If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

This is an amazing project that’s been four years in the making: one picture that features all of the 490 first-team players who graced the grass at Highbury (four are missing).

Anyway, rather than continue regurgitating the entirety of someone else’s post, I’ll just direct you here.

Oh, and Bring On The Trumpets won last week’s poll, so I’m just off to shoot myself in the face.

You might notice that the new poll has some inverted commas that are there for all the wrong reasons. I hope they’ll be featured on this website.

(Thanks, D.)

Of course, it could backfire as they land on you and you try to kill them, saying ‘Fuck off Power of Dreams’, or ‘Get the fuck off me BMW Joy’.

Let’s see what happens next.

I bet they’ll drug us to make our eyesight really good then do something similar to protons, neutrons and electrons, turning the entire planet into a series of tiny commercial opportunities that we’ll just love.

Very well shot by Ringan Ledwidge. Hats off to all involved (although I’d like to have seen the horse talking a bit more clearly. That is a very small quibble).

Let’s all shed a ginormous tear for the passing of one of advertising’s greatest ever agencies: Cliff Freeman and Partners.

You can read the article for the bumph behind the demise, but I’d just like to say that for anyone working in creative advertising for the last 22 years, particularly from the mid-nineties to the early 00s, this place was the gold standard. They basically invented the ad style which boiled down to 25 seconds of hilarious followed by a white-on-black punchline, that was imitated but never bettered.

Run VT:

An American reader has just sent me this ad (thanks, B):

It made me think how beautiful the photography is and how it’s nice to see a big, meaty brand film in this day and age (apparently it runs properly on network TV over there).

Then it made me think about how American it is. I thought that a British attempt to do something similar would fall terribly flat and seem rather desperate. Only in America, as they say.

But why is that? Well, the obvious answer is that we’re all bloody different. We all have our own cultural personalities that mean we can or can’t make film like this. I think that English people are class-obsessed with elements of being somewhat apologetic about the Empire and somewhat embarrassed at its collapse. We’re riddled with fundamental antipathies that make us dislike and mistrust one another to a greater or lesser extent (obviously a generalisation, but like many generalisations it’s true).

I believe (as a substantially Scottish person) that people from Scotland define themselves by their existence in the shadow and under the thumb of their more successful neighbour to the south.

Perhaps the French arrogance is a blustery cover for their guilt about what happened in WW2. Perhaps not.

Anyway, this is all leading to a point about globalisation and pan-global ads.

Of course, some of them work very well (I’m thinking about Playstation Mountain and HSBC ‘local bank’ here), but most are a lowest common denominator effort that means nothing but vanilla blancmange to the vast majority of their audiences.

I would have thought that the differences between us were obvious enough for the folly of effective global advertising to be equally obvious.

And if you want further proof, this would be the celebration of Britain that seems closest to the Levi’s ad, and yet it’s fucking miles away:

Bullets at 1,000,000 fps (Thanks, D).

So we’ve had some mad talking sweets. How about a bitchy pair of apricots?

Or some camp nuts?

Sympathetic pizza?

It’s all for the Food Standards Agency by RKCR/Y&R, directed by Mark Denton. Eat healthy. You know it makes sense, even if it is slightly boring compared to fish and chips and a pint of Margarita.

I’m just back from the Campaign BIG Awards.

Too much of little interest to report, but you might like to know that this was the best TV ad of the year (it also won the Paul Arden award, which rather surreally came with £1000 of book tokens, like the winners won their school sports day or something):

In its category, and overall, it beat this:

Which would you rather have done?

No need to comment, it’s the subject of this week’s poll.

By the way, for what it’s worth, I can’t understand why anyone would think BOTT was any good. It just seems to be hatstand for hatstand’s sake and has been ignored (as far as I recall) by pretty much every other award scheme. Are any of the jury members reading this? Was it a unanimous decision or a contentious one?

(Last week’s poll was interesting, wasn’t it?)

Our first contender puts the ‘loo’ in Waterloo Station (thanks, C). What does it mean? It means the hyphen key was broken that day:

Number two takes the suggested rule of seven words to a 48-sheet and rogers it senseless (thanks, D).

Number three is living proof that the contribution of creative departments is somewhat overrated (however, it pretty much rhymes, which makes me want to give it a big patronising hug):

And finally (sorry about the quality, but I was on a bus in the dark), I have no idea if this poster is any good because the bill posters were unable to put up a backlit 96-sheet the right way round:

Good product demo.

Let’s make it viral so that BMW stop all their Joy ads.