If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

An interesting aspect of the advertising creative’s lot is their team chemistry.

The overwhelming majority of copywriters and art directors work as a duo, so beyond their own individual abilities they have to try to create a successful working combination. That throws up a multiplicity of questions and circumstances, all of which can have a massive bearing on the output that ensues:

Is this possible partner Mr./Mrs. Right or just Mr./Mrs. Right Now? You have to have a partner, so you have to go for someone, but what if the perfect Yin is not available for your Yang? You have to compromise, but to what extent?

How do you find that partner? If you go to some kind of advertising college you have a couple of advantages: you’re discovering the skill and the business from the same starting point; but you also have a larger number of people to choose from, so there’s a better chance of finding your Romeo/Juliette.

What if you don’t appreciate what your other half gives you? I’ve long believed that it can be very helpful to have a team composed of a shit-hot creative and a shit-hot PR-ish person, someone who will schmooze the best briefs out of the CD and help sell the resulting work down the line, protecting it from possible damage along the way. But in the early days the PR half’s benefits may not be immediately apparent, and even later, might you resent them for being less ‘creative’?

What if circumstances lead to a change of teams later in a career? Your partner might get disillusioned enough to leave the industry; they might have to follow their boy/girlfriend to a new country; they might get fired; your CD might want to shake things up; another creative in the department might chat up your partner in the agency bar, and over a few months persuade them to leave you. Whatever happens, you then have to find another partner in your agency, or, if you are then considered to be surplus to requirements, you have to go out into the big wide world and find another partner. Are the partnerless options a bit crap? Why is a divorced person divorced? Are they damaged goods or were they just mismatched in the first place? Lots of fine creatives kissed a few frogs before finding their prince, or at least made the best of a situation that was not quite perfect.

What if your combination is just off? Two plus two can end up equalling all sorts of things if you get it right/wrong. When Tom got together with Walt it was a match made in advertising heaven. The same went for Mark Denton and Chris Palmer, Dave Dye and Sean Doyle, John Hegarty and Barbara Nokes, Richard Flintham and Andy MacLeod etc. etc. What if Walt, Chris, Sean, Barbara and Richard had been working elsewhere? What if they had never existed? Would the work of Tom, Mark, Dave, John and Richard have been better or worse? What if Dye had teamed up with MacLeod? What if Denton had joined Nokes? We’ll never know (unless they decide to go for those pairings now), but the possibilities are intriguing.

I think the very good creatives can make many partnerships work. If you go through old award books you’ll find some of them winning prizes in different combinations. But the question remains: what if Lennon had met Dylan instead of McCartney, or Neil Young had found himself somehow working alongside Pete Waterman. What works of genius have we missed? What terrible pairings has fate allowed us to avoid?

Quantum physics suggests the answers lie somewhere in the universe, but it also suggests we are all random compositions of energy that render our human forms laughably pointless.

Pay your money, take your choice.

Sign painters: keepers of the craft:

An oral history of Mad Men (thanks, W).

How do cheeseburgers age? In the case of McDonald’s not very much:

Everything is better with googly eyes.

Share your fucking story (thanks, V).

Good One Direction spoof:

Pulitzer nominated comics.

And some other amazing comics (thanks, T).

Beautiful food colour gradients (thanks, J).

The great combovers of Asia (thanks, J).

Yes. That’s the joke (thanks, D).

This is very funny (thanks, T).

Cam writes:

Hi Ben,

Here’s a poster currently ‘gracing’ the London Underground:

‘Men have status. Boys are busy updating theirs’?

Seriously?

In 2015?

1.3bn people use Facebook. Is Schweppes really suggesting that it’s more mature not be one of the, say, 500m ‘boys’ who update their statuses? It’s not as if it’s 2007 and Facebook is a niche thing used by little kids. EVERYONE is on Facebook; that means a lot people update their status at some point or another; that means lots of ‘men’ are among those people (including Lee Goulding, who is by far the most manly fella I know).

I’d also question calling out ‘status’ as something to aspire to, like it’s 1987 and we’re all clamouring to be Gordon Gekko. Even if we can get past the outdated bling-craving that feels so 2005, I don’t think 35p worth of tonic water is the best way to denote status, at least not when there’s a Nebuchadnezzar of Cristal to be had.

And it’s fucking Schweppes. Here’s some news for the Dr. Pepper Snapple group who own the esteemed drinks mixer brand: a G’n’T ain’t the most masculine of drinks. I’m a big fan, but it doesn’t separate me from the boys like a straight shot of rye or a pint of bitter might.

One last thing: the model looks like an utter bell.

But it’s not just the guys who are getting it in the neck. Here’s another poster causing controversy on the Tube:

So far over 55,000 people have signed a petition asking for its removal on the grounds that…

‘Perhaps not everyone’s priority is having a ‘beach body’ (by the way, what is that?), and making somebody feel guilty for not prioritising it by questioning their personal choices is a step too far. A body’s function is far more intricate and important than looking ‘beach ready’, so in fact it is Protein World who have confused their priorities, if anyone.’ 

And many women have been taking their distaste into their own hands:

Personally, I don’t see why this has annoyed people so much more than any other ads that ‘make women feel guilty’ (by the way, only you can make yourself feel guilty. Remember that, kids!). I guess it’s a bit more explicit than the other images of idealised women that have featured in ads for decades, but I think the posters that make women feel unattractive/inadequate in a subtler way are more dangerous because there is no open dialogue about the damage they do:

I also think that all this furore will have put Protein World’s Weight Loss collection at the top of any insecure girl’s shopping list. ‘Women’ (whatever that actually means) can object all they want, but this anger isn’t going to undo hundreds of years of aesthetic fascism, and the ladies who are still under its powerful thumb will still want to be ‘Beach Body Ready’.

So, two good reasons why I’m delighted not to be in London right now.

And good luck with that General Election, everyone! From where I’m standing it doesn’t look anything like a giant fucking mess!

Here are three stats that often pop into my life that don’t explain exactly what they’re suggesting they do:

1. Rotten Tomatoes ratings: I used to think that a high RT rating was a pretty-much-guaranteed indication of a film’s quality, but then something happened. John Wick got 85% (I think it was over 90% at one point). I wasn’t the only one to be puzzled by this, but my explanation is slightly different. RT bases its score on whether a movie has had a positive or negative review, so a 6/10 review has a much value as a 10/10 and a 0/10 is the same as 4/10 (roughly speaking). So a great/shit movie that polarises (eg Inherent Vice – 71%) would get a lower mark than a so-so movie that doesn’t (Furious 7 – 82%). Is Furious 7 a better movie than Inherent Vice? Yes, if you’re an 8-year-old boy. Overall RT will point you in the right direction, but tread carefully.

2. The second one is also to do with movies. Cinemascore asks people who have just seen a movie to rate it on the school scale of A, B, C etc. As you can see, it’s pretty hard to get below a B, which is kind of odd considering how many awful movies there are out there. For example, Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 gets an amazing 0% on Rotten Tomatoes but a reasonable B- on Cinemascore. Clearly the reason for this is that people who have just seen a film are the ones who wanted to see it in the first place. The legions of people with double- and triple-digit IQs who stayed away from PBMC2 weren’t forced to go and see it so that their opinions could give a fairer score. That means only the people who thought they might like it in the first place were asked and, surprisingly, they were broadly in favour.

3. The last one is about football, although I have a feeling it applies elsewhere. When newspapers report that a team has had two wins in ten games or three defeats in their last seventeen they also mean that the team has gone through three wins in eleven games or four defeats in eighteen. They’ve taken a point they want to make (this team is shit/good) and found the most illustrative fact to back it up. Obviously if they’ve lost three in nine that doesn’t sound as good as three in seventeen, so they go to the outer limit of the number of defeats, which means the next game that they decided not to include must have been a non-defeat. Obviously this doesn’t necessarily change the overall impression of the team’s form, but it is an interesting example of ‘not the whole truth’.

It seems I’m not the only one in this mood.

First up is this excellent NewsWall, which offers the day’s headlines in gif form that you can then click on to find more. I think we underestimate the engagement of young people in the issues of the day, but for those who do find a newspaper off-putting this could be a welcome change.

And just in case, C4 are turning E4 off so that its viewers get the message to get out and vote (instead of watching Hollyoaks, if that still exists):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pahIcUi0kns&feature=youtu.be

Nice ones.

Mitch Hedberg compendium (thanks, V).

Literal New Yorker cartoons (this made me weep with laughter; thanks, C).

Great pics of Chinese nail houses.

Quite wonderful: an oral history of Airplane!.

Christopher Nolan and Bennet Miller chat (thanks, G).

Vintage supercars left to rust in a forest (thanks, J).

Interesting neologisms (thanks, D).

Ex-cops smoke dope for our education:

Nabokov’s love letters (thanks, T).

Economy of storytelling: the opening of Back To The Future.

Julia Louis Dreyfus’s last fuckable day:

Tortilla record player (thanks, J2):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjOerycMxM4&app=desktop

Chrome extension that saves pages that make you smile (thanks, M).

Has any brand kept up such a consistently high standard by essentially making the same ad over and over again?

I’d argue not.

There’s a new BT campaign in town, and it’s certainly… interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VA5SIsvWYlc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwmsk06PAHo

I kind of like it, but that’s in spite of a few things that I often have very little time for, i.e.: BT ads, Ewan MacGregor, ads about ads, Robin van Shitwipe…

But I think it works better than it should. Ewan gives a decent performance, the twatty creative is quite amusing and they pull off the old American trick of simply saying all the product stuff out loud in the context of the gags so you don’t notice it as much.

It’s missing that top-US-level of writing (the gag about mum calling and the guy pretending it’s a girlfriend is a bit so-so), but it’s not bad (although a combined 25,000 YT views in four days is a little concerning).

But never mind what I think – I don’t even live in the country this runs in…

Tell me, dear reader, what do you think?

I’ve been a dad for nine years and some kind of creative manager for ten, and yet it’s taken me this long to notice the similarities between the two tasks, at least to the extent that I thought it’d be worth a blog post.

1. Retaining/releasing information.

This situation extends all the way up to government, but it certainly applies every single day in parenting and managing: what is the point at which letting people know what’s going on becomes harmful or counter-productive? As a parent you tend not to make breakfast more interesting by explaining how mummy and daddy are about to miss a mortgage payment or why that planned brother or sister is on hold because daddy can’t get it up (obviously these are fabricated example situations that have nothing to do with my own life – smiley face made out of punctuation). There are simply some things that kids don’t need to know, at least at certain ages. Younger kids won’t understand and older kids can end up extrapolating too much from whatever they’re told.

Similarly, it’s probably not the best idea to explain every knock-on effect of an account loss to a junior copywriter. Sure, if it means you have to let him/her go, then blab away, but if you’re having to downsize the HR dept or stop serving Fox’s biscuits at client meetings then that info is not going to help. Even at higher levels you might be having a row with the holding company about making 8% cuts instead of 11%, possibly resulting in redundancies, but putting the shits up everyone by giving them daily updates on the situation is not going to help anyone.

2. IT’S NOT FAIR!

Another one that continues through the rest of your life. Why did he get that when I only got this? Why does Andy get a lollipop while I only get a penny chew? Why did Mike get a raise when I didn’t? Managing comparative rewards and punishments is bloody hard. You might not even have two lollipops; you might have forgotten how many raises happened and when; you might be planning a big raise next month… Dave Trott once told me he went to a parenting advice thing where he was told that the two things you have to be are positive and consistent. I find positivity much simpler to default to, after all you can find the positive in pretty much anything if you look hard enough, but consistency is a bitch because your definition and perspective on it will never be the same as someone else’s.

3. It’s 24/7

There are times in the day/week when your kids and job are much more front and centre than at others, but they’re always there, lurking in the back of your mind. Another aspect of this is the feeling that you’re neglecting one when spending time with the other. Of course, you feel guiltier when you’re working instead of parenting, but if you’re working on an email that really needs to go out but your daughter wants to play Barbies then the temptation to break her little heart can be greater than you’d like.

4. You’re nurturing a big project that has plenty of ups and downs

Managing a dept: you win a few, you lose a few, but you keep heading in the right direction looking at the bigger picture and shaping things to be in a better place as you learn to improve together. You feel a compulsion that drives you through the tough times to the highly rewarding moments on the other side.

Bringing up a kid: ditto

5. You’re having a huge effect on people’s lives

Of course there’s the practical stuff, like whether you’ve given your kids dinner or given your middleweight creatives a nice office, but the touch points of your effects are constant and significant. For example you might make an off-hand comment that your son will never become a footballer because he spends every evening dancing. Your son might then read more into that, perhaps thinking that you don’t consider him tough enough, or believing that he’s somehow let you down, or indeed that you’re delighted by this and he should now try to join the Royal Ballet. Similarly, someone in your department might see you walk right past them without saying hello and wonder what they’ve done to anger you, fretting about it for days. You might simply have been deep in a thought about how on earth porn shops stay open when it’s all free on the internet, but he just saw the slight and it ruined a chunk of his life. So the actions of a manager can have great but unintended consequences, just like the actions of a dad.

6. Ending

You can resign from a job and, in much the same way, drown a kid in a canal.