If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6eZ3WQCjhA

Ah! Disabled riders, racial minorities, little girls who like milk… These are the very moments that represent Britain’s horsiest bank.

Funny, though, that it doesn’t end with something reflecting the 40,000 staff they’ve laid off since receiving a £20bn bailout in 2008. 

Or the fact that despite this, the CEO earned £11m last year.

Or the time they were fined £226m for rigging interest rates.

Or that other fine over payment protection insurance.

Perhaps a horse having its way with a member of the British public?

I texted a friend the other day to tell her I’d be arriving at her house by Über. She replied that she was looking forward to seeing me but didn’t agree with Über. She doesn’t like the way it’s doing proper London cabbies out of a job, people who have done three years of The Knowledge and based their entire income streams on the status quo that existed when they decided to drive a taxi.

It’s an interesting argument, but one that has been steamrollered many times by the march of ‘progress’ (define that word as you wish). Automated factories, nuclear power over coal, call centres in India, the cruel way in which those blokes who used to have to walk in front of cars with a red flag to stop them going too fast have been deemed surplus to requirements… The world moves on and, alas, some people get left behind.

But I could also counter the cabbie argument by saying that the only times I’ve been deliberately taken the long way round, it’s been in a black cab (it’s essentially impossible to do that in a credible way if you don’t know the city like the back of your hand). In addition, when I needed a cab at Heathrow last week and I only had a tenner on me, no black cab in quite a long line would accept a credit card. Then, after running around the terminal looking for cash point there was barely enough space to get the four of us plus luggage into the taxi. That strikes me (I don’t know why this realisation has taken me so long) as insane: London’s taxi fleet is less equipped to carry a family plus luggage than a Toyota Prius? WTF? Next, the fare was £7 before we’d even moved. £7. Seven fucking pounds. That’s over $10 to move an inch, part of which was a little extra fee for… drum roll please… taking the fucking luggage unsecured and squashed up around our knees. We took an Über in the opposite direction the following morning; the fare was £7 instead of £14 in the black cab.

So you can build in your own obsolescence by overcharging for a very poor service (let’s not get into the occasional racist chats I’ve had to endure). These cabbies don’t know they’re doing it, but they are digging their own graves (so are Über drivers, of course: the self driving cars that are obviously coming our way by 2020 will make many industries obsolete, including them).

Anyway, to take my mind off this experience I considered how it might relate to advertising.

I’ve written a few times about my theory that improved computing has actually made working in creative industries much harder because now everyone knows how easy it is to change a font or resize a logo. Hell, with a rudimentary knowledge of Word you can slap together a poster with a funky font and a Google image. So now the job looks easy (I’ll have to ignore arguments that say it’s easy to do it in a mediocre way. Unfortunately most clients can’t distinguish mediocre from excellent, or indeed poor, so they don’t care).

Then we made the whole process look easier and easier by sticking logos on the end of YouTube clips and cans of other people’s paint. Back in the day you just had to watch ads like this, pick your jaw up off the floor and throw money at whoever could think up an execute such genius:

When’s the last time an ad made you feel like that?

Of course there are very good ads around these days, but they look somewhat within our grasp in a way that the greats of the past did not.  And if they look somewhat within our grasp then they also look a little more like that to clients, and indeed to the public.

It may have been a necessary turn that happened after the first dotcom crash, where budgets and credibility began a gradual process of reduction. It may be the fault of a brain drain that has seen the best creative migrate towards creating TV shows or tech start ups. It may be another consequence of the rapacious march of global capitalism. It may be the way in which ad agencies now charge more for, and place greater emphasis on, the kind of 360-degree brand analysis/futurism conferences that planning departments take care of. It may have something to do with the vicious circle that all these factors create.

But whatever it is we can’t deny that we, as an industry, are like cabbies: we haven’t helped ourselves to justify the value in what we do, or rather what we did. That’s why salaries have fallen. That’s why production companies and TV stations are offering to do what we used to do. That’s why none of your friends or parents give a shit about that case study film you spent so long choosing just the right War On Drugs song to soundtrack. 99.99999% of the time, if it happened online, as far as the public is concerned, it didn’t happen. Sorry.

We don’t accept credit cards. We charge £7 before anyone even moves. We don’t have room for luggage.

And until someone creates a new model to send us off in a different direction, we’re just going to continue getting shafted by our own versions of Uber.

The ball is in all our courts.

Unrelated people who look exactly alike (thanks, T).

Taxi Driver doc.

Lee Marvin on gay rights (thanks, J).

How and why Eric Stoltz really got fired from Back To The Future (thanks, J).

14 times life imitated The Onion (thanks, T).

Cassetteboy-ish remix of Donald Trump (thanks, J2):

Colbert interviews Eminem on a Michigan public access show (around 22’10, thanks, J3):

Hi Ben,

I’ve just returned from a trip to London, my first since emigrating.

The overwhelming impression I got of the physical city was one in the midst of much rebuilding. On my first day there I took a look at the skyline from the top of Primrose Hill. The horizon was littered with cranes. Ordinarily I’d think that this regeneration was at least some indication of a GOOD THING happening: London is a living, breathing entity, so a refreshment of its innards would be a necessary and beneficial development. But then I took a few journeys into town and was surprised at the number of huge holes that had sprung up in areas that had shown little change since my childhood. The electronics shops that once gave Tottenham Court Road its identity have given way to a building site, as have the shops on the east side of Berwick Street Market. Apparently the entire market is going to disappear, as is the market at Shepherd’s Bush between Goldhawk Road and Uxbridge Road.

So what are all these pointless, unnecessary elements of the fabric of London going to be replaced by?

Housing. Lots and lots of housing. And that’s great, right? There’s a massive shortage of housing for London’s essential workers, and huge communities are being driven from London’s estates to towns and cities across the country. So now they’ll have somewhere to live in the capital, allowing them to contribute to the diverse combination of ethnicities and social demographics that has made London London for so many centuries.

Ha ha ha! Of course that’s not what’s happening. The housing is being built for rich people from abroad who want to buy London property as an apparently safe investment. Usually they leave these homes empty, decimating the communities in which they exist. If no one lives there, no one will use the shops that surround them, so no one can afford to serve those areas, leaving them as de facto ghost towns.

As I chatted to friends about this and wondered what would become of the London in which I’d spent the first forty years of my life, I found this article in The Observer (there’s another by Rafael Behr in the Observer magazine that I couldn’t find online). It expands on the above in a somewhat depressing fashion.

If London carries on this way it’s going to change beyond recognition, and not in a good way. When I left it wasn’t because of a dislike of what I thought London would become, but if I still lived there I’d think even more seriously about leaving, just to find something less expensive and less homogenised. For the price of my London flat I bought a home in LA that’s twice the size with a big garden and pool – and that’s in a nice area with a good school. When LA seems like a massive bargain in comparison, that’s when you have to wonder about London’s future.

Or come to LA!

Or both.

Last week there were a lot of retweets of Dave Trott’s analysis of Cannes (full interview here):

Do you think ad festivals like the Cannes Lions can change this?

No. Ad festivals prevent creativity. You’re not doing advertising for six million people in the street anymore, but for ten people on the jury, and for a few clients. You win an award, because then Martin Sorrell will give you a raise, and Martin Sorrell can go and tell Unilever that he won an award, and Unilever will maybe give him another piece of digital business. How has that got anything to do with the job we’re supposed to be doing?

Despite big, high-profile, ‘proper’ campaigns winning Lions, we still had at least three Grands Prix awarded to work of utter, steaming bullshit: two for the Volvo Paint excretion and one for the Iron Fish mendacity.

Of course there are mixed consequences to this: I guess the publicity around the Iron Fish thing might result in the entrants being stripped of their prize. Or not. It’s not as if Cannes is a bastion of integrity. And I’d imagine that the Paint guys won’t be held to account at all for their truth-fudging lack of creativity, allowing them to pop those two Grands Prix up on a shelf and slurp up the pay rises they bring. Good for them. They played the game and won. And that’s all this is: a game. For every Epic Split or World Gallery (by the way, the Paint thing actually beat the Ice Bucket Challenge in one category. The jury involved should hang their heads in permanent shame for that one) there’s a scamtastic, industry-cheapening cack heap to create a big gain for the people involved but another step back for the credibility of advertising as a whole.

It also undermines the credibility of Cannes and the other winners. Did those press ads for 24-hour cycling actually run? More than once? Did they move the 24-hour cycling needle? Who knows… All I know is I wouldn’t be surprised if they ran once in the creative agency’s in-house magazine, and that’s a shame. Of course this isn’t the first year this kind of thing has happened, but the accumulation of fakery and half-truths has led to a weary cynicism that if you haven’t actually seen the work in the real world then it’s definitely bullshit.

So I’d add to Dave’s point: yes, the whole thing has now become so contorted that we’re holding up little bagatelles designed purely for the twelve people on a jury as the finest our collective minds have to offer; but beyond that the organisers of the Festival are complicit in the perpetuation of this. Clearly the terms of entry are flexible enough for agencies to spin base metal into gold under the noses of the jurors, and until that stops the carousel of bullshit continues.

Does that all have a deleterious effect? Jeff Goodby seems to think so.

And is the national press similarly dismayed? Indeed.

But what do we do about it?

One of the commenters on last week’s Cannes post had this to say:

I just don’t think you can slag off Volvo Life Paint too much though – Grey played the game. Awards are an industry-facing nonsense – and I kind of feel like Grey appropriating a product and using it for a client isn’t all that different to every team in the world scouring Youtube for inspiration and then using it for telly ads.

It’s all cheating. But who gives a fuck, we’re an industry full of cunts innit…

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Stop creating scam.

Stop approving scam.

Stop celebrating scam.

If you’re a juror, stop awarding scam.

If you’re the head of a holding company or chairman of an agency, stop remunerating scammers.

Be the change you want to see in the world.

Be the solution, not the problem.

Peace out.

x

Pete Tong reads out a web address in 1995:

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

How to tap your dad for cash (thanks, D).

Drone footage of Nubian pyramids (thanks, T).

David Shrigley has designed a new mascot for Partick Thistle (thanks, P).

Joseph Campbell on having a fulfilling life.

Professional poo diver (thanks, T).

The most inane bollocks from Cannes (thanks, J).

Screenplay writing explained in seven infographics (thanks, J2).

Epic conducting gifs.

And how to create an epic movie.

Hi all.

Media Arts Lab has won the 2015 Cannes Grand Prix for ‘Outdoor’.

Here are my peeps going up to collect the heaviest of Lions:

If Cannes is going to award a poster campaign (Outdoor? Magazines are often ‘outdoor’, as are radio ads etc.) then it’s great that it’s holding up the World Gallery/Shot On iPhone 6 work as an example of the kind of excellence the rest of the industry should aspire to: it’s a proper campaign that ran at great cost all over the world for a massive corporation (unlike another ridiculous and disappointing Grand Prix winner I could mention); it brightened up cities across the globe with a simple message that acted as a powerful demonstration of the product it was advertising; it was executed to the highest standards of craft in many different formats but remained just as brilliant throughout thousands of different versions.

Well done to all involved. You’re all very talented and I’m proud to work with you.

You’re also lovely people, so that’s nice, too.

Bx

Since I emigrated a few things seem to have changed in the London ad scene. One of them appears to be a massive movement of some of London’s biggest agencies. DLKW Lowe has moved from South Kensington to Old Street, Publicis has bought a huge building in Farringdon, Ogilvy is about to move to the South Bank, and already over there are both TBWA and AMV BBDO.

So, what’s it all about, Alfie?

I assume the driving reason is financial, because that’s the driving reason behind the vast majority of corporate decisions these days. Thousands of square feet in the West End/Marylebone/South Ken etc. will always cost more than the equivalent further out of town, so if your lease comes up, the cheaper option is likely to be a move. Odd that so many are happening at the same time, though, and from different holding companies.

Anyway, as I work in a pleasant office in Marina Del Rey, some 5500 miles away, I have little firsthand knowledge of all this, but I did experience a similar situation when my agency moved from the West End to Spitalfields in 2007. I was initially not keen, partly because I  had never been there, despite living in london for 34 years, but when we made the move I loved it. It turned out that we were a stone’s throw from W&K/Mother in a vibrant and creative part of town. Yes, there was also a nearby cunt soup of besuited cityboys, who I assume were at that very time fucking the entire planet up the arse for shits, giggles and cash, but if you kept to the right side of Commercial St you barely saw them. So despite being much further from advertising’s traditional home, and my own home, I’m glad we moved.

But what of the rest of you? How are the TBWA-ers, AMV-ites and Lowe-ingtons feeling about their new environment? I’d assume that the new location is one thing, but what about the office spaces? Better? Worse? More or less conducive to producing great ads?* (Interestingly, I see that A&E DDB is staying put. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?) Is being close to Tate Modern a reasonable trade-off for being so far from Selfridges? Are the South Londoners happy while the North Londoners are miserable?

Let me know in the comments section, which might be tempered slightly because I’m an Omnicom/TBWA employee.

*Obviously I don’t mean ‘great’ ads as in properly great, like Guinness Surfer and all that. No one in London is doing that, and nor have they since Cadbury’s Gorilla. But more like the new definition of ‘great’ – the kind of stuff that would have won BTAA Silvers ten years ago.