If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

(Can I just say before I explain why I dislike this ad that I wouldn’t normally be so negative because I usually have no idea what factors impacted on the ad behind the scenes. However, with house ads most of those problems do not exist, so if they’re crap they deserve everything they get.)

1. For an ad with what appears to be 1000 words of copy, it’s really badly written. Examples include:
We think there are three things. In reality there are dozens obviously.
You should totally come in and talk.
If you don’t have anything to do with advertising, and found this copy of Marketing on the tube or somewhere…
It’s not like specialising in goldfish or helicopters or something
But enough with the trendcasting already.
Like everybody knows…
Fucking hell. It reads like it was written by a twelve-year-old, or aimed at one – two scenarios that seem unlikely to say the least.

2. Hypocrisy: ‘To a lot of people, a lot of advertising is tedious and self-aggrandising…’ This ad refers to how dull it is (‘We don’t mean to be boring’) and if it thinks it’s being amusingly ironic, I’m sorry to say that’s about the only point it makes that is absolutely correct. Self aggrandising? ‘We believe in creating…content that is genuinely helpful, informative or entertaining. We believe this kind of output represents the future for our industry‘. I think that counts as enhancing or exaggerating one’s own importance, power, or reputation.

3. What the fuck does the headline mean?

4. The ‘funny’ attempts at world-weary exaggeration at the beginning. Neither funny nor perceptive, and boy do they go on in a way that suggests that whoever wrote them is really fucking pleased with him/herself.

5. Unfounded exaggeration: ‘…we’ve gradually created a management team with a broader range of experience than any other in London.’ Come on! Who seriously believes that? London: the fucking capital city of one of the most advanced nations on earth, home to companies whose staff might just be a little more experienced than this lot.

6. ‘Our recruitment motto is this – beware the agency guy who says he has twenty years’ experience’. Great to have a recruitment motto that can’t possibly apply to more than 10% of your job applicants.

7. There are more, but I’m getting tired. Read through the copy yourself and you’ll find something either false, dumb or wrong presented in a way that’s false, dumb or wrong. But one last thing: Rapier? if I were choosing an agency name I’d discount all suggestions where one of the syllables is ‘rape’.

If that’s how they do their own ads, imagine what they do when they have to work with client comments.

Something better, I’d imagine.

Well, it can’t be worse.

Who paid for it?
Whose idea was it?
Is this where promos are heading?
Does anyone else feel a little dirty watching this?
Is that dirtiness connected with the relentless commerciality or is it to do with the crapness of Fiddy?
Is this the first instance of advert placement as opposed to product placement?
Does it matter, as promos are just ads anyway?
How many ads can one piece of film take?

Etc.

And if you have a moment, why not vote for the worst ad of the year?

This is the one that made me puke the furthest:

(Via the wonderful Cinematical.)

I’m not much of a fan of sensationalist metaphors, and raining polar bears that land in bloody splats around a US metropolis to represent the weight of the greenhouse gases you produce on an average European flight is definitely a sensationalist metaphor.

Visceral polar bear innards spread across cars and pavements as the ursine quadrupeds make their unfortunate arrivals to get me to give a shit about the payoff. The problem is, I’ve no idea what that payoff really means. I’ve taken a few European flights in my time and so, I’d imagine, have you, almost certainly on planes that were quite full. So we’d all find it reasonable to believe that millions of these flights have happened so far. Now, truthfully, is your daily life any different for that? Does 400kg of greenhouse gases really matter? If so then why are we not all dying under a cloud of sulphur from all the kajillion tonnes that must have been produced since the Wright Brothers had their little brainwave?

I understand that the polar bears have been used to demonstrate the animals that are suffering because of the proliferation of greenhouse gases, but they’ve rather oddly chosen to make a point about how much the gases weigh. Is the metaphor direct and physical or la-di-da and figurative? Why give me a double metaphor? I’ve got enough on my plate trying to work out why a polar bear that lands from 30,000 feet makes such a small impact. They should be going ten feet into the pavement, exploding in a mile-wide spray of furry nipples and giant white arses.

I think they’ve used a sledgehammer to crack an incomprehensible nut. And, ironically for this client, I would deem that a huge fucking waste.

Here.

*Puts on Nigel Tufnell voice*

Wot?

And this is fun/good/something that helps Apple users feel even more smug than we already do:

(Via the excellent Toadstool blog.)

Like this.

(Don’t click on anything, just give it a moment.)

The Tories (Euro RSCG) have just come up with this brilliant idea: make the leader and chancellor of the opposing party look like Jedward out of X-factor:

It’s brilliant because they waited a good couple of weeks after the Labour party (Saatchi and Saatchi) made the leader and chancellor of the opposing party look like Jedward out of X-Factor.

I don’t know if they’re going to say that theirs is a response to the Labour version (no one mentions it), but if it is then it’s very weak indeed. They don’t recognise the other one, they just copy it. This poster is not making a comparison between the posters, it’s making a fucking hilarious reference to Jedward being kicked out and yet we’re still left with DEADWOOD (which sounds a bit like Jedward. It does. Go on – try saying them one after the other. See? Genius).

It makes the Tories look like a bunch of rip-off merchant muppets, it makes Euros look uncreative and extremely lazy and it makes Labour look like such brilliant thinkers and trendsetters that their ads are worth copying almost exactly.

Was that really the result they were looking for?

I read The Sun and The Guardian. The first one I read backwards because I’m only really interested in the sport, the second I don’t even read, at least not the main paper – I just read the sport (again) and the features section, G2.

To be honest, I don’t see the point in finding out what’s going on in the world via the daily press. It’s just one long round of scaremongering after another. To be interesting, news has to have some drama, and drama only comes from negative situations, so that side of every story is scaled up and made out to be much more significant than it really is.

Papers will also print a tonne of pointless conjecture about these stories. As The Black Swan explained, not only are most important occurrences literally unpredictable, the many attempts at prediction are wrong. As a basic example, check out Martin Sorrell’s constant predictions about the recession: L-shaped, bath-shaped, W-shaped, V-shaped, LUV-shaped. He’s pretty much covered all the bases there. My cat might as well have predicted that, and yet Martin’s word is taken as significant wisdom by most of the papers (and their less skeptical readers). But newspapers have space to fill, so they need supposed experts to blather on about which direction the house prices are heading in, whether global warming is real or not and who’s going to win the league.

Talking of winning the league, have you noticed the language they use when it comes to reporting about football? Steven Gerrard will give a ‘war-cry’, Alex Ferguson will ‘taunt’ Rafa Benitez and Cesc Fabregas will ‘vow’ to take revenge on Man City. Then you read the stories and find out that Gerrard said ‘I think we’ve got a good chance against Croatia if we all do our best’; Alex says that he thinks Liverpool might not be as strong without Torres and Cesc will talk about how he hopes to get a better result against Man City than in the corresponding fixture last season. In other words, the papers are trying to make everything seem much more significant than it really is (do you see a pattern forming here? Up the drama, sell the papers. Never mind how much bullshit it all is).

So if the papers are basically presenting everything through a filter of crap, why read them? Well, there’s always that nagging doubt that something is happening in the world that might be making a difference to your own life. But how often does that happen? How has the war in Afghanistan impacted on your everyday existence (assuming you’re not related to a soldier who’s out there, and in that case you’ll hardly need a paper telling you what’s going on)? What about every single aspect of global warming? Barack Obama’s attempts to push universal healthcare through the US government? And let’s not even start with Jordan/Amy/Lily etc. Last week there was a huge story because Kate Moss said ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’. She was vilified for the bad influence that might have on teenage girls, but the phrase originated at Weightwatchers, and no one took them to task for it. More paper-selling crapola.

Anything else? How about hypocrisy? People tend not to say this aloud, but if you’re a kid that goes missing, you’d better hope you’re a pretty white girl. The sad fact is that pictures of Madeleine McCann, Holly, Jessica and Sarah Payne sold papers. Is that because their stories were more tragic than anyone else’s? Have no boys gone missing in the same period? No children from ethnic minorities? I think that might be a bit too much of a coincidence. The sad truth is that these stories made the front pages for days on end because the kids involved were pretty and white (what this says about us as a nation is equally disquieting). But then the very same papers happily published pictures of the girl who played Hermione in Harry Potter as being pretty/attractive from a time when she was about thirteen. ‘Yay!’ they are tacitly saying, ‘We all like underage girls, don’t we?’ When you think about that for more than a second it makes you feel pretty queasy.

So I like to read the sport if I can filter out the hyperbole and I like the features because they’re not about some hysterical angle on some insignificant event (well, some of them are, but you learn to pick and choose). If you take the papers as entertainment, they can work quite well as a way to pass the time, but the extent to which they are taken seriously is really quite disturbing. Let’s not forget that most of them have an agenda that sees them promoting what’s most helpful to Rupert Murdoch, or whichever political party they support.

Despite all this, I don’t feel uninformed or unconnected with the ebb and flow of modern life. This may be because I read Private Eye and watch The Daily Show. Their presentation of the news filtered through the skepticism of comedy seems to me to be far more honest and truthful than that of the other outlets.

Something not quite right there…

So the opportunity to be a D&AD juror is less popular than that of being a sex tourist (what even is that?), policeman (I forgot to mention it’s in the pornography-watching squad of Scotland Yard. Does that make it more or less popular?) and, by a long distance, cowboy.

I don’t know if that really means anything. If your full-time job was being a D&AD juror you would probably want to kill yourself by the end of the first week (it is rather dull, although fine for a short burst when you know it’ll be over in a couple of days). Good luck to all who are doing so next year.

New poll. Vote away…

UPDATE: some agency Christmas cards from Ben and James.

A very funny, very well written blog by Dave Knockles, ‘client’.

Here’s an excerpt:

I use my mother as my sole focus group. She’s nearly target audience, and she’s a shrewd old bird, so she lets me know whether the agency boys have landed a hole-in-one or shanked the ball into the face of the club chairman’s wife, then attempted to play the next shot off her blood-spattered chin where the ball had come to rest, misjudged the grip on the driver, smashed the club right into the old dear’s windpipe, broken the club and called her a cunt for getting in the way in the first place. (This didn’t happen to me, by the way. It didn’t.)

(Thanks, anon.)

PS: for reasons I don’t fully understand this has been far and away the most viewed week on my blog. Thanks for dropping by. More dismal cackbabble next week.