If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

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):

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.

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:

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.

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!:

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

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…

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).

Enjoy this one-take funny/sad short (thanks, K):

How to clean up graffiti.

Did Wes Anderson design North Korea? (Thanks, J.)

Bruce Lee Jnr:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vQ1QwCkQvg

This is quite fun:

Dude dancing in car (thanks, T):

Headfucking paradoxes (thanks, K).

Great shots of English cities in the 70s (thanks, T).

An oral history of Stand By Me.

The budget for your creative endeavour is always an interesting chicken-and-egg situation: do you write something in the knowledge it probably can’t be filmed, then hope, or do you compromise your idea to ensure it fits within the available budget? Oh, and in most situations it’s pretty much impossible to know exactly what the budget is or what it will make available. Go!

Throughout my advertising career I’ve either been given a sketchy neighbourhood idea of the budget or no idea at all, and in some ways that’s how it should be: I don’t know what a cherry picker costs vs a helicopter; nor do I know in advance the price of that that critical music track. My job involved coming up with the best possible idea then working with the production department to make it happen in the best way possible.

But if I come up with, say, an idea about waves made of white horses for my Guinness brief, should I be aware that such a thing would be impossible to shoot without £1m, or should I just think up what’s best and go from there? If the client then turns round and says I’ve got £150k, what am I supposed to do? The two options would be either to trash the idea or to work out how to make it for less (animation, for example). But even then, what would I know about the limits of those two options? The Guinness example is a good one because this question came up after the shoot. The waves had been shot and looked so majestic that the CEO of the agency agreed with the client that the extra £250k it would cost to add the horses was now unnecessary as they already had a spectacular ad on their hands for much less than expected. On hearing this the creatives said they’d resign if the horses were not added and the rest is advertising history. Was it worth spending the extra money? Clearly. Was that 100% obvious to everyone before the money was spent? Clearly not. So the point at which creative vision hits financial reality is a big grey area where one side needs to quantify and value something which is impossible to quantify or value, and the other side has to take a leap of faith.

If a producer says I have another £100k, how can I know what that will buy me in terms of the overall quality of the execution? Should that be spent on a great track, or a so-so track and another week of post? This ad is an interesting example of how hard it is to make that decision:

It looks like a million dollars but actually cost much less because the director loved the ideas and wanted to make it work. So the buildings at the beginning are just painting on panes of glass that were shifted around. And they could only afford to film one crash, so they only had a single shot at getting it right (fortunately they did). It wasn’t cheap, but the compromises in budget were mitigated by an increase in creativity and a willingness on the part of the director to make it happen. This may be the point where the favours accrued on previous full-price jobs are called in to allow for more editing time or extra post. The ad makes the people involved look good so things are shifted around to make sure the finished article is not a let-down.

This issue occurred to me because of a conversation I’d heard about how it applies to the digital world. How much does something cost when it’s ‘only’ going to run online? Usually a production budget is worked out to be around 10% of the media spend, so when that media spend is relatively small (online vs proper TV) that proportion becomes unworkable. After all, a motion picture ad is a motion picture ad, whether it’s viewed on a TV, a computer or a phone. And what about the other ideas that live in less conventional media? How much is a Snapchat Story? What about an Alternate Reality Game? A new product that syncs with the car you’re selling? A giant event that takes over a city square? An installation on the side of a skyscraper? An app that depends on a Michael Jackson song? No idea. Does that mean you shouldn’t think of those things? Obviously not; they seem to get made regularly enough. But having some idea of what a budget can afford will presumably be what stops you wasting time planning a five minute underwater shoot helmed by James Cameron when your client is the local caff.

The question is, where do you draw the line? A pound of gumption or creativity can be worth thousands of pounds sterling, but there has to come a point where you discover that your great idea that needs the involvement of Jennifer Lawrence has zero chance of involving Jennifer Lawrence.

Experience helps you understand when you’re getting in over your head, but putting the shackles on your brilliant idea before it’s had a chance to live is never going to result in greatness.

For several years now the ad industry has expressed its jealousy of the John Lewis campaign. initially it simply showered it with awards, then it started to copy it until it was impossible to move for 60-second portions of sentimentality, soundtracked by some soppy git singing an acoustic version of a song you liked until you saw the ad.

The interesting thing about this is the extent which it showed how hard it is to do those things well. If you don’t have a shit-hot creative department and Dougal Wilson to hand it can be very hard for your JL knock-off to rise above 7/10.

However, I kind of hoped we were out the other side of this ‘genre’. Then I saw this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMaV1VBnDr0

It’s so John Lewis it might as well be for John Lewis. Little kid? Check. Sentimental expensive song? Check. 60 seconds+? Check. No dialogue? Check.

Alas, it copies the formula but misses everything that makes a JL ad good:

First off, there’s no story. It’s just a little girl walking through an airport. Where is she going? Where is the story going? She’s getting on a plane (yawn) and the story is going nowhere.

Next, the track. I love David Bowie enormously. I got married to Kooks and I even bought the bloody Tin Machine album, but this is not his best track. It’s boring and limp, kind of like the ad.

There are literally no charming or insightful touches (and I include the anvil-heavy swimming-goggles-as-flying-goggles gagette). Check the shot where two people kiss (50″): no emotion, nothing to engage with, nothing for us to take away. She looks in a shop window, she sprays some perfume, she walks about a bit seeing people of no consequence… I’ve watched it a few times just to check I haven’t missed the hidden meaning behind any of this, but I’m pretty sure that’s it: we’re supposed to share in her wide-eyed amazement at visiting an airport for the first time, but like all visits to airports, nothing much happens.

And a owl? A owl?

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

Slavs squatting in tracksuits (thanks, D).

Utterly brilliant Slightly Wrong Quotes (thanks, T).

Listen to how music taste evolved (thanks, W).

Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris drinking stories:

The Coen Brothers: Green:

One dude’s comprehensive guide to finding your passion.

Dana Carvey quick impressions:

Graphic designer redesigns a movie poster every day (thanks, L).

My favourite medium is the poster. It gives a poor idea nowhere to hide so the good ones have to be exceedingly good. Also, distilling a message down to a few words, or no words, is a real skill and a necessary exercise in the simplification we strive for in every other medium. If it can work as a poster it can probably work elsewhere, but the reverse is not necessarily the case.

So I found this article on the power of the Netflix image fascinating. It’s about the images people choose from to select their programs, but it goes into all the standards that a billboard has to meet: capturing someone’s attention quickly; conveying a lot with a little; the importance of regional nuances; using emotional imagery to elicit an emotional response…

And you might think they have it easy; after all, people are already on Netflix looking for something to watch, and Netflix already knows their browsing history, so it can serve up the kind of things that might be interesting to someone who likes similar stuff. But Netflix exists in a very crowded marketplace (over 400 scripted shows clutter the airwaves and the internet) and must therefore ensure that its offering provides satisfaction on a regular basis. ‘Sure, I enjoyed House of Cards, but what have you done for me lately, Netfl– Oh look! HBO has a great new show!’ Cutting through the clutter is a very real issue.

This is also an interesting junction of data and creativity: they have a bunch of images, test them in real time with a variety of tightly-focused audiences, and put out the ones that work best, something for which they have conclusive proof. Of course, billboards can’t work in the same way, but I’ll bet most advertisers pay nowhere near the same level of attention to the success of each execution they put out.

This leads in to a pet obsession of mine: movie posters – where this Netflix stuff meets regular advertising stuff. Although some think recent posters have started to become homogenised, the ability of studio marketing departments to distil a complex story into a single image (and maybe a few words) is something I admire a great deal. And sure, I imagine that there have been as many complicated and ugly posters as beautiful and iconic ones, but try using a single image to convey 120 minutes of a man trapped on a planet reluctantly growing plants with his own poo:

Journeyman boxer flights the odds inside and outside the ring? Better make it gritty and melancholy. See how the image fades off into the distance? That’s Rocky’s hopes, that is.

Creepy film? Creepy poster, but it’s also intelligent, so we don’t want any slasher bullshit. And make the image massive to draw you into the tiny words. That way the whole thing is even more unsettling.

All of you who have done the old visual collision, bow before perfection:

And when the script is this good, forget all the rules of simple imagery; just chuck it up there for all to read:

When it comes to posters, choose simplicity, choose emotion, choose power.

Choose to look at what movies do and perhaps be inspired.