If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

The other day I was reading an article about the longevity of stardom. It asserted that stardom can only last for three years, after which stars can remain famous, but only as a kind of reminder of what people liked their three years of stardom.

I mentioned this to my wife, and we then considered various stars and the degree to which they reinvented themselves at the three-year mark: George Michael with three years of Wham, three years of Faith, three years of Listen Without Prejudice, then a kind of retirement; Bowie with three years of Ziggy/Aladdin Sane/Diamond Dogs, three years of Berlin, three years of Let’s Dance, then another kind of retirement; Eddie Murphy with three years of tyro parts like Beverly Hills Cop and 48 Hrs, three years of superstardom (Coming to America etc.), then an enforced sabbatical imposed by making shitty films no on wanted to see, and a late-career return with three years of dressing up in fat suits.

My wife went on to say that she’d read an article that said Baby Boomers tended to stay in their jobs for twelve years, while Gen X-ers were six years, Millennials were maybe three years, and Gen Z were looking like one-and-a-half.

I assume this reduction has something to do with the grotesqueries of late-stage capitalism, as it increasingly robs us of stability and security, the better to enrich the already copiously enriched. But that aside, our attachment to jobs, and by extension, corporations, is worth examining.

When I worked at AMV BBDO I remember having a chat with Mary Wear, who told me that she and her then-partner had a policy of staying at each job no longer than three years. She then split up with her partner, who may have have then pursued his own three-year stints at Mother and Lowe before founding his own agency. Mary, however, stayed at AMV for a good few years, but with different art directors, perhaps each partnering her for something like the magical three years. So it wasn’t necessarily the agency that dictated the length of cycle. Sometimes it was the art director. 

I look back at my own career in this context and see quite a few three-year chunks: an art director, another art director, an agency I co-founded, a period of freelancing, ECDing Media Arts Lab in London, doing something similar but larger in LA, starting another agency etc.

It makes me wonder if there was some kind of natural progression to that time frame. Unlike Mary, I wasn’t conscious of making moves at the thousand-day mark, but perhaps there was a kind of corporate circadian rhythm that made me feel as if it were time to move on. Some of those changes were not by my choice, but is it possible that I was subconsciously sabotaging my circumstances, readying myself for the chrysalis and attendant reinvention?

Going back to the article my wife read, are we all leaning towards shorter stints at each place, or do we keep the timelength with which we started? There could be an arc to any situation, one that we adhere to without realising: a beginning, a middle and an end, with each new act feeling appropriate at a certain time. ‘Here comes year three. Time to start packing my parachute and putting out feelers for another position. Or to look for a new copywriter who can refresh me…’

It’s also possible that people get tired of people after a certain amount of time, and we collectively conspire to move on and be moved on. Or at least the excitement of the new is bound to fade over that time: just look at Madonna’s 3-year cycles, often starting with something provocative (the lyrics of Like a Virgin, the video for Like A Prayer, the Sex book) that echoed to faintness before she found another way to ‘shock’ us. 

Does going over the allotted time simply lead to a kind of disappointment or failure? Do you have a different timeframe that dictates your career? Do you try to jump before you’re pushed?

I need more data. I’ll add a question to wherever I end up posting this, but do feel free to comment with your own experiences…

Come on! Let’s just get it out there: older people are icky and lame. They are often covered in a layer of dust. They need help going to the loo (which is why so many smell of wee). They have no idea what Zoom, Twitter or Charli D’Amelio are. They talk about things that happened in the last century. They look at you funny when you insist on creating an 80-page deck to convince a fifth-rate director to take on your 6-second blipvert. They don’t know how to create DAOs, and they think crypto is a pyramid scheme for the terminally credulous.

But on the other side, look at the kidz: their faces are buried in their TikTok feeds instead of an old One Show annual. They have no idea how to craft anything, or what ‘craft’ is. They think ‘Create The Future Together’ is a great endline, or maybe a great strategy, or possibly a great campaign idea. They spend more time comping visuals than thinking about why they’re comping those visuals in the first place, and they think that a Cannes Bronze is actually something of value.

In short, both are making advertising worse. One is too expensive while the other is too ignorant. One is too stuck in their ways while the other flits from fad to fad. One thinks everything was better in the 1990s while the other has no idea what happened in the 1990s.

But other than the people who are 30-35, everyone is too young or too old, so maybe we should try a bit harder to make the best of both worlds rather than condemn the worst.

As luck would have it, I just read an article that might help us with that. Although the title is ‘The kind of smarts you don’t find in young people,’ it’s really an explanation of how the brains of younger and older people have separate specific abilities, both of which are essential to the creative process:

In the mid-20th century, psychologists set about finding an explanation for a great mystery. Researchers had long noted that some skills—analysis and innovation, for example—tend to rise quickly very early in life and then fall through one’s 30s and 40s. Meanwhile, one’s knack for combining complex ideas, understanding what they mean, and relating them to others rises throughout middle age and can stay high well into old age.

The two groups of skills originate in two basic types of intelligence: fluid and crystallized. The first is essentially the ability to solve abstract problems; the second represents a person’s knowledge gained during a lifetime of learning. In other words, as a young adult, you can solve problems quickly; as you get older, you know which problems are worth solving. Crystallized intelligence can be the difference between an enterprise with no memory that makes lots of rookie errors and one that has deep experience—even if the company is brand new.

In a neophiliac industry like advertising, new stuff is always highly prized. From Second Life to NFTs to the latest bands, influencers and pop-ups, adland always likes to jump in first and ask questions later. Is it right to recommend the latest fashion to a client? Sometimes, but many agencies feel compelled to do that without considering or waiting for the consequences; after all, by the time you’ve done your due diligence, your new thing is longer new.

But older people are more predisposed to seeing the patterns that point to the mid- and longer-term futures of what is currently untried and untested. Sure, it’s not as whiz-bang to move slow and fix things as it is to move fast and break them, but older people have seen the fashions come and go, so they tend to have a better idea of how your current circumstances might play out in the weeks or years to come.

The point is, as a general rule, using the old to optimise the implementation of the new makes a lot of sense. Yes, that might seem like clipping the wings of the crazier ideas, but it also might mean that strategic or creative rigor is applied, leaving less chance for errors or problems further down the line. As that article says:

Companies would do well to install master teachers throughout their business. Don’t target people who pine for the “old days” in their careers and abilities. Instead, look for elders who recognize that it is healthy and normal to see some of their capabilities decline with age, and that this presents an opportunity to foster those abilities in others. Older leaders should be enthusiastic about making great teams, developing others’ ideas, sharing knowledge openly and generously, and making prudent judgments based on their own deep experience.

Obviously, doing this requires hiring or retaining more older people, and I’m fully aware that such a practice is heresy for many agencies. Even though St Luke’s recently took on my friend Mark Denton as the Oldest Intern In Advertising for a month’s placement, that was still unusual enough to be worthy of lots of ‘How’s That Ker-Azy Idea Going To Work Out???’ articles, while further agencies giving it a go seem to be thin on the ground.

But oddly enough, it’s one of the closest things I’ve seen to the ‘master teacher’ suggestion in that article. Mark’s conclusion, ably assisted by another elder statesperson, The Ad Contrarian, is that he could be a ‘Brain In A Bottle‘, a kind of Yoda, sitting in the corner of the creative department as a wisdom resource for his more callow colleagues. We saw how things worked out for a month, but what about a year? Twelve months where course corrections could be made and feedback could be taken on might well add more value than whatever a ‘Mark’ might cost. Advertising is always exhorting clients to be brave. Shouldn’t we take our own advice occasionally?

One other factor might be the fear and competition bred by the situation: young people have to use whatever edge they can to get their job, and when that happens they know that they only succeed by having their idea chosen over that of the other team on the brief. So may the best team (or the team that creates the most sellable idea) win, which means that the other team loses. That is the implication of every day in the agency.

For the older ones, you know that every raise increases the size of the target on your back and the number of knives aimed towards it. No one says no to a raise, but we all know that the higher the salary, the more you stick out to the network CFO in Manhattan, who just needs to cut costs by 8%, and can see that one easy way of doing that is to delete the names of you and your partner. What is the magic danger-number, and when does the axe-person start looking around? Nobody knows, but your career is generally spent inching closer to the guillotine, and it’s coming for us all.

So if you take those two situations and run them simultaneously, you get fear and competition instead of something that might be far more useful: collaboration. We’re taught from the start to try to be the last team standing, but an atmosphere that gets us all to try to improve each other’s work would surely be better for both the work and our mental health.

Instead we take our place on the conveyer belt, watch as the people some distance ahead fall off the end of it, and brace ourselves for that inevitability. But if the more experienced people were retained and given the chance to continue contributing to the young, that might improve the system and the advertising for everyone.

Mentors, mentees, education, growth, improvement, success.

It’s not exactly a new idea, but then sometimes the things that stand the test of time do so for a reason.

Last week I was listening to the peerless Graham Fink on his second episode of Behind The Billboard. If you haven’t had a listen yet, stop reading this now and rectify that scandalous situation. Then listen to episode 1. I’ll wait.

You’re back? Good.

Wasn’t it brilliant? There were many excellent anecdotes, but the part that really stuck with me was an almost throwaway comment at the end where Graham quoted Hugh Laurie as saying, ‘There’s no such thing as great ideas; only great execution of ideas’ (the actual quote and interview are here). Graham went on to say that there was a big difference between having ideas and getting those ideas made exactly as you want, or even better. 

He added that we never really present ideas to clients that are above 8/10, but then you go into execution, and that’s when you crank it up a few notches with great photographers, typographers or directors.

OK. There’a a lot to examine there, so let’s start with the main point; the one that says execution supersedes concept…

Many years ago I went to Watford (West Herts College) to study Copywriting and Art Direction under the great Tony Cullingham. He instills in his pupils the opinion that concept is 90% of the endeavour. The other 10% is the actual writing or art direction bit (the execution).

And he’s not alone in that thought. We’ve all heard those creative department insults: ‘Yeah, but what’s the idea?’ or ‘There’s no fucking idea’, suggesting the primacy of the conceptual underpinning, but you only have to go back to my penultimate post (and this one I wrote seven years ago on a similar theme) to see that we don’t even agree on what an ‘idea’ is. This incredibly valuable currency of the ad agency is… what exactly? 

If we go back to Hugh’s suggestion, and Graham’s agreement, it’s not that important. 

According to the winner of the Commercial of the Year at last week’s British Arrows, it’s ‘Show models dressed in Burberry jumping and dancing around a street while snowballs land on them’. You might say that fashion advertising doesn’t usually have ‘ideas’, and you’d be right, but this is undeniably a brilliant ad. It was liked, shared and awarded all over the place. It might even have sold some clothes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbmW76Cp4s8

As far as the concept went, Riccardo Tisci, Creative Director of Burberry, said, ’It’s about that fearless spirit and imagination when pushing boundaries.’ That sounds like bollocks to me, but the end result, like great fashion, is all about emotion and attitude, so it makes sense to skip the logic of a conceptual foundation. This is all about execution, and the distance between ‘People dance around in a snowball shower’ and the finished ad is like the distance between a Cadbury’s Creme Egg and a Fabergé Egg.

So is the idea ever important? Well, Good Things Come To Those Who Wait, Mac vs PC, Beware Of Things Made In October and Write The Future make very effectively the argument that it is. But Burberry, Flat Eric and Whassup are equally powerful on the ‘no idea’ side of things.

So why don’t we just get it out in the open? Sometimes advertising ideas matter, and sometimes they don’t. It’s OK not to bother with a solid concept, but if you have one, great. No biggie either way.

But idea-wise, what really does matter are the thousands of little creative contributions that happen between brain and reality. Let’s stick with the Burberry example: many, many ideas happened even after someone suggested dancing around in the snow would demonstrate the fearless spirit and imagination one displays when pushing boundaries. What kind of street? How many models? What size snowballs? When do they fall? What are the dance moves? Who goes where? Who should shoot it? Who would be a good DOP? 

And those are just the basics. You’ll then have: which lens do we shoot with? How heavy should the greens be in the grade? Should we shave three frames off the end of that shot or that one? Four frames? Five? Back to three again? How far should we roll up the second dancer’s cuffs? What expression should the dancer at the back have at 1:23.06 seconds? Should the camera move this far to the left? Another inch? Three inches? Three feet?

And even then there will be another thousand questions that pivot from those answers, but you get the idea. (Yes, I said ‘idea’. That was deliberate.)

So many ideas happened to improve this ad, and yet there was no discernible ‘Watford’ idea underneath it all. Then they made something similarly idea-less a year later and it was just as loved:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCbfq_-cd-g

And it was all in the execution. So Hugh and Graham were right. Kind of.

I remember having a conversation with a colleague ten years ago. He had come up with an idea for a story and he asked me if there were people who would write a book or script based on that idea. He wanted to be an ‘ideas’ guy, who just thought up basic premises, which he would then pass on to a supposed executor.

I told him that if there was something like that I was not aware of it. Sure, there are staff writers, or people who accept commissions from studios (‘We just bought the rights to this biography of Marilyn Monroe. We’ll pay you X to write the script’), but that’s not the same as ‘I just had an idea for a story. Could you spend weeks/months writing it on the off-chance someone will like it enough to buy it?’ For a start, most executional writers have their own ideas for stories, ones that they would be happy to spend hours getting just right. In addition, great ideas are so easy to find, here are 100 of them, left on my blog eight years ago by a commenter, who said ‘Shit ideas are ten a penny. The problem is, so are good ideas’.

The example I always give is, if I came up to you in 1990 and said, ‘I’ve had this idea for a book about a theme park with real dinosaurs that are brought to life by adapting and developing their genetic coding’, would you have thought, ‘Well that sounds like a massive bestseller that will become the highest-grossing film of all time’? Probably not. You’d want to see what the characters were like, how exciting the plot could be, what kind of dinosaurs there were, etc.

I could even say that a man parks his car outside a bank, and that would still require answers to questions like, what kind of car? What kind of bank? What is the man wearing? What is the weather like? Are there any passers-by? How old are they? What city are we in? What year did this take place? Any one of your answers could make the scene better or worse.

So execution is a very large proportion, of the final work.

Which brings me to the second thing Graham said: that we never really give a client any idea that is above 8/10, and usually more like a 6 or 7. And that means that’s the level of what you tell your partner, or your CD. I can tell you for sure that paragraphs of ideas are not particularly helpful. At best they can get someone to say, ‘OK, write it into a script and show me what you mean. Stress test it’. Then, in some form of execution, it can be judged with greater clarity.

There are thousands of rejected ideas for Happiness Is A Cigar Called Hamlet, Good Things Come To Those Who Wait, and Mac vs PC. There is a smaller number of ads that got made, then binned because the execution didn’t live up to people’s expectations of the idea. There are also great ideas, executed to everyone’s satisfaction that then appeared before a public that did not not give a toss. At every step of the process you are dealing with subjective interpretations of ‘funny’, ‘quick’, ‘irreverent’, ‘cool’ and hundreds of other abstract notions. The idea just gets you to the next stage of execution, where it can get better, worse or stay about the same.

Imagine you saw the script for Guinness Surfer. Could you have executed it with the same brilliance as Tom and Walt, Jonathan Glazer, Johnnie Burn, Ivan Bird etc.? Part of the buy-in from the Guinness client must have been the track record of the agency, especially the creative department. Otherwise they’d be looking at a few paragraphs about a surfer waiting for a perfect wave, and have no idea (there’s that word again) if it was going to be worth committing a giant budget to its execution.

The idea stage is where you can change anything for tuppence (your chargeable hourly rate notwithstanding). Changes in commitment are equally cheap and insignificant. A chat over a pint of beer can lead to a joke that doubles the quality of the script. Ten more ideas can appear between lunch and home time. A client’s feedback can alter the whole thing, or be argued with until the idea is better, worse or dead. Then you just go again, for no more than your hourly rate. The idea stage is where you can watch a short film to pass the time and decide that, with the addition of your client’s logo, what you are watching could be the ‘idea’.

But execution is where the rubber hits the road. It’s where the real money is spent. It’s where the commitments are made from which you cannot return. It’s what takes the most time. It’s where specialists form a team that elevates something invisible to something tangible. It’s where you can make something great or something shit, no matter whether your ‘idea’ is great or shit. 

Let’s not say one is better or worse, or more or less noble than the other. The idea is necessary to get to the execution, but the execution is absolutely necessary to make the idea any good.

How topical is this?

I wrote this post a few days ago, but what I witnessed at the Oscars tonight helped prove my point.

Here’s a question: which category of advertising offers the best opportunities to produce brilliant, famous and (if you’re into that kind of thing) award-winning work?

Is it the heartstring-tugging, gritty edginess of the Charity and Public Service sector? Is it the in-built coolness and decades of brilliance of sportswear? Maybe it’s tech, or alcohol, or luxury.

Nope. It’s media.

Here’s why: if you are a newspaper or a TV channel or some kind of social media platform, you are the conveyers and/or creators of things the public finds very interesting. If you in turn have to advertise those very interesting things then your work has a much better chance of being interesting itself.

This gives you a massive head start over washing powder, chocolate bars or even brilliant things such as holidays. Those three things are also interesting to the public, but they are also broadly the same things, offering the same effects, year after year.

But media is different. Even if you watch BBC1 every single day, you might find yourself experiencing anything from sport to drama to horror. The Guardian covers everything from the climate crisis to sexual dysfunction. Twitter will drive stories on Black Lives Matter, murder and Taylor Swift. All of the above will run millions of words about Will and Chris’s little contretemps.

So you’re not selling these intermediaries; you’re selling what they show, and as these intermediaries want to seem as compelling as possible, you will usually be given the opportunity to advertise their most interesting content.

About ten years ago I was freelancing at 4 Creative. Their idents had just won D&AD Gold, their Paralympics coverage was just about to win D&AD Gold, and in the meantime they had to tell people about sexy Skins, superlative Sopranos and global cultural touchpoint, Friends. 

One day the creatives were called into one of the meeting rooms and briefed on a new show called Black Mirror. We were told about the plot of the first episode, which sounded fascinating, especially when the planner said, ‘They’re going to kill the Princess of Wales unless the Prime Minister does something specific.”

They’d been pretty forthcoming to that point, so I wondered why they were suddenly being so coy. “What does he have to do?” I asked. The planner looked a bit sheepish before replying, “He has to fuck a pig in Trafalgar Square.”

This, dear reader, is why media clients, especially those as edgy as Channel 4, are so great to work on. 

Sure, Persil Automatic washes whiter, Beanz Meanz Heinz and Autoglass repairs and replaces, but none of them has a central proposition that involves the leader of the country being blackmailed into practicing bestiality in public.

Even if you don’t get to go that far, just take a look at the best media ads of all time: decades of The Economist; years of LWT; The National Gallery (another D&AD Gold); endless great work for The Guardian, including D&AD Gold for its redesign; brilliant posters for The Times; Endless pencil-winning genius for Fox Sports; Twitter’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning billboards; more Cannes Grands Prix for The Tate Gallery; more D&AD Golds for The New York Times; D&AD Gold for BBC2’s idents; D&AD Gold for Channel 4’s logo; D&AD Golds for Channel 4’s second Paralympics campaign and Film 4’s idents. Time Out, Britart.com, Uncommon’s current ITV work…

This extends into the world of design, where books, albums and especially movies have inspired hundreds of indelible and iconic images. Just think of the Jurassic Park logo, the helmet from Full Metal Jacket, the shark rising to towards the swimmer of Jaws, The spiral of Vertigo, the characters of Trainspotting… 

Media properties are almost always created to elicit an emotional reaction, so their representative communications must be able to to the same. distilling those feelings into a single image or a minute or two of film. That’s a great target to aim for, one that is rarely part of the KPIs of your average ad campaign. 

On top of that, you have a never-ending churn of product. Instead of trying to breathe new life into yet another year of KFC, Travelodge or Audi, you get to sink your teeth into new shows, new issues, new stories and new people. That helps with morale, recruitment and retention, and of course fame and awards, which also help with morale, recruitment and retention.

Charity accounts were always famous for being the easy route to a prize because they dealt with issues that were inherently compelling. That meant you had to do far less heavy lifting to persuade people of your way of thinking. But there was a stigma to that: work was often created for free, as a kind of quid pro quo for the opportunity to win awards and feel a bit better about yourself. Was it proper work to proper briefs? Sometimes; sometimes not so much.

But many media accounts offer creatives a product that is already fascinating, without the suggestion that they’re doing the work as a cheap shot at grabbing a Cannes Lion.

These are real companies, looking for real success, often via work that is original, riveting and as brilliantly crafted as their own offerings.

In many ways that’s advertising’s dream, and unlike many other parts of the industry (and Will Smith’s career), it’s alive and well.

I once wrote a popular tweet that listed ten words that are used in every advertising meeting, even though nobody really knows what they mean. I only mention the popularity to indicate that there was quite a lot of agreement with the list. Anyway, I had a look for it, but it’s buried too far beneath my thousands of tweets despairing of Boris Johnson, so here’s an attempt to recall the magic ten with an additional one for good luck:

Organic

Graphic

Human

Idea

Platform

Strategy

Digital

Effective

Brave

Emotional

Simple

Yes, I know you all know what brave and effective mean, or at least you could give me a definition that’s pretty close to the one in the dictionary, but you know what I’m saying: these words take on new meanings in the advertising boardroom or creative review.

Does that stop us throwing them about like confetti, with no thought for how they ended up in your hand, nor where they might finally fall? Of course not

So let’s take them one by one, examining the advertising definition and how far it has traveled from its origins.

Organic

I just looked up the dictionary definition of this word, only to discover that is has several, and NONE of them is the one we use when we talk about ads. Then I realised I have no idea how to define the advertising version.

I think it’s kind of ‘pertaining to nature’, or ‘naturally occurring, but not like a flower, more like naturally occurring from a situation or process. Like when a man hits his head in a way that isn’t contrived, we say that it happened organically’. How’s that for a definition?

We tend to use it as if it vaguely means what I just wrote but can any of us define ‘advertising organic’ clearly? I don’t think so, which means we all mean something slightly different when we use it. And we’re all talking bollocks to some degree, and no one is calling anyone out on the bollocks, or admitting they don’t understand what’s just been said.

If you think that’s a little bit crazy, read on…

Graphic

The dictionary says graphic means ‘relating to visual art, especially involving drawing, engraving, or lettering’ or ‘giving a vivid picture with explicit detail’. (There are other definitions, like the one that pertains to the phrase ‘graphic sex’, but none of them is relevant here.)

Of course, none of that is what we mean in our agencies. The advertising definition of ‘graphic’ is, ‘with straight lines and corners, and probably quite a lot of negative space’. That’s it. In advertising, ‘organic’ pictures are full of curvy lines and natural colours, but ‘graphic’ imagery is closer to the work of Mondrian, or the contents of a geometry text book.

Again, this has never been said explicitly, or agreed upon, but that is what people in ad agency meetings seem to think graphic means. Pay attention next time someone says it (almost certainly at some point today) and see what they’re really suggesting. From art directors to clients, all departments seem to use this meaning, possibly because all departments seem to use this meaning. It’s another silent agreement that means we can’t really go back to whatever meaning ‘graphic’ used to have.

Human

As a noun, easy; as an adjective, it’s nowhere near as simple. The Human League song Human appeared to suggest it meant that you’re born to make mistakes, but of course an ad agency chat takes it elsewhere.

When someone says, ‘It’s really human’, I think they are saying that something is organic (see above), as in ‘pertaining to nature’, but with a further emphasis on ‘not like a computer or robot’. So the human characteristics of love, kindness, thoughtfulness tend to be what we mean by the advertising version of human. Humans can also be evil, envious, anxious, jealous etc., but those are bad things, so they do not describe characters in ads or products we try to sell (see ’emotional’ below).

A close cousin to ‘human’ is ‘intuitive’, which is more of a product word, and is closer to its real definition, but when we add it to a pre-prod meeting we soon find that any real meaning disappears and it’s simply a surrogate for ‘soft’ or ‘nice’.

Idea

Bearing in mind how many times it’s used in an ad agency, you’d think that we’d have a clear definition of what an ‘idea’ is.

But we don’t.

I know this because I once attended a management meeting where we discussed all sorts of things, one of which was ‘ideas’. It soon became clear that we were talking about different things. Some said ‘Just Do It’ was an idea; others suggested the idea was the articulation of the concept that could then be copied by anyone else, eg: ‘show how something can be worth waiting for’; others thought it was more like ‘Dell computers are easy to use’.

So we all say ‘idea’ fifty times a day, and we’re all talking about different things.

Let me complicate it further by asking you to explain the idea in the VW Lemon/Think Small campaign. Could you please articulate it in a way that is consistent with your definition of the ‘idea’ for Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet? Or the entire Old Spice campaign, from The Man Your Man Could Smell Like to Wolf CEO, to Momsong? Or the idea for the Whassup campaign?

As an industry we definitely use ‘idea’ to mean several different things, but it’s one of the most important terms we employ, so how does that work? Poorly.

Platform

This is a new one. For decades it meant that place where you found your train, but 10-15 years back it became the word used to describe a giant medium, such as Facebook or Google; a thing that acted as a starting point for lots of other things (kind of like a train platform).

But more recently I’ve heard it being used for that Old Spice thing; a campaign above a campaign. Wieden and Kennedy clearly sold P&G some kind of über campaign that could encompass the various manifestations of The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, including Terry Crews as a manipulable online character, that crooner playing the piano, Wolf CEO, Momsong, and everything else we’ve seen on behalf of that brand during the last decade.

I think The Power Of Dreams is the clearest articulation of an advertising platform (although it was never referred to as a platform), but even then, it’s kind of vague. Cog, Grrr, Impossible Dream, the banana press ad… yes, you could say they came from the power of dreams, but doesn’t everything? You think something up, and if that thing is exciting enough, it drives you to bring it to life, whether that’s a Kit-Kat, a board game or a Honda Civic.

If platform can accommodate sub-campaigns, is it a campaign, or is it something else? I think it would help to call it something else; but if you do that, what do you call it? Platform makes sense, except that it already has a significant meaning in the advertising world. But here we are with two ‘platforms’ when we could have one ‘platform’ and one ‘springboard’, or one ‘trigger’. I dunno. I bet there are fifty good names for the campaign above the campaign that aren’t ‘platform’, but we now have ‘platform’ creeping into that space, so we may have to just accept the unnecessary stupidity of that.

Strategy

Here’s a contentious one.

So ‘planners’ are now ‘strategists’, and by implication everything they do is in service of the creation of a strategy. But it’s not. Most strategies that I read (having ploughed through a massive deck that leads up to the hallowed ‘strategy’), are not strategies at all; they are maybe tactics, or abstract sentences that sound a bit like a strategy but are really just… not strategies.

Great strategies are hard. Bogstandard strategies are apparently also hard, because I rarely see them. They should be overall guides for what an advertising campaign is supposed to achieve, distilled into a sentence, or (these days) a paragraph (or, God help us, a deck). But they are often less specific, like ‘PayPal is the way we all need to live our lives’, or ‘Adidas is ambition, distilled’.

Those are not strategies, but we tend to accept and discuss them as if they are. Then we use Slack, Teams and WhatsApp to bitch about he fact that they are not. And then we go into the process of creating the work without a strategy…

Digital

A few years ago I attended a three-day Hyper Island course, along with the entire management of my agency. A couple of hours into it, one of the people running the course asked us (maybe 60 people) what we thought ‘digital’ meant. He received different definitions from every single person. (By the way, mine was ‘not analogue’, which was as correct as it was useless).

The point was that we all used that word without agreeing what it meant. So, to emphasise the point of this entire post, Hyper Island made it very clear that we were not speaking the same language, when it would make a lot of sense for us to do exactly that.

What do you think digital means? Do you think your definition is the same as that of everyone else in your agency? Your department? The other voices in your head?

The reality is that we all say the word ‘digital’ every day, and it could mean a dozen things from ‘online’ to ‘non-traditional’, and that is not a great basis for a useful conversation.

Effective

The weird thing about effective is that we are often left in the dark as to what it means, and what it is supposed to mean.

Is it sales figures? Awareness? Likes? Or a bunch of other odds and sods that we’re never told about?

I once asked this question of my bosses and was told (sheepishly) that our client just wanted to look cool to his colleagues. That was the effectiveness we were aiming for. Yes, we all understand what effective means; it’s just that the thing we’re trying to achieve in those terms is often kept from the people trying to achieve it, rendering it essentially meaningless.

Do you know the ultimate aim of your current campaign? Are you sure? If you’re not sure, what the heck are you doing?

Brave

People who are staying in Ukraine to protect their country are brave. Nothing that happens in an advertising agency comes under that definition.

Yes, all things are relative, but come on. How brave is ‘advertising brave’? About as brave as driving five miles an hour above the speed limit.

Of course we like to think that some of our decisions take some kind of courage, but as we all know, bland advertising is brave because it’s likely to fail. But exciting advertising is also brave because it some people might not like it. So everything is brave and nothing is brave (especially your decision to add a serif to the client’s typeface, FFS), so let’s just retire that word and allow it to go back to describing actual, y’know, bravery.

Emotional

If your ad isn’t funny, or incredibly straightforward/dull, it’s  almost certainly emotional, but what does that mean?

There are many emotions. Here are the eight basics: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust, joy. How many times do you see all of those in an ad break? Not much disgust, I’d imagine; probably not much fear. The more negative emotions tend to be shunted off to the side, so when we say an ad is emotional, which emotion are we talking about?

The odd thing is that I’m not sure human beings are particularly good at specifying emotions, never mind advertising people. My reaction to Guinness Surfer is definitely emotional, but is that excitement+surprise+anticipation? And how much of each? I have no idea.

When we talk about very powerful ads, we often use the ‘E’ word, but it’s more of a verbalisation of ‘it makes shivers run down my spine’ or ‘it gives me goosebumps’. But if we all speak of something being ‘emotional’, that must be something both subjective and unspecific, and thus functionally meaningless.

Simple

Simply put, your simple ain’t my simple.

Simple briefs, simple scripts, simple solutions, simple edits, simple endlines, simple decks, simple meetings…

I have definitely had different expectations of that simplicity to other people in the room. Whenever I’ve said that we want something simple, I think everyone nodded in agreement, but what were we agreeing to? Different things, of course!

You know when you brief a photographer or a sound designer or a director as to what you would like to achieve? Do they always produce the exact thing you were hoping for? Or an even-better version of that vision? Not always, right? They misinterpreted what you were after, and those people were fellow creatives. Imagine how differently a client or account person defines ‘simple’. Now you know why your pleas for simplicity fall on subjective/deaf ears.

Your ad, which was striving at all times for simplicity achieved exactly that, by which I mean it achieved nothing of the sort, and all because your simple wasn’t the same as the strategist’s, the account handler’s or the client’s.

So there we have it: we’re constantly speaking different languages in quite fundamental ways.

The good news is that the first step to a solution is admitting you have a problem.

The bad news is that no one thinks this language gap is a problem.

Perhaps I can magically sum that up in language we all understand:

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I heard a podcast recently that compared the ages of companies to the ages of humans: in short, when they’re babies they need a lot of help and attention; when they’re teenagers they’re prone to making errors as they attempt to transition into being grown up; as they get towards the end, they need to downsize and, well, prepare to die.

Interesting enough, but it was the corollary that really caught my attention.

Each one of these different phases of growth needs a different set of people. Maybe not 100% different in every department, but enough to make the company work properly and seem appropriate for its new age.

New companies often need someone with a great vision that they can bring to life in an inspiring way. More energy and charisma can attract more investors, along with the kind of employees that will agree to work on a project that barely exists. On the other hand, older companies need a safe pair of hands to wind things down and sell off assets for the best price.

I used to work at an agency with a talismanic president. She was the kind of leader many people would crawl around the world on broken glass to please (although she inspired as much fear and antipathy as respect and love). She was perfect for a while, dragging the company from its infancy through to its teenage years, but then things had to calm down as we entered maturity. After a tussle with her network bosses and our major client, she was eased out and replaced by someone less incendiary.

Would people have followed the new president through fire? Less so than the woman he replaced, but instead of that trait we now had calm, compassion and a little more sanity, along with a happier client and more confident network management. The work was still excellent (some might say better).

Three years later CEO number two was out, along with the CCO, who had been there from the start. A new president and a new CCO arrived. I don’t know too much about them as I left as they arrived, but things seemed to be humming along well, with plenty of award-winning work continuing to flow into the usual media channels.

Considering all this, a few questions popped into my mind: are advertising creatives suited to certain needs of a company, and do those needs only appear at specific stages of its existence? Are we aware of when we change to fulfill a different need? Do the skills we develop at the start of our careers continue to make us valuable in the later years? And when so much changes, how can you predict and aim for those new needs?

I think most creatives go into advertising with the belief or ambition that they will be the ones who create enormously famous award-winners on a regular basis. No one thinks they’ll be the steady workhorse, or the pitch specialist who wins business but never makes anything. But there are far fewer awards or culturally significant ads than there are teams, so by that mathematical logic, most of us are doing a job that does not fulfill our original ambition.

Is that a problem? It depends on the extent to which you can make peace with that reality. In this day and age a creative is even less likely to produce famous work because so much of it exists in the dark recesses of the interweb. No taxi driver will be aware of the great line you just cranked out for Audi’s Snapchat feed, so you’d better be OK with sweating buckets to produce work that is seen by hardly anyone you might know, and disappears forever the day after it runs

But these lines need to be written (and art directed), so that’s now a big part of the job. If you’re able to turn great (in reality, decent) stuff around quickly, and be OK with its 99% insignificance, there is a place for you in this industry in 2022, possibly with a decent salary in a big agency. So you have the right ability for a current need, just like a CEO who is covering an apposite growth stage of a company.

If, however, you are not that person, you might now find it harder to justify a good salary.

In the mid-Nineties, you had to develop an ability in press, posters, TV and/or radio. You might have created something we now think of as experiential (much of the ‘guerilla’ categories of those days seemed to cover that kind of thing), but it was usually no more than a nice-to-have niche, often created specifically for awards.

Now you have to be adept at far more disciplines, reducing the time you have to hone your craft skills or explore the outer edges of your concepts. Distant deadlines and generous budgets are largely a thing of the past, so you now need to adapt or die.

This is especially true as younger people coming into the business have known nothing else, so they might ironically be the equivalent of the late-stage CEO that keeps the ship steady despite increasingly straitened circumstances. Clients are now more willing to pay for quantity than quality, so cheaper (younger) people who can do that to a competent level are what the industry currently needs (I say ‘needs’ knowing full well that the industry actually needs the exact opposite of that, but more immediately it needs to get paid, so here we are).

As someone who has gone through these changes, I can say that a degree of pragmatism is essential. I feel like the requirements for good quality at high quantity rather than exceptional quality on a more occasional basis have actually improved my headline writing. Instead of stressing over one great line, I can now produce larger numbers at greater speed, at least one of which is up to my former standards.

So I’m in no way the creative I was when the Spice Girls first appeared. Back then I was insecure, awards obsessed and not particularly good. Now I’m confident, entirely uninterested in awards and (excuse me for blowing smoke up my arse) better than I used to be.

The other thing I get asked to do is CD/GCD/ECD projects, where I’m client facing and have the responsibility of overseeing and improving the work of others. That might be on a production or a pitch, but it’s where my management experience comes in handy. 

I guess that makes me a little more Swiss Army knife than someone who has never been an ECD, maximising my opportunities by being able to fit into more roles. On that subject, I occasionally consider learning design and Photoshop because those skills are where the industry is currently leaning. The creation of decks, comps and social layouts are three requirements that didn’t really exist 10-15 years ago, but are now daily needs in almost every agency on the planet.

So if I want to be the right-place-right-time CEO in the next 5-10 years, adding those strings to my bow would not only improve my chances of getting a gig as a creative in 2027, they would also make me a better CD/GCD/ECD by improving my ability to evaluate the non-writing elements of a project.

But I know how specialised the writing side of things is, so I get that learning design and art direction to a CD-level, including those software skills, is something I would have to devote a lot of time to. Is it worth it? Probably. I bet my time in and around advertising has given me a decent foundation, which I could then spend a year or two building upon. And if it extends my employment by a couple of years, it will surely be a good use of my time.

I get that (possible AI contributions aside) advertising will always need human concepting and writing, but who knows what else the future holds? I am aware that I am entering the autumn of my career, and that advertising is an inherently ageist industry, so if I can squeeze a few more years out of the journey, learning along the way, where’s the downside?

You can expect the industry to constantly have a home for your current contributions, or you can adapt to fill its changing needs. Some people have managed the first option successfully, but I think it makes more sense to see what you can do to bring about the latter. It will increase your odds of employment, and thus your longevity.

‘Nooooooooooo!’ button for dire situations.

Are you you?

Six degrees of Wikipedia.

24 underrated websites. A thread 🧵👇

— Lucy Hughes (@lucyhughes_PR) September 15, 2021

Global database of fruit trees on public land.

Explore music history an album a day.

Guess where global food dishes come from.

NYC with the sound back on:

Back in October I wrote this post about the couple of lockdown months I’d spent watching classic films.

Well, in the year since I subscribed to the Criterion Channel I’ve watched many, many more of them, so I think it’s time for an update.

As the title of this post suggests, the first year of my Criterion fun, between August 2021 and August 2021, took in just over 600 films. A lot? maybe, but remember we were mostly in lockdown, so it was a good diversion when I was unable to go out for dinner, drinks, and, crucially, to the cinema. So I bought a big telly and a good sound system and turned my living room into my Odeon/Arclight.

I’d say about 90% of the films were feature length, with 10% being shorts. I finished maybe 85% of the films, and gave up on the other 15% before they finished. Not sure of an average length, but as older films were closer to the 90-minute mark, and many were over three hours, I’d guess at around two hours.

I did see other films during this time – as a dad I am compelled to watch Disney and Marvel movies – and although I enjoyed many of them, and think they are good (in their own special way), I only included them if they were good good, by which I mean they had to have the kind of artistic merit that would allow them to seem at home on this list (examples include Pixar’s excellent Soul, and Mad Max: Fury Road).

I also found a few kindred spirits, some who were going through the same process as me and a few who had already been on a similar journey. It was fascinating to chat through some of these classics with those people, and discovering the depths of others’ movie fandom was always a real kick. I recently went through the production process of a commercial with directors whose references were movies like Playtime, and I was delighted to be able to understand them and discuss their nuances. It’s great to expand an artistic frame of reference, then use that expansion beyond just a nichey nerdiness.

If anyone wants to discuss the relative merits of Ozu vs Mizoguchi vs Kurosawa (and, at a push, Kobayashi, although he’s a little on the nose), hit me up. I will happily chat Rohmer/Malle/Chabrol/Demy/etc., or Fellini/De Sica/ Passolini/Antonioni/Visconti tilll the cows come home.

Here are some of the films you might not have considered watching because they’re kind of ‘deep cut’, but I loved them:

The Music Room (Satyajit Ray). Is about a rich Indian man who has spent all his money and is now on the verge of poverty. However, he decides to have one last blowout on a concert in the music room of his house. It made Indian music surprisingly (to me) compelling, and took me into a world I’d never even considered, let alone visited.

The Wages Of Fear (Henri Clouzot) is one of the most entertaining films you’ll ever see. It concerns a group of roughnecks who have to drive trucks of nitroglycerine across the bumpy terrain of an unspecified country in South America. Great characters combine with endless tension to make a Palme D’Or winner that never lets up.

Viridiana (Luis Bunuel) is funny, dark, twisty, crazy. Of Bunuel’s work, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is the best-known, but Viridiana is the bravest. He returned to Franco’s Spain after decades spent in exile in Mexico and made a shockingly irreverent film against the wishes of the religious authorities.

High And Low (Akira Kurosawa). Kurosawa kindly invented the action film (Seven Samurai), the medical procedural drama (Red Beard) and this film, the first police procedural. We begin by spending an hour in one very cool room, then the hunt is on…

Le Plaisir (Max Ophuls) is a kind of anthology, split into three. The great thing about Ophuls is his camera movement: although the lack of editing keeps you immersed in the story, at some point you realise you’ve been watching the same unbroken shot for ages, then you start to wonder where it began, rewind and marvel again. Have a look at the same technique in La Ronde and The Earrings of Madame de… In Le Plaisir you’ll see it to stunning effect in the first and third stories.

Closely Watched Trains (Jiří Menzel) is just so warm, charming and funny; full of delightful little touches, wonderfully observed moments and gorgeous photography. Yes, it’s a Czechoslovak film about some people running a rural train station, but that only proves that greatness can come from anywhere, through any story.

Z (Costa Gavras) is one you might have heard of. It’s the thinly-fictionalised account of the death of a Greek politician, and it’s insanely gripping. It feels as if it lands between a documentary and a movie, but not in the same way as, say, The Battle Of Algiers. It’s more fun than that: a tense ride unlike anything you’ve seen before.

Army Of Shadows (Jean-Pierre Melville) was dismissed on its initial release for being sympathetic to de Gaulle, so it languished, forgotten and unknown for forty years until it was reappraised as one of the best films of 2006. There’s a lot of great Melville out there, but this is his masterpiece: a fascinating, compelling tale of a small band of French resistance fighters in World War Two.

Black Orpheus (Marcel Camus) is a vibrant reworking of the Orpheus and Euridice myth, transplanted to the favelas of Rio during Carnival, it has colour, music, energy, passion, joy, tragedy and pretty much everything else.

La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti) isn’t usually mentioned in the Italian Neorealism conversation, but as far as I was concerned it might as well have been a documentary. It features no real actors and follows the lives of some working class fishermen in a small Italian port. It really transports you to that time and place, and gets you deeply involved with one man’s tragic attempt to break out of his circumstances.

Ashes And Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda) is set on the day the allies win World War Two, and is impossibly cool. The lead actor modeled his performance on James Dean, bringing an oddly American vibe to a very Polish story. Again, it takes you right into that time and place, wondering how communist Russia would take control of war-torn Poland.

I Vitelloni (Federico Fellini) is the film that most other people who have been on this kind of journey bring up to me as a favourite. It’s Fellini at his best, telling us a wonderful story of a bunch of layabout young men in a small seaside town. It’s a clear influence on Swingers, Goodfellas, and any other film with a bunch of guys having fun and taking no responsibility for themselves.

The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr) sounds like the dullest, most depressing film ever made, but it’s the exact opposite of those two things. Never will you find the sight of two people eating a potato so compelling. A man and his daughter live on a decaying, windswept Hungarian farm, then something happens to the well…

Au Revoir Les Enfants (Louis Malle) is the only film I saw that made me cry. I’m pretty sure I saw it when it came out, but I didn’t remember much about it. It’s one of several autobiographical films made by Louis Malle, which gives it an added poignancy. From Zero De Conduite and Les Quatre Cents Coups, to Les Murs and Etre Et Avoir, the French make such great films about childhood and school. This is one of the greatest.

The Servant (Joseph Losey) is an utterly English film, directed by an American. The plot is very unpredictable (although the makers of Parasite must have seen it a few times), as are the performances, but as it descends further and further into a rabbit hole of insanity, you’ll be dragged right along with it.

Another Round (Thomas Vinterberg) is among this year’s Oscar nominees. It’s a Danish black comedy that’s so wonderfully life-affirming (even though the director’s daughter died tragically at the beginning of filming), culminating in a giddy, delirious dance. I think the message was ‘drink more booze’; it certainly tempted me to do just that.

The Fireman’s Ball (Milos Forman) is another film made all the better for it’s use of non-professional actors. If you’ve ever wondered how and why Milos Forman was plucked from Czechoslovakia to direct One Flew Over The Cockoo’s Nest, watch this and all will become clear. It’s a sort of One Flew Over The Strange Little Community Get Together, hilarious, touching and beautifully observed.

Town Bloody Hall (Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker) is a documentary/filming of a debate on feminism in The New York Town Hall, featuring, among others, Germaine Greer and the provocatively sexist Norman Mailer. It’s shown in all it’s ugly, fiery energy, dumping you right in the centre of a full-throttle battle of the sexes.

The Kid With A Bike (Jean Pierre and Luc Dardennes) is a modern Belgian film with all the authenticity of Italian Neorealism at its best. The story of a young boy whose idolises his dad, who in turn would rather his son didn’t exist. It is played so realistically you feel as if you were given a front-row seat as all this happened for real. I’d also encourage you to seek out other Dardennes Brothers films, such as The Child, The Son and Lorna’s Silence, all similarly brilliant.

Il Sorpasso (Dino Risi) is a comedy, so it won’t be mentioned alongside all the serious dramas that tend to make up the lists of greatest-ever films. But this hilarious road movie, combining an uptight guy with a random ‘friend’ who doesn’t give a shit about anything, is as good as many more lauded Italian films of the 1960s, and has an ending you won’t see coming.

Le Trou (Jaques Becker) is the best prison break film of all time. It is almost entirely about five guys who tunnel out of jail, making more progress, night after night. It has all the tension, twists and great character acting (including some people involved in the real-life breakout it was based on) you need to make a film like this work perfectly.

But you want to know what they all were, don’t you? Relax, I’ve got you. Here’s the list, chronological from 15th Jan:

1. Man with a Movie Camera
2. Late Spring
3. Au Hasard Balthazar
4. L’Avventura
5. Le Mépris 
6. Ordet
7. Andrei Rublev
8. Stalker
9. The General
10. Metropolis
11. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
12. Sátántangó
13. Pather Panchali
14. Gertrud
15. Pierrot le Fou
16. Close-Up
17. Ugetsu Monogatari
18. La Jetée
19. M
20. Sherlock Jr.
21. La maman et la putain
22. Sansho Dayu
23. Modern Times
24. Pickpocket
25. Sans Soleil
26. A Man Escaped
27. L’eclisse
28. Beau Travail
29. The Spirit of the Beehive
30. Fanny and Alexander
31. The Colour of Pomegranates
32. Greed
33. A Brighter Summer Day
34. Partie de campagne
35. Intolerance
36. Yi Yi
37. Touki Bouki 
38. Imitation of Life
39. Madame de…
40. The Conformist
41. Meshes of the Afternoon
42. Two or three things I know about her
43. Stalker
44. The Gospel According to St. Matthew
45. Come And See
46. Close-Up
47. The Passion of Joan of Arc
48. Playtime
49. Viridiana
50. Hour of the Wolf
51. Vivre Sa Vie
52. Husbands
53. Los Olvidados
54. Opening Night
55. The Gold Rush
56. Zero de Conduite
57. L’argent (1983)
58. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
59. Mouchette
60. The River
61. Meet Me in St Louis
62. Memories of Underdevelopment
63. Vampyr
64. Nosferatu
65. Chung King Express
66. The Music Room
67. The Story of Apu
68. Chimes at Midnight
69. Alexander Nevsky
70. Daisies
71. Closely Watched Trains
72. The Great Dictator
73. Madame Verdoux
74. A Woman Under The Influence
75. Husbands
76. Wanda
77. Sawdust and Tinsel
78. Through a Glass Darkly
79. Winter’s Light
80. Red Beard
81. Amarcord
82. Dr Zhivago
83. Giant
84. The Virgin Spring
85. Smiles of a Summer Evening
86. High and Low
87. Sanjuro
88. Stray Dog
89. The River
90. The Most Beautiful
91. The Life of Oharu
92. The Tale of the Last Chrysanthemum
93. Street Of Shame
94. Scandal
95. No Regrets For Our Youth
96. Sanshiro Sugata
97. I Live In Fear
98. The Lower Depths (Kurosawa)
99. The Hidden Fortress
100. Dersu Uzala
101. I was born but…
102. An Autumn Afternoon
103. Late Autumn
104. Princess Yang Kwei Fei
105. The Crucified Lovers
106. Utamaro and his 5 Women
107. The 47 Ronin (Mizoguchi)
108. A Canterbury Tale
109. The 49th Parallel
110. The House Is Black
111. Aparajito
112. The Big City
113. I Knew Her Well
114. Ashes and Diamonds
115. The Wages of Fear
116. Cleo from 5 to 7
117. The Devil and Daniel Webster
118. A Nous La Liberte
119. Dogtooth
120. Mon Oncle
121. Mr Hulot’s Holiday
122. Two Men and a Wardrobe
123. Beauty and the Beast
124. Red Desert
125. Umberto D
126. An Angel At My Table
127. The Philadelphia Story
128. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
129. Arsenic And Old Lace
130. The Seventh Seal
131. Pygmalion
132. Cries and Whispers
133. The Silence
134. The Night Porter
135. Rome Open City
136. Germany Year Zero
137. Journey to Italy
138. Paisan
139. Gallipoli
140. The Year of Living Dangerously
141. Army of Shadows
142. Weekend
143. Strike
144. Lift To The Gallows
145. Ivan’s Childhood
146. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
147. Belle De Jour
148. Britain Is Listening
149. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
150. 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
151. The Shop Around The Corner
152. The Exterminating Angel
153. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
154. 1917
155. The Double Life of Veronique
156. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
157. Mildred Pierce
158. Le Plaisir
159. Lola Montes
160. Letter From an Unknown Woman
161. Accatone
162. I’m No Angel
163. Holiday
164. The Heiress
165. Stagecoach
166. The Men Who Tread On The Tiger’s Tail
167. Drunken Angel
168. The Bad Sleep Well
169. Charulata
170. Masculin Feminin (chronological order starts here, 15 Jan)
171. Le Petit Soldat
172. I Vitelloni
173. Juliet of the Spirits
174. Nights of Cabiria
175. Il Bidone
176. 8 1/2 + 8 1/2 with commentary
177. La Strada
178. Les Mistons
179. Les 400 Coups + commentary
180. Shoot The Piano Player
181. Jules et Jim
182. L’Atalante
183. Day For Night
184. The Last Metro
185. La Regle du Jeu (Jan 26)
186. Persona
187. Wild Strawberries
188. City Lights
189. Meantime
190. Le Corbeau
191. Arrival
192. The Mirror
193. Night And Fog
194. A Trip To The Moon
195. Hiroshima Mon Amour
196. A Bout De Souffle (Jan 31)
197. Marketa Lazarova
198. Tokyo Drifter
199. Black Girl
200. Faces
201. Antoine and Colette
202. The Soft Skin
203. Stolen Kisses
204. Bed and Board
205. Two English Girls
206. Love On The Run
207. Throne of Blood
208. Yojimbo
209. Bande A Part
210. Dodes’ka den
211. Day of Wrath
212. Soul
213. Les Dames Du Bois De Boulogne (Feb 7)
214. Osaka Elegy
215. Sisters Of The Gion
216. A Touch Of Zen
217. La Bête Humaine
218. Paths Of Glory
219. The Secret Of The Grain
220. The Seventh Continent
221. Code Unknown
222. The White Ribbon
223. The Piano Teacher
224. Gate Of Hell
225. Rashomon 
226. Dheepan (Feb 14th)
227. F For Fake
228. Wavelength
229. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
230. Divorce Italian Style
231. Rocco and his Brothers
232. A Taste of Cherry
233. Certified Copy
234. The Kid
235. Black Orpheus
236. La Notti Bianche
237. Foreign Correspondent
238. Floating Weeds (Feb 21st)
239. Floating Clouds
240. Three Colours: Blue
241. Three Colours: White
242. Three Colours Red
243. .In A Lonely Place
244. Celine and Julie Go Boating
245. Nomadland
246. Ivan The Terrible, Part 1
247. Ivan The Terrible, Part 2
248. Ministry of Fear
249. Judas And The Black Messiah
250. Senso
251. Red River
252. Kings of the Road
253. Paris Texas 
254. The Bad and the Beautiful 
255. Vagabond (Feb 28th)
256. The Traveling Players
257. The Damned
258. Fun With Dick And Jane
259. Out of the Past
260. A Tale Of Tales
261. La Terra Trema
262. Only Angels Have Wings
263. The Black Panthers
264. The Gleaners and I
265. Le Bonheur
266. Don’t Blink – Robert Frank
267. The Battleship Potemkin
268. The Revenant
269. The In-Laws (1979)
270. Kung Fu Master
271. Let The Sunshine In
272. October
273. Zazie Dans Le Metro
274. La Pointe Courte (March 7th)
275. The Turin Horse
276. Underground
277. Distant Voices, Still Lives
278. The Southerner
279. The Sacrifice
280. Riot In Cell Block 11
281. Letter From Siberia
282. Nostalghia
283. Mauvais Sang
284. Steamboat Bill Jnr.
285. Z
286. Portrait Of A Lady On Fire
287. Fear (Rosselini)
288. The Servant
289. Le Silence De La Mer
290. Bamboozled
291. The Go-Between
292. La Collectionneuse
293. Samurai Rebellion
294. The Chase
295. The Flowers Of St Francis (March 14th)
296. Ma Nuit Chez Maude
297. Doubt
298. King Kong (1933)
299. Stromboli
300. Promising Young Woman
301. Safety Last!
302. Always Sometimes Rarely Never
303. Les Enfants Terribles
304. Saute Ma Ville
305. The Sound Of Metal
306. Love In The Afternoon
307. Christmas In July
308. Another Round
309. Ida
310. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
311. The American Friend
312. The Green Ray
313. Magnet Of Doom (March 21st)
314. Paris Belongs To Us
315. Europa 51
316. Locke
317. Le beau Serge
318. Les Cousins
319. The Idle Class
320. Lola (Demy)
321. Autumn Sonata
322. The Private Life Of Henry The Eighth
323. Grey Gardens
324. Shame (Bergman)
325. Mon Oncle D’Amerique
326. Victim
327. Mad Max Fury Road
328. Life And Nothing But
329. Le Coup Du Berger
330. The Bitter Tears Of Petra Von Kant
331. Charlotte Et Son Jules
332. We Need To Talk About Kevin
333. The Beaches of Agnes (March 28th)
334. Tokyo-Ga
335. L’Amore
336. 24 Hours In The Life Of A Clown
337. Mamma Roma
338. Junkopia
339. La Ricotta
340. Lacombe, Lucien
341. The Father
342. Mur Murs
343. They Live By Night
344. California Split
345. The World Of Gilbert And George
346. Duck Soup
347. La haine
348. White Tiger
349. A New Leaf
350. The Mission (April 2nd)
351. Tampopo
352. McCabe And Mrs Miller
353. Caught
354. The Firemen’s Ball
355. Days Of Wine And Roses
356. Man Push Cart
357. 35 Shots Of Rum
358. Le chant du styrene
359. Sunday In Peking
360. Grand Illusion
361. The Loves Of A Blonde
362. Man On The Moon (April 12th)
363. Gregory’s Girl
364. Les Enfants Du Paradis
365. One Night In Miami
366. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage
367. Sacrilege
368. This Sporting Life
369. Where Is The Friend’s Home?
370. Nanook Of The North
371. Life Goes On
372. Bottle Rocket
373. Through The Olive Trees
374. Overlord
375. Cast A Dark Shadow
376. An Education
377. Detour
378. The Mattei Affair
379. Town Bloody Hall
380. The Big Short
381. Brute Force
382. Dark Days
383. Accident
384. In The Mood For Love
385. Tom Jones
386. Black Peter (April 19th)
387. Sunset Song
388. Gilda
389. His Girl Friday
390. The Thin Blue Line
391. Nadja In Paris
392. Eraserhead
393. A Nos Amours
394. Claire’s Knee
395. Kapo
396. The Bakery Girl Of Monceau
397. Bad Timing
398. Suzanne’s Career
399. Police Story
400. Losing Ground
401. Mikey And Nicky
402. Sons Of The Desert
403. 48 Hrs
404. And God Created Woman
405. The Naked City
406. The Fall
407. Bob Le Flambeur
408. Morocco (April 25th)
409. Tunes Of Glory
410. One False Move
411. Wooden Crosses
412. Le Samourai
413. Ghost Dog: Way Of The Samurai
414. Weekend
415. My Brilliant Career
416. Harlan County USA
417. Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
418. Salut Les Cubains
419. La Chambre
420. The Third Man
421. A Clockwork Orange
422. Secrets And Lies
423. The Last Detail
424. Kajillionaire
425. Day Of Freedom
426. House Of Games
427. Minnie and Moskowitz
428. The Last Movie
429. Roman Holiday (May 2nd)
430. The Wild Bunch
431. On Dangerous Ground
432. Irma Vep
433. The Great McGinty
434. Shane
435. Phantom India Part 1
436. Patton
437. L’enfance nue
438. L’amour existe
439. Doodlebug
440. Murmur Of The Heart
441. Palm Beach Story
442. Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
443. Gloria
444. The Reflecting Skin
445. Buena Vista Social Club
446. Bay Of Angels
447. The Hustler
448. Horse Feathers
449. Remember The Night (delightful Christmas movie)
450. Synonymes
451. White Rock
452. Weekends (May 9th)
453. The Stranger
454. Girlfriends
455. Le Trou
456. George Washington
457. Ars
458. La Luxure
459. The Lady Eve
460. Pixote
461. The Taking Of Power By Louis 14th
462. Le Havre (May 16th)
463. Burn
464. Revanche
465. The Miracle Of Morgan’s Creek
466. How Green Was My Valley
467. Donkey Skin
468. The Gambler
469. The Warriors
470. Bad Trip (May 23rd)
471. Adam’s Rib
472. The Human Condition
473. Le Amiche
474. La Gente Del Po
475. Le Deuxieme Souffle
476. To Sleep With Anger
477. Daguerrotypes
478. Judex
479. The Last Emperor
480. Chocolat (Denis) (May 30th)
481. Blood of the Beasts
482. Tucker: The Man And His Dream
483. The Kid With A Bike
484. Sansho The Bailiff (again)
485. L’Enfant
486. Le Grand Melies
487. La Promesse
488. Mr And Mrs. Smith (Hitchcock)
489. 2 Days And 1 Night
490. Incoherence
491. Rosetta
492. Young Ahmed
493. Lorna’s Silence
494. Moonstruck
495. Aguirre Wrath of God
496. Fitzcarraldo
497. Last Year At Marienbad
498. Fantastic Planet
499. The Cranes Are Flying
500. Ikiru
501. Kill List (June 6th)
502. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
503. Safe
504. A Week’s Vacation
505. The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit
506. Hard Eight
507. Images
508. Deep Blue Sea (2011)
509. Ran
510. Along For The Ride
511. The Class
512. Gimme Shelter (June 13th)
513. Diabolique
514. Under Satan’s Sun
515. Panique
516. Henry 5th (Olivier)
517. The Aviator
518. Orphée
519. Hunger
520. Sea Countrymen
521. Rush
522. Carnival of Souls (20th June)
523. Jacquot De Nantes
524. India Matri Bhumi
525. The Tree Of Wooden Clogs
526. Crossfire
527. Cameraperson
528. Cruising
529. Miss Julie
530. Bird
531. Animal Crackers
532. The Long Good Friday
533. Il Posto
534. I Fidanzati
535. Il Sorpasso
536. Golden Parable
537. La Cotta (27th June)
538. Late Chrysanthemums
539. Moonrise
540. Topsy Turvy
541. Spartacus
542. My Dinner With André
543. Swimmer
544. Born Yesterday
545. Bad Day At Black Rock
546. No Sudden Move
547. The Blue Angel
548. The Leopard (4th July)
549. Drugstore Cowboy
550. Mona Lisa
551. Andrei Tarkovsky: A Cinema Prayer
552. La Ceremonie
553. The Blue Dahlia
554. Scarface (1932) (11th July)
555. Cold Water
556. A Running Jump
557. The Set-Up
558. Drums Along The Mohawk
559. Hoop Dreams
560. The Children Are Watching Us
561. The Primary
562. The Young Girls of Rochefort
563. Confidential Report
564. Fat Girl
565. Lenny Cooke
566. Women Of The Night
567. Clouds of Sils Maria
568. The Trial Of Joan Of Arc (Bresson)
569. Following (18th July)
570. Day Of The Fight
571. L’Assassin Habite Au 21
572. High Fidelity
573. Limelight
574. La Ronde
575. Kuroneko
576. The Ruling Class
577. The Steel Helmet (25th July)
578. Minari
579. Dis-Moi
580. A Story Of Children And Film
581. Knock On Any Door
582. One Sings The Other Doesn’t
583. White Material
584. The Life Of Brian
585. The Other Side Of Hope
586. Toni
587. The Steamroller And The Violin
588. Au Revoir Les Enfants
589. Clockwatchers
590. Salesman
591. Tout Va Bien
592. Anatomy Of A Murder
593. La Chienne
594. It Should Happen To You
595. Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love (August 1st)
596. The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
597. Kings Of Pastry
598. The Dead
599. Richard The Third
600. Vertigo
601. Bicycle Thieves
602. The African Queen
603. Bells Are Ringing (August 8th)
604. Lord Of The Flies (1963)
605. Black Narcissus
606. The White Sheik (August 15th)
607. That Obscure Object Of Desire
608. Night Moves
609. Slacker
610. Tristana
611. Diary Of A Chambermaid
612. Simon Of The Desert
613. This Is Spinal Tap
614. Death In The Garden
615. The Asphalt Jungle
616. The Phantom Of Liberty (August 22nd)
617. The man Who Would Be King
618. Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
619. Knife In The Water

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