If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

BBH: the story so far…

Formed in 1982, Bartle Bogle Hegarty immediately became one of the best, most respected and coolest ad agencies in the UK and the world. It’s work for such diverse clients as Levi’s, Audi and Lynx established it as not only an awards magnet, but also an agency capable of dictating what was cool to an entire generation.

So far so good.

I have to admit, as someone who has worked for the last four years at an agency that never pitches, and for the last 16 months in LA, I don’t keep very close tabs on the British agency ‘scene’. That said, occasionally a lazy moment might lead my fingers to corners of the internet related to the ‘industry’. One of those moments found me checking out the website of the aforementioned BBH. I had a good old scroll, dear reader, and I must tell you, I am now rather confused. Confused enough to ask the following questions:

1. Why is your ‘about’ section so self-contradictory?

The power of difference to make a difference.

That’s what we believe in. That’s what we do.

We create ideas that make a real difference to our clients’ businesses. Setting them apart from their competitors. Shaping culture, rather than just following it.

Our enduring commitment to difference is best embodied by The Black Sheep. It represents our businesses, our culture and the people who work here.

BBH is a set of highly specialist and connected creative businesses offering services such as UX, digital, ecommerce and CRM, agile production and sports marketing. Different skills working together to unlock the power of difference for our clients.

By that I mean that if you espouse the characteristics of the ‘black sheep’, or the one that goes against the grain, why write such generic waffle about yourself? Then again, I’m not sure any other company is combining those varied attributes, so maybe that’s what they mean by embodying the Black Sheep.

2. If BBH  is an advertising agency, why isn’t ‘advertising’ one of the words after ‘such as’ in the last paragraph of the ‘about’ section? Oddly enough it’s just UX, digital, ecommerce and CRM, agile production (what exactly is that?) and sports marketing. Is that really what BBH has become? An agency that lists six things that form its offering to the paying client, none of which is advertising, and one of which is ‘sports marketing’?

3. Why is sports marketing such a big deal to BBH? Here’s BBH’s explanation:

We believe in the power of sport.

It is innately emotional and inherently social.

Combine the power of sport with the power of creativity and the results can be staggering.

We work with sports brands, sporting events, sports talent, rights holders and organisations wanting to build their brand through sport.

We are a collection of people, from very different backgrounds, united by a love of sport and brand building.

They even have Uber-CD Ewan Patterson in charge of it all. But you could replace the word ‘sport’ with ‘music’ in the above, so what I don’t get is why sport and not something else? Many ad agencies have very strong sport connections (eg: W&K, 180), but do they offer separate sports marketing? Not that I’m aware of. Ewan and Lawrence Dallaglio (yes, that one) are listed as ‘Founding Partners’, so it’s not just a division of the company, it’s something a little more substantial than that. Perhaps it’s a very clever idea to get into a growing niche. Perhaps I’m just behind the times.

4. I know doing the Christmas ad for a big retailer is hard, but what’s all this about?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nzLTkKd9Q0

It seems really misjudged, both as a piece of communication and as a representation of this cornerstone British brand. Aren’t Tesco in trouble, relatively speaking? Will this help?

5. While we’re on the subject of actual advertising, how is this connected to a tube of sweets? And do they really expect anyone to believe the whole thing hasn’t been faked?

6. There seems to be an increasing focus on digital (I’ve even heard tell that they are attempting to move their clients away from TV). If that’s the case, why is their explanation of their digital offering so vague?

Digital Products and services:

Digital innovation helping brands deliver their promise through better or new experiences.

On the same subject, why is their TV section full of ‘Content’ and ‘Integrated’ work, even though both those disciplines have their own sections? Could BBH, the place that routinely used to walk BTAA Agency of the Year, really not muster eight TV spots for their website?

8. They have an interesting image of a sheep, divided into sections like a butcher’s diagram. Tellingly, the largest section, right in the middle, is of course for Sports Marketing. Elsewhere, they offer something called ‘Creative Studio’: Based in Milton Keynes. Focused on delivering creative that sells at every touch-point along the consumer journey. Does the stuff they do in Kingly Street not focus on delivering creative that sells at every touch-point along the consumer journey? What happens in Milton Keynes that can’t happen in London?

Look, I get that the work isn’t perhaps of the standard of the 80s/90s/2000s, but this entire site seems to convey an image of a corporation seeking out uninspiring ways in which to make money. The old BBH, the one that inspired insane jealousy amongst the world’s creatives, the one that resigned Asda because they wouldn’t let them make good work, even the one that got the country talking with those Yeo Valley ads, well, it seems to have disappeared.

That’s a huge shame for advertising as a whole, for if this is what BBH has now become, what hope is there for the UK’s other agencies?

I found it quite charming and well made. It’s a little sugary, but with enough wanton destruction to temper the fromage-y ending.

I rather like Mog. We read her books round my way. There was one where Mog pissed on an armchair then ran away. She does seem to be something of a liability.

But who cares what I think? Here are some comments from YouTube people to shape our opinions:

Football mascots observing a minute’s silence.

The amazing life of Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek.

iTunes terms and conditions reimagined as a graphic novel.

Excellent JJ Abrams interview (thanks, J).

Brilliant street art (thanks, K).

Handwritten lyrics by Bowie, Bush, Ramone etc (thanks, T).

Why did women start shaving their armpits? (Thanks, H):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwcCV1nEisQ

Interview with Walter Murch, one of the all-time great editors (thanks, J).

Album covers, slightly reimagined (thanks, D).

Creative apartheid – an advertising board game (thanks, T).

David Foster Wallace interview (thanks, T).

I’d almost forgotten how much people like to give their opinions on the ad du jour.

Well, there’s currently no ad du jourier than this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuz2ILq4UeA

I think it’s fascinating how the JOHN LEWIS AD has become a national event, with significance far beyond the ad itself. It’s also singlehandedly turned the UK Christmas season into an extended version of America’s Superbowl, where the biggest brands compete for the nation’s cash through the medium of quite long, emotional ads.

(And there’s that word emotional. I mentioned yesterday that those of us who speak English tend to use ’emotional’ to convey a feeling that we don’t really have a word for. It’s kind of a happy/sad, often nostalgic sensation that we can’t put our finger on. And despite having a massive vocabulary (we have 800,000+ words, four times more than German), we still haven’t managed to come up with an agreed upon collection of letters that conveys the thing we limply call ’emotional’. And yet we have a very precise word for a situation in which many men ejaculate on a woman’s face at the same time. How odd of us…)

Sorry, back to the ad:

I think John Lewis has become a little bit of an Arsene Wenger: they set the bar so high in the early days that anything that doesn’t measure up to the first successes is tinged with a little negativity. Is it up there with the little boy who is just gagging to give his parents a present? Or the bear and the hare? Will it spawn the obligatory number one single with a remarkably twee version of some other ditty (this time it’s erstwhile Oasis B-side and Royle Family theme tune Half The World Away)?

So even though it’s much better than 99% of ads that have been on TV this year, it’s not one of my favourite JL ads. The story is nice enough, but that old man is a bit creepy. I think it might have helped if they’d cast someone who could more immediately elicit sympathy. Instead, I’m kind of relieved that this fella is trapped on the moon, and not, for example, down here offering Werther’s Originals to passing schoolkids. I get that he’s representing all the lonely old people and Christmas, and find this giant arrow pointed in the direction of their plight a GOOD THING, but next time get one who’s a bit more likeable. And maybe don’t give him a telescope so he can spy on little girls.

Anyway, some journalists with nothing better to write about are reading far too much into it, while others have christened the old man ‘Moon Hitler’, so the buzz machine is in full swing: job done. Again. This kind of consistent quality is very hard to pull off, so it’s to the massive credit of A&E DDB that they’ve managed to make such an enormous splash for the umpteenth year in a row.

(By the way, there’s a kind of mini script under the YouTube link that contains a ghastly ad-ism: ‘Lily watches on as our man goes about his chores, all alone up there.’ I hate the use of ‘our man’ in scripts. It’s lazy and poor writing that you only find in ad scripts, but to be honest I don’t think I’ve seen it in maybe fifteen years.)

Let’s leave the last word to Goldie Lookin’ Chain:

I’m just having a read of this FT article on how ‘Mad Men Lost The Plot’.

The gist of it is that we all rushed towards ‘digital’ advertising because it allowed companies to target their consumers with far greater accuracy than a TV ad. Why spend a huge amount of money communicating to ten million people when many of them won’t have the faintest interest in your category, let alone your brand? Well, apparently there’s no brand growth in targeting your already-loyal customers (the ones who sign up to your Facebook page); you need to target the light users and nudge them into making their use a little less light. What media are best for that? TV, press, posters and radio.
The other problem with much of ‘digital’ (funny how terrible human beings are when it comes to really important adjectives. Have you ever wondered why people describe so many things as ’emotional’ without even specifying which emotion? ‘Digital’ is the same: so much covered with a single word that it’s now virtually meaningless) is that it’s boring. Think of those little banners that follow you all over the internet after you almost buy a shirt from a website but change your mind before completing the purchase. Or the messages on the right hand side of your Facebook feed. Boring and annoying: two adjectives you really shouldn’t have anywhere near your brand if you want people to like it.
“Les Binet, from John Lewis’s agency Adam & Eve DDB, is one of the industry’s most respected experts on advertising effectiveness. In 2013, on behalf of the IPA, Binet, along with Peter Field, conducted an analysis of the most successful UK campaigns of the past 30 years. They found that “the most effective advertisements of all are those with little or no rational content”, and that TV is the emotional medium par excellence. An online banner ad, however smartly targeted, is unlikely to make anyone grin, gasp or weep.”

So why did we rush with such abandon towards this new frontier? A few reasons:

1. The ad industry loves new things (see: ageism). Beyond that, it also hates to get left behind (see: the desperate openings of agencies on Second Life). Digital was both ‘new’ and ‘cool’; how could advertising not smooch its buttocks into oblivion?
2. Human beings like things they can measure, which is why quantity so often wins over quality. Show me 50 ideas and I’ll know without any doubt that you did the work for which I pay you money. Give me a single, brilliant idea and there’s still a nagging feeling that you just came up with it while sitting on the lav in between games of Halo. Digital advertising can be measured with (theoretically) great accuracy, so the people paying for it feel far more comfortable with it. Alas, what they failed to measure was the huge amount of fraud in those measurements.
3. We all do it. We’re all in the digital space all day: sending emails, visiting websites, liking pictures on Facebook. How could the idea of putting out messages in this medium be anything other than THE RIGHT THING TO DO? Perhaps we forgot that we spend all our time in the digital space doing the things we like to do and hating anything that interrupts that. Y’know, like ads.

Anyway, billions of pounds/dollars later, here we are. The annoying ads still follow you around, click through rates are still minuscule and TV ads are still alive, well and expensive.

Perhaps we forget that dinosaurs were around for hundreds of millions of years before they died out.

Apparently I once posted something about these excellent caricatures. (I can’t remember doing it and I can’t find the original post. Stay off crystal meth, kids.)

Anyway, they really are fucking good and now they’ve been turned into a real, live book!

Congrats to Adrian and Jana.

If you’d like to win one, visit this other site.

Daniel is the bully in Karate Kid:

Jurassic World vs Jurassic Park:

129 of the most beautiful shots in movie history. (slightly questionable list.)

A visit to Rob Zombie’s house – on acid (thanks, T).

Goal of the season (thanks, G):

Jar-Jar Binks, genius? (Thanks, G.)

How an episode of The Simpsons is made (thanks, J).

A deeper look into TED talks (thanks, G).

Tinder and Linked In photos side-by-side (thanks, P).

Bill Murray on being obnoxious (thanks, J):

What business leaders eat for breakfast (thanks, G).

The colours of certain films compressed into single images (thanks, G).

Amazing soviet-era bus stops (no, really; thanks, G).

Kids’ hipster book (thanks, R).

Classical action figures (thanks, R2 – not the one out of Star Wars).

Ten real-life lairs fit for a Bond villain.

Frank Budgen, one of advertising’s greatest creatives and directors, has passed away.

He was the best director of that golden period of the mid-to-late 90s and early 2000s.

As a creative during that time I know that every team in London, if not the world, would pray that Frank would agree to take on one of their scripts.

It would take forever to list everything he won, but in short, he was D&AD’s most awarded director of all time, won two Cannes Grands Prix, and was the Gunn Report’s most awarded director of the year several times.

His longtime producer, and co-founder of Gorgeous (the most awarded production company of all time), Paul Rothwell explains what made Frank so special.

Here’s some of his best work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbseqMxhoP0

I was just reading an interesting post about the reality of finding your passion.

The central point is that you’ve already found it but you just don’t realise it.

I think that’s a great angle on a well-trodden subject. Here’s a quote on that suggestion:

You already found your passion, you’re just ignoring it. Seriously, you’re awake 16 hours a day, what the fuck do you do with your time? You’re doing something, obviously. You’re talking about something. There’s some topic or activity or idea that dominates a significant amount of your free time, your conversations, your web browsing, and it dominates them without you consciously pursuing it or looking for it.

That’s your passion. my main one is movies. Given the choice of any ways in which to spend my free time, I’ll often choose something related to one of that topic. I read movie books, check movie sites, hell, I even go to the movies – a lot. There was a weekend earlier this year when the rest of my family was in Mexico, leaving me alone in LA with a couple of free days. Reader, I spent those 48 hours watching thirteen movies, eleven of them in the cinema. I started at 9:30am, meticulously planning my days so that I could fill them with the most movies, then I went home at 10 and watched another movie on iTunes that I knew my wife wouldn’t be interested in. And I loved it. (By the way, I tweeted that I had done this. My boss saw these tweets and told me how envious he was that I’d managed to find such a large chunk of movie-going time. So I know I’m not alone.)

Can you think of anything in your life that you’d voluntarily want to spend that much time doing?

Of course, I have other hobbies and interests, but they’re mainly related to the visual conveyance of stories. I’m writing a screenplay with my wife, I write novels in the hope of making them into films, I listen to Howard Stern on the radio because he often interviews film stars, I have lots of friends out here who work in movies (or TV) etc. My passion seeps into and out of almost everything I do.

Thankfully my job is related to one of my passions: TV ads are little movies with scripts and directors. The process of creating them is somewhat like the studio system, with submitted and selected scripts, allocated budgets, shoot schedules and release dates. Movies have very high profile advertising (I collect movie posters) and result in successes or failures that are generally matters of opinion. The process of taking a concept and making sure it communicates powerfully is both the advertising and movie businesses in a sentence.

Yes, we also create posters and press ads, but as I drive round LA I see Apple’s billboards alongside those of 20th Century Fox, Universal and Disney. I feel like it’s all part of the same world, with the same high profile that means it’s all a large part of the lives of ordinary people.

So are you living your passion? What is it? How do you squeeze it into your working day? Or is your job simply a means to an end, allowing you to pursue something you really love outside your office hours?

Ibiza classics played by an orchestra in the Royal Albert Hall (thanks, S):

The dark beauty of film noir in 50 shots (thanks, T).

Dyer dubs Double-0-7 (thanks, T).

Huge basketball shorts (watch till the end; thanks, J):

Breaking Bad x Pulp Fiction (thanks, D):

Excellent David Lynch article (thanks, J2).

Chinatown (best movie ever) at 40, an oral history with Nicholson, Towne, Evans, Polanski etc. (thanks, G).

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the animated book review (thanks, G):

Correcting the swordplay of The Empire Strikes Back (thanks, G).

Staying with Star Wars, isn’t about time you got one of these? (Thanks, T):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WUIiiadIWg