If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

I don’t see the point of this poster:

1. Who gives a fuck if Stella Is made from four ingredients? I’ve spent most of my life having no clue what goes into beer and it hasn’t bothered me one bit. If I was told Stella also contained peat or woodpecker turds, I’d cope. And what about the others that don’t make this boast? Kronenbourg is lovely, as are Grolsch, Hoegaarden, Corona, Cobra etc…

2. Talking of others, this is exactly the fact that Becks based their advertising on for years. Did anyone care then?

3. What about the target market? I can see how they might have enjoyed those Jean De Florette-type ads (at a push), but why they’d care about this fact, I have no idea. They call it Wifebeater. If you call something Wifebeater, you may not be that precious about what goes into it.

4. The art direction makes it a real arse to read and take in. It’s a bit of a mess and looks like the kind of thing that might appeal to people who drink mineral water or Pinot Grigio.

Next:

I don’t know if it’s big enough to read, but this is a full-page ad that appeared in Tuesday’s Evening Standard. It was placed by a company called Rapier and has the perplexing headline ‘marketing people want’, which never seems to make much sense, then it dribbles on VERY indulgently for about 1000 words that feel more like a million.

Dear reader, I tried to get through all of it just so I could convey its brilliance (or lack thereof) accurately, but I got so darn bored after about a third that I simply could not do it. It just made me think that Rapier are up their own arse, dull and misguided as to what they think people would find interesting.

AND it appeared in the Evening Standard, which has a circulation of hundreds of thousands. How many of those could possibly care about choosing a marketing agency (if that’s what Rapier is)? 100? 200? That’s what’s technically known as a Waste Of Money, and I don’t want to give my money to people who have no idea what to do with it.

Last: Squeezy Marmite. It costs more than the stuff in glass jars despite the fact that it’s much lighter, and therefore cheaper to transport. I’d also imagine that a plastic Marmite jar is cheaper to produce. I know Squeezy is better and you usually have to pay more for better, but why not just reflect the cost of the goods? Actually, that’s a really dumb question, and the answer is capitalism.

Rewatchable and almost certainly an accurate reflection of what goes on in a chip factory.

(Thanks, Borat.)

Read all about it.

I know several creatives at that hallowed shop, and I think it’s worth saying that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer bunch of guys (were any girls involved?).

Good Lord, Dan Brown gets a lot of stick.

To hear people talking about him you’d think he wrote books like The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons by scrawling them in crayon on a big sheet of orange paper.

But I’m betting that he didn’t.

The Da Vinci Code (I haven’t read any of his others) is an incredibly pacey thriller that has sold over eighty million copies and counting. Writing a book that is enjoyed by that many people is not just difficult, it’s about as close as you can get to impossible. Only six works of fiction have sold more copies, and they’ve all had decades-long head starts on TDVC.

Cervantes, he ain’t, though. As the book’s Wikipedia entry states:
“The novel has also attracted criticism in literary circles for its alleged lack of artistic or literary merit and its allegedly stereotyped portrayal of British and French characters.
Salman Rushdie claimed during a lecture, “Do not start me on ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ A novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name.”
Stephen Fry has referred to Brown’s writings as “complete loose stool-water” and “arse gravy of the worst kind.”
In his 2005 University of Maine Commencement Address, best-selling author Stephen King put Dan Brown’s work and “Jokes for the John” on the same level, calling such literature the “intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.”

I’d suggest that this opprobrium is only considered reasonable because the book has been so successful. People feel they can take pot-shots at Dan and his ‘crappy’ effort because he can hide behind all his royalties, deflecting criticism with piles of gold coins. But I’m not sure that makes it all fair.

It is not easy to point 100,000 words in the same direction. Producing a coherent plot that lasts the length of a novel takes a lot of effort, and it’s just possible that you might achieve that aim without managing to to make all your sentences as elegant as the petal of a snowdrop swooping and diving on a spring breeze. You might neglect (or be unable) to make all your characters resonate with the depth of Magwitch or Atticus Finch. You might sacrifice brilliance of metaphor for coherence of plot.

In the end, most authors seem to be missing some part of the full arsenal. I know of one recent Booker nominee who told me that he’d love Michael Crichton’s sales. Well, to get them, you need to produce work that is as widely appealing as Crichton’s. He’s not necessarily as successful as he is because he’s less ‘good’, but he’s chosen to write the kind of book that millions wish to read, and that is rarely the kind of thing that gets a Booker nomination.

Are the two mutually exclusive? Not entirely, but the exceptions seem to be limited to Ian MacEwan. Otherwise, Terry Pratchett won’t be winning the Nobel anytime soon, and VS Naipaul is unlikely to knock John Grisham off the top of the bestsellers chart.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the popular books take any less effort.

Writing a book is, in my experience both difficult and hard work. I may like some more than others, but that doesn’t mean the ones I dislike should be kicked to death.

(This is the point where I would normally point this post in the direction of advertising, but look at the sentence under the blog’s title at the top of the page. I don’t have to do shit.)

It’s well shot and really quite compelling.

Having something so everyday all exposed as it enters space is an intriguing thing to be shown.

The payoff was fair enough.

I’d watch it agin if it came on the telly.

Only question: will people think ‘Toshiba’ afterwards?

(Thanks, Vinny, via Twitter)

Oh, and yesterday someone suggested I blog about how bad the Christmas ads are this year. No need when Charlie Brooker’s about.

This is his worst of the lot.

By the way, I did social psychology at university.

One day I was in a lecture about some kind of psychological thing or other and the lecturer started telling us about animals and facial recognition. The gist of his talk was that most animals don’t really recognise themselves when they look in the mirror.

The exceptions (as far as I recall) are higher primates, such as chimpanzees. They can recognise themselves when they look normal, so to see how far this ability went, the experimenters tried adding clothes to make the chimps look a little bit different. The lecturer explained that one chimp was given a big pink hat to wear and when he looked in the mirror, he failed to recognise himself.

So the guy behind me puts up his hand.

‘Yes?’ says the lecturer.

‘Are you sure he didn’t recognise himself?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well maybe he just looked at himself in the mirror wearing a big pink hat and said, ‘It’s not really me, is it?”

The peerless Social Media Guru and All-Round Good Egg Alan Wolk has brought us The Hive Awards:

‘The Hive Awards started as a pipe dream, about a year ago, when I was looking at web award shows and realized that none of them rewarded things like user experience, content strategy or even coding. At least not on any significant level. What’s more, the awards that were being given out seemed to go to big, high profile sites in glamor industries. Which is not to say that those sites weren’t deserving, just that they didn’t seem to reward all the people working in the trenches, what I called the unsung heroes of the internet.’

God, something that encourages people to make the Web better in ways that might actually make a real, practical difference. Thank you. At effing last.

We all spend hours on the interweb, so l think a bit of support for anything that improves that experience has to be A GOOD THING. Enter today if your work’s eligible.

The second plug is for my Facebook group that I’m going to use to expand my novel online (join today!). There you can see the cover art along with the strapline, which is wrong, but they had to put something on for now. For some reason my publisher thinks I ought to be able to come up with a better strapline. So far he’s wrong.

I’m kind of feeling my way in the dark at the mo, so any suggestions for any improvements will be most welcome.

Here.

I’m voting for Starburst ‘Bus Station’ because I’m a little lad who loves berries and cream:

UPDATE: a few people have mentioned this:

I absolutely fucking love that ad. When it was on telly I used to rush in from the kitchen to watch it. I heard from a Cannes Grand Prix-winner that it didn’t win as many awards as it should have because it has no humour in it, nothing to puncture the portentous tone. Fuck it. I think it’s up there with the best.

Good writing and art direction too. Hats off Christian and Andy@DDB:

I was thinking about my first-ever ad the other day, then I realised that it’s just possible that some of you might recall it.

It was for Le Crunch apples and featured some schoolkids wittering on about the fruit in a faux-sophisticated way (‘They tempt the senses like a concerto of sunbeams’. How the fuck did I ever get that past a client? Or my CD for that matter). The last lines were, ‘Ah, no rest for the wicked. What have you got?’ ‘Colouring in.’

Although I wouldn’t say it was that memorable per se (no one’s put it up on YouTube and for obvious reasons I didn’t keep a copy), it ran for three years, usually in the mornings from about 1997-1999.

Do you remember it? If so, would you like to tell me how shit you thought it was and how it nearly put you off going into ‘the business’ altogether?

And on that subject, would you like to confess to making any shitty ads in your past, perhaps providing YouTube links by which we can judge you?

Go on…it’ll be cathartic.

I promise.