If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Full list of Golds here.

Last night was the Creative Circle awards.

It was a really good do, full of truly beautiful people and some quite excellent ads, especially when you consider that 2008 was supposed to have been a crap year for creativity.

The big winner on the night was the Wallace and Gromit Press/Poster campaign for Harvey Nichols (6 Golds and the Platinum award – when did that last go to a 2-D campaign?):

That should see it also succeed at D&AD…except, I’m a little concerned. When St Wayne failed to win at D&AD, I pointed out that we’d be unlikely to award a poster of Alex Hleb painted in the Belarussian flag, so why should we expect the foreign members of the D&AD jury to award the English equivalent? Will the same happen with W&G? One hopes not, but imagine an ad for the new Goan Branch of India’s best department store, featuring Suki…

…in Alexander McQueen. Worth a pencil? If it’s as well art-directed as Wallace and Gromit, why not? But I think we all know it wouldn’t stand a chance.

The other big winner was Dave Trott, who entered the Hall of Heroes. They played a selection of his and his agency’s greatest work and it all looked like it could run and win awards today, despite some of it being nearly 30 years old. Dave writes such a good blog that you sometimes forget what an amazing ad-man he is. This was a fine reminder:

There were also some brilliant ads that I hadn’t seen on the big screen before, most of them done for TV channels:

And this one (embedding disabled by request. Thanks, Channel 4).

A lovely bit of writing from Joe and Sam at Fallon:

But this one (Gold for special effects) was my favourite:

Overall, another excellent night overseen by Mr M. Denton Esq. and the brilliant team at Creative Circle. Mark won two Golds himself, by the way, and a greater testament to bribery and corruption you could not hope to witness (just kidding).

Thanks to all involved, now it’s over to Trevor Beattie for next year.

UPDATE: I can’t remember them all, but Hovis was best TV/Cinema, Barnados best Charity and Editing, Dothetest was best Viral, the Carlsberg announcement and Honda Live ad were best Ambient, Museum of Childhood got best illustration and art direction, Creative Circle Call for Entries also got best Art Direction and an illustration from the CC annual got best illustration, that Kubrick ad was best Production Design, HSBC Lumberjack was best Direction, VW everyday was best Sound Design. That’s all I can recall. If anyone remembers any others before they put the full list up, add them in the comments. x

About ten years ago I had a chat with a copywriter who is now an ECD. As we drained our pints, he made the heretical assertion that Mary Wear was a better writer than David Abbott. His argument went that Mary created a completely different voice for each of her clients, while David tended to write in his own voice for whichever client was blessed with his copy.

I don’t think I need to point out that both were/are extremely good and successful at what they did/do, so either way could work well. But that’s just on the level of single creatives; what about agencies and the wisdom of having a house style?

Even if most shops would suggest that they find an individual tone for each of their clients, that may only be true within the parameters of a consistent approach that is broad enough to accommodate different voices.

For example:
DDB generally coveys its communications with a slightly irreverent intelligence, and has done so brilliantly for decades.
BBH has always existed on the ‘cooler’ and more visual side of things (Sir John is a famous believer in the minimalism of copy, although the recent Barnados print ads have provided an admirable exception)
Delaney Lund has had a reputation for marrying their clients to a musical solution.
There’s something about WCRS that seems very likeable, almost persuading you without you realising.
Mother: for years, nothing but funny. Now: funny with an occasional bit of ‘cool’.
Wiedens don’t seem to take anything on unless they can do it ‘well’. The definition of ‘well’ is is obviously subjective, but they never just chuck things out.

Etc.

I’m sure you can find common threads in many of the agencies, and that’s understandable: after all, clients come to agencies because they want their kind of work. If you want Mother, you don’t go to Publicis, and vice versa. Generally, the same group of people will be imposing their unique personalities on the work, so it’s unlikely they’ll be able to lurch from gently intellectual to bat-shit crazy without it seeming odd.

So there may have been a very good reason why David’s voice didn’t change hugely from client to client: many of those clients existed within a middle class, deeply British, fabric-of-society area that could take a similarity of approach. And it’s pretty difficult to argue that Sainsbury’s, BT, RSPCA and Yellow Pages were harmed by that similarity. If anything, it may have provided a benefit, as each brand bolstered the others as the kind of companies you could like and trust.

So, your style or theirs? Looks like ‘yours, but within it, theirs’ works pretty well.

Here’s a small doc about Bill Shannon:

Here’s RJD2’s promo for Work It Out:

And here’s the new Visa Ad:An anonymous commenter on the next post down has pointed out the provenance of the ad with the sentence ‘plagiarism reaches a new low’.

I wish I could arsed to get into the whole stealing/borrowing/inspiration debate AGAIN, but I can’t.

You have all the brilliant geniuses who say ‘lesser artists borrow; great artists steal’ (Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, Sir Thomas Beecham and others.) and then God, who says ‘thou shalt not steal’.

But the thing here is that Saatchis have used Bill Shannon. They haven’t ripped him off. They’ve said we like what you’ve done in your many YouTube clips and thought it might work for Visa. Here, have some money and come to Buenos Aires for a few days.

Just as Tom and Walt liked that picture with the horses on the waves and Ben and Matt liked Der Lauf Der Dinge. But this is morally ‘better’ than those because the original guy got paid and will now be even more famous.

I take my hat off to those who produce true originality (if such a thing is possible), but we can’t, as an entire industry, say that what we do must never, ever have been done before in any form. Visa did exactly what these ads did. I don’t remember any uproar at the time.

Oh no. I have got into the bloody debate again.

Bollocks to it all. We’re never going to agree.

Nice ad. And why does he get such cool crutches? When I broke my leg (both times) I got those crappy grey ones from the NHS.

Is it me, or does it look like the interviewer dies at some point during the first question? I’ve never seen anyone sit so still.

And for those of you with more than two minutes to kill, here’s nearly an hour of David Ogilvy:

UPDATE: Leo Burnett comes across a lot like David Abbott (meant as a huge compliment to both):

So, most of you want to be a man trapped in a woman’s body.

I’d guess that’s because most of you are men and you thought you might go to a lesbian bar and imbibe from the furry cup, or go to the gym changing rooms and just…hang out.

That’s fine.

The headmash of what life would really be like as a human transformed into a chaffinch which is then trapped in an otter’s body appealed to some of you, and who can argue with that?

Then a few of you went for the option of ‘handbag trapped in lightbulb’s body’. I don’t think you were taking the poll seriously.

But the one thing I’ve learned from this is that more people participate in the poll if the question is not frivolous.

With that in mind, why not have a go at this week’s conundrum?

The embed seems a bit sticky, but persevere, or wait till Simon puts it up ;-).

I like the track, but I’m not 100% sure I understand the ad.

It’s supposed to be advertising the smoothest picture ever, but aren’t Zoetropes a bit flickery? Do they get less flickery when they’re enormous?

And I appreciate the use of Kaka, the world-famous, ironically-named footballer of the year, but could we have been given something slightly more interesting to watch? He’s dribbling against himself on a white background.

Well, whatever I think, it’s going to be the topic of the week, so feel free to leave your trenchant analyses in the comments.

There’s an article in this week’s Sunday Times that discusses the pros and cons of appropriate celebrity endorsement. Apparently, brands are ‘much cleverer’ now, with their incredibly much cleverer choices of Duffy to hawk Diet Coke and the Ting Tings to flog Adidas.

Well done to them.

But then I saw this in my local betting shop (wonderfully, it’s called ‘Better Betting Shop’ and sits adjacent to the Odeon Camden Town).

For those not familiar with the man in the picture, that’s Paul Merson, the former Arsenal and England midlfielder who was addicted to gambling to such an extent that he effectively became homeless.

This seems so unbelievably arse-brained that I struggle to think of something comparable. Amy Winehouse flogging WKD? Mickey Mouse recommending Rentokil? Actually, no need to wait for something similarly ridiculous, because Joan Rivers thinks that she can be an authority on plastic surgery, despite having a face that looks like a Hallowe’en mask of Joan Rivers.

This is what celebs should really do with their time.