If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

(Thanks, A.)

It’s turning into a gritty couple of days here at ITIABTWC, but hey, that’s life on the mean streets of Adland:

By the way, today is the last day to cast your vote for the Exec Committee of D&AD, so if you haven’t voted and you’d like good people to do good things that will improve that organisation, email emily@danadad.co.uk

(In case you’re wondering who to vote for, why not try Mark Denton? Apart from having added Zing! and Pow!, he sorted the Creative Circle out and made it properly good again. Perhaps he can do the same for D&AD. Here’s hoping.)

Have a nice weekend

x

On the second of July I decided to rattle on about the new Pimm’s ad.

The post itself was the usual load of ill-thought out crapola, but in the comments section of the post, a guy called Dan decided to take me to task thusly:

I’m not sure if I’d buy anything you say about tv ads anymore.
You pissed all over that Stella campaign for the last year.
It picked up 3 golds at Cannes.

Someone is getting out of touch and it’s certainly not them.

I replied that I hadn’t even seen the ads in question and was therefore innocent of his accusations.

But now I’ve finally got round to watching the bloody things and can give Dan my genuine, honest verdict, leaving him at liberty to take further issue with my taste in ads.

Well…I can say in all in sincerity, they suck big fat elephant balls covered in crusty monkey poo.

I could only manage this one:

I wanted to turn it off after 1:42 but in the interests of journalistic integrity I thought I’d better sit through the whole thing.

Shit on toast, mes amis, shit very much on toast. I’ve never been so bored (incidentally, I just walked out of Bruno after ten minutes. Not on the grounds of taste; simply on the grounds of humour, or lack thereof), but it was the sheer oh-so-pleased-with-itself self-indulgence that made me want to corkscrew my eyeballs out and send them to Mother in a jiffy bag. It’s meaningless twaddle and if that’s what Cannes wants to bestow its much-coveted Gold award on, fuck Cannes right in the ear.

Moving on, I love what the Craigen fans did to this week’s poll. It’s sad, but I’m vaguely touched that enough of you cared to play such a delightful prank on my blog.

In case any of you aren’t regular readers, Droga looked like he had it sewn up 75-25 until yesterday when a giant last minute Craigen vote sent it over the edge to give him a win of 57% to 42%. I guess that’s the kind of affection and loyalty you can only get after years of brilliant ads coursing through your agency and a similar amount of time being, by all accounts, a really top bloke (I have had the pleasure of meeting him a few times and found him to be fine company on each occasion).

There will be a bottle of booze and a trophy on its way to JC eventually. I happen to know he’s a big fan of White Lightning, but only the 2008 vintage, which has heady top notes of meths and urine with a really lengthy finish of hobo ball sweat.

As a continuation of the Dominic Savage post below, this is the kind of thing he could do brilliantly. Fortunately, someone has already done it brilliantly.

There are some good directors out there who will gladly apply their talents to your scripts in exchange for money.

There’s not a lot of point in talking about all the obvious ones, but I thought it might be worth giving a mention to one who’s not quite as well known.

Dominic Savage (reel here at QI films; interest declared – Stephen who runs QI is a friend of mine) rarely features in advertising award books because his day job is directing highly acclaimed and award-winning TV dramas (including Tuesday night’s Freefall). However, he’s available for ads and I’d say he’s worth a look because he’s better than anyone I know at presenting chunks of modern, everyday Britain realistically.

He often uses improvised dialogue, but also writes his own scripts, which means he understands why some dialogue works but some doesn’t (quite a handy skill if you’re doing a script with dialogue).

It might be worth saying that he came to my attention about five years ago when he did an ad for one of the country’s biggest clients. It was a very realistic slice of life that featured the product as the catalyst for a reconciliation after an argument. It was so realistic that the client refused to air it. I thought this was a great shame. This industry spends an awful lot of its time talking down to people as it attempts to hoodwink them into buying a pair of shoes or a chocolate bar. Heaven forbid anyone was grown-up enough to show a chunk of unvarnished life that simply reflected us back to ourselves and made us think.

Anyhoo, check out this sample of his movie Love and Hate and you’ll see what he’s really capable of:

I think you’ll find this works in a metaphorical sense, too:

(Thanks, S.)

When I was a nipper, there were only a few job titles in the creative department of your average UK ad agency.

You had the Creative Director at the top, then maybe a Deputy Creative Director, then the rest of the department, which could use the prefixes ‘senior’, ‘middleweight’ and ‘junior’, but were really just copywriters and art directors.

Larger agencies would have Group Heads, who were kind of like deputy CDs, but that was about it.

Over the last 5-10 years, this has changed.

For some reason, the top job is now Executive Creative Director, and the title of Creative Director is now used to describe anyone from the former Deputy CD to the Group Head to anyone who has responsibility for an account (‘Yeah, well I’m the Creative Director on Marmaduke Dog Food, actually.’)

I think this has happened for a number of reasons:

When I was at AMV around 1999, Tony Cox joined the department. He had been CD of BMP/DDB for many years with a great deal of success, so he couldn’t really come in as anything other than CD. But Peter Souter was the CD and it would have been a bit confusing to have two CDs when one was above the other (Peter hired Tony). Thus, Peter became the ECD, while Tony was the CD.

Fine.

Except (and this is where my facts turn into conjecture) I’ll bet that across town, there were CDs who saw this happen and wondered why they weren’t ECDs. I’ll also bet that upper management of those agencies were only too happy to bestow this prestigious title upon the mere CD because it got them out of giving a raise and it meant that they could boast to clients of having an honest-to-God ECD. Not a mere bogstandard CD, you understand; an E fucking CD.

And the disease spread from there. Over the course of a few years, the normal job title for the person who runs the creative dept of an ad agency has become ECD. This has freed up the CD title for the former Deputy CD or Group Head. So now any agency yet to adopt this system has a CD whose title denotes something less significant in another agency.

It’s also interesting to see what that word executive means. As an adjective (which the E in ECD is), it just means something that is to do with execution or implementation. So an ECD is a CD who is involved with carrying things out. Great. And let’s not forget that an Account Executive is the lowest rung on that ladder, almost certainly because that job carries the proper meaning of the word, which is being responsible for implementation (ie making tea and photocopying).

As a further oddness, I also know of some agencies who can’t actually bring themselves to allow the CD title to be bandied about so freely and have come up with some other titles for the group heads/individual account CDs, such as Creative Supervisors. Truly pathetic. I can only suppose that the people who do this still hold the CD title in the esteem it used to have, even though they have supposedly moved beyond that. It’s like a particularly arsebrained dog in a manger.

So where will this end?

That’s an easy one. Just look across the pond to see the Creative Vice Presidents, Creative Chairmen, Chief Creative Officers, Senior Creative Vice Presidents and all the other daft bullshit that fails to do what a job title, any title in fact, needs to do: tell you what it denotes.

The Evian Viral:

I find it less creepy and more appealing than its roller-skating big brother. It has a charming lo-fi accessibility and the post is unfuckwithable.

According to page 40 of today’s Independent, David Abbott is due to release his debut novel in the very near future.

Oddly, I’ve been told this by several different people in recent weeks, so my breath is fully bated.

No one seems to know what it’s about, but if it isn’t a cross between Jackie Collins and Dean R. Koontz, I’m going to be thoroughly disappointed.

Here’s an interview about it from 2002.

(Thanks for the tip, S.)

Now you can read it too.

In the past you’d expect an article with that headline to detail the evacuation of Frank Lowe, John Hegarty and at least one Saatchi amongst a phalanx of Adland’s overspending 5-star grub-munchers.

Now what do we have?

Just two people.

One of whom I have never heard of, and another who did a few Levi’s ads back in the early nineties.

No so much Adland as a small island off Adland; the Guernsey of Adland, if you will.

But none of that is anywhere near as sad as Campaign featuring it on their website.

Or me regurgitating it for your timewasting delectation.