If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Jul 23 2010 July 23, 2010 July 23, 2010 10 Comments by ben

The Work, The Work, The Work.

Effort’s a funny old thing.

You can put a lot in and get sod-all out at the other end, and you can toss something out on the way back from the pub and hit a home run.

And that can fuck with your mind.

Should one work really hard? Will it produce better stuff?

Well, annoyingly enough, the answer to both those questions is ‘yes’.

Although you might produce the best executions in the first ten minutes, the tedious truth of the matter is that if you come up with 100 more executions, the standard of your best three cannot possibly get any worse. That means the only outcomes to greater effort are either stasis or improvement, and neither will do you any harm.

But, y’know, work can be a bit of an arse, especially when compared to sitting around playing GTA 4 while mainlining whisky sours.

So where do you draw the line?

That’s a much harder question to answer because it depends on many factors at the same time: how ambitious are you? Do you need to impress your CD? Is the client too cunty to appreciate/ buy what your extra toil produces? Do you stop at eight, nine or ten o’clock? Are the extra hours worth it or should you get some sleep and try again in the morning? Is that new ad better or is the desperation for some kind of improvement screwing with your perspective?

God knows.

But I do think it gets easier as you get older, partly because you know how to spot which ideas are good, partly because you learn to recognise the dead ends before you go down them and partly because practice makes perfect, or at least better.

But if you want the real solution just find something you love doing, then it won’t feel like work. That means that you will end up doing tons of work and no work at all simultaneously.

Good luck finding that thing.

Jul 22 2010 July 22, 2010 July 22, 2010 7 Comments by ben

A couple of good articles I didn’t write

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This one is all about what makes a good CD.

(By the way, Peter Souter once told me that a good CD is the opposite of a good creative. The latter has to be really selfish while the former has to be really selfless. Perhaps you have a selfish CD. Perhaps he is therefore shit.)

And here’s another article by the same dude, Felix Unger (although that may not be his real name, unless maybe his parents were big fans of The Odd Couple):

How to sell creative work.

Jul 20 2010 July 20, 2010 July 20, 2010 24 Comments by ben

Truth: Like A blanket that always leaves your feet cold

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Advertising has an interesting relationship with the truth.

People will tell you that the classic way to construct a TV ad is to take the product benefit and dramatise it.

By ‘dramatise’, we mean ‘exaggerate’ and by ‘exaggerate’, we mean ‘lie about’.

Look at Lynx: you don’t just pull women, you pull gorgeous women and lots of them (not true).

Or VW: their car is so small but tough that policemen would hide behind it in a shootout (they wouldn’t).

Or Cadbury’s: eating their chocolate brings you as much joy as a gorilla playing the drums (not in my experience).

Or Macdonalds: their restaurants are full of pleasant, salt-of-the-earth types and smiley, well-behaved families (they are packed with eye-bleeding shitwhistles).

Of course, people will say that we’re all aware of the rules and we should expect to be lied to when we take in ads. We will then tune out the lies and accept only the true bits that we can easily decipher and understand.

But isn’t that just bullshit? We’re saying that these massive, expensive exaggerations won’t confuse anyone, that people can separate truth from horse feathers perfectly well in the blink of an eye, that they are supposed to accept one piece of film as both mendacity and veracity simultaneously.

I find it odd that we’re supposed to stuff ads with pointless legals that no one will ever read just in case they get the wrong impression about something that barely matters, but the humongous flim-flammery goes unchecked. If I tried to say, legally, that Lynx will definitely make you pull more women I think I’d run into a large brick wall from the BACC. However, if I just imply it, somewhere in the world of bullshit, then I’m fine.

‘But,’ I hear you cry (I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Gout-Legs will take particular issue with this), ‘aren’t you just saying the public are morons? Can’t you credit them with enough intelligence to separate fact from fiction?’ Well, I guess I just don’t understand why a massive illustration of a load of bollocks is fine, and why it’s so hard simply to tell the truth. Whether the public can understand or not, why is sophisticated smoke and mirrors so acceptable?

Perhaps if it weren’t, we wouldn’t end up with so many dogshit propositions about life being better when we get together (unique to every alcoholic beverage, telecom company, airline, and postal service in the world).

Jul 20 2010 July 20, 2010 July 20, 2010 3 Comments by ben

Madness

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Regular readers may have noticed that I quite like ads that are somewhat mad.

And that’s why I like this:

Jul 19 2010 July 19, 2010 October 24, 2017 41 Comments by ben

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwnnnnnnnnnn…

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Here’s Juan Cabral’s new ad for Eurostar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMiRJq_v1WU

In case you’re wondering, it’s shit.

But this blog does not deal in such besmirchificationary assertions without a bit of justification to back them up.

My biggest problem with it is: what the fuck has an idiot girl running around looking for talking animals got to do with taking a train from London to some city in Europe? Seriously, I like a slightly indulgent/nebulous ad as much as the next wanker but this is just crazy. It’s like advertising a bar of chocolate with a drumming…oh, wait….

Anyway, this is not Gorilla because it’s not interesting or memorable. It’s like watching someone smearing vanilla blancmange and skimmed milk over the screen while beaming Amanda Seyfried romance movies into your eyeballs, then getting a labrador puppy, covering it in Cecilia Aherne novels and getting it to lick you softly and non-committally until you weep with boredom. THEN putting a Norah Jones album on a loop and painting the planet a particularly neutral shade of beige while dressing you in Next clothes and shoving a rolled-up copy of the Mail on Sunday up your starfish.

Really, is anyone going to watch this (billed, incidentally, as ‘Eurostar’s first TV ad in three years’, like anyone gives a fuck) and think of taking a train to Europe? ‘Exploring is beautiful’ ought to be a line for selling LSD, not a boring journey to a boring place on a boring vehicle (although at least the ad accurately reflects the experience).

I fully believe that no one has led the creativity of advertising further in the last ten years, but compared to the rampant spanking that was ‘Gorilla’ and the lush, heartfelt snog that was ‘Balls’, this is like getting to a party and discovering that someone you don’t really fancy had to go home early with a mild cold.

Or something.

Jul 18 2010 July 18, 2010 July 18, 2010 9 Comments by ben

Inception

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So I’ve just seen Inception and it is really bastardly good. Beyond that there’s not a lot of point in going into it. The plot is actually quite difficult to spoil, but if you like movies, just go and enjoy the ride. There’s also little point in me trying to review it because others will do it much better.

I guess, as someone who blogs about advertising, it might be worth making a point that occurred to me that surprisingly linked one of the best films of this century with our much maligned (by me) industry:

As I was watching scenes that, quite frankly, blew my fucking tits off, I did think that it was a shame, with reduced budgets and fearful clients, we tend, as an industry, to have left the jaw-dropping and the dark behind. The kind of amazement that Surfer and Twister used to generate had been replaced by a more everyday excellence (Old Spice guy, Dove Evolution girl, Gorilla) that pleases in a less impactful way.

Then I remembered this and realised that was complete and utter bullshit:

Honestly, Carousel could have been a scene in Inception and would not have looked out of place. Those opportunities to be dark, adult, intelligent and ground-breaking may be few and far between, but at least they exist.

Perhaps that’s something worth clinging to.

Alternatively, you might think that the chances of you getting to make something like that are so small, you might as well not bother trying and will instead choose to resign and go and work in the movies. You might also acknowledge that for all its brilliance, Carousel will have roughly one trillionth the longevity and cultural impact of Inception.

Be a hero in a tiny industry or create deep, resonant art that will make people thank God that you’re alive?

Just measure your ambition and act accordingly.