If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Love Actually given a detailed shoeing (thanks, E).

600 fake posters highlight the Paris climate change summit.

Economic Hitmen (thanks, G):

A great NSFW promo like they used to make:

Funniest UK tweets of 2015 (thanks, B).

All the Star Wars vehicles sized to scale (thanks, R).

How to clean your nose the easy way (thanks, J).

Excellent Miyazaki doc:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52raDbtNpa4

Adele’s Hello by movies (thanks, A):

Billy on the Street, Julianne Moore acting edition (thanks, G):

Here’s a really excellent read.

UPDATE: it disappeared for a while, but I think the link now works.

But just in case it disappears again, here’d the text from Tom Demetriou, co-founder of Rockbox:

Dear Advertising,

Thanks.

You people are all totally out of your minds and you know that. But bottom line I owe you a lot.

I went to high school. I learned nothing.
The summer after graduation, I worked construction. I learned something.
I went to college. I learned nothing.
I worked in advertising. I learned everything.

That’s hyperbole. But that’s one of the things I learned.

 Yeah, I bitched and moaned about it. At the office late on a Saturday night, working on a doomed pitch, revising the presentation per our boss’s instructions, which he casually phoned in from a bar.

 “What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Too much Llama.’”
“What?”
“More sales associate. Less Llama.”
“Less Llama? That’s the entire fucking concept!”

 Which begs the question. What exactly is the right amount of Llama to put in a :30 TV commercial for a retail furniture store? Chris Cima, Jason Niebaum and I will never know. It remains a mystery wrapped in an enigma sleeping in a recliner. We lost the pitch.

I left agency life, and those inexplicable kinds of verbal exchanges, almost two years ago to start a new company with some friends. And with that distance comes some sincere appreciation.

I guess this letter to advertising was partly motivated by Thanksgiving sentiment. I also just felt like writing something. Either way, it’s going to sound like a late night booty call.

Hey, Advertising. Miss you, girl.

Do I mean it? Eh, I don’t know. Put it this way. I feel it.

The summer I worked construction, I got my ass chewed all day long. It wasn’t just profanity. It was profane profanity. Technicolor language was the electrical current that powered the whole operation. They were hard guys who did hard work. They dealt, almost exclusively, in reality. The cinderblocks were plumb to the line. Or not. The wall went up on time. Or it didn’t. So I figure they had the right to use foul language. As long as they built those walls, they could say whatever they wanted. One of the masons was named Alan. He had two tattoos, one on each arm. One read, Alan. The other read, Fuck You. What did it matter? He was a brick mason. And he was good at it.

Compared to that dusty, 100-degree, foul-mouthed landscape, Corporate America is a bright and shiny, but ultimately bland place. Tasteless, colorless and odorless. (No disrespect to all my friends at various levels in corporate America, but I think you would agree?) Short on colorful ass chewing. Long on political acumen. Sure, there’s humor. But it’s shrewd. Everybody watches every word they say.

Conversely, in advertising, you have to say all kinds of stupid shit. All the time. As a matter of survival. If you bore your peers, they trash you. If you bore your creative director, she trashes you. Why? Training. If you bore your clients, they fire you.

No doubt, advertising is a twisted game. Recently disparaged and dismantled by both a dying man and Jerry Seinfeld. For me, the most profound problem with the business was always this: It asks you to give everything you’ve got, to convince people to buy a bunch of shit they don’t need.

If Elon Musk wants you to work 60 days straight to put a human being on Mars, hey, you know what? You’re in. But when the agency asks you to work 60 days straight to convince people to eat more pizza, well, after a while, that gets to you.

It’s 1 am on a Sunday night. You walk into a war room plastered with three weeks’ worth of your work. You can no longer smell the B.O. because it’s mostly your B.O. The junior account person realizes you forgot to write the :15 versions of the :30 TV spots. The head planner and the agency president are still debating a nuance of the strategy. The travel team is on a plane in the morning. The presentation to the client is in the afternoon. You’re exhausted and emotionally spent and you feel the weight of it all. Everything is riding on this. Then you remember. You’re selling graham crackers.

You can have a kind of out of body experience (I’ve had several) floating above the room, saying to yourself, Who in their right fucking mind would give the time of their life to this? And the answer, muttered under your breath with a mix of perpetual bewilderment and pride is, Me.

The truth is, as an existence, agency work is closer to a construction site than corporate America. You don’t just chime in on email chains. You make stuff. Cool stuff, by the way. And your wall, it gets measured. The day of reckoning is never far off. If not tomorrow, then the next day. You’ve got to walk into a room, not with some bland report, or some cut and paste agenda, but with The Answer.

What’s The Answer? Well, that’s debatable. And here, I think, lies the heart and soul of the attraction. As Chuck Klosterman observes in his brilliant book, Eating the Dinosaur, on why we’re obsessed with reality TV:

In most people’s daily lives, nothing unusual ever happens.

Nothing.

Ever.

Every single day is exactly the same. Every morning. Every commute. Every meeting. They know exactly how it’s going to go.

But in Advertising, when you walk into the room with your artsy fartsy, fancy pants ideas, nobody has a clue what’s going to happen. Whatever you predict, whatever you feel in your gut, you’re wrong.

You think they’ll love it? They fucking hate it. You think they’ll hate it? They fucking love it. You get a standing ovation and then, inconceivably, impossibly, it all unravels in the blink of an eye. The person you thought was your enemy stands up and defends the work. The person you thought was your friend pulls out a knife.

That is the thing about advertising.

It’s exciting.

As fellow Creative Circus alumnus, Jonathan Cude, recently wrote, advertising teaches you mental toughness like no other business. A thick skin is standard issue. Eventually you grow a rhinoceros hide.

You come up with a terrific idea. They kill it because they don’t like purple. You explain the idea can be blue. Too late. It’s dead. You come up with a better idea. It dies a long, slow death of unknown causes. Then, up against the wall, in the clutch, you deliver another idea, your best one yet. The perfect solution. The magic elixir. The silver bullet. There’s a new CEO and he fires your agency.

You learn to be like Bruce Lee in the final scene of Enter The Dragon. Smashing all the mirrors until you finally stick a spear in the man with the iron fist. You can’t just be good. That’s not good enough. You have to be really fucking good. And that’s not good enough either. You have to be relentless.

It’s that intensity, combined with the creative process, combined with the total unpredictability that gets people hooked. Advertising is thankless. Morally dubious. Usually pointless. Shockingly dysfunctional. Only the mentally tough and slightly deranged can hack it, or would even want to. But if you can last awhile, when you come out the other side, you realize you’re walking around with a degree unlike any other. There’s no education like it in the world.

You know how to make something out of nothing. You know how to make decisions under pressure. How to work fast and smart, under the gun, right down to the last millimeter of wire. You can take a big, bloated bag of facts and boil it down to the bone. You can take meta-speak and turn it into plain talk. You can take an insult from a CEO. You can find, not the right words, but the right word. You know how to tell a story. You know how to make a point.

And you learn all this the hard way. Which, of course, is the only way anybody ever learns anything. Just like the brick masons, advertising people say all kinds of crazy shit. They earn the privilege.

Allow me to conclude this note of philosophical thanks with some real thanks. There are many people I worked with who I never appreciated nearly enough at the time (I probably felt too much a victim of my circumstances, or maybe I was just tired). Writing this list maybe a little self-indulgent, but hey, it’s Thanksgiving weekend, and the thanks are long overdue:

 Thank you, Norm Grey (in header photo) and MJK, for teaching me the creative process. Not to mention, introducing me to my wife.

Thank you, Sylvia Gaffney, for teaching me about color.

Thank you, Luke Sullivan, for teaching me that simplicity = sacrifice (with the image of a Double Mint twin in the crosshairs).

Thank you, Mark Fenske, for teaching me how to write a sentence.

Thank you, Dennis McClain, for teaching me what business I was in.

Thank you, Bill Oakley, for teaching me how to rope-a-dope and come out swinging.

Thank you, Jim Ferguson, for teaching me how to tell a dirty joke. It truly is an art form.

Thank you, Todd Tilford, for teaching me how to write poetry for a living.

Thank you, Cameron Day, for teaching me how to be a world-class talent and class act at the same time.

Thank you, Wade Alger, Jay Russell and Bob Brihn, for teaching me to lead by creative example, how to argue for ideas based on their merits, not dictating from your box in the org chart.

Thank you, Scott Brewer, for teaching me to find the utterly disrespectful humor in absolutely everything. You’re right, Scott-o, the laughs are in there.

Thank you, Shep Kellam, for teaching me how to write a TV spot like a page in a novel.

Thank you, Phil Gable, for teaching me it’s not enough to be nuts, you have to stay nuts. More people should try it. Love you, buddy.

Thank you, Brian Brooker, for teaching me to write with restraint. I’m pretty sure I bombed here.

Thank you, Tom Hansen and Mike Swenson, for teaching me to how to present to a big room. 

Thank you, Sunshine Stevens, for teaching me how to be a one-man gang.

Thank you, Eric McClellan and Tim Galles, for teaching me the meaning of relentless.

Not that I know how to do all those things on the list. But, hey, I saw it done.

Thanks, Advertising.

I owe you everything.

Maybe that’s hyperbole.

Maybe not.

A couple of days ago I was listening to John Ronson on the Nerdist Podcast. He was promoting his latest book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which is all about internet shaming. You know the kind of thing: well-meaning person makes slightly misjudged joke on Twitter, and by the end of the week he/she has been hounded from their job by a baying pack of judgemental wolves.

When I was listening to it I recalled an incident in the heyday of Scamp’s blog when the youngish team who created this ad…

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

…were pilloried to the nth degree because it was effectively a remake of someone else’s virtually identical observation test. If memory serves, the vitriol ran to over 200 comments, with opinions running very high indeed. In the post itself Scamp said that it was a brilliant ad with a great chance of a D&AD Pencil. Unfortunately for the team it didn’t win. Did the antipathy, or exposure of the source harm its chances? I’ve certainly been on juries where a favoured ad can be binned by a single person explaining that it had been ripped off something already in existence.

So the mob got their way and the team was, in advertising terms, punished. But why that ad?

Back in those days (2008) there seemed to be a lot more conversation about whether or not ads were ripped off other pieces of art or culture. Some seemed ‘fair’ (as in the original footage seemed to resemble the later ad in an undeniable way), but this ‘influence spotting’ began to descend quickly into desperation. I recall someone managed to dig up some crappy footage of a drumming gorilla that resembled the great Cadbury ad to the same extent a doormat resembles a Persian rug (I should probably now acknowledge that I stole that metaphor from The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis). People even suggested Guinness Surfer was some kind of a rip-off because images of waves as white horses had already ‘been done’.

Odd, really, because advertising has often reappropriated the work of others. Think back to The great Holsten Pils campaign of 1983:

…Which was a conscious nod to one of the big films of the time, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid:

And people didn’t mind at all. In fact, it won D&AD’s Gold award that year.

So why is one a crime and not the other?

Allow me to explain. For proper ad shaming four conditions must be met:

1. The ‘stolen’ idea must be created by a smaller/weaker/poorer person or entity. If you nick the work of a massive Hollywood studio then it’s fair game. We all like an underdog, and when it’s a UK ad agency vs 20th Century Fox, we’re all on the side of the little guy. However, if the original work was created by some struggling artist, they become the underdog and the ad people are the mean giants, crushing the little guy for the chance of an award. You can of course use the original creator to make the ad, giving him or her credit and cash. That seems to be nice enough behaviour to avoid the bell of shame.
2. The team that stole the ad must lack power and standing in the industry. If a giant CD who has won a tonne of awards ‘borrows’ the work of someone else, people don’t seem to mind. This is because we kind of think that they didn’t need to borrow the original work; they have already proved themselves capable of creating much great original work themselves. So we don’t really see the borrowing as borrowing, so much as kindly bringing exposure to an obscure piece of work. Also, people tend to get less traction slagging off the powerful and important, so are less inclined to do it.
3. The theft must look lazy. If you took an influence and gave it a twist to improve it enormously (see above Guinness Surfer example) then you’re OK. If, however you effectively stuck a logo on something and hardly changed it, or – heaven forbid – made it much worse, then you have committed the extra crime of failing to use the ad industry’s money to stand on the shoulders of giants and at least improve the original. Here’s the best example of that I can think of:

4. The ‘stolen’ ad must have a high profile. Either it’s on TV a lot, like the above Berocca ad, or it’s going to be up for an award or two. Otherwise why bother giving it a kicking? If you cry foul on a small space press ad for a village hall cheese sale the only effect you’ll have will be to look like a pedantic nit-picker who wants to make himself look good for spotting obscure references.

So there you go: conditions for ad-shame. As I said, I’ve noticed far less of this stuff being called out in the last five years, so either it doesn’t happen as much or people don’t care as much. Or both.

I certainly don’t give much of a toss anymore, so even if someone sends me the two pieces of work and asks me to expose the thieves, I usually can’t be bothered.

Have you wanted to use the bell of shame lately? Or have you stopped caring because ads are generally too shit to care about where they came from?

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

Funny, tonally right and aimed at a target just starting to disappear up its own arse.

Nice one!

(Interest declared: the director was my mate Mark Denton.)

NFL Bad Lip Reading (thanks, J):

Another fine explanation of the Theory of Relativity:

Amusing Black Friday deals (thanks, G).

Hateful 8 featurette (thanks, B).

Surprisingly impressive guitarist who also plays a few digeridoos (thanks, G):

The Lost Weekend: alcoholism in mainstream cinema.

Lightsaber riot (thanks, N):

Simon Griffin, copywriter and reader of this blog has just sent me his excellent new book, Fucking Apostrophes.

To cut a long story short, I’ve written a book. It’s more of a self promotional book than something you’ll find in Waterstones, but I’ve printed about 500 copies (via helpful design friends). It’s called Fucking Apostrophes: A guide to show you where you can stick them. So far there’s only a twitter account (@fingapostrophes) but the website should be live once I’ve tweaked a few final bits.

Thanks in advance, and keep up the great work.

Kind regards,

Simon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlUXh4mx4gI&feature=youtu.be

The way I see it, if prayer is for everyone, there are three possible audiences for this:

1. People who already pray. This might make them feel even more virtuous than they do already, and solidify their faith if it’s a bit shaky.
2. People who are a bit on the fence about praying. Maybe they forget to pray as much as they could/should and this reminds them that you can do it anywhere, no matter what your age or ethnicity.
3. People who think religion is a stupid load of old bollocks. Perhaps this incredibly persuasive ad will get them to reassess their attitude towards the practical help that can be gained from talking to an imaginary figure in the sky who created the world in six days before having a fag break. Good luck with that!

Anyway, all the major UK cinema chains have banned it because they don’t allow religious or political advertising, so God is going to have to wait for all those amazing messages of thanks, hope and/or self-centred greed.

Last week Paul Burke, the excellent creative and friend of mine, wrote a very interesting article.

It made the undeniable yet provocative suggestion that some creatives are ‘work people’, while others are ‘career people’:

Sweeping generalisation alert
Here’s the first one: creatives are all work people, aren’t they? Coming up with ideas and executing them brilliantly is all that matters to them. They take great pride in the craft of creation. For them, excellence is its own reward – but if their work also receives garlands from various awards juries, their careers are destined to flourish. 

Hmm…
But it doesn’t quite work like that, though, does it? We all know some brilliant creative people who have not been as successful as they should have been. And we certainly know some spectacularly useless ones who have somehow secured very senior positions. Second sweeping generalisation: they will be the career people.

So to sum up, we have people in the creative department who are really just interested in the work, ie: making the best ads they can make, while others are partly interested in that, but only to the extent that it helps them to advance in their career. Paul concedes that he is generalising in his assertions, as he then suggests the ‘career’ people are most likely to be middle class because they’ll be better at the inevitable meetings that come with ascending the corporate ladder:

The doctor and the priest
Creative departments have always attracted people from working-class backgrounds. When I was growing up, Dr Curry and Father O’Leary were the only people I knew who had anything resembling a career. Everyone else had jobs. Usually manual, often menial, so they were obviously work people. Which is why creative people from humbler beginnings tend to be work people too. And while they are being judged purely on their work, that’s fine. But after a few years, other factors start creeping into play. 

In a meeting
As creatives become more senior, they are expected to attend more meetings and raw creative talent becomes less important. This is the moment the career people have been waiting for. If they have managed not to get fired – and they are very adept at this – they can now start to pull ahead. Often more (sweeping generalisation) middle-class, they are quite comfortable in meetings. And the more they can talk the talk, the less they will have to walk the walk.

Wow, I’m really doing a bad job of paraphrasing this article, but lazy copy-and-pasting seems to a better way of getting Paul’s points across. Having said that, I can tell you Paul goes on to suggest that career people apparently care much more about job titles and have better websites, some of which might mendaciously imply that they’ve done some great work that they actually haven’t.

In the end he says there are good and bad points to both, but you’d be a tiny bit thick if you didn’t see him leaning somewhat in the direction of the ‘work person’. He doesn’t seem to have ended up with the multi-hyphenate job title in the upper reaches of WPP, but then he does have a pretty distinctive online presence.

My take on this is that it’s an interesting view with a certain amount of truth to it, but it’s in those ‘sweeping generalisations’ that it starts to break down. I guess the definitions of ‘middle class’ can get pretty muddled these days, but I wouldn’t say that Trevor Beattie, Paul Silburn or Tony Davidson are the ‘career’ types Paul suggests, yet each has risen to the top job in a London office of an international network from fairly normal beginnings. David Abbott’s dad ran a shop. Is that middle class? Surely Mr. Abbott was utterly obsessed with the ‘work’, and yet progressed in a very ‘careerist’ fashion when he became MD of DDB’s London office in the 60s. Similarly, Peter Souter’s work was brilliant, allowing him to be promoted to be in charge of people he admits were more talented than him, and even when he was ECD of the largest agency in the UK he still wrote plenty of ads. Were the working class Mark Denton and Chris Palmer just doing another job when they opened their own agency, or were they building a career? Does the intention matter, or just the reality?

Paul also suggests that career people spend 25% of their time on their work and 75% of their time on their career. There may be some truth in that; after all, who hasn’t met the team with one articulate PR person who shakes the right hands and ingratiates himself with the management, and one quiet fella who everyone suspects of writing all the ads? The former will be most likely to become a CD, while the latter may well become one of the perpetual ‘workers’ Paul mentions. Having said that, this does bring up the thorny question of what counts as careerist behaviour and what merely helps to suggest a creative has all the attributes necessary for promotion? Any creative promotion has to start with some good work, so wherever anyone heads after that, they would had to have shown some promise in that area in the first place. And to get up to the management positions you really have to have done a fair amount of acclaimed stuff (yes, in these digital days the need for famous, awarded work might have been reduced, after all, if it’s not in the old traditional media of TV, Press and Posters, the chances of it really affecting culture are much lower). I think the people who have risen to the top with very little good work are few and far between, in numbers that don’t really back up Paul’s point sufficiently for it to be credible.

I’d also say that there’s a lot of grey area in any career progression. If I look at my own situation, I did enough good ads to be asked to start an agency. Was that career or work? Were my ‘people skills’ a big part of that suggestion? At that point I was in the CD club, which gave me a good standing for my next move, but my next move was to leave the agency and spend three years freelancing, despite plenty of D&AD entries. So was that work or career? I then became a CD at a London agency for the next three years. Was it my middle class articulacy that got me the job, or my book? Was my interest in that position a symptom of my grasping careerism, or a logical next step? I certainly enjoyed being a CD because of the new challenges it provided; having written ads for fifteen years I was ready for something similar but different. The same applies to my move to LA. I could have stayed in London, continuing to do pretty much the same thing as I’d done for the previous three years, but I wanted the fresh challenge of a new situation in a new country. Careerism or a wish to expand myself? In effect, I was one of a handful of people running the London office, while in LA I’m further from the top, but I get to learn from some very smart people, both in the creative department and outside it. I think by Paul’s definition I’m building up some sort of career, but that makes it seem like there’s a deliberate plan which has always been in the back of my mind. Yes, I’m middle class and articulate with a good (non-mendacious) online presence and a job title that I’m not really bothered about. Without going into details, my job is about half creative and half management, but I only really contribute creatively in a CD capacity where I improve work I’ve been shown (when appropriate).

Paul continues:

And that point often comes when career people find themselves in charge of work people more talented and experienced than they are. This can make them feel awkward and insecure, so they set about preventing the work people from doing the very thing they are good at. The career person cannot see that the work people are no threat to them at all. If they had wanted the job, the title, the responsibilities and the anxieties, they too would have spent their careers desperately trying to acquire them.

This is something I can’t recall ever seeing. Managers who prevent work people from doing work? That would be pretty perverse. Peter Souter once wrote an article about that very situation when he was made ECD of AMV. He said he just let his very talented department get on with what they were great at, which was clearly a good idea as AMV soon became the most awarded agency in the world. And ‘If they had wanted the job, the title, the responsibilities and the anxieties, they too would have spent their careers desperately trying to acquire them’? Is it merely lack of desire that prevents this? Or lack of the skills and attributes Paul suggests are necessary for a climb up the ladder?

So is it better to be a work person?
Of course it is. You retain your talent, your soul and the respect of your peers. People like who you are, they like what you do and they will always want to work with you. But, deep down, you do feel slightly embittered. It’s not fair. You didn’t really get to reap what you sowed. Was that because you wouldn’t accept that you needed more talents than just talent? Or because you didn’t play the game? Or, most likely, because you still haven’t realised that there was one? 

Here the sweep of the generalisation is a little too wide. On the whole, I’d imagine work people and career people are as likeable or otherwise as each other. I’ve certainly met some unpleasant workers and some lovely managers, and vice versa. And your ‘soul and the respect of your peers’? I’d say Mr. Abbott retained his soul and the respect of his peers, even when he was at DDB, otherwise no one would have asked him to join them in starting an agency. And if you’ve been a brilliant creative for many years but not become a CD, there’s usually an element of disrespect from your peers. Why have you not made the jump? What are you missing? Surely it can’t just be desire? Whether that’s the case or not is entirely subjective, but the suggestion that a lifelong ad creative is what we should all aspire to be is frankly a bit of an odd one.

Or a career person?
Absolutely. You’ve done very nicely, shrewdly embedding yourself into that major piece of business. You’ve got the big corner office, the nice fat salary and the Club Class flights to that “Future of Creativity” conference in Miami. But, deep down, you know you’re not very good, so how long much longer can you fool people into thinking that you are? You also know you are just a number (actually, quite a lot of numbers) that your global paymasters could delete at any time. So now you use all your creative energy to devise ever-more political survival strategies. Is this really how you wanted to end up?

I’d assume if you’ve got a big corner office and all that jazz then you probably haven’t fooled people into thinking you’re good, but actually proved it. But perhaps it’s being good at a new set of valuable skills, such as being able to compile a good department, hiring and firing as necessary, creating a good mix that works impressively. You should also be able to manage budgets, balance the needs of the department with the needs of the agency and its clients, sell the good work of others, manage the fragile egos of creative people etc. If you’re shit at all that, no corner office for you. And global paymasters can delete any number at any time. Plenty of workers bite the dust along with career people, including very good examples of both.

So overall, there’s a little truth buried beneath a mountain of generalisation. How you make the transition from creative to creative management, whether that’s the right thing to do, and why this oxymoronic career progression is the clearest career path available to advertising creatives, are fascinating questions. But there are so many shades of grey within Paul’s black and white that his analysis doesn’t so much help as entertain.

I’m sure it also makes ‘workers’ feel better about themselves… 😉

Picture of Donald Trump made from 500 dicks (thanks, C).

The power of props in movies (thanks, J):

How a working class couple amassed a priceless art collection (thanks, T).

The making of Abbey Road, including outtakes and alt cover shots (thanks, T2).

Advertising awards for all!

Subject of You’re So Vain finally revealed!

This explanation of the Theory of Relativity is so good it won $400,000:

Has Wes Anderson been to North Korea? (Thanks, R.)

Bowie’s new and creepy Blackstar video/short film (thanks, T):

Hi all,

One of the other dads at my son’s school is the excellent photographer James Stenson.

He’s one of those versatile guys who has done war zones, celebs, on-set, advertising etc.

He currently has an ongoing project where he adds tattoos to the bodies of kids.

Here’s my son Jackson with my tattoos (not the chest one; just the arms):

Thanks, James!