If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

The Seinfeld composer re-did the theme every week based on Jerry’s stand-up routine:

The story of The Silence of the Lambs.

Hallways in horror films.

Dominos!:

And the same kind of thing, but with matches (thanks, T):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BACQc9f6pGs

Double Indemnity: the greatest Noir.

This guy paints pretty well cnsidering the speed:

I was reading the sublime Ad Contrarian last week, when I came upon this quote:

First, I don’t hate online advertising. I think as it exists today it is annoying, ineffectual, and wasteful. But I think there is a future for it. All that needs to happen is for adtech to go away, and for agencies to start hiring some talented people to do it. I think we’d be surprised that it might light a spark under the moribund agency business.

Agreed, but what really caught my eye was this part:

and for agencies to start hiring some talented people to do it.

That is absolutely essential to the improvement of advertising. Clearly, the more talented people there are to attempt something, the more the quality of that attempt will increase (if those people are properly harnessed; but that’s a separate chat for another day). When creative departments were manned by Salman Rushdie and Alan Parker much of the work was ridiculously good, and even when they slipped off to other creative fields the ad industry was still populated by some shit-hot minds, all pointing in the direction of the country’s brands.

But what attracted them to the idea of spending their working days writing copy and directing art? And, more importantly, do such attractive aspects still exist today?

To answer this question I thought I’d ask a few of the younger people in my agency why they chose to work in advertising. After chatting it over a few times I came to a revelation that I had yet to consider: attraction comes in many forms. You see, I’ve tended to think of people’s decision to work in advertising as quite deliberate; as part of some larger, well thought out plan. But of course that’s often not the case, so what are some of the other reasons people work in the land called ‘ad’?

1. Convenience. A few of my interviewees mentioned the idea of just ‘falling’ into advertising when it proved to be the easiest alternative when there were no longer any places in the course they had really coveted, or they had no idea what to do but their mate seemed to enjoy his job writing ads, so they thought they’d give it a go. So it’s quite attractive when you have no burning career desire but you’d like some cash. Creative advertising needs no formal qualifications, so you can just ‘fall’ into it, at any time, no matter how much you drink or how well you can articulate your hopes and dreams.
2. Salary. Advertising might have to compete against many other creative jobs, but those that might be more attractive as actual jobs can often be maddeningly out of reach, particularly when it comes to getting paid. If you’re willing to put up with placement wages and a lowish starting salary you should be able to cover enough bills to be able to live (just about). But if you want to be an author or work on an epic video game of your own design then you have to wait until someone gives a shit about it before you get paid, and how long can you live on nothing? Of course, when you end up earning a better salary you might feel less inclined to strike out for your ‘dream’ job, but that’s a not exactly the worst problem to have.
3. Flexible hours. Yes, ad agencies are quite keen to squeeze as much labour out of their creatives as possible, which is why they get nicknames like Weekend and Kennedy and GBH. But during those hours you are somewhat left to your own devices, provided you come up with the goods. So if you can crack a brief quickly and keep it to yourself until the deadline then you can do what Salman or Fay Weldon did: write your novel (or these days design your app or whatever). Also, I tended to write best at home, where there were fewer distractions, so if your agency is OK with that you can really just arrange your day in a way that suits you. Some will be easier with that than others, but I feel there is more wiggle room built into the schedule of a copywriter than that of a chartered surveyor.
4. It is a well-worn stepping stone to certain other professions. If you want to be a film director or run a movie studio there are worse places to start than an ad agency. How did Ridley Scott, Andrew Niccol and David Fincher get their starts? They worked in advertising. What about Hugh Grant and Alec Guinness? Or David Puttnam? Yes, they worked in different parts of the industry, but they worked in a job that allowed them to meet many other creative people, many of whom are restlessly seeking the next opportunity.

So the actual job itself may not be exactly what people want to do (although it often is), but the fringe benefits can be very attractive. And even though other, potentially more interesting jobs have been created in the last fifteen years, draining some of the talent away from advertising, they may not have the overall balance of good things that advertising has.

Having said that, with real pay levels falling, the ads getting worse and the hours getting longer, it’s no longer the tempting number it used to be. But then lots of the other jobs have become equally less appealing (just ask any journalist, author, filmmaker or screenwriter). There are now more people searching for an ever-decreasing amount of job satisfaction, and the bosses know that, so they exploit accordingly. Then it just comes down to relativity: so long as advertising can remain more appealing than the competition it will still attract talent. After all, it dragged you in, didn’t it*?

*If you don’t work in advertising feel free to ignore this question.

Every movie would end better to Walk of Life by Dire Straits (thanks, K).

Monty Python’s letter to all the Life of Brian haters (thanks, T).

Bowie’s lost years in LA (thanks, T).

What’s it like to write a successful piece of shit? (Thanks, J.)

Every bomb dropped by the allies in WW2 (thanks, T2; apologies for the Daily Mail link).

Oddly satisfying power wash videos (thanks, J2).

Spike Lee’s 87 essential films (thanks, E).

Odd and dirty Ghostbusters remix (thanks, K):

Can you fold a piece of paper more than seven times?

All of Donald Trump’s lies.

Over the last six months I’ve heard a steady bubbling of excitement about a musical called Hamilton. At this point I should probably come clean as a general loather of musical theatre. My favourite musical movie is South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and I have seen Matilda twice, but overall it’s a genre that leaves me a little chilly.

Anyway, there’s this Hamilton thing, which on paper sounds utterly awful: it’s a hip-hop musical about the life of former Treasury Secretary and founding father of the United States, Alexander Hamilton. I think that description is what kept me from delving deeper, despite hearing that it had become a massive sensation on Broadway.

But as much as I don’t like musicals, I am a big fan of unlikely success stories (see the recent Mad Max reboot, directed by the septuagenarian guy who made the not-particularly-lucrative earlier versions of MM and has spent the time since making crap like Babe and Happy Feet; or Deadpool, which spent several years in development hell, attached to a star who could barely get arrested, before entirely reinventing the superhero movie genre). So this situation interested me because it contains two such stories. The first is Hamilton’s: a man from humble beginnings who ended up making a great contribution to the birth of America. The second is that of the musical’s writer and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda. Sure, he had a pedigree (he created another award-winning musical called In The Heights, which I believe is playing in London), but for one guy to take on this complex musical biography in rap, with actors from various ethnic backgrounds (despite the whiteness of the real characters they are playing) is pretty inspiring. And I think it’s fair to say that the idea just seemed kind of funny to a lot of people, including Barack Obama, who invited Lin-Manuel to the first ever spoken word and poetry evening at the White House in 2009:

And despite the laughs that this concept gets, particularly when the words ‘Alexander Hamilton’ are said, he seemed undeterred in believing that this would work as a deadly serious play. I think others might have felt concerned that this would come across in the way it was intended, but hats off to Mr Miranda: he stuck to his guns and created his vision.

By the way, for some people the success of others can be tempered by the knowledge that the person is question is a bit of an arsehole. Well, in this case you have nothing to fear:

So he took a chance and produced a musical which, unusually, is almost entirely sung-through (very little dialogue). That means that those of you who can’t get to New York and afford the $1100 resale seats can instead buy the album or download it from a streaming site and find out why it won a Grammy and makes a good case for being the best album of last year and a better rap album than last year’s efforts by Kendrick, Dre or Drake, as this Billboard review suggests:

“But digesting every nuance in these mostly rapped renditions of the infamously verbose title character’s oratorial jousts is almost impossible without a rewind button; every listen finds a new sanguine historical detail, slick interpolation of a hip-hop classic or dizzying rhyme pattern delivered with Eminem-level intricacy

And as a writer and huge fan of hip-hop I like to think that when it comes to this kind of thing I’m quite hard to please. But I just listen open-mouthed to this combination of 18th Century vocabulary, hip-hop vernacular and references to everyone from Gilbert and Sullivan to Jay-Z. I mean, the balls on anyone who writes this and expects to be brilliant when rapped with a straight face by a man dressed as an American politician from the 1770s:

What are the odds the gods would put us all in one spot

Poppin’ a squat on conventional wisdom, like it or not.

A bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists

Give me a position show me where the ammunition is.

Miranda’s take on how good the music and lyrics are?

“And then everyone goes, ‘Oh, my God, he’s a genius! Hamilton’s a genius!’ They conflate the two. I’m not a fucking genius. I work my ass off. Hamilton could have written what I wrote in about three weeks. That’s genius. It took me a very long time to wrestle this onto the stage, to even be able to understand the worldviews of the characters that inhabit my show, and then be able to distill that.”

So work hard, don’t be discouraged by how outlandish your idea might be, and bring something amazing into the world.

Let me leave you with the cast’s Grammy performance of the musical’s opening number. It is fucking brilliant.

Her: Needs and Desires:

Harlem in the 1970s (thanks, T).

The audiophile club of Athens:

Funny corporate tweets (thanks, V).

DiCaprio’s career in seven minutes:

The making of Tomorrow Never Knows – RIP George Martin (thanks, T):

https://vimeo.com/66472961

This looks fun:

Racial minority reports from Roy Chubby Brown gig.

Here’s a spot created here at MAL LA for TBWA’s International Women’s Day initiative:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4dKUmV856A

Nice one, Lauren, Brydon and everyone else involved.

UPDATE: check the site here.

Here’s an interesting article about the consequences of adblocking software (check the comments for further discussion).

I wrote a post at the start of the year that explored some of this topic, and if you check out the comments beneath the Guardian article you’ll note many complaints about the quality and tone of the ads that fill up the sites you really want to see, while also sucking up their bandwidth:

kooljeff says:

Indeed. If they were discreet, tasteful and unobtrusive letting the content take precedence that would be fine.

But we are bombarded by garish, tasteless overwhelming greed. Continually punched and kicked with corporate grasping, money grubbing. No wonder the Tories like it so much.

This has led to last year’s Cannes Grand Prix-winning ‘Unskippable ads’ from Geico:

Which has since been followed up by this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLwTsyIROsacim24vPVm-6Vf_P5AtfvMk9&v=DgCHUHgNnZI

Funny, isn’t it? There’s this huge smelly problem in the world of advertising and, aside from the odd pisstake, the entire industry seems happy to ignore it. As far as I can tell, websites seem to think it’s better to annoy you by following you around the net with a picture of that lampshade you decided not to buy (or, even stranger, more lampshades when you’ve just bought one: ‘He seems to be a great lover of lampshades. He must want more and more of them. Let’s shove them all under his nose!’) than simply acknowledge that you’ve spent time on their site already, and perhaps that’s enough for now. The analogy of being chased out of the shop and followed all over the place by the shop keeper makes total sense, but why does no one acknowledge that? Is this method of salesmanship so damn effective that it’s worth all the bad blood?

That brings us on to adblockers. Another comment from the Guardian article:

7heManFromDelMonte (ironic name?) says:

He needs to ask WHY people are using ad- blockers. And the simple answer is that we are sick of being fed ads 24/7. 

Tv, radio, social media, busses, taxis, billboards, newsletters. Even on petrol pump handles!

We use ad blockers because we are sick of being force fed ads. Otherwise we wouldn’t use them.

Precisely.

Ad blockers are used because people don’t like some aspect of the ads, be that persistence, ugliness, use of bandwidth, indication of a further corporate greed that they’d rather not enable etc. But instead of addressing those faults, the websites and advertisers have got together and attempted some sort of guilt trip, suggesting that we should bloody well take our medicine because it’s paying for the next Muse album.

I think the angle here should be positive reinforcement; the carrot instead of the stick. To avoid the King Canute-esque whining of Mr. Whittingdale and the media moguls an effort must be made to create things people want. Is that easy? No. Is there currently a better alternative? No. Is any of this really going to change? Hahahhahahahhahahahahhahahhahahahhahahhahahahhahha…

The worst spelling mistakes on Twitter.

The North South divide (thanks, G).

The last words of movies collected into themes (thanks, J):

Every Kate Moss magazine cover:

https://vimeo.com/155030351

British drivers swearing quite brilliantly (thanks, C):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOjUL8LwUsE

If the moon landings had gone wrong, Nixon would have given this speech (thanks, C).

Get Rich Or Try Reading (thanks, J2).

Michael Jackson, top beatboxer (thanks, G):

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

Ghostbusters is back (thanks, R):

Ted Cruz bad lip reading (thanks, J):

I’m writing this after watching the Oscars.

Why do we have awards? I think there are two main answers: the first is that kind of self-congratulatory pat on the back for the winners and the whole organisation in general. Advertising awards seem to make advertising more respectable and prestigious; movie awards sometimes make us forget that some rich people further up the chain were trying to make a boatload of cash; and valve salesman awards help the valve sellers think that their lives have a purpose, making them 12% less likely to commit suicide.

The second reason is that the awards supposedly act as some kind of inspirational carrot. You see the great work and are instantly shamed into upping your own game. In addition, you see your friends get to walk up to the stage, and the next day collect a raise and you think you’d like some of that for yourself.

Mmmm… stages… cash… prestige…

Far be it from me to piss on the pure goodness of the above, but I have a couple of cons to place on the other side of the see-saw: awards are a ‘bad’ thing because they separate us by exalting the few. Forgive me for getting a little hippyish here, but there’s a lot of wise people that say we’re all equal. Yes, it doesn’t always end up that way, but that’s the ideal most of us aspire to. So what is the good of spending a lot of money making it very clear that some of us are better than others? I’ll guess some winners had an easier run than some losers, so their endeavour may not have been as impressive. But we’re going to say the winners are better because they won. Hooray.

And sure, some can run faster and throw further; those are unequivocal facts. But when it comes to providing a definitive measure of who is better or worse in subjective fields then it’s really fucking pointless. So Leo gave a ‘better’ performance than Bryan Cranston? Did he? Or did he just spend more time freezing his arse off? Was Cranston’s portrayal of Trumbo uncannily realistic and more nuanced than Leo climbing inside a prop horse and snotting all over his beard? Who really knows? Well, hundreds of millions of us; one was worth the Oscar, and therefore ‘better’ than the other.

I used to take awards very seriously, mainly because they were the clearest route to progress in creative advertising (a Cannes Gold will always trump a 12% uptick in sales when it comes to bonus/promotion time), but for years they’ve felt increasingly meaningless. I get that the respect of one’s peers is usually a pleasant sensation, and a chance to get your work out to all the people paying attention to the awards must help something in some way, but maybe we shouldn’t make them into such a big deal. After all, if the work is good we hardly need a few shiny trinkets to confirm that.

Or perhaps some people do…

Help Kenya, not Kanye (thanks, J).

There used to be a 5th playing card suit (thanks, T).

We Are The World x Faceswap Live (thanks, J):

Dick art hits a new peak (thanks, S).

Servicing an Omega Speedmaster.

Photoshopper turns random pictures into movie posters (thanks, W).

The Beatles isolated vocals from Abbey Road.

The screenwriter of Out of Sight and Get Shorty on how to write (thanks, J2).

The Coen Brothers, shot/reverse shot: