If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Here’s the government’s new, 90 second anti-obesity ad.

It’s part of a £275m campaign to stop the nation’s kids turning into a bunch of lardy bastards.

“Change4Life has a critical ambition. We are trying to create a lifestyle revolution on a huge scale, something which no government has attempted before,” said public health minister Dawn Primarolo.

“We have adopted ideas from successful movements such as Make Poverty History and Comic Relief. We want families to engage with the campaign and understand that obesity is not someone else’s problem.”

Problem (with the ad at least): it doesn’t seem to be telling anyone anything new in a compelling way.

It seems to me that they’ve decided to adopt the tone of a 3-year-old’s TV show to impart some crushing yet obvious information: ” …which meant they’d be more likely to get horrid things like heart disease, diabetes and cancer…their lives might be cut short. And that’s terrible, because we love the little blighters.”

Indeed, cancer is a pretty ‘horrid thing’. And thanks for explaining why the premature death of our children might be a bad thing: because we love them.

The country isn’t really this thick, is it? Do we really have to tell people that cancer’s bad and we love our kids? And if not, surely this isn’t the best way to persuade people the change their behaviour.

On top of that, we can add the fact that the government thinks this is the best way to spend £275m of our money.

As an ex-porker (I weighed 15 stone when I was 15), I’d like to make a small alternative suggestion that might at least persuade the teenage section of the target market to drop a few pounds: point out the effect that being fat has on your chances with the opposite (or same) sex. That thought alone got me to drop 5 1/2 stone in 6 months.

I’m sure it’s un-PC to point out that most people find fatties physically unpleasant, but it’s true, it’s motivating and it could make for some thought-provoking ads.

I’m envisaging a 96-sheet of a dribbly pair of pasty man-boobs with the line: ‘If your tits are bigger than hers, you’ve got no chance’.

Something like that, anyway.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I set last week’s poll, but it certainly wasn’t such an overwhelming antipathy towards the 20th letter of the alphabet.

More than half of voters decided that they would rather do without T than the other choices: E, S and A.

Enlightening? Hmmm…

Well, a new poll starts today, so if you wouldn’t mind contributing, I think we can bring elucidation to another dark corner of the universe.

Every year William Hill elbows its way onto page three of The Sun with its annual list of strange bets. For example, it might give odds of 500-1 on Alex Ferguson marrying Cheryl Cole, or 30-1 on Florence and the Machine winning the Eurovision Song Contest.

Well, this year they’ve extended its remit to the world of advertising*:

Evens: Hiring freeze at all agencies not currently in the midst of a hiring freeze.
3-1 Hovis best ad at BTAAs.
2-1: People whinge about Hovis getting best ad at BTAAs.
8-1 New Cadbury’s ad feted as saviour of industry despite trying to portray an evening on Amyl Nitrate as a ‘glass and a half of joy’.
10-1 Creatives marginalised to the point of being asked to clean the agency loos with their tongues.
11-10: uses of the phrase ‘client mandate’ to top 100000 by February.
6-1 ‘Dear Jeremy’ letters are exclusively about avoiding home repossessions.
50-1: New Carling execution features one of the happy-go-lucky chaps going down for sexual assault of a minor. His mates’ decision to stick with him rings somewhat hollow this time.
20-1: ‘Left by mutual consent without a job to go to’ becomes the most popular euphemism for ‘sacked’.
80-1: UK finally produces groundbreaking piece of digital advertising.
3-1: YouTube is the point of origin for the best ad of the year.
150-1: Skoda and Fallon misjudge the mood of the nation by making a car out of aborted foetuses as an allegory for all the substandard models that didn’t happen.
75-1: Credit Crunch leads several agency arse-lickers to try to steer Noel Bussey towards the set lunch menu.
150-1: Noel takes the hint.
8-1: The general lack of cash is mentioned all the bloody time but the actual situation ends up not being anywhere near as bad as anyone expected, but then China starts WW3 over the number of used nappies we’ve been accidentally sending them for recycling and we all end the year hiding from a nuclear winter down the Bakerloo Line.

*Not true.

Whopper Freakout was one of the best ads/multimedia whatchacallits this year. Here’s the version with swearing and references to being a junkie:

Now and again the advertising ‘community’ wrings its hands over the paucity of racial minorities that work within it. Then we go back to our lattes and wring our hands over the lack of women or homosexuals or, more likely, most of us couldn’t care less.

I posted about this on the ‘other’ blog about a year ago and DHM’s blog has mentioned it recently, but I think I might have found a subconscious reason why:

There aren’t many racial minorities in our ads, at least not in the good ads that might make you want to get into advertising. Chack out the UK nominees at D&AD this year:

Skoda Cake? Zero. Here Come The Girls? Two quick shots in 100 seconds. Carling Space/Out has a black guy but he’s not given a line in 60 seconds of Space (in fact you can barely tell he’s black) but he’s upgraded to a line in Out. Time Theft? Zero. Dangerous Liaisons? Zero. In Orange ‘belonging’ the star has about 50 friends, one of whom (barely featured) is black. Brylcreem Effortless? None.

Interestingly, the main character in the best ad of last year is black, but then Americans seem to have either a much more enlightened attitude to featuring racial minorities or a legal paranoia about positive discrimination. I remember a few years back where every ‘youth’ ad in the US had to have a young black guy who was often the cool counterpoint to a white idiot. Hey! Reverse racism! (Or something)

I’m not for a second suggesting that this is all about racism, but there may be some reasons for this that come from somewhere other than a desire to burn crosses on lawns:

1. Pan-Euro ads. Aside from the fact that most of Europe is caucasian, the vast majority of the spenders in Europe are definitely so. Add to that the very real racism of countries like Italy and Spain and you have territories where the inclusion of racial minorities is very unlikely to happen. And now that more and more of the UK’s ads are for other markets, this is only going to increase.

2. The Scandinavian influence (I say Scandinavian because they have made the biggest impact on UK advertising over the last ten years, but the same could be said of other nations). There aren’t as many racial minorities in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, so for those directors and creatives, it’s unlikely that the the first person they think of casting for a commercial will be a racial minority, and the absence of such may not even occur to them.

3. A few years ago I went to see Miuccia Prada give a talk. One of the audience asked her why she didn’t feature black girls in her catwalk shows. She replied that her shows represented her visions and dreams, and if those didn’t feature black people then nor would the shows. She didn’t think it was her responsibility to dishonestly represent her ‘art’ to tokenly include racial minorities. I guess there may also be an element of that in advertising. Should we have a black person in an ad just because there are a lot in the country?

4. Racism. I worked on a telecoms account (not BT) a while back and we suggested having a black guy as one of the characters in our animated commercial. I can’t remember why we wanted to do that, but it was probably to differentiate his vignette from the several others we featured. Anyway, we didn’t see it as a problem. We then got an email back from the client that said we were being ‘controversial enough’ by using animation and that we didn’t want to ‘fan any flames’ by featuring a black character. It was written with the kind of illiteracy one might expect from an unhinged BNP member and left us, in the year 2000, quite shocked, particularly as the account guy was a racial minority.

There are some interesting exceptions: Halifax has given us black, asian and fat as a house, as if they’re trying to cast anyone but a good-looking white guy, and of course, many of Nike and Adidas’s finest spots have featured black people, but it’s not many. Check out the Hovis ad: one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it view of a black guy from behind followed by a quick shot of an asian couple.

Is this the reason few black people want to get into advertising? Maybe. Or is it the case, as I mentioned on the DHM post, that black people don’t actually like the overall image of advertising as an industry and don’t find the idea of joining a hotbed of white, middle class smugness very appealing?

Thanks to L for this festive clip:

and here’s my favourite Christmas song:

I may post over the next two weeks, but I hope to be too drunk to work a keyboard.

Happy Christmas.

xxx

This delightful festive message was brought to you by (among others) Mark Denton of Coy! Communications.

Interesting place, Coy. Slightly different (in a good way) to your average production company.

For example, they have an in-house typographer, the great Andy Dymock, who works on Coy! and Mark Denton Design jobs, but is also available for commissions, should you require the skills of a highly awarded type guru.

They also have photographers, a photographic studio and a frankly rather lovely bunch of production peeps who make it all go by whilst literally singing Morning Has Broken, if the opportunity presents itself.

As a fine example of their output, they’ve spent the last few weeks producing the Creative Circle Plea For Entries. If you receive one you might like to take a second or two to appreciate that they are all hand-made and have required many hours use of a typographer, a scalpel, thousands of rolls of Sellotape and duct tape, millions of paperclips and hundreds of miles of string. And that’s the kind of attention to detail you simply do not find these days (see yesterday’s post). Mark estimated the cost of each one at a frankly eye-watering number of pounds, but nothing’s too pricey as long as it’s right.

So here’s to you, one of the few bastions of extended creativity. In the interest of puns, I might suggest that you could also be mad about the Coy! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ahahahhahahahhahahh!!!11!111 Oh dear.

Merry Christmas.

By the way, what do you call a Welsh bloke with the runs?

Dai O’Rhea.

When I was a nipper, the route to success in the creative side of advertising was clear: win awards.

There were occasional anomalies, such as Jaspar Shelbourne, CD of JWT, who didn’t appear to have won much at all, but everywhere else the creative credentials of those in charge were impeccable.

However, over the last few years, something seems to have changed. Of course, most of those in the top jobs are highly awarded, but it doesn’t seem to matter quite so much any more. Now you need to get on with the chief of a network or holding company who might not give a toss whether your pencil count is one or seven, or whether your awards were won last year or ten years ago.

I once went to a talk about how CHI started. Johnny Hornby said that he and Simon Clemmow chose Charles Inge by leafing through the last few D&ADs and choosing the person whose work featured the most (I’m sure it was slightly more scientific then that; they probably had a pint with him too). Somehow, I can’t see that happening today.

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, there are no longer lots of famous teams as there were when I started. It almost seems as if something is happening to squash the potential stardom of creatives, to prevent them growing too powerful. This might be because their inclination to kick up a fuss is in inverse proportion to their suitability for the top jobs. Perhaps those who are choosing would rather have a slightly less good CD/ECD who won’t scare the horses, than a thrower of pot plants through windows who will show horses Dawn of the Dead and The Omen on a regular basis.

Then, in turn, slightly less good creatives get chosen to populate the departments. The non-horse-scaring ECDs aren’t going to be keen on hiring horse-scarers, so the process filters through. Of course, propensity to kick up a fuss doesn’t correlate exactly with creative ability, but if those rows that push ads to be 8% better disappear, then so do the ads that are 8% better.

So is this the revenge of the suits? Are some of them turning CDs/ECDs into puppets that will step into line rather than risk losing an account to lah-di-dah creative standards? Is this a coincidence, or is the economic climate making creative indulgence seem like too much of a…well…an indulgence?

On one side that makes complete pragmatic financial sense.

On the other, it’s so depressing it kind of makes you want to scrape your eyeballs out with a rusty nail.

I was reading the Guardian a few weeks ago when I came across this article.

It’s all about a phenomenon called Clubland, which tours the UK but rarely ventures south of Birmingham.

Here’s an example of its content that is interesting for two reasons:

First off, it’s so awful it makes me want to lean my face into a hedge trimmer.

Second, it’s had 3.3million YT hits, so we can probably double that in total.

I’m assuming you agree with my assessment, after all you probably like Bon Iver, Television on the Radio and MGMT. But 6-7 million people seem to think its great. Before I read the Guardian article, I hadn’t even heard of any of this shit, but it’s out there, making me feel like I’m swimming above the Mariana Trench while zillions of creatures go about their business unbeknownst to me, and I to them.

So how many of these huge, unknown movements are there? What else is of interest to a tenth of the population that we don’t know about? And how do we find out?

I guess it’s all down to visiting places you’ve never been before, and not just for the sole purpose of finding something to stick in your next ad. Because for every one of these, there’s one of these:
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