If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Posting sporadically, if at all.

I don’t really watch live TV.

All the decent shows come out in box sets that you don’t have to wait weeks to finish.

And everything else is on iPlayer (or the commercial equivalent).

So I finally got round to watching this week’s Top Gear tonight.

It’s a bit dull, but you might be interested in watching the section in the middle where Jeremy and James attempt to write a VW ad. They pop down to DDB London and show their stuff to Jeremy Craigen, who remains admirably unimpressed with their attempts at both advertising and humour.

And when you’ve finished watching that, why not have a look at the trailer for Fantastic Mr. Fox:

(OK, I’ll be honest here. I think that looks shit. I think The Royal Tenenbaums is shit. I think The Life Aquatic is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. As far as Wes Anderson goes, I only really like Rushmore. While I’m on the subject, Zoolander is shit, everything Pedro Almodovar has ever done is shit, Dodgeball is shit, most of what Ben Stiller does is shit. Have a good weekend. x.)

PS: check out this post from the Denver Egotist about the intrinsic crapitude of award schemes. It’s sharp.

PPS: shoot the account guy

Flicking through a copy of Marketing the other day, I came across this recruitment ad for an advertising and design company called Maverick:

The thing I don’t get is why an ad agency would represent itself with something so badly written and horribly art directed.

They talk about wanting someone with a highly creative nature, but attempt to entice that person with a series of lame puns that connect the name of their company to a character from the film Top Gun who has the same name.

They also want someone with a ‘strong knowledge of digital’. They couldn’t get any more specific than that.

In fact, the whole thing is a spew of meaningless cackbabble that the writer should be ashamed of.

And as for the sign-off, ‘So…if you never lose that loving feeling for liaising between clients and internal colleagues, and you’d like to join a team of aces who like to do things a little differently…’

‘…you are a giant prick.’

Earlier this year I stuck the darylandben.com website on the blog.

It got a generally favourable reaction but we are all too aware of its limitations.

It’s pretty basic and a tad glitchy, but it does the job.

So imagine our surprise when we turned to page 55 of this month’s Ceative Review to find this (minor licence has been taken with the page layout to remove the stuff next to it):

Very kind (although ‘slick’ is not an adjective I would use to describe that site).

Anyway, for those of you who want to check out the whole article, we’ve been featured next to the website of Adam Chiappe and Matt Saunby (also described as ‘slick’). They have taken a theme of ‘Pimp Your Brand’, whereby they suggest that they can do for your brand what Tim Westwood can do for a battered old car.

Now, I’ve never met Mr Chiappe or Mr Saunby, but I assume they put out a website that reflects their personality. It’s fun, it’s (as Creative Review says) ‘cool’, and it’s confident. All good things to be.

Whereas Daryl and I have not employed a theme, instead deciding to let the work and PR speak for itself (I guess that’s why we got the adjective ‘simple’). But we didn’t set out to reflect ourselves; it just happened. The CR blurb says that we’ve been ‘pretty successful in conveying what Daryl and Ben are about’, but how do they know that? Unless the pseudonymous author of the piece knows us, they must have assumed, quite rightly, that our website was designed to be an extension of ourselves.

That might be worth bearing in mind when you design your own. As Michael Jackson nearly sang, it’s just another part of you.

(By the way, if you’re bored, why not check out a few Japanese Bug Fights.)

Last week’s poll asked whether the best ad of all time was either Guinness Surfer or something else, pitting my favourite ad against all the other ads ever made.

And it lost by 39 votes to 50. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting it to be that close, I mean all the other ads ever made in the history of the world?

Snowplough? Cog? Chuck Out Your Chintz?

But assuming the 50 votes were for a variety of ads, none of which got more than 39 votes, Surfer is the favourite ad of the readers of this blog.

Hooray.

Talking of hooray, I was sent a 90″ version of this year’s wacky ‘organ of fluffy creatures’ Coke ad. It’s better because the extra seconds are wonderfully daft, the new bits explain where all the dancing twats that marred the 60″ came from, and it’s 50% more of one of the best ads of the year.

Take it away, mad creatures:

When I speak to my advertising friends, not a day goes by without somebody complaining about how shit things are: worse briefs, worse clients, more process, more work for fewer ads, the general standard of ads heading down the toilet, more legals, tougher BACC (have you noticed how the BACC never gets laxer?), smaller budgets etc…

And the main backup to all of this is often a misty-eyed nostalgia for how things used to be.

We’ve all heard the stories: afternoons in the pub, all day with the racing channel on, no research, brilliant account men who sold your shit first time and got you an extra 50k to make it, limos round the block to take people ten yards up the road to a five-star lunch washed down with classed-growth claret. And, goddammit, the ads were better, too. Weren’t they?

I guess the question here is whether that is down to the aforementioned misty-eyed nostalgia, or were things actually better in every single way at some point in the past, and have just been getting worse ever since.

I’d say that it’s pretty difficult to compare the actual ads because context is everything. What may have been amazing in 1982 would seem pretty crap nowadays, but the ads were made for a different era and the best were probably great for their time. However, I think there are a lot of ads from at least ten years ago that would actually be better than today’s work (regular readers will know the ones I’m talking about, so I won’t stick them all up again, but suffice to say, we’d all love to have made Dunlop ‘Unexpected’, Volvo ‘Twister’, Blackcurrant Tango ‘St George’, VW ‘Protection’ and ‘Surprisingly Ordinary Prices’, half a dozen Levi’s ads including ‘Creek’ and ‘Drugstore’ and Blackstar Beer ‘Fake History’).

So I think that proves that the work was indeed better.

Which leaves the question of the day-to-day working conditions (by the way, this is obviously all relative; none of us is a janitor in a porn theatre or the guy at Scotland Yard who has to watch all the Gary Glitter vids. For more jobs that might make you put your own ‘shit day at work’ in perspective, have a look at this).

I can’t speak for anyone else in any other time frame, but in my experience (since 1996) the degree to which you enjoyed the days depended on a lot of things that weren’t era-specific. For example, when I left Y&R and started at AMV (1998), the days became far more enjoyable because the new agency had all the things a junior creative would love: one team per brief, ads got written one day and made the next, the CD suggesting Will Smith to front your campaign seemed entirely reasonable, the other teams were the best in the world, the bar was fun, brilliant accounts were flying through the door all the time, so were ‘Agency of the Year’ accolades, the best work in the world was coming out of the offices around you and people were really impressed when you told them where you worked.

Does that sound like where you work now? Any of you? In any agency in the world?

I’d be surprised.

Which leads me to believe there has been an overall drop in enjoyment as well as standards. Late-nineties AMV may have been one of the best places to work in the last twenty years, but other places, such as BBH, DDB (BMP) and Leagas Delaney of the same era weren’t far off. Maybe people are having just as much fun in all those places now, but like I said, I’d be surprised (I’m not saying the current employees are not enjoying themselves, but perhaps not as much as they would have done a decade ago).

So I guess that just leads me to conclude that things were better back in the day.

Is the encroaching malaise confined only to advertising, or is work in general becoming less fun across the board?

If so, can the old enjoyment still be found anywhere?

Another brilliantly written website to while away those hours when someone’s explaining why you need to do six ‘routes’ for a wanker in Slough, thus ruining a planned weekend of crystal meth and pornhub.

sexyexecs.

Enjoy.

x

Here’s the list of candidates for the D&AD Exec Committee:

Tim Ashton, Mark Denton, Gary Hoff, Billy Mawhinney, Tham Khai Meng.

Good to see Mark there. Presumably his remit will be to apply the same keen eye for improvement that he brought to the Creative Circle. Don’t forget to vote for him.

And I guess Gary is a slightly different kettle of ball games, being a digital chap, but I’m not 100% sure of the others.

I’m not saying that the committee needs to be a hotbed of the most thrusting young things in Adland, but it does surprise me somewhat that I couldn’t tell you anything about what the other three have been doing for the last ten years.

Of course, Tim and Billy are elder statesmen-types (Billy was on this committee in 1996) and there’s certainly a place for that, but it seems that no one who is currently producing great work decided that their vision for improving D&AD was worth standing for, if indeed they had such a vision.

On one side we could blame a kind of disaffected, disenfranchised, self-interested laziness amongst the top creatives of our day. On the other hand, we could blame D&AD, and what this once-illustrious organisation has belly-flopped into. (Also, on a practical note, I had no idea these elections were going on).

Let’s face it, the pencil now is blunt. D&AD is just another Cannes, commanding a modicum of extra affection because of how good it used to be and the fact that it’s our home tournament (apologies to my foreign readers).

I sincerely hope the current people in charge can stop the seemingly never-ending, please-everyone-at-once grasp for cash and get it back to the level of prestige it used to have.

That should be the one single aim of D&AD for the foreseeable future.

(Obviously, the only person with a proven track record in this department is Mark. Vote for Mark.)

I’ve just come across this fascinating website (thanks, W), which explains the daily routines of various writers, statesmen, filmmakers, musicians etc.

It’s quite reassuring to be told that most of them, even the geniuses, don’t find it easy.

Some get up early and work like bastards until 10 then take the rest of the day off. Others seem to drink a fair bit or fit things around their kids, or both.

But hey, whatever works for you.

The person whose daily lifestyle I envied most was Winston Churchill:

Despite all this activity Churchill’s daily routine changed little during these years. He awoke about 7:30 a.m. and remained in bed for a substantial breakfast and reading of mail and all the national newspapers. For the next couple of hours, still in bed, he worked, dictating to his secretaries.

At 11:00 a.m., he arose, bathed, and perhaps took a walk around the garden, and took a weak whisky and soda to his study.

At 1:00 p.m. he joined guests and family for a three-course lunch. Clementine drank claret, Winston champagne, preferably Pol Roger served at a specific temperature, port, brandy and cigars. When lunch ended, about 3:30 p.m. he returned to his study to work, or supervised work on his estate, or played cards or backgammon with Clementine.

At 5:00 p.m., after another weak whisky and soda, he went to bed for an hour and a half. He said this siesta, a habit gained in Cuba, allowed him to work 1 1/2 days in every 24 hours. At 6:30 p.m. he awoke, bathed again, and dressed for dinner at 8:00 p.m.

Dinner was the focal-point and highlight of Churchill’s day. Table talk, dominated by Churchill, was as important as the meal. Sometimes, depending on the company, drinks and cigars extended the event well past midnight. The guests retired, Churchill returned to his study for another hour or so of work.

I love the fact that he returned to work after a day of drinking Champagne, whisky, port and brandy.

And Hitler still couldn’t outsmart him.

Cool things, apparently: