I don’t know what I was doing a month ago, but I wasn’t reading Brand Republic.
That was when they broke the story of Lego re-running this ad:
It also featured in last week’s Campaign Private View.
The reason I’d have written about it, and the reason I’m writing about it now, is that I once suggested that companies should run their successful past ads if they are appropriate.
Come on. You have nothing to lose but the opportunity to bash your head against a brick wall trying to make something that turns out to be a big smelly turd that millions of people couldn’t care less about.
I was chatting to another creative recently and we both agreed that we’re no longer as thrilled by the idea of going on shoots as we used to be, even the supposedly glamorous ones in sunny foreign climes.
Of course, you have to do shoots, and it’s not as if they’re actively bad experiences, but I miss the wife and nipper and (whisper) the vast majority of a shoot is spent sitting beside a monitor trying to stave off the boredom by playing Kill, Shag or Marry and reading Heat, Now and Closer.
But I remember the early shoots, where you’d turn up on location to see battalions of HGVs and hundreds of crew in North Face jackets, and they’re only there because of what you wrote on a piece of paper a few weeks earlier. Good Lord, what a rush! And then the first foreign shoot! Turning left on the plane! Cracking open the minibar without worrying that a Snickers costs $4.50! Basking in the Cape Town sunshine in December! It was a time of warm wonder.
Then the law of diminishing marginal returns kicks in and you find yourself a decade in, looking at it as you do any other day at the office (slight exaggeration; shoots are definitely cooler than 99% of 99% of people’s days at work and much better than a day at the office).
But is there an element of having to take on the less flighty elements of the job as you go higher up the agency? The more senior you get, the more client contact you have, the more responsibility you’re given and the more pressure is sent your way. (Again, not a problem; just less fun than when things were a little looser at the bottom of the pyramid.)
And then this links back to the ageism of the industry. Maybe agencies don’t want oldsters, but maybe it’s also the other way round. Sure, the more senior creatives want the pay cheque, and the job is far better than almost all alternatives, but it’s pretty unlikely that it will be as fun on day 6000 as it is on day 600.
So maybe the key is keeping that youthful wonder alive against the odds. If you can stay curious, wide-eyed and Walk In Stupid (® Wieden and Kennedy) then you might have a longer career, my son. I mean grandad.
Bodybuilding must be a fascinating hotbed of ‘issues’, after all, why would anyone want to dedicate such an enormous amount of time to performing dull, repetitive exercises just so that they can look like a condom stuffed with walnuts? (that’s actually Clive James’s simile, although it does make you wonder why Clive stuffs condoms with walnuts).
Psychology aside, the world of bodybuilding does throw up an interesting comparison with advertising.
The ‘sport’ is actually divided into steroid and non-steroid (clean) competitions, i.e. those which allow performance enhancing drugs and those that do not.
And here’s the thing: no one gives a shit about the clean shows. Bodybuilding fans just want to see man at his biggest, veiniest and smallest-bollocked.
It does make sense. If we take a step back and acknowledge that there are millions of things that give people unfair advantages over others (nutrition, training facilities, available teaching etc.) why limit those benefits to the ones that some arbitrary moral code decides is reasonable? Let’s see the human race at its limits. After all, chemicals are simply a recombined mixture of that which is found in nature, so why are they so wrong?
Thanks for bearing with this so far; here’s the ad bit:
Ads are often considered to be scams if they aren’t created under the most difficult conditions possible (two posts ago a commenter dismissed the Museum of Childhood ads for being the result of an easy brief), or if they ran somewhere other than the centre pages of GQ, the ad break in Coronation Street or a poster site on the Cromwell Road.
Unfortunately for these nay-sayers, the ad awards clearly display their rules and the ads that run in parish newspapers, on Granada Men and Motors at 3am or on one street in Droitwich are usually equally valid.
Is that a bad thing? It depends. Do you want to see the best the industry can produce, or do you want to see only what the big brands run as big campaigns? How about the 120″ director’s cut of Balls or Mountain that ran once? The brilliant ‘viral’ that was simply posted on YouTube? The cleaner layout that only ran as an instore poster in the food section of a department store?
In an ideal world all these would be major parts of major campaigns, but if we don’t get to see them we miss out on the best the industry can produce. Under favourable conditions, admittedly, but it’s what helps smaller brands and newer agencies get noticed. They show you what the creators are capable of, and that includes getting the client to run the better version (I think we all know that ain’t as easy as it looks).
Sure, it’s not ideal and maybe it’s not fair in the strictest sense, but if it means we get ads that we can wave at our clients as examples of how good things can be, then it’s kind of like a murderer who invents a cure for cancer. Kind of.
The Epica awards have been announced.
The TV Grand Prix winner was a UK ad.
But which one was it?
Go on, have a guess.
10 points if you named this one:
OK, let’s get the cards on the table. First off, I know (and consider myself a friend of) Dylan and Feargal, who created this, so hats off to them for their fine achievement. Hats even further off for the million+ YouTube hits this ad has received.
But to be completely honest I’m a bit surprised. In the last few months I’ve twice asked the readers of this blog for suggestions for best British ad of the year. In over 50 responses nobody mentioned ‘Dog’ (weirdly, though, a friend emailed me the other day to tip it). Personally, I couldn’t wholeheartedly get behind it because I didn’t quite understand it. I enjoyed the singing dog (who wouldn’t?) but I didn’t get the fear/confidence thing. I just thought it was being quiet indoors because that’s what people are like: they sing in the car, then hum in the bank; otherwise they’d be arrested.
Fortunately, millions got it and the Epica jury loved it.
Will it be BTAA ad of the year? Well, it’s got hot form now, so why not?
On the subject of DDB London, they also won the press GP for Marmite, and this is the best poster I’ve seen in years:
For those of you who want the iplayer link.
I know it’s a cliche to say that people ought to have better things to do than complain about ads (Hello? The country is going to hell in a financial handcart, and if you don’t care about that, 3000 people are getting killed in the Congo every day) but the latest round of ASA rulings is a delight.
Yes, it does indeed link exports with the sex trade, but does it really disrespect Eastern culture? Look, if they didn’t have so many bloody ladyboys, we wouldn’t all think they had so many bloody ladyboys. And by the way, it’s a JOKE. As Robert Plant often said, ‘Does anyone remember laughter?’
Anyway that only got 8 complaints, so it’s a mere sideshow to the 94 complaints the ASA received that Stella misleadingly implied that they had used maize as a brewing agent since 1366.
Stella implied WHAT? Oh my good God! They didn’t, did they? Really? They implied that they’d been using maize as a brewing agent since 1366 when it wasn’t the case?
The absolute shitbags.
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I’m sorry to mention another Amnesty ad in my series of charity ads that I don’t think do the tin-rattlers justice, but it’s a cause that I feel very strongly about. Apart from a bloke who plays the penny whistle on the Metropolitan Line, the only deserving cause I give money to is Amnesty International. It’s kind of a selfish thing, really: they help people in the position I’d least like to find myself in.
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On the occasions that I’ve been given a brief that mentions ‘early adopters’, I always think of these people with some degree of envy.
They’re the kind of trendy bastards who know when and where to find the super-limited-edition, obscure-Japanese-artist-designed Nike trainers; they know where the secret gigs of the tiny bands are taking place a year before they blow up on MySpace, and they went on holiday to Iceland when I thought it was made entirely of ice.
In short, they don’t really exist, but they made me feel a little insecure.
But not any more.
It might be something to do with the splurge of the internet, but it doesn’t feel like anyone’s personal taste is better or worse than anyone else’s. The received wisdom is that the long-tail fragmentation of people’s interests and its validity has meant that the superiority and inferiority of individual opinion has all but dissipated. Hooray.
But that’s not all: recent stampedes in the direction of the Next Big Thing have not necessarily resulted in a great endorsement for getting in on the ground floor.
For example, the absolute, 100%, complete fucking NEED to do the digital thing has definitely cooled. I’m certainly not saying that digital is neither cool, big, or relevant (of course, it’s all those things); it’s just that it’s not the THING YOU MUST FUCKING DO RIGHT FUCKING NOW that it was said to be a year ago. Instead, it’s seeping in gently and relentlessly like the long-term thing it’s going to be, but you can hang back and watch where it’s heading for a little while yet.
Ditto (and somewhat related) is Second Life. Does anyone know if Leo Burnett or BBH’s agencies are still offering advertising in the virtual world where men pretend to be children so that they can be ‘abused’ by virtual adults? Did any of you buy Second Life real estate, cursing your luck at not being able to secure the prime beachfront location? How many T-shirts did you purchase with Second Life currency just so your avatar could look like a groovy prick?
And then there’s the mass exodus of cool agency life to the East End of London. The current residents are Mother, W&K and…and…I’d name a few digital shops but I can’t remember which ones are there. The East End is brilliant, stimulating and a breath of fresh air from the stagnant Central London locations of the rest of adland, but that still hasn’t tempted anyone else to make the move (Grey headed in that direction, but didn’t quite finish the journey).
So, the lesson here is go your own way. Or go the same way as everyone else. Or wait and see.
Just don’t bother adopting early. For every John Lennon, Leo Tolstoy and Malcolm X, there’s a…bunch of adoptees who have been, frankly, crap.
It’s good to see four-and-a-half minutes of well-written, well-observed, well-directed amusement advertising a department store:
Alas, though, it’s not quite funny or interesting enough to demand multiple viewings, but it’s certainly a noble attempt.