If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

I’ve finally got round to having a proper read of the Campaign Annual 2008

As usual it seems to be broadly accurate but with several entries of slightly questionable merit that might have hinged more on the hospitality provided by the companies in question than the quality of their advertising.

Three lunches for Journalist X? Three spots higher on the top photographer’s chart.

Four hour lunch for Journailst Y? Four ads in the top ten regional print list.

There obviously a fair bit of room for interpretation, and this year that was most visible in the list of top directors:

Number 2, Danny Kleinman: ‘This year’s output is just as prestigious as last, with big budget numbers on Specsavers and Orange…’ Eh? Last year Danny did the brilliant Smirnoff ‘Sea’, PG Tips ‘The Return’, and ‘Neon Girl’. I have no idea what this Specsavers ad is, but it wasn’t in Campaign’s top ten TV ads, and Orange was, um, not in that list either. As long as Danny’s working he’ll always be one of the top directors but that paragraph was just a smidge too bullshitty for comfort.

Number 6, Noam Murro: he may be the sixth best director, but Campaign still has to mention that his Orange ‘I Am’ ad was ‘one of his less impressive efforts’. And VW Dog is ‘easily one of the top ten ads of the year’. Agreed, so why does it squeak into the list at number 10?

Number 7, Nicolai Fugslig: the seventh best director of UK ads in the world has been ‘a little less busy in the UK’ this year. So much so that we can only name Ford ‘Blank Canvas’ to his credit. And it was crap. Congratulations to the hospitality team at MJZ.

Number 9, Shane Meadows: an odd choice of position. One ‘pay the bills’ ad for Asda’s back to school kids range and a slightly odd campaign for acting on CO2 are apparently the results of demand of ‘epic proportions’ and justifies his number 9 ranking. I’d have put him in the top three for Somers Town alone.

I know it’s not been a vintage year, but what about (my friend) Jeff Labbe? Barnados campaign (Campaign’s number 4 ad of the year), Levi’s ‘Secrets and Lies’, BBC HD ‘Antiques Roadshow’ and the VW ‘Driving Test’ ad. And I’d have given a nod to Guy Ritchie for ‘Take It To The Next Level’, the closest to a dead cert for a 2009 pencil that I can think of.

Dear Campaign, you don’t have to do a list of the ten best directors if there aren’t ten who had a good year. Do a list of something else. An obvious gap was scandals: CHI’s salaries email, the dothetest theft row, the Ipint theft row, the Cannes bullshit entries and then six others that involved media companies or planners or some other things that might have annoyed some people who took you to lunch.

Hang on, who am I kidding? We’re not exactly talking about the NY Times. A few trips to the Wolsley for a place on one of these somewhat arbitrary lists?

Job done, apparently.

One Sunday back when I was at school The Untouchables was on TV.

I had seen it several times, I had it on video and yet for some reason I still watched it.

When I went into school the next day, I asked my friend, who also had it on video, if he had seen it. He had, so we chatted about the best scenes and agreed that it still held up really well.

Then I said how odd it was that although we could both watch this movie anytime we felt like it, we ignored it, yet when it happened to be on TV we gave it another go. We didn’t really consider it consciously but whether it was the fact that we knew we were watching it at the same time as millions of others, or that the immovability of a TV schedule meant that we couldn’t just pause it to make a cup of tea, thus making it closer in experience to watching it in a cinema, or that we preferred to have someone else decide how we spent our Sunday evening, there was some way that the lack of choice beat the ostensibly superior option of being able to choose.

I guess this happened again on Saturday night when I felt strangely drawn to the final of X Factor. (That Irish kid who looked like a teddy bear and sang like someone emptying the bins nipped the feeling in the bud pretty quickly.) I hadn’t watched the series up until then and had little idea what was going on, but it felt like one of those occasions where the whole country was doing something at the same time, however educationally subnormal it might be.

But hang on.

Doesn’t this fly in the face of the Tivo, BitTorrent, Sky Plus, Long Tail world where we can all have exactly what we want, exactly when we want it?

On the surface, having all entertainment at your personal beck and call sounds fantastic. In fact, where’s the downside? This is what the entire rise and spread of individuality, fueled mainly by the internet, has grown from. We want things on our terms and now, finally, for the first time in history, we can have just that (nearly).

But.

Isn’t there still something to be said for the communal experience? That’s part of the reason why millions of us will go to movies, theatre, gigs and stand-up comedy: the collective occurrence where you can look around and see that you are part of something bigger than your own personal tastes. No man is an island and all that, and sometimes you want a reminder that you’re not as unique as you might think.

So where does that leave the future of the media experience?

It’s all heading one way, with not so much expanding into the other direction. Yes, there’s social networking and flashmobbing, but the appeal of those is provided by the participants rather than the medium.

Perhaps that’s where the next gap in the market, or even in the joy of human existence, will be filled.

Well, well, well.

It seems that the majority of you have eaten 1-100 crumpets.

Maybe there are some who have never had one of the delicious hole-ridden comestibles.

Look, there’s still time. All I’d say is the bog standard ones are often better than Taste The Difference or Finest or whatever. They hold the density of jam or Marmite in a more complete way.

And to the person who’s claims to have ploughed through more than 10,000: you’re either very old or a man/woman after my own heart (to be eaten on a crumpet, of course).

‘Nothing had changed in the mix except the advertising. In the right hands it is a commercial weapon of enormous power. It will remain so. Indeed, I believe it will become even more important to clients. As media opportunities expand and audiences fragment only outstanding work will stand out. The good agencies will be at a premium.’

It wouldn’t be any fun if I copied that out of some article Brand Republic posted yesterday, so why not kill a few seconds and guess who said it and when?

Full marks to the absolutely none of you (except maybe Daryl) who said ‘David Abbott, AMV annual report, 1989’.

So he got the fragmentation of media thing spot-on at a time when Batman had us queuing round the block and Ride On Time was the soundtrack to a million really shitty dance moves. (By the way, does anyone else mentally sum up the eighties with an image of a black guy in cheap braces and a cycle cap with the peak flipped up dancing in a really Uncle Tom-ish, grinny way to The Only Way Is Up by Yazz? Nope? Just me then.)

But even though David Mystic Megged himself a cracker with that one, the rest of the prediction leaves me somewhat perturbed.

Are the good agencies really at a premium?

Aside from what they charge (that really varies from client to client), the gap between the good and the bad agencies and the work they produce has shrunk.

Here’s Grey:

And McCann’s:

To ram the point home, I’d now embed a couple of examples of crummy work done by good agencies but it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Think of a good shop and it should take you about another nanosecond to think of an ad they’ve created that won’t be troubling the jurors of the BTAA.

So we’re through the looking glass here, people. Black is white and white is black.

Is any agency capable of producing really good work? And if every agency is capable of good or shit work under certain circumstances, what really distinguishes one from another? And, therefore, which ones deserve to charge a premium? And with the coming economic constrictions, will any of them be able to?

It almost feels as if any client can now cast a few pennies to the floor and watch in mordant satisfaction as half a dozen shops scrabble around in front of them, selling any dignity they had for the opportunity to bend over like a cheap streetwalker on pay day.

Or have I had one too many G&Ts?

I’m sure I’m right in saying that Anca, the mysterious Transylvanian UK ad blog stalker, fascinates us all.

She seems to have heard and memorised every piece of music ever written, she has incredible views of forests out of her window, her high school didn’t really mind if she played her guitar instead of learning about Pythagoras and she has limitless time to visit the blogs of (among others) me, Dave Trott and Scamp.

Anyway, she kindly sent me this link today and I have to admit I found it amusing.

Dell was my favourite. Elegant, simple and witty.

Yes, her posts may be too long and a little rough around the edges, but I assume English is not her first language (and I’d love to see your attempts at comments in Romanian/Magyar etc.) and she seems engaged, interested and, yes, a touch barking, but in a nice way.

But we’re English, so we apparently have to regard her with a bit of a sneer, whether she deserves it or not.

Oh well.

Well, here’s an odd little ad:

Will it make people think Mother are as wacky as they were around 2001/2?

Will it make people say, ‘Well at least it’s different. You’ve got to get under the radar with this target market. The usual ‘drugs are bad’ shit ain’t gonna play with Johnny Q. Crackhead’?

Will it make people talk about it?

Possibly.

Will it make anyone, and I mean one single person, take less/fewer drugs than they would have if this ad did not exist?

Absolutely not.

In fact, for all the good this ad is going to do, they might as well have spent the money on a giant daffodil in Shoeburyness that says ‘bananas climb fandango treehouse crimplene pacino’.

And if my tax dollars paid for it, I’d like them back.

While Mr Brooker’s schtick consists mainly of shooting fish in a barrel with swear words and creative similes, it seems he can also provide a fine and helpful insight into the process of writing.

In this episode he interviewed several of the UK’s best TV writers, such as Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong of Peep Show, Tony Jordan of Life On Mars, Graham Linehan of Father Ted, Paul Abbott of Shameless and Russell T. Davies of Doctor Who (which is shit, by the way).

They discussed how they work and what it takes to produce great scripts.

Much of the advice differed, but they all seemed to agree on one thing: as Ernest Hemingway said, the first draft of anything is shit (although Graham Linehan confusingly compared his first drafts to toilet paper. Maybe you can wipe Hemingway’s up with Linehan’s), but the consensus was that the first draft is where the real work begins.

And there’s no reason why it should be any different in advertising.

Or, for that matter, blogs. If any of you are insane enough to re-read what I write, you’ll see that I’m insane enough to do the same, changing sticky sentences or imperfect adjectives as I go, even after I know 99% of the people who read what I write have already done so.

Nothing’s perfect (except maybe the opening sentence of A Tale Of Two Cities), so there’s always room for improvement.

Shrinking that room as much as possible is always a good use of time.

This post is really just an excuse to tell my favourite story about famous people:

Back in the thirties Carole Lombard was going out with Clark Gable.

One day, Carole signed up to do a movie and went to go and meet the producer to discuss her schedule.

He told her that he expected her to shoot on various days of the week, all of which Carole agreed to.

Then he mentioned that she’d also have to work on Sunday morning.

“Oh no,” replied Carole. “I’m not working on Sunday mornings. That’s the only time Clark and I have to fuck.”

Isn’t that priceless? I thought sex was invented in the sixties. I certainly didn’t think Carole Lombard used the F-word. And Sunday morning? How, um…bohemian.

Anyway, in a spurious attempt to make this related to advertising, I thought it might be interesting to blather on about excuses.

In a process that involves so many people, its really easy to blame any part of that process for its failure: The account team didn’t sell it; the client didn’t buy it; we didn’t get the right editor; we couldn’t afford the right track; I was ill during the grade so they made it purple; the media guys bought a 20″ when they should have bought a 40″; we’d have won those awards if we’d been given that brief; we only got three days to work on it.

All may be true; all may be reasonable grounds for complaint.

Unfortunately, they don’t print those in D&AD annuals.

Excuses don’t count.

They won’t help you get to anywhere good.

Want proof? Carole died with no Oscars (but possibly an enormous grin on her face).

Check the Comic Store Guy spoofing 1984.

(Thanks, L)

Here’s the link.

I think it’s a fine, fine list. No arguments at all.

Except…

The Snoop Dogg Orange ad?

I’m sorry, but those ads stopped being funny a long time ago.

Here’s how to write one:

Find out who your semi-washed-up, cash-hungry star is.

Choose what you think is their best known film (in Angelica Huston’s case, reduce an amazing career down to The Addams Family).

Get Lenny Beige and the cut-price Kevin Spacey guy to reject their script and be rude to them with reference to this movie, then suggest script amendments that involves crass inclusion of Orange product.

Star takes umbrage and walks out.

Get cut-price Kevin to deliver a variation on the most famous line of the most famous movie over the end title.

Having said that, I did like the line in the new Dennis Hopper one where cut-price Kevin says that ‘America smells of bus’.

And also having said that, I thought the earlier ones (Vader, Swayze, Roy Schneider, Spike Lee, Carrie Fisher etc.) were genius. It just all started to go wrong with Steven Seagal:

Compare that to the superb writing and timing of this one:

I blame the defection of Yann and Luke (although I think they did Seagal).

And sorry, but I forgot to add just a couple examples that knock any Orange cinema ad into a cocked hat:

‘Shoulda been you, yo.”

“No doubt, boo, no doubt.”