it. That’s why dildos are getting hired all over the place.

Is there an answer?

Well, you can choose to play the game and make sure you know how to make the people that matter like you.

Or you can accept that’s not why you got into the business, try to make the best ads you can and hope that works for you instead.

It might be a matter of how good you are. Obviously, route one is a brilliant development for people who know how to smile and press flesh but are shit at the somewhat trickier business of creating brilliant advertising. Route two only works for people who really love what they do and are prepared to sacrifice the most secure route to a payrise for a Bronze at Creative Circle.

Route three is being good at both. Fucking difficult but worth a try.

Good luck.

And some advice for writing.

And some other words of advice.

And some more: double dipping and the five-second rule

(Thanks to B for both.)

Inception characters don’t understand Inception.

(Thanks, K.)

XX and Snoop.

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.