If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

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.

The likelihood of your ad getting made is in inverse proportion to the degree to which you want to make it.

Your CD will pick the one you just stuck in the pile on the off-chance.

You will never read the Daily Mail unless it’s in a pile of magazines on a shoot and you’ve read everything else. Then you will read it cover to cover and be ashamed at enjoying one of the articles.

The food that arrives at the sound session will have someone’s order missing. That someone will be you.

You will forget that It takes as much effort to make a shit ad as it does a good one.

The actors will lie on release forms. If you need them to ride a horse/tap dance/speak Urdu they will say they can because by the time you find out they can’t it will be too late.

The client will hate something about your ad that you hadn’t even thought of.

Wardrobe calls with attractive members of the opposite sex are more awkward than they are in the dream you had the night before.

You will not get the director you wanted, but you will convince yourself that the one you end up with was your favourite all along.

No matter how clearly and emphatically you ask, including threats of death and maiming, the illustrator will not follow your instructions.

Pre-prods always last half an hour longer than the biscuits.

The client will never provide enough of the product to shoot, and it will never arrive on time.

When you all go out for a meal on location, the creatives will attempt to sit as far away from the client as possible, even if they like him/her.

Art directors are always late. This annoys copywriters, who are always punctual.

It’s always more fun and less fun than you think it will be.

So the majority of you would either like to be a creative (36%) or a creative director (24%).

I guess that makes sense. Statcounter doesn’t break down the readers of this blog into their respective occupations but I’d imagine that most of you are what’s known as ‘creatives’. I wonder why you’d generally prefer to not to be the boss. I agree, but for what it’s worth, my reasoning is that I’d rather not do all the client hand-holding in Dusseldorf or Darlington. And I hate meetings. They’re all far too fucking long because people love to faff. What is it with faffing? I know one faffer who simply repeats everything she has already said at least three times while I am silently imagining setting her face on fire then putting it out with a chisel.

More of you would rather be a lav cleaner than an account person. I second that. I’m not particularly fond of cleaning lavs (particularly on Friday morning), but it’s honest work and I think my soul would be OK at the end of it. Not sure I could look myself in the eye if I was a suit, and I certainly couldn’t explain to my son what I did for a living. He’d think I was a right cunt.

Not so many of you want to be a ‘Post Person’. I should have been clearer with that one: I didn’t mean despatch guys; I meant editors and sound engineers. Anyway, it’s too late for me to use English words to make my thoughts clear. I’ll just have to accept that it’s not my strong suit.

Finally, 8% want to be a planner. I can see where you’re coming from. You are on the up. You are in the ascendancy. You have taken on the mantle of the asymmetric haircut and the Japanese denim. You are cuckooing the creatives into oblivion and it stirs warm your nerdy loins.

But don’t forget: when the copywriters and art directors have finally had enough and and all fucked off home, you’ll regret it.

Because we’re taking the ball with us.

I’ve been sent this a few times over the last couple of days:

The Last Advertising Agency On Earth from FITC on Vimeo.

Ha ha, very funny etc.

But how does that tally with this?

Apparently, TV viewing is actually at an all-time high and only 1% (fuck-all) is done online.

And last time I looked, there were quite a few print ads on the pages of almost every non-book that I read.

Suck that up your digital anus, geekoids.

I remember, as I’m sure you do, that a few years back, digital was IT (no pun intended). People were saying that if you don’t have some digi shit in your book by about March 23rd 2010, you would be fucking obsolete. Well, that turned out to be a giant bollock sandwich with monkey shit on top.

Sure, there is a whole effing load of wonderful, supercool, admirable digital stuff (yet the UK STILL hasn’t made a digital across-the-whole-country-famous breakthrough like the three things everyone’s been bleating about for, like, five years: BMW Films, Subservient Chicken and Nike Plus) but the usual, traditional, ‘dinosaur’ media are still the predominant ones in terms of cash and viewership.

And that doesn’t look like it’s changing.

So where does that leave us?

I think it’s time to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Whatever that means.

This is probably some of the best advice you will ever receive (thanks, Dave Trott, via his Twitter feed).

And check out the new blog from my friends, Diccon and Al.

And this is cool (via the excellent Denver Egotist).

To be honest, the competition hasn’t been that stiff, but when I checked out this link on Saturday afternoon I was astounded (I am rarely astounded).

(Thanks, Luke Sullivan of Hey Whipple, Squeeze This. Via his Twitter feed.)

This is amazing for a number of reasons:

First, the idea that television advertising is open to anyone at such a miniscule price is a real breakthrough (As far as I can tell, the service is not open to the UK yet) because it’s the last piece in the universal accessibility of advertising. As the film shows, it’s fairly easy to make an ad for little to no money, so now that you can show it to over a million people for a tiny budget, mass communication is being truly democratised. Say your piece (within the regulations) and find your audience.

Second, it now seems remarkably easy to buy media. Like all of you I am sarcastically certain that media planning and buying is an incredible art that can only be practised by experienced geniuses. Now you can sort out your own media schedule and fill it up for tuppence. 1000 solid responses is a great ROI.

Third, the potential for scam ads is now infinite. The last great frontier – the cheating TV ad – is now within the grasp of any unscrupulous agency. Go for it lads! Fill your boots! Make ad awards seem even more pathetic than they already are.

Even though it’s only available in the US, I’m definitely going to use it to promote my novel.

…In about as tiny and pathetic a way as possible (it’s the last thing mentioned in this list, and they’ve shortened the URL so the ITIABTWC name doesn’t get an airing), but I’m delighted that the guide section of a national paper has seen fit to dedicate an area the size of an anorexic postage stamp to my ramblings:

If anyone’s interested, it had no effect on my visitor numbers whatsoever.

As Hirsute Gentleman says, you want to hate him, but there is an annoying amount of sense being spoken.

Seen one like it before, but still impressive.

Amazing pictures of people made up as paintings from this site (Thanks, D):

And this looks fun:

There was a very good comment on yesterday’s post that questioned why advertising agencies overcomplicate the process so much when it could be so easy.

I’m sure Boobs (the commenter) is already aware of this, but it’s all down to the different motives of the people involved.

On the surface, we all want to make good ads that sell the products or services of our clients. However, under the surface are the other motives.

I’ll gloss over the fact that many creatives just want to win awards (I think I’ve written about that before), and, I assume, many planners want to do the same (by the way, how did planners get ownership of an ad’s effectiveness? So they write those papers that you have to submit to effectiveness awards, but surely the actual effectiveness itself is down to a number of other factors) and mention instead the overall motivation for much that is shitty on Planet Earth: money.

The advertising process is complicated because the more complicated a process gets, the more people have to be involved and the more people who are involved, the more an agency can charge for all those people. This is the reason why traditional ad agencies want to be responsible for digital/design/DM and everything else that used to be done by specialists: there’s a big old pie out there, and the people in charge want every fucking slice they can get their hands on.

If you asked most non-creatives (and probably quite a few creatives) what they want out of their day’s work, the answer would be ‘money’. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that. Money’s nice and nice things cost money. But then it begs the question: why advertising? There are surely better, more enjoyable ways to make more cash for less work than the creation of ads. Even the skill-sets involved in being client friendly (account management) or doing research (planning) must be useable in a host of more lucrative industries.

I wrote recently how I believed that the residual reputations of an agency can attract people to work there, even if the fuel behind that name burnt out long ago. I think it might be the same with the whole industry. Many people think that advertising is bad at branding itself, but I think that the image of a Porsche-driving fat-cat pulling up to the Ivy for lunch with the famous star of their new campaign is one that still lives on for many people.

Advertising seems like an office job with more glamour than most, so it sometimes attracts the kind of people who want money, but also the kind of people who want to bask in the perceived trimmings. But there’s a strong chance those perceived trimmings do not include ‘the making of great ads’ so much as looking like your life is more fun that that of your chums who earn more than you in The City.

You may have entered this industry with more ‘noble’ intentions, but you’re almost certainly spending your days with people who didn’t.