An acquaintance of mine found a list of the winners at the beginning of the evening.
Tp Prove this, I can now, at 10.25, having walked home, tell you that the only TV craft winner was Coca-Cola ‘It’s Mine’ for Special Effects.
I’ll post that now.
And here’s the making of:
I like it because they seem to have squeezed a lot out of a tiny budget.
Hats off.
I was on David Reviews the other day and he was suggesting that the Heinz ad that’s on there is one of the best of the year.
Which got me thinking…
There was a lot of speculation at the end of last year about whether the recession would produce work that was worse or better than before.
I’d say it’s exactly the same.
There’s a few very good ads:
(Although the similarity between this and the Geico campaign does reduce its brilliance somewhat)
And a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t seem to spring to mind just at the moment. Oh, hang on the J2O stuff is good, as was the Thinkbox ad. Cadbury’s Eyebrows seems to have been launched last year…The HSBC Rugby idents…
Anything else?
Actually, maybe it’s better than last year (so far). Not that such an achievement would be anything to write home about.
To me, the visuals are like some Hunter S. Thompson peyote-induced nightmare and the sound is from another ad entirely.
Batshit fucking crazy.
Batshit fucking crazy.
A few years ago I started to write the agency blog at Lunar BBDO.
Not sure why. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.
I didn’t read or even know about any other blogs written by creatives, but a friend told me about Scamp, which turned out to be written by a bloke I’d met a few times over the previous years.
I got in touch with him and he couldn’t have been friendlier or more helpful.
Anyway, in the following years his blog seemed to go through the roof (you might find it interesting to check out his posts from the earlier days and the responses they received. Something definitely happened to make it reach a tipping point), eventually resembling a giant medieval church hall where people threw mead over each other’s heads as they rowed over the origins of some Fallon blockbuster, or called for supposed YouTube thieves to be drowned on the ducking stool.
Axes were ground, people pretended to be other people as they complimented their own work, there was swearing, bitching and personal attacks by the bucket load.
In short it was a lot of fun and made the sometimes lumbering industry we work in take on a sprightlier step, providing instant reaction to the good and bad ads that were significant enough to spark a conversation.
Then there was a bit of trouble. Expecting advertising creatives to behave with maturity or police themselves is an exercise in futility, but even after Simon had to switch to comment moderation it was still essential reading.
I just wanted to say thanks for making me up my game. The races we had to be first to the new Guinness or Sony ad made a few slack mornings go by a little faster (although there was no real point in hurrying; 90% of the chat would happen on his blog whether I won or not). And knowing there was (before the days of Dave Trott’s brilliant blog) another person barking up a very similar tree made the experience easier and more enjoyable.
Ta very much, Simon.
Now I can relax.
I watched that excrement and thought, ‘Bloody hell, I’ve gone back to 1976 and someone’s replaced one of the world’s most respected creative organisations with the sixth form of a school for the educationally subnormal and lobotomised.’
Alas, I was wrong.
Shame its topicality is now somewhat questionable.
Also a shame they’ve had to pull it over sensitivity issues.
They’re still brilliant illustrations, though.
First it was mission statements, now it’s company ‘philosophies’.
I guess the relevant definition of the word in this case is, ‘Any personal belief about how to live or how to deal with a situation’.
So it’s a corporate statement of intent.
Sounds innocent enough, but how and when did all this start, and how did the world cope so well without them for thousands of years?
The first one I recall was some load of guff about providing decent fast food that was stuck up in the window of every Pret about ten years ago (interestingly, it now seems to have disappeared), but now every company on earth feels as if they must explain themselves in terms of what they do and why.
Here are two from wildly different ad agencies. See if you can guess who says that…
We develop Creative Business Ideas. A Creative Business Idea combines strategy and creativity in new ways to transform the nature of a business. Creative Business Ideas arise from, and influence business strategy, not just communications strategy, and result in innovation, breakthrough solutions, and industry firsts – maximizing the relationship between consumers and brands. Creative Business Ideas generate profitable growth for our clients’ brands and business by injecting creativity at the heart of their business, enabling the development of new revenue streams, the expansion of brand franchises, the penetration of new distribution channels, and the creation of new and engaging connections with consumers.
And who says that…
The strongest brands represent a meaningful emotional relationship – they have fans not consumers. The most powerful brands are leaders, not followers – they reinvent themselves as fast, often faster, than their consumers. The most effective brands are provocative – they change people’s minds, they disrupt the market place, they change the consumer culture. And we’ve seen that brands like these deliver real business value.
I don’t know about you, but having read that, I’m none the wiser (by the way, the first was Euros, the second was W&K).
Recent posts on Sell! Sell! about an agency that tried to entice a client by telling them that they ‘ignited conversations’, and on Chronic Fatigue about the strange need to start or join the conversation, have made me wonder…
Is this happening because someone started it and now no one feels complete without one (I actually saw a potential placement team recently and even they had a ‘philosophy’ on their website)?
Or do companies really feel that they are expressing themselves in a way that is beneficial to them and potential employees/clients?
God knows.
I’ll admit we had one at Lunar, but at least it contained the sentence ‘we’d never claim to have anything as questionable as a philosophy’ and suggested one of the reasons people might be reading that page could be boredom.
Stay with it till the end.
Director: Peter Candeland of Passion Pictures.
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