If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

The obvious answer is ‘because it’s shit’, but we all know that creative work bites the dust for myriad reasons. Here are a few:

1. You’re looking at different colours. When you said ‘It’ll be a dark satire in the form of a man whose business goes under’, your client/CD/director thought of one version of those subjective nouns and adjectives, while you were thinking of another. If your client’s imagined version is too far from yours they will either kill yours or they’ll injure it badly by trying to shape it into what they really had in mind. If it’s your director/illustrator/typographer you might be fortunate enough to go again with someone else, or use others (the editor/sound designer etc.) to salvage the work, or (very rarely) be pleasantly surprised by something you were not expecting. But more often their wrong work will just result in the end result being plop.
2. Bad timing. I remember coming up with a campaign at AMV that I told my wife about. As a production company rep, she was aware of much of the work flowing through the industry, so she sadly informed me that another agency was doing something with the same idea. Were we supposed to tell the client? Would we back off? Who would be on air first? In the end we went ahead, scuppering the other campaign, which, I imagine, was quite annoying for the other creative team. They suffered from an unfortunate accident in timing, but such an occurrence can take other forms: delays with the budget can drag an ad into ‘Q3′, fucking up the chances of finding the cash to do it properly. Or the client might go under or get bought out, just when the green light was about to happen. No fault of your own, but you deal with the consequences.
3.  A changing of the guard. Your CD loved it. He sold it up the chain, holding the hand of a worried client who wasn’t sure he could buy such brave work. He eked another 100k out of the CMO for that helicopter shot that would send you sauntering to the D&AD podium. Then he got a job offer elsewhere, fucked off to Sao Paolo and the whole house of cards collapsed. Or maybe the client left, and like any self-respecting studio head, the new guy/gal binned everything his/her predecessor OK’d. After all, if those ads became successes the old client would get the credit, and if they were failures the new one would get the blame. Better to kill everything and avoid such difficulties. Sorry if that means your long-cherished 90″ cinema spot is now dead, but thems the breaks.
4. Competition. The funny thing about creative endeavours is that they are entirely subjective, so it doesn’t actually matter if your script is ‘better’ than the one the senior team down the corridor turned in; if that team is tight with the CD and/or client, you’re probably fucked (of course, there’s always the possibility that their script is better, and that the CD/client just feels more comfortable going into production with a more experienced pair of hands). May the best man win is a fine sentiment when the playing field is level, but I’m afraid it’s never really level, and at the beginning of your career you’re most likely to be at the wrong end of its slope. At some point in the future you may be that senior team that gets a more advantageous rub of the green, and when that time comes the likelihood of you falling on your own sword will be close to zero, so this time, tough shit.
5. The people doing the choosing are utter fuckwits. We’ve all been there: you write a script Paddy Chayefsky would be proud of, the timing is perfecto, there are no other scripts in the way and everyone is solidly entrenched in their job for the next few years. What could go wrong? Well, alas, not everyone has good taste, so there’s a little chance your CD, CEO or client (the three people who can really kill your work) might be too stupid or talentless to see the gold sparkling on your page. At best they might add or remove some crucial elements that will now send your idea to Turd Town; at worst they might just think it’s crapola and strangle it in its crib. Actually maybe the first of those is the worst one, because then you have to see the thing through, which means getting on the Excrement Express and taking a month-long trip to Turd Town, stopping at the resort of Cackville on the way. Best to let it die early; you will feel less pain.

With all that to navigate it’s amazing any good ads get made at all.

What’s that you say? Good ads hardly ever get made at all?

Well, now you know why.

Artisanal firewood (thanks, S):

A very compelling video (thanks, T):

All about the sound guy from Loony Tunes.

Client comments turned into cool posters (thanks, G).

Why the direction in which a character moves matters:

How film scores play with our brains:

Frank Lloyd Wright on arrogance:

Famous novelists on whether the symbolism in their work was intentional (thanks, G).

Chess grandmaster plays unsuspecting guy in park:

Prisoners painting people who should be prisoners (thanks, G).

Counterintuitive means ‘contrary to common sense expectation’, eg:

Fat makes you thin.

You have to fail to succeed.

Getting healthy can kill you.

If you want to attract someone, be rude to them.

etc.

Makes you wonder when it’s the right time to do the obvious and when it’s better to do the exact opposite…

If I want to top the global music charts and get 2.5bn views on YouTube, should I become a dumpy older man and make a song entirely in Korean?

If I want to make the best reviewed film of the year, should I remake a small hit from 35 years ago with the original director, a man who has since made several films about singing penguins and talking pigs?

If I want to put together the best team in the football league, should I recruit a decent but unremarkable manager, then put him together with a team of cheap and non-league players?

It must be the toughest choice to make, especially in creative endeavours, but the truth is that no matter how often human beings try to play the odds, the greatest work always comes from doing the opposite.

Of course, you can try to follow successes, emulating elements of what they have done. After all, without The Sopranos there would be no Deadwood, The Wire, Mad Men or Breaking Bad. But until The Sopranos (and perhaps Oz) made adult, intelligent episodic TV drama an attractive idea, that path looked to be blocked with a brick wall. Now it almost seems obvious that there was a huge untapped market in smart TV.

But for every instance where a brave decision turned out to be a trailblazing game-changer there must be millions of other attempts that turned out to be less successful. So the real question is: are you doing something wonderfully fresh or just misjudged and stupid?

Unfortunately, the only way you can find out is by putting your great new thing out there and hoping it’s received as you intend it. And that’s where the real crunch comes: it may not be the quality of the work or the idea that doesn’t work; it might instead be the timing, or the mood of your audience, or what others produce around the same time.

So the first job is to come up with something brilliant that goes against the prevailing wisdom, then you have to do a lot of hoping that you hit the part of the target marked ‘counterintuitive brilliance’ rather than the part marked ‘pointless shite’.

Good luck with that!

Arethra Franklin’s amazing version of Eleanor Rigby (thanks, T):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spXjauv0NSM&feature=share

If movies ended when someone said the title (thanks, J):

Amazing footage from an iPhone on a string (thanks, C):

Hunter S. Thompson’s daily drug intake.

Great/awful descriptions of female movie characters (thanks, G).

Buster Keaton’s most amazing stunt (thanks, J2).

Simpsons movie references:

Rent a minority (thanks, J).

Dark Side Of The Moon syncs with The Force Awakens.

Hey Ben.

Remember that euthanasia roller coaster film that you helped PR on your website?
I’ve finally released it this week on vimeo.
Is there any way that you would put it up on your website by any chance?
You’ve been a really good guy helping me already on this and I would love a little final push as it’s now officially out…

Here’s a little PR note from me about the film:

You’re dying. If money was no object, would you manipulate euthanasia so that you could die on your own terms?
Would you suffer the indignities of a drawn-out and painful terminal illness if there was an attractive alternative?

This story examines how the protagonist Mark uses his wealth to help create a euthanasia roller coaster. A roller coaster so powerful, it causes cerebral hypoxia, thus suffocating your brain ensuring a euphoric death.

I’m Glenn Paton, a director, and these are the questions that my debut short film “H Positive” delves into.

It’s a Kickstarter funded film (which I raised £20,000) and I directed it through Academy Films.

I’ve just uploaded it to Vimeo after winning 8 Laurels in the film festival circuit and I was hoping that you might consider a small write up about it on ITIABTWC.

https://vimeo.com/154188234

Nice one, Glenn.

I watched it thinking, ‘How the fuck did this get made for 20 grand?’ and ‘This is jolly good’.

Have you ever been fired? The question also applies if you’ve been made redundant. Employment law pretty much bans actual firing these days, so if you’ve been made redundant, you’ve basically been sacked.

I have.

Back in 1997 I was given my marching orders from Y&R (before it had Rainey and Kelly attached), and I can tell you it was one of the least pleasant experiences I’ve ever endured.

To set the scene, my partner Paul and I had fallen straight into a job off our first placement out of Watford. It was a pretty fun time to be in London as we joined around the time of Euro ’96, the peak of Britpop and a strange run of documentaries that made Soho seem a bit cooler than usual.

To be honest, we didn’t exactly set the agency alight with our brilliant ads, but we did OK for a placement/junior team. At the time I remember reading an editorial in Campaign that said a couple of print campaigns a TV ad or two was a pretty decent return for a creative team, so we managed that and thought we were doing well.

Then I think we began to confuse the lines between ‘Advertising is a bit of a lark, Waldie in the pub all day, lunch turning into dinner etc.’ and ‘working so little that you’re both taking the piss and clearly surplus to requirements’. After a decent start the briefs seemed to dry up – not just for us, but for all the younger teams. At one point the traffic dept told us there wasn’t going to be a new brief for at least two weeks, so we tended to spend our afternoons down the pub or at the movies, and, as it seemed as if the whole agency was on a bit of a go-slow, we didn’t feel as if we were taking any more piss than anyone else.

But apparently we were. Some time in October 1997, after maybe 16 months of employment, our CD (they didn’t have ECDs back then), the double-Gold-Pencil winning Mike Cozens popped into our office and closed the door. (I now fear closing doors, and am very careful about closing doors with younger creatives; if I’m not about to sack them I let them know immediately that this is a ‘good news’ door closing, and they have nothing to fear). But that day was a bad news door closing, accompanied by phrases like ‘It’s just not working out’.

Shellshocked, Paul and I went to nearby Regent’s Park to try and absorb it all and think about what to do next. We’d been given a month’s money, but it was a bit close to the industry-wide easing off of Christmas for another hiring, and besides, we didn’t really have a strong enough book to get another junior job. Really, we’d have to start again. That was the biggest kick in the teeth: we’d climbed some really difficult rungs of the ladder only to find ourselves dumped on our arses, scrabbling around for another placement where we’d again earn very little and have to bust our guts inside out to turn that opportunity into a job.

If you want to know what grim is (I know all this is relative and probably not very grim to a Syrian refugee, but you know what I mean), try entering the above situation just before Christmas: no agency parties, no cash for presents, lots of family meetings where you get to discuss your current employment situation… deck the fucking halls. We also enjoyed the beautiful experience of being on the dole and having to explain to a remarkably unimpressed government employee what the hell a ‘copywriter’ did for a living, only to be told to apply for a job at McDonalds. Even worse, I had to walk past AMV BBDO’s offices on my way to the DSS. Looking in the window of Britain’s biggest and best agency to see a beautiful grand piano only seemed to hammer home my utter failure. On the good side I actually signed up for the credit protection insurance before it got a really bad name, so when I lost my job the bank paid my credit card bill and even sent me some more cash on top.

So we got through that time, which also included my birthday, and worked on our book, taking breaks only to watch Neighbours and Petrocelli. We saw headhunters, arranged crits and I fucked up my foot by standing on a plug, leaving me plodding through the snow on crutches. I think it’s fair to say that we had also downgraded our expectations; after all, if we weren’t good enough for a mid-table agency like Y&R, who would employ us? McCann’s? Grey (which was shit in those days)?

Dear reader, I must thank you for sticking so long with my tale of woe. As a reward, this is finally the part where the whole story takes a turn for the better. After blagging a crit with John Hegarty (easier than you’d think) and having him suggest we go and write for Viz, we tightened our book right up and went to see John Gorse and Nick Worthington at the aforementioned AMV BBDO. They were the best team in the world, working in the best agency in the world, so it was a bit of a coup (but also easier than you’d think). And they loved our book, so much so that they dropped it into the office of the CD, Peter Souter, with a note that said ‘This is a thing of beauty’. Which was nice.

A few days later Peter called me up (interrupting Neighbours, FFS) and invited us in to begin a placement at the BEST AGENCY IN THE WORLD, which was also nice. Over the next few months we converted that placement into a job, showed work to David Abbott, went to lots of award shows, worked in Miami and the South of France and generally experienced a level of enjoyment that was diametrically opposed to the misery of Christmas 1997. Going to industry parties and having people ask what we were up to was a delightful buzz. Up till then AMV had taken on two placement teams in their entire history. I was now their youngest copywriter.

So that was the really good part, but to get to it we had to go through the really bad part. I know lots of people who have experienced the soul-destroying horror of being unexpectedly given the heave-ho, and almost all of them seemed to find themselves in a better position at their next place. For me and Paul it was a kick up the arse to do some bloody work, and when we did we ended up in our dream job. I don’t know what would have happened if we’d stayed at Y&R, but I doubt it would have been quite as fun as that first year at AMV.

Oh, and around that time Arsenal won the double, playing some remarkable football. Good old 1998.

Anyway, what about you? Have you been given the old Spanish Archer? If so, how did it turn out?

Hip Hop country dancing (thanks, J):

Remarkable cover of Hello (thanks, C):

15+ people who have accidentally dressed like their surroundings (thanks, T).

A comprehensive history of clubbing (thanks, J2).

Quite brilliant and entertaining analysis of where the world’s biggest companies are heading (thanks, S):

Indian Superman and Spiderwoman (thanks, G):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1m9tWfZR5s

An illustrated talk with Maurice Sendak:

Teletubbies x Joy Division (thanks, J3):

Thump-a-Trump.

And Donald Trump x Ralph Wiggum (thanks, G).

Japanese fart scrolls (thanks, G).

Remarkably funny sketch:

Embroidered X-rays (thanks, J).

Very good History of Japan (thanks, J):

Animals that look like celebs (thanks, G).

Hi Ben,

I thought a few of your readers might like this:

The brief was to create a piece of film as timeless as the cars themselves.

It turned out so well that MrPorter.com approached us to run it as a partnership, so the exposure has been phenomenal.

The Mill in LA did all the post and it was shot by Tash & Tanya at Unit9 Films.

The whole process has been one of the most joyful things I’ve worked on in a long time.

The aim now is to create a film a year.

I don’t work with big budgets but if any of your readers love cars I’m very up for collaborating.

My email is Cam@hexagon.uk.net

Thanks,
Cam

My pleasure, Cam (Cam Mitchell is a good friend who’s worked at many excellent agencies, including AMV and Fallon).

Here’s an interview with Lesya Lysyj, former CMO of Heineken USA, where she tells clients how to create better briefs.

Her five points are:

First is Know Thy Brand – if you’re selling an emotional product, such as beer, you need to have emotion at your core. Rational products, such as gum, need a rational benefit.

Is chewing gum really a ‘rational’ product? I remember this ad from when I was at school:

All emotion, nothing rational. It seemed to sell a lot of gum. In fact, I can’t recall a single rational gum ad. Surely the ‘rational’ benefits of gum are all subjective (flavour etc.), while longevity is a function of how quickly you get used to the flavour (this is why you can take your flavourless gum our of your mouth, leave it somewhere, then start chewing it again to discover the flavour has returned). Anyway, on the brief side of things, ‘do a brief that matches the emotional/rational level of the product’ makes good sense and is fine advice if you’re so thick this thought has never occurred to you before.

Next is Don’t Get Bored With A Great Brief. She changed a brief because sales were declining. This messed things up even more, so she returned to a version of the original brief and sales picked up again. Great, but her original brief clearly seemed to be something other than ‘great’, hence the falling sales. If everyone had thought it was still ‘great’ they wouldn’t have changed it. So she’s really saying, ‘Don’t fail to recognise a great brief’, which again seems both obvious and a bit of a tricky ask.

Then we have Every Word Counts. This is illustrated by an example where calling out ‘bollocks in beer’ was changed to the wider canvas of calling out mere ‘bollocks’, allowing for a bigger idea. I suppose that’s a good point, but I think it comes down to ‘write a good brief that allows lots of good work; not a shit one that doesn’t’, and again that’s a bit obvious. It’s not just the words that changed in her example; it’s the whole scope of the idea. When you change words you change the brief, but you still need the smarts to think of the better brief.

The next one says How Much Creative Is Actually Needed? But it’s not really about that, so much as suggesting you divvy up your media budget up front for some reason that seems less and less clear to me the more I read her paragraph. Sorry, but I can’t really work out what she’s on about, let alone how it relates to the amount of creative needed.

The final one is Mandatories. She says that this laundry list of things to include in the advertising can kill the final work, so don’t have more than three. I’d say that it’s not the number of mandatories that matters but the nature of them. One mandatory that says ‘feature a squawking, shitting monkey throughout the spot’ will do more damage than ten that say things like ‘Don’t feature junk food’ or ‘include a shot of the new pack’.

She signs off with this:

Good luck. As I have said before, this whole thing is incredibly difficult. Like raising kids, most of the time you are wondering if you’re doing the right thing and just hoping for the best. And you won’t know if you made the right decisions until they end up being a Rhodes Scholar or going to prison. The best you can do is follow your instincts, trust your planner, and don’t be afraid to adjust along the way.

That’s more interesting, because when a brief finally arrives on the desk of the creative team it often seems like it’s taken a long time and (supposedly) a lot of effort to produce something that can be uninspiring or break down easily under scrutiny. I guess a brief that doesn’t do that is hard to come by, hence the ‘incredibly difficult’ part of what she says. But because a brief is a single piece of paper that has sometimes taken months to produce (sometimes leaving a few days for the creatives to answer it) the feeling is that it had better bloody well be good when it arrives. I don’t think many creatives have a clear sense of what has gone into the process, and our ‘natural’ sense of grumpy, come-on-then-impress-me cynicism means that we’re rarely blown away when we read one.

And when you read articles like that you wonder how many of them across the industry really are just poor.

ECDs with folded arms.

HOW TO SPOT A HOMO!

The insanely wonderful The Chickening:

Nice illustrations of the horrors of 19th Century surgery.

Everything is a remix (thanks, R):

https://vimeo.com/14912890

Istanbul via Inception (thanks, J).

Camera on a potter’s wheel (thanks, J):

Sad, sad cookery (thanks, K).

Hours of Truffaut interviewing Hitchcock.

Composition in storytelling (thanks, J):

Colour in storytelling:

Paris in movies (thanks, J):