If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

A recent survey suggests that, out of all the jobs on the planet, 60% of Britons would most like to be an author. (No idea who they asked, but the fact that positions two and three are taken up by ‘librarian’ and ‘academic’ suggests to me that very few viewers of X Factor took part.)

Interestingly, this author thinks they’re mad, and if they only knew the reality of writing novels for a living they would surely and quickly change their minds.

Well, as some kind of an author, perhaps I can offer an opinion as to why this might be, along with an insight into my impression of doing the most attractive job in the world©.

On its best day writing a novel is an immense pleasure. Creating a world and populating it with people who have sprung from your imagination is a lot of fun. You can play God, all the while fantasising about the millions that might come your way when your finished work defines the zeitgeist and is then bought by a rich film producer and made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Natalie Portman. Perhaps not every author harbours this attendant fantasy, but I’ve often thought of writing books to be a long, difficult version of buying a lottery ticket: if the book turns out well it could be made into There Will Be Blood or Jurassic Park. And that would be pretty cool. If the book turns out shit, or is never finished, then that dream must disappear, but until reality sets in, everything is perfect.

But is the actual writing (typing, marking out chunks of time when you could otherwise be playing Crossy Road on your iPad, suffering creative speedbumps and road blocks) fun? I think so. The things that make it less enjoyable are external processes that you can choose not to suffer: the guilt writers feel if they haven’t written enough or solved a plot flaw; the insane and seemingly insurmountable difficulty of actually getting down to the bloody thing when there are so many distractions on the internet; the torture of looking with envious eyes at the success of others, etc. But the actual writing? When it’s flowing? Sheer bliss.

Then again, it’s not my only job. I’m fortunate enough to spend my working days with a bunch of fantastic, pleasant, funny, driven people, all of whom are making great efforts to solve fascinating problems for a company that millions of people love, and that is a great privilege. If I had to spend most of my hours alone, cranking out the words and pages that might allow me to crank out more words and pages, and hopefully pay the mortgage, I might find it less appealing. In the first link above, Sebastian Faulks, an immensely successful author, talks about wanting to give it up to do a proper job for just that reason. And my old boss, Peter Souter, writer of several excellent plays and a fine TV series, told me the same thing, which is one of the reasons he decided to return to agency life.

I’d guess that the 60% who want to be an author want to choose their working hours, in which they produce an excellent and beloved work of art, giving them the golden treble of autonomy, mastery and purpose. That does sound appealing, but of course it misses the uncertainty that your next novel will be enough of a success to pay the bills. That’s the reality of being an author, and in these impecunious times the chances of making decent cash solely through the writing of novels are slim to none.

Having said all that, I’m the kind of vain, shallow wanker who takes immense pleasure in knowing lots of people want to do something I’ve done, so I shall continue to bask in their envy as I procrastinate away another hour in which I could otherwise be writing my next book.

Mranswerman (thanks, S).

Cathy cartoons with Louis CK quotes.

Excellent John Milius interview (thanks, J1).

Famous footballers as kids (thanks, J2).

Pantone chip art (thanks, J3).

Fine, fine gif.

Jurassic World (sort of):

Watch the guy on the left and realise just how much you’ve been wasting your life:

Interesting doc on some of the men of Florida:

All of Saul Bass’s title sequences:

Do you like top knots? (Thanks, P.)

When you leave college will you continue your advertising education? If so, how?

I was a bit of a nerdy autodidact, who read The Copy Book a disturbing number of times and spent many Saturday afternoons reading D&ADs in that library at the bottom of Leicester Square. But I was also lucky enough to work at AMV BBDO, which contained many great creatives that I could learn from. I remember showing my work to David Abbott, Peter Souter, Paul Brazier, John Gorse, Malcolm Duffy, Paul Belford, Nigel Roberts, Dave Dye, Sean Doyle, Mary Wear (I can’t be arsed to keep typing this list; it goes on forever), and having it improve enormously as a consequence. But I had to want to do that; I had to seek out the advice. It would have been easier not to bother, but I’d never have got into the D&AD Annual that way.

A step beyond that wish to learn from one’s superiors was the use/creation of a mentor.

The most successful younger creatives at AMV latched themselves, limpet-like, onto one particular shit-hot creative and did not let go. (One particular AD went so far as to emulate as closely as possible the clothes, beard and car of his hero.) I remember when we heard the news that Paul Belford and Nigel Roberts were on their way: you could almost smell the superglue being applied as the ADs waited at the door to attach themselves to Paul and the writers to Nigel.

But that had to be a two-way street; the mentors had to agree, whether explicitly or not, to spend the time improving the mentees. If the requisite effort and improvement were not apparent then the mentor thing would simply not materialise. Would the junior cross the line from merely being the subject of some occasional creative direction to actually become a great creative’s protégé? It was interesting to watch.

Anyway, I wonder if such a situation exists today. Are there enough great teachers and willing learners? If not, what will that do to the chain of knowledge? Will it be broken forever or will people find other methods by which to swashbuckle their way to excellence?

And what’s the mentor situation like in your office?

Oh, and if you want to name a great mentor or two, go ahead. They should all get the gallons of credit they deserve.

UPDATE: apologies, I have neglected to mention any mentors of my own. Oddly, when I was a youngster I never felt as if I had a specific mentor, so much as lots of great CDs. But since I left Lunar I’ve found a few people to be sort of mentor-friends, who helped me see where I should head, sometimes in advertising, sometimes outside it. Without going into specific details I’ve found a lot of inspiration from knowing Dave Trott, Mark Denton, Dave Dye, Peter Souter and Paul Belford.

Shame there are no women or racial minorities on that list, but white men are just fantastic, aren’t they/we?

Last week I was listening to this episode of Marc Maron’s excellent WTF podcast, featuring an interview with Paul Thomas Anderson:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F59SVVlPdy4

It’s a great listen if you want to find out how the director of Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood came up with that kind of stuff. There’s also a very funny story at around the 53 minute mark, if that’s what floats your boat.

Anyway, the thing that stuck out most to me was a little passage from PTA:

My favourite movie of all time is The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. I must have seen it five or six times and thought, ‘OK’. And then, whatever it was, when I came across it at just the right time, at just the right moment… And I went ‘Holy shit’. My life opened up and I thought ‘This is the best movie I’ve ever seen, and that’s when I was writing There Will Be Blood. I just watched it over and over and over again. These movies are moveable feasts, in other words, you catch it on an airplane, you catch it on your  phone: where are you going to see it? It’s out there and it exists and it’s going to be something different all the time.

Marc replies:

I think that’s a movie, not unlike Pynchon, or not unlike a great piece of literature, that as you evolve, or music, that when you go back to it it speaks to you differently

I entirely agree. When I mentioned this to my wife she reminded me how our perspective had changed on the the film Brief Encounter. When we first saw it we thought it all seemed like an exciting affair for a married woman in austerity Britain; a couple of years later we saw it again and the guy who was making the affair happen seemed like a really rapey bastard, changing the tone of the entire story.

But there are countless examples of music tracks that only spoke to me after I either listened to them many times, or grew a bit older and was able to appreciate them with more experience. For example, the album 2001 by Dr Dre remained on heavy rotation for years because every few months a new track would become my favourite. The art somehow met me further down the road when I was ready for it.

And of course the opposite can happen: who hasn’t cajoled their friends into watching ‘this great movie I saw last year’ (usually a comedy), only to find yourself sitting there while tumbleweed blows through the living room because Cameron Diaz’s jokes seem roughly one millionth as funny as they had done the first time around?

Obviously that means you must now revisit every artistic expression you’ve ever seen thus far, just to check if it really is shit/great.

Here’s a comment from one of last week’s posts:

It got me thinking: was the brief easy? 

No idea. I suppose the people involved would know, but even then there is a massive set of variables that alter enormously the degree to which a brief is or is not ‘easy’.

Let’s take the Last Minute ad as an example. The brief might have been, ‘Show how LastMinute.com is the best way to have a dirty weekend’, in which case the leap from brief to solution does not seem to be particularly large. But even then, you could answer that brief in many, many ways: are LM the kind of client that likes to push the boundaries and get a bit saucy, or are they quite staid, requiring a great effort from the agency to get them to buy edgy work? Is this indeed the ‘first thought possible’ or was it a desperate 2am solution after weeks of rejection? Was there even a brief? Was this in fact done on spec? Had it been sitting in a drawer for several years after being declined by twelve other clients? Was the initial solution more elaborate, only to be pegged back by a tiny budget and a minuscule lead time? Was the creative team a pair of wet-behind-the-ears newbies who needed a lot of support, or a pair of grizzled veterans who can turn this kind of stuff out in their sleep? Did the agency have to wait until the boring client was on holiday before slipping it through her more broadminded substitute?

Then again, the brief might have been, ‘Show how adults 24-35 could use LM.com as their primary resource for a city break’. Then the question of genesis gets trickier: did the creative team spot the potential diamond in the rough? Or was it the CD? The client? The planner? Did that take weeks, facing a great deal of resistance from various personnel who did not fancy a tough/embarrassing chat with their prudish client? Was this the umpteenth incredibly dull brief on the same subject, leaving all concerned immensely grateful to an inspired creative for finally pulling something funny out of the bag?

And those are just some of the questions that could have made this easier or harder. What about the mood the creative team was in? Was the AD going through a divorce? Had the copywriter just been turned down for a dream move to another agency?

Etc.

When I was judging the Press section of D&AD in 2005 we unanimously awarded the Silver to this campaign:

In a sea of turgid shite it made us laugh, and it was pretty unusual for a car ad.

Anyway, after the results were revealed someone from VW’s agency told me that the idea was basically handed to the team by the planner during the briefing, with the implication that the award shouldn’t really have been given for such an easily-reached solution. Well, none of the jury knew how hard it had been to come up with that campaign; we just saw it, liked it and awarded it.

So no one can ever truly know how tough a brief really is. Those 90″ Nike brand ads are probably just as tough to generate as a really good 25×4 ad for 15% off carrots at Tesco. Which is the harder brief? Fuck knows, and at the end of the day no one in the public gives a toss, so it’s best not to worry about it.

Theo from Artsy writes:

Hello,

My name is Theo and I work at Artsy. While researching Paul Strand, I found your page: “www.ben-kay.com/2012/08/its-nice-that-its-nice-that-have-featured-my-bookshelf/“. Great content, by the way.

I actually worked on Artsy’s new Paul Strand page, and I think it would be a great resource for your readers. Our newly designed page includes Strand’s bio, over 20 of his works, exclusive articles about Strand, as well as up-to-date exhibition listings – it’s a unique Paul Strand resource.

I’d like to suggest adding a link to Artsy’s Paul Strand page, as I believe it would benefit your readers.

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions on how we can improve the site. I look forward to staying in touch with you about future opportunities.

Best,
Theo

“Look at the things around you, the immediate world around you.”
-Paul Strand

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

Then again, I do have a mental age of 12.

(Thanks, S.)

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

It was shot entirely on an iPad.

Hats off to a great team who put this together.

Damn Gaslamp Killer aint just “in” the ipad commecial he is IN THE FUCKIN IPAD COMMERCIAL. Tight!

Top grannies (thanks, J).

Best Guardian Soulmates ads (thanks, J).

Amazing Russian Mafia gravestones (thanks, J).

Top dad (thanks, J).

Superbowl ads remade in Lego in 36 hours (thanks, A):

Naughty kids get old man hair cuts.

Delightfully insane 90s commercial spoof:

Standing on the precipice of the future (thanks, A).

Ace banana art (thanks, J).

I only ask because I think I’ve seen things happen every which way:

Brilliant scripts made into bad ads.

Nothing scripts made into great ads.

Throwaway briefs that won pencils.

Great budgets, good clients and the best director in town fucking up something so badly it didn’t even run.

Leftfield nonsense making the whole planet laugh.

Leftfield nonsense leaving the whole planet cold.

Risks failing.

Risks succeeding.

Experienced creatives being 100% sure of decisions that turned out to be completely wrong.

Happy accidents.

CD interventions that saved ads

CD interventions that destroyed ads.

Client comments that everyone fretted about for ages, then implemented with no detrimental effects.

Client comments that turned so-so ads into award-winners

Dead ads brought back to life by sound engineers, editors, Flame operators, assistant producers, junior account people, planners or spouses.

Etc. etc. etc.

So what combination of circumstances are we trying to achieve to create repeated success? After all, surely that’s what we’re aiming for.

Are we just playing the odds that suggest the more the CD gets involved, the more numerous the improvements? That deeper preparation and harder work will lead to better results? That collaborating with those who have the best track record will be most likely to bring excellence?

Or that a good CD will step away and just let talented people get on with it? That loosening things up and leaving them to chance is the only thing that will create real magic? That taking a chance on a newbie will bring an essential freshness of perspective?

Perhaps we need to take a step back and say that none of the above are guaranteed keys to top work; more that the best thing you can do is develop a good sense of when to take which path – when to hold and when to fold.

The paths to greatness are many, varied and, if you try to work them out, contradictory.

So don’t bother. Or bother a lot.

Whatever works.