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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.

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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

The National Jukebox of America.

Nyan Cat’s cousin.

Ancient Earth globe.

The ultimate shitposting site.

Cool and fancy fonts to copy and paste.

Chemical Brothers video:

Rich people love huge crystals.

Most Buddhist art is Greek.

Turn images into posters of any size.

Saddam Hussein anonymously published a romance novel… in 2000.

Why is Bicycle Thieves so great?

It feels like the last five years have given us a constant stream of binary opinion. From Leave/Remain in the UK to Trump/No Trump in the US to Masks Are An Evil Infringement on Freedom/Masks Save Lives Everywhere, the division of complicated issues into right/wrong, good/bad and them/us appears to be the order of the day.

But even within supposed two-horse situations, there are often many other horses involved. Take the 2019 UK General Election, in which the Conservatives beat Labour in a landslide. If you read the media coverage you might have missed the fact that 3,500,000 people voted Lib Dem, and 850,000 voted Green. And that doesn’t even take into account the many shades of difference within the two big parties: Brexiteer Conservatives, Fiscal Conservatives, ‘I Hate Corbyn’ Conservatives, All Of The Above Conservatives etc.

It’s the same with the Republicans in the US. They may seem like one homogenous mass of dumb, uncaring racists, but they are made up of all sorts of groups: Qanon nutjobs, law-and-order Miami Cubans, Christian Conservatives who are just taking the shortest path to the outlawing of abortion, Moderates who want lower taxes, a smaller homogenous mass of dumb, uncaring racists etc.

And look at the many and varied reason people have for giving the vaccine a swerve.

You might also have heard about issues such as ‘Cancel Culture’, where defenders of ‘free speech’ suggest that it’s bad and wrong to demonise people for their incendiary opinions. But if you scratch beneath the surface you’ll soon find that every one of them has something they too wish to ‘cancel’.

For example, here in America a TV host called Bill Maher continually goes on about how corrosive Cancel Culture is:

But he also goes on about hating many of the ‘oppressive’ elements of the Islamic faith, suggesting that they should be… um… canceled. Maybe, like him, you think that these are two different things, and that demanding that women wear burkas or banning homosexuality is a false equivalency when compared to Kevin Hart losing his Oscar hosting gig for being homophobic a decade earlier. But here’s the problem: plenty of Muslims would disagree with you, and that’s because there is no right or wrong here; only opinions. The problem is those opinions are often presented as hard fact, with a dash of straw man nonsense and some pejorative terms such as ‘woke mob’ (by the way, a Twitter user recently accused me of being ‘woke’ because I suggested Margaret Thatcher sometimes did her job in a way that not exactly compassionate. Subjectivity, eh?). I think Bill would be considered to be part of some kind of woke mob if he expressed his opinions in Saudi Arabia. And then he’d probably be murdered. Cancel culture indeed…

I get it. Bill is a comedian who exaggerates to make jokes, but he also uses double standards: he later concedes that people shouldn’t hold a ‘dress up like we’re in the Old South’ party. Is that cancellation? Political correctness gone mad? Where do you draw the line? How do you know? So I suppose he agrees with Cancel Culture, except when he doesn’t… The problems of binary expression.

Have a look at 2:30 in the above video. Bill takes a statistic that ‘80% believe political correctness is a problem’ (quite a vague assertion) and exaggerates it by listing demographics that cover everyone in America and saying they ‘all hate the current atmosphere of hypersensitivity’. Then he asserts that ‘everybody’ hates it, so it becomes even blacker and whiter, and less accurate, but at least it supports his point a bit more forcefully.

So cancel culture is complicated. It’s subjective. It’s contextual. Pretty much everyone wants to cancel something, but the idea of cancelling cancel culture is clearly the most ironic of ironies.

Which brings me to the current hand-wringing over purpose-based advertising. Again, this is a complicated subject that is often spoken about in binary terms. It seems that for many on my Linkedin and Twitter feeds, we as an entire industry are woke idiots who are promoting baseless social justice initiatives instead of getting down to the proper business of selling stuff. There is in fact an entire book out there called ‘Can’t Sell, Won’t Sell‘ whose subtitle is ‘Why adland has stopped selling and started saving the world’. Having read the whole thing I can tell you that it contains some interesting points, but even with a book with that definitive a title, the author mentions several instances of purpose-based advertising being a good thing. So why write a misleadingly binary title, subtitle and Amazon blurb paragraph for a non-binary book?

Has adland really stopped selling? Obviously not. The amount of purpose-based work is dwarfed by that which explicitly tries to sell stuff, but if you are of a mind to decry any purpose-based work, then you can certainly find many examples to back that opinion up. However, an overall assertion that this is advertising’s biggest difficulty deflects attention from larger, more problematic issues (eg: malignant data scraping, the massive talent and money drain to tech, the reduction of fees due to the rise of procurement departments etc.).

But here we are with the binary nature of 2021 language. Purpose bad, selling good, as if they can’t co-exist in any way, except when they do, very successfully (see Nike’s recent Cannes Effectiveness Grand Prix-winning Colin Kaepernick work; or Microsoft’s Gold Effie winner, Changing The Game; or Aeromexico’s Gold Effie-winning DNA Discounts campaign). Sure, many purpose attempts are more Kendall-Jenner-Pepsi than Kaepernick-Nike, but there are lots of crappy, poorly considered non-purpose ads out there, too, and the vast majority of them will get nowhere near a Gold Effie. Perhaps ‘purpose’ is simply another advertising genre, like ‘humour’ or ‘celebrity’, and like those it is done both well and badly, suggesting another situation full of shades of grey.

Additionally we are now in a similar set of circumstances regarding ‘diversity’ (my inverted commas are there to denote the subjective nature of defining that word in 2021) where middle-aged white people are winning discrimination cases. That’s a direct result of people speaking in black-and whie terms about complex issues. If you, as a female ECD, say you want to ‘obliterate’ your agency’s reputation for being full of white, privileged straight men, you might just leave your agency open to charges of gender-based discrimination (I must add here that Jo Wallace, who said that, seems like a decent, intelligent person who has been treated dreadfully by the gutter press).

It’s not a binary issue of ‘obliterating’ a certain demographic to favour others. It’s a very nuanced problem that takes in systemic discrimination, meritocracy, conscious and subconscious gender biases and several other deep, complex topics, each of which could justify an entire post-grad thesis. But this was not a case of oldish white man bad, everyone else good, and I’m pretty certain that’s not what Jo meant to suggest, but here we are in binary world where a complicated issue has left egg on a great many unfortunate faces, and caused massive damage to the very situation it sought to help. Who will now be brave enough to sack an oldish white guy? How much more likely is it that a sacked oldish white guy will take that sacking to a tribunal? What is intrinsically wrong with oldish white guys? (Full disclosure: I am an oldish white guy.)

I know we’ve reached this situation because of the way social media discourse works, with incendiary, attention-grabbing statements leading to clicks and sales, but if we don’t employ critical thinking and nuance in all areas, we might find ourselves shutting off potential avenues of success, or useful and necessary arguments, while heading off in the direction of some pointless fool’s gold.

The black and the white is where the easy shit lies. But it’s also where the bullshit lies. If you find yourself making a massive generalisation you’ll probably find yourself missing out a big chunk of truth. The title ‘Sometimes Sell, Sometimes Don’t Sell: Why adland occasionally uses purpose to great effect, but sometimes kind of fucks it up’ … Hang on, I was about to say that it wouldn’t be as good, but that’s actually a much better title, although it would have to be for a different book. Anyway, there’s no need to be definitive when reality is nothing of the sort. Sure, human beings like certainty and closure, but playing to that need betrays the opportunity to make the kind of difference that happens when you engage with what is actually the case, rather than the superficial headline version of things.

Sure, it requires more work and less simplistic thinking, but what are we saying? ‘Drain the swamp’ or ‘Let’s take a look at corruption in politics and see how we can reduce it’? ‘Lock her up’ or ‘Has this person acted in a way that contravenes any laws? If so, what should be done about it?’? ‘Get Brexit Done’ or ‘We should examine the ways in which leaving the EU might affect most of the people of Britain, then act in the best interests of the majority’?

Yes, the cheap sloganeering is easy to remember, and has incited many people to both support and action, but to what final result? ‘Move Fast And Break Things’ sounds great until you ask what might be broken and discover the answer is Western Democracy.

The simplicity of black and white is so tempting, but life tends to exist within the grey, and we ignore that at our peril.

There’s a lot of chat about AI copywriting at the moment. Companies such as this one have been offering some form of machine-generated advertising writing for a while now, and are understandably getting better at it.

Equally understandably, copywriters have been up in arms about this. How could a machine/robot create something as artistically pure as a combination of words that informs people that frozen chickens are available for 20% off at Sainsbury’s?

I jest, but I kind of don’t. There’s a reason why someone thought a computer could come up with copywriting and it might be a little hard to swallow: most copywriting is not very good, and it’s also not very difficult. When you see the post copy on a Facebook ad for cheap wine, or the headlines on most posters, or you listen to most radio ads you probably think, ‘What a load of rubbish. I bet a crappily-programmed robot could do better’. Well, you weren’t the only one.

I get that there are many other elements to the job that AI might still find difficult/impossible. These include thinking up a concept (although most ads don’t seem to bother with them), taking feedback and reworking ads to a client’s satisfaction (I think this one will save all our careers. Clients are not usually good at this, but they are also not usually happy with the first ten versions they are offered), and coming up with something original that no one was expecting (also becoming vanishingly rare). But when it comes to some basic-bitch copywriting, they are as good as at least some of us.

And here’s how that happened: our predecessors wrote a lot of shitty ads, then many of us did the same.

So they/we made the job look easy, and that’s what made other people think they could program a computer to do it. Yes, I know they’re getting AI to do some very difficult jobs these days, but the artier ones, the ones that involve excellent creativity, are the hardest to replicate. Rubbish creativity, on the other hand: piece of piss.

This isn’t the first time we’ve shot ourselves in the foot by making the job look easy. Back in the early 2000s there was a fashion for finding a good short film by an unknown director, slapping a logo on the end and entering it into advertising awards. Here’s an example:

Spot the difference (good luck).

This was then followed by several years of doing the same thing with interesting YouTube clips. For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4

Although the above are both very good ads, and every artist borrows from somewhere, this straight lifting of other people’s work made the job look very easy. Why pay lots of money for an ad agency when an enterprising 15-year-old searching YouTube could produce the same result?

Is it a coincidence that ad agencies are paid much less than they used to be? I don’t think so. Although several factors have contributed to this situation, I think you could make a good case that devaluing our creative currency has been one of the biggest. Making great ads used to be a mysterious process, only managed by a select few. Now it looks much easier, and therefore worth much less.

A third process has contracted things still further: digital and social media is cheap, quick, disposable and done very well by kids and idiots (and both). So it was partly we who made this part of adland look easier, and partly others, but check out the average corporate social media feed and ask yourself honestly: does that look so difficult that it should be expensive or time consuming?

Nah.

We’ve gone from great creatives (sometimes) writing and art directing ads in such a way that it looked very difficult, to crap that looks (and often is) cheap and easy. And when we did that we let crappier practitioners seem perfectly capable of doing it to a professional level: computers and kids. Who needs excellent, experienced humans when the opposite can give you 80% of the quality at 30% of the price?

We unwittingly made our own bed, and now we must lie in it.