If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

The influences of Star Wars (thanks, A):

Awkward boners (thanks, J).

Where do airport codes come from? (Thanks, D.)

Professor Stanley Unwin meets the guy who does the voices for Bill and Ben (thanks, A):

Quite the artwork (thanks, T):

So much great Apocalypse Now shiz.

Aaron Sorkin on loving dialogue (thanks, B):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fT3FbSiJu4

The anatomy of a Facebook status update (thanks, P).

Tom Cruise: stuntman (thanks, J2).

Henry Miller’s writing advice (this is really good. Thanks, G).

DHMIS4 (thanks, J):

Brydon writes:

misterMrs is currently looking to partner with a talented pattern maker or clothing designer, preferably in the LA area. 

Founded by husband and wife duo Brydon & Sharlene Gerus, misterMrs is a wardrobe for postmodern humans. A bold stance against the frivolous cycles of fashion that hold no meaning. 

Clear your closet. Clear your mind. Simplify your life. 

Comprised of a 5 piece all black wardrobe cut uniquely for men and women, misterMrs empowers you to focus on the things that matter while not having to sacrifice on style. 

Sharlene is an account director who has worked with some of fashions biggest names in fashion, including Mario Testino and Vogue. Brydon is an international art director who has created many campaigns for the world’s greatest and most loved brands. He is also the founder of the ADCAN awards. 

please get in touch at info@mistermrs.com

A niche request? Yes, but if you are in that niche, this is the thing for you.

Who was Ron Brown?

I think many of the people who knew him would answer with the sentence, ‘David Abbott’s art director’. That’s how the title to this remembrance piece begins and, if we’re going to be honest, that’s what defined him professionally.

But Ron Brown did not merely exist in the shadow of the greatest ad man this country has ever produced – he was too good at his own job for that to happen. Of course, he had some fantastic words to play with, but he sure knew how to bring them to life. And let’s face it, David could have chosen any art director on Earth to work with, but he chose Ron, and not only as an art director, but also as a business partner and friend. That’s an endorsement that says more than all the awards (and there were many) they won put together.

Here are two of my favourite of his press ads:

Neither has a headline but they work all the better because of it. Was that David’s idea or Ron’s? Whoever it was only one of them had to make the end result work.

If memory serves he continued at AMV for maybe five years after David left, gracing the agency as a charming, friendly connection to a time when the industry was populated with gentlemen. He was a genuinely lovely bloke and always had time to offer advice or chat about the old days.

RIP Ron Brown’s copywriter’s art director.

Here’s someone else’s post about Volvo’s reflective paint.

In case you don’t have time to read all that, here’s the two word summary: it’s bullshit; Grey London has simply rebranded someone else’s product with a Volvo logo. Why? Could it possibly be to win a Cannes Lion or two?

According to the Wired article on the subject:

The spray-on reflective paint appears to be a simple rebranding of Albedo100’s Invisible Bright product. LifePaint is a branding partnership between Volvo, creative agency Grey London, and, of course, Albedo100. In other words, it’s possible to get a similar (if not identical) product here in the US. It’s just not branded as LifePaint.

If you’re wondering why, if LifePaint is intended for fabrics, there’s a brightly glowing bike in its promotional materials, that’s probably a little bit of misdirection on Volvo’s part. Albedo100 also has more permanent solutions in its stable, including “Permanent Metallic,” which is designed to be sprayed onto bikes, signs, and stenciled patterns. That could be what’s lighting up the bike, rather than LifePaint itself.

Yes, kind of odd to recommend the temporary fabric paint for your bike when there’s a more permanent metallic version. Also  interesting that the website doesn’t mention Volvo developing the paint at all (probably because it didn’t). To clarify, this is like Persil Automatic ‘rebranding’ Dyson vacuum cleaners or London Zoo ‘rebranding’ Cadbury’s Animal biscuits. And now that I’ve written that word so many times, I have to say that I’ve never even heard of a ‘rebranding‘ of this nature. I’ve only ever heard of companies rebranding their own products (Jif to Cif or Marathon to Snickers). Is this really a rebranding? Or even a ‘branding partnership’? WTF is a branding partnership anyway? So many questions for a simple purchase/borrowing of one company’s product by another much larger company for purposes that seem really quite strange…

On the positive side, this story has been all over the internet, so I guess it’s caught the imagination of the public, or at least the related websites that are hungry for a story. I suppose it’s also good for the people who have obtained a can of the spray and used it to possibly avoid being hit by a car on a London road at night.

On the negative side it’s unclear how many people fall into that category. The site doesn’t let you buy any, and it appears only to be available as a freebie at a few bike shops around London (I wonder why it’s not for sale. Is it perhaps too expensive for Volvo to subsidise the product of another company to look like they care about road safety? After all, Volvo is a massive corporation that could surely put some distribution muscle behind such a worthy innovation). It all seems a bit weird and complicated with a bunch of inconvenient difficulties being masked by subterfuge.

And that brings me on to the other negative side of this: I’d be delighted if someone at Grey London corrected me, but it appears very much as if someone at the agency came across this niche safety product and persuaded its vaguely related client to… um… Here it gets a little hazy: have they persuaded Volvo to ask to kind of licence the product or promote it (paid or unpaid? No idea) somehow? Clearly they don’t actually make it and equally clearly they haven’t bought the paint manufacturer or its patent so that they ‘own’ this innovation, so I’m a bit confused. What’s in it for Volvo and what have they done to bask in the reflective (pun very much intended) glow of this product? Also, I recall from my time at AMV that Volvo hasn’t traded on its safety angle for many years. They wanted to move away from that, so is this a first step back into that territory? Via the medium of someone else’s spray paint?

If I were a slightly cynical person I’d have to say that this looks a lot like Grey saw a Lion opportunity and did what many scamsters do: they retrofitted someone else’s brilliance onto one of their clients in order to spend a lot of time walking up to podiums at awards shows.

It’s like this:

That was originally a short film by an excellent animator called Tim Hope. The film was bought, a Playstation logo was added to the end and awards were won. However, that happened in the pre-YouTube days, where every ‘inspiration’ was not so easily found. Since then, after the Cog rip off furore and its many, many children, the slapping of a logo on an existing piece of work has been somewhat frowned upon. Despite it often producing some excellent advertising it has also produced a great deal of dismay and embarrassment because it made our job look easy and its practitioners lazy. After all, if you could just spend a few days trawling the internet for whatever’s interesting, find a tenuous connection to your client and put its logo on the end, why would you deserve to be well paid? A creatively-minded student on a zero-hours contract could get pretty close to what your six-figure adland creatives are supposedly capable of, which is why so many creative departments now look as if they’re composed more substantially of the former than the latter.

Has it caused such problems? Well, take a look at creative salaries these days and compare them to their pre-internet juiciness. Coincidence? It might be, but of course it isn’t. The people who pay our wages listen as we call them up, cravenly rubbing our hands together like Uriah Heep, as we beg ever so ‘umbly for the chance to run this little knockoff spot at 3:30am on Granada Men and Motors. Then they think we’re just a little bit more pathetic than they thought we were before the request. Then they remember the whole incident when it comes to financial negotiations. Of course, they didn’t come right out and say it when the figure at the bottom of the contract was a little less than last time, in fact it may not even have been a conscious decision, but somewhere in the back of their minds they thought a bit less of us and acted accordingly.

This can of paint bollocks is just another example of that. I’m sure it’ll be voted into awards shows from London to Lebanon, then held up by stupid people as an example of what we can achieve if we’re allowed to innovate, to truly be let off the creative leash, but in the end it’s just another nail in the coffin for advertising’s credibility. It’s not solving a business problem for Volvo, and the only skill it’s demonstrating on Grey London’s behalf is the ability to produce award-winning work from the easiest of non-briefs, then negotiate permission from a client to be allowed to play a silly little game called ‘Win The Pencil’.

I think it’s appropriate on Easter Sunday to say Jesus fucking Christ…

Obama talks drugs with the creator of The Wire.

Fine Cameron satire:

And more of that from the peerless Cassetteboy:

Loads of great Third Man stuff.

The gif connoisseur (thanks, J).

Really enjoy the hell out of National Corndog Day (thanks, G).

What was Bowie doing at your age? (Thanks, J).

Tunnels were planned from the Playboy Mansion to Jack Nicholson’s home (thanks, J).

Tarantino profiles supercut (thanks, J):

And Pulp Fiction up close (thanks, J):

Great article on why Tidal will fail (thanks, D).

Gluten-free gallery (thanks, B).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgjCEOk1poc

I have no idea what the idea is supposed to mean insofar as it relates to Lynx Black, but it’s a jolly fun watch and a very cool version of that excellent song.

And it’ll definitely adhere to Bernbach’s rule of needing to be noticed.

Will it adhere to anything else he said? Possibly not.

(Thanks, A.)

When I go out for dinner I might take five minutes over the menu.

When I want a pair of trainers I might mull over the options for a couple of weeks.

And when I see a film it might take me years to finally decide how much I like it.

But in all the creative reviews I’ve ever seen, the person doing the reviewing is expected to evaluate and give feedback on whatever they’ve seen in a matter of minutes, sometimes seconds. That’s right: the analysis of multi-million pound marketing efforts in abstract form often happens in the same amount of time it takes someone to decide on which chocolate bar they’re going to buy (TBH the chocolate bar decision is usually one that takes several hours, beginning from the moment the previous purchase has concluded).

Of course, there’s plenty of time after that to change the work, or even change the mind, but at least 90% of the ads I’ve shown, been shown, or watched being shown have elicited an opinion within ten minutes. And if it’s been condemned that decision is almost always final.

Yes, it’s the CD’s job to be able to work out what might or might not save or kill a business in such circumstances, but surely a little longer wouldn’t hurt. The occasions I’ve been sent work to chew over in my own time (within reason) have often been the most fruitful: I don’t just have longer to think over the quality of the work, I’m also able to spend more minutes, or even hours, on working out the advice that might lead to an improvement.

How often do you get complex decisions right first time, with ten people watching you, with so much hanging on the result?

DID YOU LIKE WHIPLASH? WHY? TELL ME NOW!

SHALL WE GET THE BUS OR THE TRAIN? ARE YOU SURE? HOW DO YOU KNOW?

CREME EGG OR TWIX? QUICK! CREME EGG OR FUCKING TWIX??????? GIVE ME FIVE GOOD REASONS!

I guess it must work to some degree, but couldn’t another way work better?

Vintage creepy photos (thanks, L).

And if you liked those, try some terrifying Wikipedia pages.

Odd promotional film for the greatest album of all time (thanks, T):

 Groovy architectural collages (thanks, J).

Brilliant first and last frames of movies (thanks, J):

Leonard in Slow Motion (thanks, J):

Modern day Dali (thanks, J).

Nigel Farage is baffled (thanks, J):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O925jNVmpOQ

I guess it’s a zeitgeisty thing these days, which makes it juicy fodder for an ad.

But to be fair, Apple did make a similar, Emmy-winning suggestion a couple of Christmases ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhwhnEe7CjE

Anyway, I think you should make up your own mind about all that. Phones don’t ignore people, people do.

Which reminds me of this:

I recall liking it when it came out, but I only watched it once.

Now it’s won Ad Of The Year at the British Arrows (no idea where to find the results in a neat little website, but you can look through here).

I thought Sainsbury’s was going to win.

What do you think? Is this a deserving winner? Was another ad robbed?

Do you even care?