If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

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.

I’ve had this idea that could be vaguely useful.

I could follow it through, but as it’s unlikely to make me rich, famous or fulfilled, I thought I’d just put it out there and see if anyone’s interested:

With the greater degree of churn in ad agencies (people are getting laid off; the freelance market is growing) I think it might be handy to provide a cut-out-and-keep (or whatever the digital version of that is) guide for people who are joining agencies temporarily and would like to get up to speed with the essential info before they arrive.

If I could be bothered, I’d email friends at agencies and ask them to answer the following questions:

Agency local:
Nickname for agency local that if you fail to use you will seem like a bit of a twat:
Nearest EAT and Pret:
Nearest newsagent:
Name of creative secretary/PA:
Does the ECD have a sense of humour:
What time does he arrive/leave:
Where should I park bike:
Chances of it getting nicked:
Does the agency have a bar:
Does anyone use it, or will ordering a drink there make you seem like a bit of a twat:
Does anyone over 25 use the pool table:
Nearest cashpoint:
Any people that will try to befriend you like the billy-no-mates latching onto the newbies at school:
What are the loos like (can you hear the person straining in the next trap?):
What daily papers are available:
Is Campaign accessible on Thursday morning or will I have to beg for a dog-eared copy on Monday::
Buses and tubes that go nearby:
Hangover caff (bacon sarnie and tea for under £2):
Library of D&ADs:
In case I get in the lift with one of them and make an off-colour joke about Jordan, what do the agency upper management look like:

Any other questions, or anonymous answers that illuminate your agency can be left in the comments, as can sarcastic and withering mots amusants about whether or not there’s any point to the above.

The other day one of Scamp’s commenters put a link up to Arthurkade.com

Initially my interest was merely a bored foray into what might or might not be an entertaining website.

Now I am fascinated.

Is it possible to be this much of a douchebag?

Surely not.

But he’s a real guy whose life seems to match his douchey web profile.

So what gives?

(By the way, don’t visit his website without a taking a look at the Kade Scale – it’ll make you want to gnaw your fist to a bloody stump.)

I think the problem might have been that there is only one famous ‘Brains’, so they couldn’t really do that visual pun again.

Instead we have an ad that seems completely hatstand for less discernible reasons.

If you add this one to Coke and Rubberduckzilla, the whole industry appears to have gone stark, staring batshit.

UPDATE: Oh, I get it now…’On top of your game’…pheasant is a kind of game…I’m a bit thick…

It’s like the client cut the budget, leaving the agency tea-lady to go through a stock footage website, except she’s got bad ADD and just woke up from the coma she entered in 1996.

It’s like Mickey Mouse breathed life into a mood board from Latvia’s equivalent of JJB sports then ate it and threw it up.

It’s like a blind dog covered itself in superglue and ran through the cutting room floor of a shitty Nike ad.

But worse that all that.

It’s fucking boring.

I don’t know what you think of when you think of Blackpool, but for me it conjures up images of corpulent, bearded men hanging around penny arcades and chip shops attempting to ensnare runaways into a web of greasy-handed depravity. That, or menopausal trouts on their third hen night starting fights that would make even the beefiest inebriated southerner run screaming in fear for the next train to Euston.

But hang on, I seem to have got it wrong. It’s actually a hot-bed of continental mystique and sophistication.

Helen France (apparently her real name. How odd), director of tourism for Blackpool Council, said: “Often when we get French visitors – they like to do London, Stratford and Edinburgh and often drop off at a seaside town on the way, and we hope that this will encourage them to come to Blackpool.”

Well, Helen, mission well and truly accomplished. You’ve made it seem like the kind of life-affirming, step-springing delight that I can’t do without for another second.

Either that or a shithole that’s run by a bunch of bovine fuckwits who think French people are as thick as they are.

One or the other.

Here.

Congrats to Mike and Paul and the DDB creative dept.

My personal print Gold goes to this website. (Thanks, L).

The creative world is divided in many ways: asymmetric haircut/normal haircut; skinny jeans/bootcut jeans; steal ideas from Magma /steal ideas from YouTube etc.

But the one that dare not speak its name is keeping a scrapbook of useable idea snippets versus tapping the side of your head and saying ‘it’s all up there’.

I write as one who does the latter, partly because I’m not quite organised enough to keep a scrapbook and partly because I trust the ebb and flow of my brain, allied to whatever I’m experiencing at the moment.

However, I know of many others who keep several years of orderly clippings, random photos and yellowing newspaper articles in those blue hardback books, just waiting for the moment when their usefulness will spring into life.

But there doesn’t seem to be any consensus on which is better.

When I was at college, we were visited by Jim Bolton and Chas Bayfield of Blackcurrant Tango fame. At that stage, they had yet to make that particular work of genius, but they did show us a page of their portfolio that was just a series of little thoughts that might come in useful in future. One such thought was ‘a naked fat man running down a hill is funny’. I don’t know if that’s exactly where Blackcurrant Tango came from, but the relationship is close.

Then again, I once read an interview with John Hegarty where he explained that he didn’t think it was a good idea to keep scrapbooks because your brain then relied on those notes and didn’t work as hard to connect things in the generation of ideas.

I also recall the advice of a novelist who said that it was ridiculous to note your favourite little lines and metaphors for future use because you’d end up forcing them into situations where they didn’t really belong, and besides, you’d have to constantly look through your notes hoping for the right bon mot to make itself known just when you needed it.

Then again, I suppose there are other versions of the scrapbook, such as keeping fffound and Deputy Dog bookmarked for those times when your brain refuses to work. And the walls of my office have often been home to fading Post-Its that say ‘Beadle’s hand/Magimix’ or ‘Tit age vs real age’.

But I’m open to suggestions of technique improvement: do you have any unusual filing systems that you rely on to lead you to the promised land?

It is.

Lovely details (the pack of worms in the fridge), great post, original idea on a done-to-death brief…

What’s not to like?

And if you haven’t clicked on the Deputy Dog link to the right for a while, this is amazing.