If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

I did like the Honda campaign, but this one had everything for me: craft, copy, art direction, attention to detail, a lack of resemblance to conventional advertising that made me notice and read it and a wit that runs through all the best VW work like the words in a stick of rock. They also flatter your film knowledge, which is great as the ads are designed to run in the Observer Film Magazine.

The people behind it were Steve Hall – Copywriter, Daniel Seager – Art Director and Pete Mould – Designer

UPDATE: this has now had over 22,000 hits on YouTube and around 250 comments.

Best ad of the year…

Drench Hamsters 28%
Other 26%
Philips Carousel 20%
Barnados 15%
Coke 8%

203 voters is quite a decent turnout, so maybe, just maybe, we can say that this poll is somewhat representative of the general opinion out there (although I do realise this blog is read mostly by creatives).

That means that Drench is definitely the champion, so let’s see if it repeats that assessment at the awards.

We don’t know who was second because ‘other’ put up quite a strong show. I’d guess that ‘other’ was one of the following: Eyebrows, Bring On The Trumpets (I’m pretty sure these two were technically last year’s), Canal +, T-Mobile, Virgin Atlantic, The Meerkat, Cadbury’s spinning head man. Were any of those overwhelmingly the ‘other’ choice? Dunno, but somehow I doubt it (if you voted ‘other’ could you say what you voted for in the comments section?).

If we remove the foreigners (Canal+ and Carousel) from that list I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that it hasn’t really been a classic year for the UK (here’s Campaign’s top ten).

I like all the British choices except Bring on the Trumpets, which I think is utter, utter shite, but how many of them are true originals that point the way forwards? Cadbury’s probably fits this description best, but it seems to play by a slightly different set of rules (long form promo etc.), so may get judged down for that.

Will we have another year with no UK ads winning a TV D&AD Pencil?

Do you think it’s been a good year? Better than last year (which wasn’t very good)?

Answers, and comments about how I’m a twat for not liking BOTT, in the usual place.

So here they are, with some hardcore scientific analysis of why they don’t do it for me: ads everyone else loves, but I don’t. (By the way, you’ll notice that they’re all highly-awarded, so I really hope that the people responsible don’t mind my one dissenting voice too much.)

1. St Wayne:

I’ve said this before, but if this ad showed Alex Hleb painted with a Belarussian flag nobody would care (maybe the Belarussian D&AD), but I’ll go further than that and say that nobody from this country would care if anyone from any other country painted his flag over his torso. Well, I hear you reply, it wasn’t someone from another country; it was our Wayne and it’s all actually very English and St George and yadda yadda yadda. OK. Fine. But there’s no idea. I like ideas. I appreciate that many people think this ad transcends its lack of idea by being such a brilliant visual, but I’m a copywriter and that doesn’t wash with me.

So there. I believe the concept has no intrinsic appeal or value, but, for some people (the people who don’t think Wayne is a nasty, granny-shagging, diving, lying little prick) this image just stirs something goddamn English within them. Well, Dr Johnson said that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’, so that’s told you.

2. NSPCC Cartoon:

This won at least three D&AD pencils as well as BTAA ad of the year, so the following opinion is officially wrong: Pointing out that kids aren’t cartoons, or that it’s somehow shocking to suggest that it’s all right when you beat up a cartoon but not a real kid, or cartoons are funny but beating up kids isn’t…hang on…what the fuck is this ad actually saying? Seriously? I have no idea. On top of that I don’t really think the man’s performance is very good (now I’m calling the abilities of Frank Budgen into question – how dumb is this post?). Anyway, I think the reality of child abuse is powerful enough without this odd journey round the houses.

3. Ice Skating Priests:

Beautifully shot? Can’t argue with that. Great performances and casting? Check. Good plot worthy of one of the greatest campaigns in advertising history? Um… Look, I’m not saying this is bad, so much as overrated (it also won several pencils and many other awards). Look at the plots of Stella’s Pilot, or Red Shoes (can’t find it online after thirty seconds’ search). They are brilliant, but ‘priests fancy a bit of Stella but one of them drops the booze through the ice so they make him go and get it’? That strikes me as somewhat weak. No twist, nothing surprising, no satisfying resolution. Just beautiful craft, and for Stella, I’m not sure that’s enough.

So there you go. Like an ant whispering in a hurricane, I am putting forward my dissenting voice against ads that I personally, subjectively, individually do not like as much as most other people do. What’s the point of that? Well, what’s the point of any of this? I think this might be my roundabout way of saying that it’s better to have your own opinions, however ‘wrong’ they might be, than feel like you’ve got to appreciate the emperor’s lovely new clothes because everybody else does. In advertising there is no wrong, just a big grey area of like/dislike.

Maybe the next post should be ‘shit ads I love.’

Let’s all spend a few moments watching Natalie Portman swear.

(Via the peerless Cinematical.)

The word is out and the word is (apparently) good.

(Guardian review here.)

I still find it hard to believe from watching the original trailer, but here’s a longer one that has some less crappy-looking bits:

And J.D.Salinger eloquently turns down the opportunity to sell the film rights to The Catcher In The Rye. (‘My mail from producers has mostly been hell.’)

AND…only one of the top fifty movies in box-office history is not based on previously existing material. What is it?

So there’s this campaign, right, and it involves a financial company that bases its idea on a mishearing of its name. To bring this to life, the agency decided to make a spokesperson out of the creature with the misheard name who is not happy at the confusion. They gave him a foreign accent and began to explore all the ways that he could live beyond the initial mishearing. The campaign was a great success:

(Check out 2:27 onwards)

Ready? Let’s all sing along: ‘compare the adverts…dot com’

Occasionally I’ll be reading something about principles of great advertising and I’ll wonder why they aren’t just followed by everyone.

Why don’t clients want ads that don’t look like ads?
Why do they want big logos when all they do is make you turn the page?
Why don’t people want and support clean layouts?
Why do people try to put across fourteen messages at once?
Why do people feel so much more inclined to make the kind of ads that will not stand out or provoke any real engagement?

Well, I think there are several reasons for this:

People who approve ads want to keep their jobs, and it’s much easier to do that with inoffensive beige work than startling, innovative work.
One man’s ‘startling and innovative’ is another man’s ‘inoffensive and beige’.
People don’t care enough.
Time and budget squeezes.
People involved in the process do not know what the fuck they are doing

It is this last one to which I turn today.
I think it’s really hard for the industry to admit, but most people who create ads aren’t actually very good at it. This means that when you are trying to persuade a client to do something, reassuring them that the risk is worth taking because the work will be so good, you might well be wrong.

I recall a TV ad I made where we were going to use an amazing post technique that the director had been developing. The director had great past form in this area and we felt confident about trusting him. Unfortunately, when we got the ad back, the technique was, shall we say, somewhat disappointing (shit). So then we had to go back to the client with smiles on our faces trying to persuade them that this was what we had tried to achieve and it was a cause for celebration, not disappointment. I’d say that the director wasn’t really good enough, but I’d also say we weren’t good enough either. We were unable to deliver on a promise we made to ensure that the technique would be as wonderful as we promised.

Sorry, Client X.

I like to think I’ve improved since then, but looking across the wide world of advertising, it strikes me that, as with every other industry in the world, 90% of us are not that good. Sure, we might be capable of excellence on occasion, but there just aren’t enough people who reliably produce excellence every time they get a brief.

You might be a good art director, but you’re not Paul Belford, Dave Dye or Mark Reddy. You might be a decent copywriter, but are you Tim Riley? Mary Wear? Nigel Roberts?

So many people (and I’m including account people, planners and MDs here) might well produce work that is mainly OK with a few flashes of brilliance on a good day. And yet we are employed to deliver the goods on a constant basis. In theory clients pay us a lot of money for greatness. The fact they they often end up with OK-ness might be why they don’t trust us to create a layout which has never been seen before. How many of us are capable of producing a really good one? No wonder they want their ads to look like ads: better a mediocre ad (they think) than an awful attempt at originality that might get them fired.

When I hear people talk about these principles of brilliance they are almost always people like Trott, Krone and Clow – people who have delivered that brilliance time and again.

But it’s one thing to agree with what they say, and quite another to manage to deliver it. Years of disappointment have led us to this cul-de-sac where you’d have to be mad to trust that your advertising problem would be solved with a work of genius by 9/10 of the agencies in the world.

A quick test: you have a new product to launch and an ad budget of £500,000. You have worked in advertising for a number of years. What’s your next move?

Luke Sullivan from Mediastash.tv on Vimeo.

(Thanks, P. Via Twitter.)

He swears more than I thought he would and he also admits to have a ten year booze and coke problem (although he might have been kidding about that).

Nice to see the Whipple man live (as it were).

And here’s the new Orangina ad:

I guess you either like those or you don’t.

Is that Fallon have lost Sony.

I suppose we can only speculate about what made Sony put the account up for pitch in the first place, but it’s quite telling that the business has gone to the groovy hotshop Anomaly.

By the way, with the loss of Asda last month, the reported billings hole for Fallon is £125million.

That is an agency-changing sum of money.

Let’s see how it changes Fallon.