When times go bad, when times go rough, won’t you lay me down in tall grass and let me do the weekend?

Famous album covers with Star Wars characters.

Literal video of Total Eclipse of the Heart (thanks, W):

RIP Gene Wilder:

All of Christopher Walken’s dancing:

https://vimeo.com/90407771

15 music videos filmed in one take (thanks, Y).

Ghetto hikes (thanks, A).

The 25 best unscripted scenes in movies:

Girlfriends describe their boyfriends’ penises to a police sketch artist:



That new Spike Jonze perfume ad

Anonymous writes:

Hi Ben,

I was just wondering what you thought of this ad directed by Spike Jonze 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABz2m0olmPg
Sorry it’s completely unrelated to your post, I was just wondering what your thoughts were on perfume advertising, it seems a different world to the work most agencies do. They either seen completely random or metaphors. I don’t quite understand how an agency presents a perfume ad back to their client.

Thanks, Anonymous.

I think it’s delightful, but I get your point. When I showed it to my kids yesterday they asked what it was for and when I told them they thought it was bullshit. Then again, most perfume ads are ‘bullshit’: you can’t convey the scent so you just have to convey some sort of vibe that will make it seem cool or at least worth trying next time you’re in Selfridges or an airport. Clearly this spot, which is currently clogging up all my social media feeds, is doing a great job of that. Who knew or cared about Kenzo two days ago? Nobody. And now? All of us. Will I buy some? Nah, but this might be the opening move in a situation where I grow to like the brand enough to buy into it. Or maybe not. Either way, it’s a big step in the right direction.

Also, most ads these days are metaphors, so no problem there.



What you want and what you need

When I’m at home with my ten-year-old son we sometimes watch a movie. He’s now old enough to watch most 15-rated films, particularly those from the 80s, when 15s were apparently more innocent. So I look through the choices on Hulu, Netflix, HBO and iTunes and try to find him something that he’ll like but isn’t just a load of old kiddie crap.

And it’s hard work. This is because he likes what he already knows: cartoons, space, pirates, dinosaurs, CGI etc. So when I try to broaden his horizons I come up against cynical resistance. But there are of course many, many films he doesn’t like the look of but will enjoy immensely if he gave them a chance. (Only last week it took half an hour of diplomatic-level persuasion to get him to try The Matrix, which he loved.)

As frustrating as this can be, it’s also frustratingly familiar: whether we’re ten or eighty, we all tend to consume that which falls within our comfort zone. As adults we have tried many kinds of food, books, music, holidays, clothes etc. and we now know what we like, so we attempt to experience more of those things, ignoring the rest.

This also seems to be the basis of the algorithms that quietly shape our online worlds. Whether from Google, Pandora, Facebook or whoever serves up your news, the overriding principle seems to be ‘here’s more of what you already like’, and that makes sense makes sense; after all, if you were a Brexiteer you’d hardly want to be fed a steady diet of Remain articles. And if you happened to enjoy Neil Young it’s unlikely you’d want a musical stream solely devoted to Whigfield. A regular at Heston Blumenthal? You’re unlikely to be interested in McDonald’s discounts.

But…

Where do you draw the line? Just like my son, people benefit from being exposed to influences beyond their usual menu. Sticking only to the familiar leads to a small and dreary life. And how did you find that comfort zone in the first place? By trying things you didn’t know you were going to like.

Social media appears to be creating an ever-shrinking feedback loop where you think your news is the news and the opinions of your friends the opinions of everyone. Where are those who disagree with you? Where is the music that doesn’t quite fit with your playlist? Where are the restaurants that might not hit the bullseye first time but could grow on you? Hiding in someone else’s algorithm, I’m afraid.

Yes, I understand that you have developed a ‘taste’ over the years, a set of experiences you’re more likely to enjoy, but you also need the other stuff. You need to see what else is out there, just in case it’s waiting to become your new favourite.

Do the current algorithms take that into account? Not in my experience. It’s becoming harder and harder to look through the other windows because they’re becoming increasingly invisible. And where will that end? Smaller and smaller bubbles and more and more separation from each other.

Ironically that’s neither what I want nor what I need.



Well, my friends are gone and my hair is grey. I ache in the places where I used to play. And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on. I’m just paying my rent every day in the weekend.

Movie plots explained by Trump (thanks, D).

All the insults in Whiplash:

The 57 most influential album covers (thanks, T).

Fantastic post about the business of screenwriting.

Best visual effects Oscar winners supercut:



Apparently we’re all storytellers, and that’s a tougher job than many people think.

I just read an excellent article that suggested everything is fiction:

“And I mean that—everything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.”

So we all go through the same trials and tribulations as any professional writer, but as it’s a kind of second nature we’re generally unaware that we’re doing it. Perhaps it’s worth having a look at a few of the limitations a writer experiences that also find their way into all our abilities to tell stories:

When most of us tell stories it’s often spontaneous. We don’t rehearse them or write several drafts before giving them to people. So what does that do? It means we have to find the best word/sentence/image/analogy our brains are able to come up with at that time. Does this lend itself to accuracy or the kind of evocation that reflects the essence of the story? Probably not, but once you are called upon to tell the story you suddenly have the writer’s worst nightmare…the deadline. This is especially important when you are called upon to tell a story that you don’t want to tell; the kind of situation that forces you, with very little notice, to make up a lie. That’s an even more demanding form of fiction that leaves you researching and creating simultaneously, as well as attempting a delivery that does not betray your mendacity. Thank god we get loads of practice at it as kids.

Tonality is a huge factor: do you convey a story in a duller way because that’s how it really was, or do you embellish it to make one person sound snickier/braver/louder/funnier/ruder? Is the important thing the story or the truth? I once had a colleague who used to tell stories with a great deal of drama, particularly when he was conveying the way another person spoke. This left me with the impression that this was an interesting person who often found himself in all manner of crazy situations, where the people around him reacted as if every little thing was of major significance. Then I started working more closely with him, leaving me able to compare the ‘real’ situation with his telling thereof. You may be unsurprised to discover that there was quite a large discrepancy between the two that often left us in quite different circumstances. But let’s be honest: we’ve all ‘massaged’ what really happened so that we might influence an outcome or appear in a more positive light. The real question is: how can we possibly know when that’s happening to us? All fiction writers are limited in their ability to convey tone, leaving the words on a page as an approximation of what is in their heads.

The audience has a significant effect. Few people speak to their boss in the same way they speak to their kids. Instead we pare and shape the facts and tone until they work in the way we think we intend. How does that affect the truth? Ask a newspaper or CNN. Every fiction writer has an intended outcome, which can only work if they bear in mind the way the words will land. If you want to scare someone or inspire them you will use the same story in different ways, again, without even thinking how you’re doing it.

Sometimes you don’t have the vocabulary because it doesn’t exist (I’ve written before about the way we use the word ’emotional’ to mean something we don’t really have a word for. And although I can’t find the link, I’ve also mentioned how strange it is that we have a word for what bukkake is, but not for that thing you do when you put your hands out, palms up, to protest your innocence). We also misuse words (eg: ‘literally’; ‘infer’) until they lose their original meaning and we collectively concede that we’re just going to use the new meaning, leaving us with no word for the old meaning. Or we use words that have a million different, often subjective, meanings (‘eg: ‘wrong’; ‘good’, ‘cool’) as if they have just one, and we all know what it is.

I mention the above because people seem to be increasingly inclined to describe advertising creatives as ‘storytellers’ without really considering what that means. If a car has a slightly boring story about the efficiency of its airbags we’re generally inclined to embellish that story in order that we might elicit a desired outcome (eg: people buying the car). But like all human beings we’re usually inclined to bend things in our favour, even if that does unspeakable things to the truth.

So sure: be a storyteller, but be aware of all the little tricks you’re employing to tell that story, and be aware of what that means.



When the party was nice, the party was bumpin’ [Hey, Yippie, Yi, Yo]. And everybody havin’ a ball [Hah, ho, Yippie Yi Yo]. I tell the fellas, start the weekend.

Mechanics pay homage to renaissance art (thanks, D).

Just so you have it to hand, the best moment in all of GoT:

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

Amusing truths.

Terrible taxidermy (thanks, R).

Great Olympic commentary (thanks, S):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gPjMvTmE2g

Robert Plant’s testimony in the Stairway to Heaven trial (thanks, T).

The hidden stuff in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Radiohead video (thanks, J):

Keep on walking (thanks, K):



Value added everything

When I buy a T-shirt I can’t help thinking about what makes one worth more than another, and by how much. Once you get past the quality of the material everything simply becomes subjective. Is a T-shirt with three wolves howling at the moon better than a T-shirt with a paisley pocket, or an ironic picture of Burt Reynolds? If you say so, and if you’re willing to pay for it. But you can spend $10 on a T-shirt or you can spend $550; both will do the basic job of a T-shirt (warmth, covering nudity) as well as each other. After that you’re going to pay for the extent to which you like the design and/or the label.

Screen Shot 2016-08-04 at 12.34.08

 

Screen Shot 2016-08-04 at 12.35.51

One of these is 'worth' $516, the other $20.99.

I remember when people used to talk about BMWs, saying, ‘you’re really just paying for the badge’. But what is that badge worth, and why? Since VW started making Skodas they have become essentially the same car, but some people wouldn’t be seen dead in one and yet would love to drive the other. That’s the power of the badge and it comes from many years of VW marketing, advertising, customer satisfaction, word of mouth, driver experience and hundreds of other tiny little events that have nudged our collective opinion in the direction of good/cool/reliable. The same happened in the other direction with Skoda: every joke you were told in the playground, every shitty-looking one you saw on the road, every newspaper article you read in the old days about how crap they were informed your judgement that the cars were poor and only an idiot would be seen driving one. (Of course, the excellent Fallon advertising of the early 2000s helped to mitigate this effect, but a degree of the original impression continues to linger.)

So that’s the branding argument, but it can be extended into other areas. For example, a book is a collection of pieces of paper that increases in value when words are added. And yet for some people that value fails to materialise. After all, if you don’t want to read a John Patterson book or the latest A.S. Byatt those words are rendered worthless. Someone has made an attempt to add value, but again, that value is entirely subjective and entirely fabricated by human influence.

When you look around at the things in your life you can see this effect everywhere: wine is just fermented grape juice. Is a 1982 Lafite worth more than a 2015 Gallo Zinfandel? Depends on who you ask. Most people don’t know or care, but some have had their opinions shifted sufficiently to believe one is worth thousands of pounds more than the other. What about art? Some people consider this to be a load of crap, fit only for tea towels and postcards:

Vettriano,_Singing_Butler

But then someone paid £744,800 for it after it had sold for £1800 twelve years earlier. Did the picture change? Did it get better? No. Some human beings said and wrote some stuff about it and some smears of pain on a canvas increased in value by 3/4 of a million quid.

That’s essentially what we do in advertising. Some products are obviously more expensive to produce, but are they ‘better’? Are they worth more? Who knows? But what we tend to do is become a very significant part of the process that tries to make some things worth more than other similar things.

So that’s all well and good, but it does make me wonder where all this invisible, somewhat bullshitty, fabricated value ends up, and what the consequences are.

UPDATE: here’s a little book review from The Economist on the same subject.



The weather started getting rough, the tiny ship was tossed. If not for the courage of the fearless crew, the minnow would be lost, the minnow would be the weekend.

Charming graffiti (thanks, C).

Milton Glaser rates all the Olympic logos (thanks, A).

People take drugs and try to make Ikea furniture. It’s Hikea! (Thanks, P):

Malcolm Tucker quotes as Winnie The Pooh comics.

100 great movie lines in 200 seconds:

Incredible balloon animals (thanks, A).

Hey Riggs!:



Kevin the teenager

You might have heard of the recent kerfuffle surrounding Kevin Roberts, the now-former Saatchi and Saatchi Chairman and ‘head coach’.

sidsexist

Kevin, a couple of weeks ago.

He said, “Edward de Bono once told me there is no point in being brilliant at the wrong thing — the fucking debate is all over. This is a diverse world, we are in a world where we need, like we’ve never needed before, integration, collaboration, connectivity, and creativity … this will be reflected in the way the Groupe is.”

I have to say that I love the lack of self-awareness. Edward de Bono once told Kev there’s no point being brilliant at the wrong thing, so he went ahead and showed his brilliance at sexism, messing up interviews and alienating his workforce. Not sure those were the right things.

Anyway, here’s his apology (Kev’s bits in bold):

“Fail Fast, Fix Fast, Learn Fast” is a leadership maxim I advocate.

Along with ‘get yer tits out for the lads’, I assume. Not sure why we should give a toss about the leadership maxims Kev advocates.

When discussing with Business Insider evolving career priorities and new ways of work/life integration, I failed exceptionally fast.

Yep. Those parts of the interview definitely passed most of us by.

My miscommunication on a number of points has caused upset and offense, and for this I am sorry.

I fucking hate non-apologies disguised as apologies. Apparently it was his ‘miscommunication’ that caused ‘upset and offense’, not his sexism, arrogance or pathetic, outdated attitudes towards women. So he made a little error? He meant to support women/diversity etc. and is so crashingly thick that he ended up expressing opinions that were the opposite of the ones he truly held? Not a ringing self-endorsement for the chairman of a massive global corporation. And maybe he’s just sorry for the ‘upset and offense’ he caused. That’s the real hallmark of the non-apology. He’s not sorry for his opinions, he’s sorry that some of us were upset about them. You see, it’s kind of our fault. Especially the ladies, who are probably still dancing around Kevin’s imagination in some weird little 1980s cocktail party where they all want to listen to his bons mots before giving him a most lavish and grateful humping.

I have inadvertently embarrassed Saatchi & Saatchi and Publicis Groupe, two companies I love and have been devoted to for almost 20 years.

I have expressed my regret and apology to the companies for the furor my remarks and language stimulated, and I extend this to colleagues, staff and clients.

Again, he’s sorry for the ‘furor’, not the words or the sentiments they expressed. And originally he only said sorry to the companies (what did he do? Walk up to the headquarters and bellow an apology into the bricks and mortar? Maybe he cried over some headed notepaper), but he’s now graciously extended this to ‘colleagues, staff and clients’. The rest of us can apparently go and whistle, but then the furor was kind of our fault, so why would he apologise to us for something we did?

So that we can all move forward, I am bringing forward my May 1, 2017, retirement from the company, and will leave the Groupe on September 1, 2016.

He’s doing that so ‘we’ (not sure who the ‘we’ refers to) can move forward. Unlike his views, which are stuck in 1957. So he wasn’t fired, he didn’t resign, he just brought his retirement forward by a few months. What a sacrifice. I wonder if he’ll be declining his inevitable financial compensation. Pardon me if I doubt it.

There is a lot of learning to reflect on, and within the thousands of tweets, comments and articles there are many powerful and passionate contributions on the changing nature of the workplace, the work we do, what success really looks like, and what companies must do to provide women and men the optimal frameworks in which to flourish.

I believe that new thinking, frameworks and measures are needed to make more rapid progress on diversity in all its forms, in all professions and occupations. Hopefully, the focus on this serious and complex issue will gather momentum.

He can say that again, with much of the new thinking hopefully occurring between his ears.

So thanks for that, Kev. Despite the revelation that there used to be a bit of a twat at the top of one of advertising’s largest companies, I’m glad the response to this gaffe has led to a greater focus on the diversity issue (including a priceless offer from Cindy Gallop to help Saatchis learn about gender diversity for the same salary Kev was on). Every cloud…



Just close your eyes and then remember the thoughts you’ve locked away. When tomorrow comes you’ll wish You had the weekend.

Blow your mind (further explanation):

All about the great Barry Lyndon.

Fucking massive wave pool crammed with people in China (thanks, C):

Blatant cocaine paraphernalia ads of the 1970s (thanks, T).

Sorkinisms Supercut:

Taxi Driver is 40.

Two brilliant moments in editing:

Shazam for fonts (thanks, R).

Crazy/interesting historical photos.

And let’s take another look at TrumpDonald.org (thanks, C).

And here’s Calvin and Hobbes x Trump (thanks, G).