If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Make the Cold War Kids your bitches.

(Thanks, Paul.)

I was hoping there was a Wings version that allowed you to isolate Linda McCartney’s singing.

Oh, there is (sort of):

Can you spot the common thread between the following:

And this.

Full marks if you spotted that they’re all ads produced by Saatchi and Saatchi London in the last year or so.

Even fuller marks if you noticed that they’ve all been shot with the kind of cheap, everyman production values that you’d find in the average YouTube clip.

And that’s a good thing.

We’ve all been watching plenty of YT for years, so its visual language is something that really ought to have been harnessed before now. Despite the fact that its whole ‘thing’ is all about being genuine and home-made, the above ads have managed to borrow that vibe without any kind of ‘giant corporations stick their nose in where it’s not wanted’ backlash.

In fact, the opposite has been true: there’s no need to explain to what extent T-Mobile has been a hit, but everyone loves that Carlsberg ad, and what’s not to like about the NDS promo?

What I don’t understand is why there’s really only one agency in town that’s successfully doing this for its brands. Usually the ad industry is the first to rush headlong towards the next successful craze, yet there seems to be very little stand-out work that is YouTube-esque.

In America, the best practitioners of this strand are Cutwater, whose Ray-Ban virals won a Pencil last year:

And, of course, the daddy of them all from Droga 5:

So if it works, why aren’t more people doing it?

Gordon Comstock’s written a CR article about the creative’s uniform.

He makes a fine point that overdesigned T-shirts, baseball caps and Converse are all very well, but the older you get, the less appropriate and more craven the wearer looks.

Perhaps this contributes to the ageism that happens in creative departments: in an attempt to look younger, the mutton-as-lamb factor can have the opposite effect.

Mr Comstock also laments the fact the we can’t dress in suits a la Mad Men because then we’d become ‘suits’. My experience of this chimes with his suggestion: in 2002, for reasons that are too boring to go into, I acquired several decent suits and shirts. As an admirer of the 1930s, when the working uniform for all men, even those who threw peanuts around at Yankee Stadium, seemed to include a suit and matching trilby, I decided to wear my new threads to the office. After two weeks of enquiries as to whether I had an interview/funeral that day, I just couldn’t be arsed anymore. Even my ECD found humour in the fact that I was wearing a tie.

Having said that, one of my creative colleagues at the time wore a tweed 3-piece suit and polished brogues every day to a total of zero batted eyelids. I’d guess that because he was slightly older and he’d never worn anything else, he didn’t get any ‘amusing’ comments, despite the fact that his behaviour was as childish (if not more so) than anyone else’s.

There could be an element of mirroring body language, where people who meet, and need to suck up to, clients (ie, ‘suits’) dress in the same way they do (ie, suits). Creatives don’t usually have to do this, in fact their creativity is often expressed and appreciated through their ‘creative’ dress sense, and perhaps creatives think they are asserting some kind of authority of their own by not having to bow to the man by wearing his stuffed shirt straitjacket.

Many creatives also like to think of themselves to some degree as artists and artists (post-1980 or so, Gilbert and George excepted) do not wear suits. Of course, ad creatives are not artists, and the attempt to pretend to be so may further undermine our credibility.

It might also be worth bearing in mind the maxim that you should dress for the job you want to have, not the job you do. This might help explain why suits become MDs and Chairpersons, while creatives (and planners, who dip their toes in the same sartorial waters) are either not interested in those positions or realise that the chances of being appointed to them are are minimal. But it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy: David Abbott wore a suit and was AMV’s chairman. No creative suit-wearers since, no creative chairmen since.

Anyway, I think it’s interesting to ask what came first: acting in a less respectable way or being treated with less respect?

Today’s Sun contained an ad that might have been art directed by Arden in his prime, written by Bob Levenson when his muse was sitting upon his knee and conceptually created by, I dunno, Bob Barrie and Luke Sullivan? Neil Godfrey and Tony Brignull? Charles Saatchi and Jeremy Sinclair?

Behold:

And don’t just feast your eyes on the avant-garde layout, drink of the glorious copy, too:

“Now, after months of wrangling over the strength of the scenes, Xcalibur is finally to be made available in the UK…Shot in Maxmacolour, both the filming and the post-production have been meticulous.”

And let’s not forget the sign-off: “But what mainstream movie will give you great acting, great sets and action PLUS lashings of explicit, unadulterated, Triple-X action.”

That sentence doesn’t even need a question mark because it’s such an obviously rhetorical question, Mr Sun Reader. For the answer is Xcalibur, The Lords of Sin.

Imagine if you were just twiddling your thumbs when in came the following brief:

Product: Xcalibur, The Lords of Sin on DVD.
Target market: Masturbatory Sun Readers.
Tone of voice: Epically erotic.
Mandatories: 35 calls to questionable action and a coupon for money off the product in a porn shop.
Media: full page national press.

It’s a very strange job but somebody has to do it.

Apparently, you can have an orgasm even if you are dead.

Would you like a T-shirt that features the stirring image of three wolves howling at the moon?

Well, step right up.

But hang on.

The reviewers seem to require the surgical removal of their tongues from their cheeks:

I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the ‘guns’), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

I ordered next-day air (if only there was same day!), and, of course, a size smaller than usual to ensure the closeness of the wolves to my chest hair. When the package arrived, I tore it open, and I SWEAR angels sang. I think it was Freebird. I immediately removed my “No Fat Chicks” shirt, and replaced it with this finery. Lemme tell you: AW YEAH.

The thing is, they’re generally funny and really well-written.

Nice collective joke, amusing, talented American piss-takers.

Stealourideas.com does exactly what you might expect (ie: provide ideas for you to ‘steal’).

You can even send them specific briefs to work on.

There’s some nice stuff on the site already, so feel free either to take them up on their kind offer or employ them (I assume that’s what they’re really after).

In other news, can someone explain this ad for me?

Did Lebron James get caught with loads of coke or something?

And has Kobe gone really dull after his sexual assault charge?

When I was at Watford, we learned that in creating advertising, the single most important thing was to have an ‘idea’.

An ad could be cut down in seconds with the phrase, ‘Yeah, but what’s the idea?’

For the three of you who don’t know, an ‘idea’ is the conceptual framework an ad campaign is based on, eg: ‘Mobile phones that go off in cinemas ruin movies, so let’s show how an Orange mobile phone can ruin movies in other ways’. Or ‘Guinness takes a long time to pour, but good things come to those who wait.’ They could even be as simplistic as ‘The Economist makes you rich and successful.’ The ads are then written as reflections of this ‘idea’.

But what about ads where it is simply a piece of copy that is beautifully art directed?

The ads can still be brilliant, but are they able to fit within the ‘idea’ framework that is so revered?

(I got bored looking for a big Barnardos ad. If anyone’s got one, send it over and I’ll stick it up.)

And if not, do ‘ideas’ matter?

Well, in the two press ads there are ‘ideas’ at work. They may not be the easy-to-reduce-to-a-sentence conceptual overviews of other campaigns, but they have ideas about tonality and expression that run through the work like a stick of rock. They don’t explicitly say ‘Barnardos won’t give up on troublesome kids’ or ‘The Big Issue provides an answer to the awful reality of life on the streets’ (those are more descriptions of the charities than their advertising campaigns), but they do say it implicitly.

The fact is, with ads like this, the reader has to engage a little further to get the message out, but by then they’ll have a deeper relationship with what you’re trying to say.

And the ideas do have size and scale. Barnardos followed the above with this campaign:

And the year after the above Big Issue campaign happened, they made a TV ad which won a D&AD pencil.

In the end, great campaigns can have explicit ideas or do without them. It’s just that nobody really thought to mention that when I was at college and it’s rarely mentioned now.

Well, the second one, obviously.