If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Here’s a cracker for those of you who are about my age or older:

I found myself singing all the words to it as I cycled to work this morning.

It’s 28 years old.

And it’s an ad.

Crikey.

I must confess though, I thought (for obvious reasons) that it was for oven chips.

But I still remember how my brother and I used to say ‘fried onion rings’ to each other in the slightly ethnic voice that they gave the token black character. But then it was around the time of Mind Your Language:

And Chalky:

Oh dear…

Maybe this post has gone a bit negative after all.

I quite like that fact about the fish that have never been frozen. Makes me think that shitty old Morrison’s does something good.

But they couldn’t stop there.

Oh no.

Apparently, ‘You’ll be hooked!‘, written in curly fucking writing with a a fucking exclamation mark.

Why?

Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

I know that people ‘hook’ fish when they catch them, but become ‘hooked’ on these well-prepared, unfrozen fish?

It’s tortuous.

(By the way, that ad runs just near the market in Camden, so I have a feeling that the number of people seeing the poster who are already ‘hooked’ on something other than fish could be quite high, making the poster unintentionally funny.)

But I don’t like this:

I don’t like the leads.
The dance is sad.
The music is shit.
I don’t buy their connection (too quick).
What sort of retard ties their shoes to someone else’s?
They’re a pair of pricks who ruin a shoe shop with their selfish, self-indulgent ways.
It just rubs me up the wrong way.
I was very nearly sick.

…But I think Danny texted this one in.

Odd also that comments have been disabled on YouTube.

But never fear, comments are allowed on this blog:

This campaign is as tired as a short-sighted rabbit who mistook a huge pile of Viagra for his morning lettuce.

It was once great.

It is now coughing up blood.

Over the course of what I might laughably refer to as my career, I have come to many conclusions about what I do and don’t like in the industry we call ‘ad’.

I thought it might be interesting to see how they all ‘net out’, as cunts say.

So here I present to you my agency:

First thing’s first: it’s called Pavement. I once read a study that said ‘pavement’ was the most pleasant word to say in the English language. That’s enough for me. I don’t want names above the door and I don’t want any meaning at all to be conveyed by the chosen title. If it all works out everyone will think it’s brilliant; if not, they’ll think it’s shit. As Jeremy Bullmore once said, things imbue names with meaning, not the other way round.

Next, the company philosophy. ‘Philosophy’ is a word dripping with wank, so it’s just here to indicate that I think everyone in the agency needs to know what we’re all about. It helps to provide an answer every time someone asks the question, ‘Should we be doing this?’. So here goes: happiness before money. Of course, money can increase happiness, but chasing it at the expense of people’s contentment seems fucking stupid to me. Would you like to work for a giant corporation full of wrist-slitting pill-munchers or a small place where joy exudes from every pore?

Now we need an M.O. that will help us decide what clients to get and how we work with them: Pavement will only do advertising for non-cunts who value happiness over money. This, I hope, will lead to a self selecting process where the companies in question produce decent things which don’t fuck people over and do not fuck over their own employees for the sake of a shekel.

Other corporate policies will flow from the central philosophy:

1. No placements. Why the fuck should we exploit the high supply/low demand model just to save a few quid? Juniors in all departments come in with a proper job from day one. If we fucked up and chose the wrong one (which can happen at any level), then we bite the bullet and see, on a case-by-case basis, how a conclusion can be reached.

2. Good bogs that you can’t hear the next-door bog from. Good Lord, why, in this day and age do we have to listen each other defecating? We don’t. I know plenty of agencies that get it right. Hats off to them.

3. If you need help, help will be provided. People should use their initiative but they shouldn’t just be left to drift. The good ones improve the young ones; it’s part of the job.

4. No Campaign. You can select any weekly magazine you like, but not that one. It’s a huge waste of money.

5. The CD’s decision on work is final. He/she will listen to other opinions, but there is to be no three hour whinging period for the people who didn’t get their way to attempt to do so just by being a whiny prick. The CD is employed for his or her creative judgement. What’s the point in failing to use it?

6. Creatives have offices. This is fucking obvious. Anyone who can give creatives offices (I appreciate it’s not possible everywhere) but doesn’t is a giant cock.

7. One afternoon off during the working week to compulsorily sponge. Off you go. A tenner each, every employee, every dept, have fun.

8. The office shuts at 6. You can work afterwards if you really want to, but that’s up to you. No one wants to stop you working hard but Pavement does not want you to feel compelled to endure a life of pointless presenteeism.

9. No pitching unless a pitch budget is agreed in advance and not surpassed. Pitching is a shite process and a giant fucking waste of money for most of the people involved. However, the pitch will be organised properly so that the people involved are not Mac-ing stuff up at 3am the morning before. I fully believe this is possible. Indecisive twattery stops it being so.

10. Office in Hampstead or Primrose Hill. Regular walks in grassy areas encouraged.

UPDATE: actually, everyone should have an office, then you wouldn’t have that strange and annoying phenomenon of people wandering around communal areas trying to make personal phone calls on their mobiles then scampering off when you arrive to get a Coke out of the machine.

Go on. Fill your boots.

Ah, Easter: a time when we celebrate that bloke dying for our sins, although how he can die for me deliberately knocking that old lady down and desecrating her corpse last week is beyond me. I also think it’s beyond him.

I firmly believe that Easter was invented 83 years ago by Cadbury’s. They saw how well Coke did with Santa so they invented another bearded man who performed impossible feats. Odd how they gave him that twist of having a prossie for a mum and all that, but you know those marketing bods…

So now we all give each other eggs to commemorate the death of a man who was crucified. Does that make any sense at all? Hot cross buns (he was nailed to a cross, the weather was hot and he had buns (an arse)) I understand, but not the eggs.

Anyway, on to the timewasting guff:

Think someone in advertising is a…how can I put this…? Cunt?

Get it off your chest.

And if you want a really fucking cool app that will impress every single one of your mates without fail, look no further.

UPDATE: Another amazing app thingie (I wonder why they’re all turning up today…):

I missed this a year or two ago, probably because I wasn’t paying attention.

But thanks God ‘S’ pointed it out to me when it got a mention on Steve Henry’s blog (it’s on here but the site is under maintenance so I can’t link to it properly).

It’s somewhat obvious that the people involved spent a lot of time reading about the recent exploits of Chuck Norris, but what the hey – these are good:

Just before Christmas I was having lunch with a few grizzly old creatives. Between them they had several gold lions and at least one Cannes Grand Prix, from back in the days when there were only three or four to win each year.

We were chatting ads, and no matter how lauded the campaign, it got a rough ride from these boys.

Except one:

They could quote it, word for word, and that’s because it’s perfect.

Perfect writing, perfect direction, perfect choice of VO, perfect delivery.

It did an incredible job of celebrating the common man. If you didn’t live by his standards, you wanted to, even though a minute earlier you couldn’t care less about how you used duct tape or parked a boat.

I can’t find the print but it was also brilliant in every way. One execution was simply a recipe for meat loaf. Nothing more. Genius.

And I’ve never heard anyone whinging on about which scene from a movie it ripped off.

Perfect concept, perfect craft.

That’s why it’s The Best Ad Campaign Of All Time.

PS: Scamp lives again.

Today’s Sunday Times Style section (a ridiculous fucking rag if ever there was one) had an interesting article about how to maintain your life in the face of demands from your job.

Most of it was vaguely interesting, but right at the end there was a piece from Tom Hodgkinson, author of The Idle Parent, which made a whole bunch of sense to me:

The problem with work is that it tends to remove your dignity. Therefore you must find ways of reclaiming your dignity. Go backwards in all things: wear tailor-made suits, use a fountain pen, walk through the park instead of taking public transport, keep a copy of Byron with you, go to art galleries at lunchtime, enjoy an afternoon pint in the pub, sneak in a cinema visit during the working day. You must transform yourself in your mind from put-upon wage slave to modern anthropologist. Detach yourself. And force yourself to leave work punctually.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post which elicited some comments suggesting that advertising creatives should have a union. Of course, the idea is laughable. Our job is ridiculously cushy when compared with real jobs, such as, well, every other occupation on the planet, so our demands would be pathetic. However, if I were to join such a body, the above passage would form a fundamental part of what I would like to see it stand for.

It’s not just the parts that seem somewhat easy (trips to cinemas etc.); it’s the change of attitude, the hope that living a fuller life away from the office will make you better at the job. Is it a coincidence that the current squeezing of the creative’s time and freedom has happened at the same time as the worst period of creativity in the history of modern British advertising?

Maybe.

Does anyone in charge care?

Maybe not.