If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

65 years ago thousands of unbelievably brave men and women landed in France.

By common agreement, nothing brings what they did to life better than this:

I don’t know about you, but I’d have just wet my pants and hoped it all went away before I had to stand in front of a bullet.

Fortunately, those guys didn’t.

They went through something that makes all this prissy nonsense about the credit crunch look absolutely pathetic.

They really did their bit.

And now it’s your turn.

This summer, the surviving soldiers from Operation Overlord are going to return to France to commemorate D-Day, probably for the last time.

And we’re going to pay for that to happen.

The Overlord List details every one of those soldiers, and you have the privilege of being able to sponsor as many as you like for their return to those beaches. You can find someone from your area and raise the money to send him or her across.

Get together with friends and divide the cost. Organise a pool tournament and make the prize a sponsored veteran of the winner’s choice. Hold a 1940s Swing night, like the one I’ve just been to, and raffle what you can to help them.

Although The Independent are publicising this campaign, I found out about it through Trevor Beattie, who is really driving it. He told me that Richard Branson could easily find all the money himself, but that’s not the point. The point is that we owe these men everything and the chance to help them commemorate what they’ve done is something we should all be able to share, so that we can say thank you.

So check the website, sponsor a veteran and do something that is purely good.

This opportunity is a rare and beautiful thing.

Apparently, there were only four golds. How tight is that? Here are the other three:

Maybe the other winners are here. Maybe not.

UPDATE: Silver(s) for VW Everyday, BBC Penguins, Binge Drinking Boy, Barnados, VW Dog.

Mother was agency of the Year, Rattling Stick was Production Company of the Year.

No Silver or Gold for HSBC Lumberjack, VW Fight, Shelter House of Cards.

And all for a good cause.

UPDATE: John Allison, one of the ad’s creators says that Captain Birdseye kept mistaking him for a 118 runner. He also says; ‘It was all done for free, Steve Bendelack of Little Britain, League of Gentlemen and Royle Family shot it for us and we spent months getting the brands to agree to do it.’

I’ll just add that Mr Bendelack is also responsible for Mr. Bean, so he’s…er…got range.

And all for a good cause.

This observation comes from Mr M. D. Esq, but it’s a darn good one, so I thought I’d give it a wider audience.

Certain ads from certain agencies are given a kinder shake of the whip than certain other ads form certain other agencies.

No need to mention specific examples here, but I think we can all come up with a few instances where the agency name or client logo can give an ad a big lift or kill it dead.

Actually, sod it; here’s an example:

That Toshiba spot was well received, but I’ll bet it would have been far better received if it had been done by BBH or Fallon than by its actual agency, Grey. There’s an inbuilt quality check that makes you think that if Nick Gill or Richard Flintham thought it was worth putting out, then it must be good.

The comparison Mr M. D. Esq made was with clothes. Like an ad, the quality of a shirt is a matter of individual taste, and therefore debate. Some ads and shirts are more obviously better than others, but if you have the Paul Smith/Prada/Alexander McQueen label tucked away inside, you can feel much more confident that your piece of cloth is better than the next man’s.

However, we all know that those clothes labels (and, more often, Gucci, Versace and Dolce and Gabbana) are capable of occasional poo, as is every agency in the world, even the very best.

I guess this permeates every art form. Is it a Dylan track? A Scorsese movie? An Amis novel? Not a guarantee of genius, but close enough to act as a kind of force field against criticism.

And no, it’s not fair, but those good shops seem to have earned the right to the benefit of the doubt because of a legacy of quality.

And if Grey produce 10 years of brilliant work, they’ll have earned it, too.

Here’s the new Comcast ad, directed by Smith and Foulkes:

There are others along the same lines, but seen one, pretty much seen them all. That’s not to say they’re crap; I actually rather like them. I think they’d stand out in ad breaks and temporal lobes and they’ve got some lovely little touches (although they remind me of the excellent Nationwide Ads that MIke Stephenson shot for Leagas Delaney about ten years ago. I can’t find them on YT, but they had little songs about customers set to live action stop-frame animation).

I guess they’ll appeal most to the kind of people who lapped up Juno last year. The music is all along its appealingly amateurish lines, epitomised by the lovely work of Kimya Dawson:

Also, it gives me an excuse to put up the other excellent recent Comcast ads (sorry about the shitty music and intro at the beginning).

There are lots of guides of this kind on YT, but here’s a charming one (thanks, A):

These all got a good laugh on Monday night:

I was having a chat with a couple of creatives this afternoon.

One said that ads might soon get very interesting because of the oncoming recession. It’s been said a few times, but the lack of budgets might force us all to think more laterally to make the most of the limited resources we have.

The other said that the rise of new media, as evidenced in this week’s news that the heart is being ripped out of commercial TV, will be the real catalyst for a positive change in the way companies communicate with the public.

I said that they were both wrong: it would be the tipping point of value-added communication that would have the most ameliorating effect. We will no longer be able to chuck stuff out there without it being inherently interesting, or it will be mercilessly ignored.

Then a thought occurred: perhaps it will be a perfect-storm confluence of all of the above.

Perhaps we are about to enter the greatest era of advertising the world has ever known.

There will be a gigantic collision of communication and entertainment that will make Playstation Mountain look like Cilit Bang. We will simply not be allowed to do anything substandard because it will be like waving a flag in space. Russell Davies’s prediction that adspend will be 100% production and 0% media will come gloriously true. The agencies that think they can get along with anonymous dross will go under in the time it takes a beam of light to pass across an atom. Our industry will no longer be a by-word for morally bankrupt hucksterism. Instead it will become a beacon for all that is good and warm and right – even the stuff that is depraved and caustic and foetid. For it shall all make us sit up, learn and be changed.

Interesting times are just ahead, but don’t forget to steer in their direction.

Like this does (thanks D2):

I intended to put up the other ad from Monday night that really impressed me, but it seems to have been removed or ringfenced from all the usual interweb sources, such as this one. No idea why. Maybe it’s not supposed to be exposed yet, but then I found some people discussing it, so it can’t be that. Oh, hang on…it might have something to do with the prominent inclusion of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, who are a pair of naughty little boys.

Good luck finding it. It was one of several really good ads from RKCR/Y&R. These also won Gold:

(And while looking for the above, I found a great blog called twoifbysee. Coincidentally, it also had the Gold-winning Museum of Childhood ads.)

So, on with the frivolous shite:

Most of you (40%) got the right answer to last week’s poll/question. The ablative singular of puella is puella. The 60% of you who got it wrong have either too much confidence but too little ability in Latin, you haven’t heard of Google, or you simply didn’t give the matter the time and attention it deserved.

There’s now a new question that is just as inconsequential, and you can’t look it up on Google.

And if you’d like to waste a bit more time and irritate those who work near you, try this. (Thanks, D.)

Finally, I just saw this on TV:

It made me laugh hysterically. I am a very bad person.

But in my defence, it is very 1970’s and seems to go about its business in a pretty clodhopping fashion, failing to do a serious subject justice.