If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

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.

I now live in a country where people actually say ‘Happy Super Bowl Day’ to each other as a greeting.

I love that, and wish people in England would say ‘Happy FA Cup Final Day’ to each other on the appropriate date.

I also live in a country where the ads that run during this game are heavily scrutinised by all sorts of people who should probably have something better to do with their time.

Anyway,  I thought I’d post a few ‘spots’ (we say that over here as well) that caught my eye for various reasons.

First up is a massive, throbbing turd. Mercedes have created a strange story where both of the main characters are massive bells. That ain’t easy. What’s even harder is getting lots of people (CDs, clients, directors etc.) to keep that vision consistent all the way up to its $9m media spend:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF–p4Dkv_Q

By contrast this one is excellent: a great idea that seems to have far stronger legs than I expected, married to a great execution with a fine, expensive twist:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqbomTIWCZ8

Here’s a lovely bit of perceptive piss-taking (marks off for feeling strangely dated, as in it feels like it’s making a point from the first dot com boom):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZnUG0EFPkU

This one seemed to light up Twitter with utter revulsion. I think it’s an interesting idea, but its depressing tone was entirely out of place for the occasion, and the message seems to be, ‘If your kid dies in an accident – something that’s quite common – we’ll give you some cash. Hope that takes the sting out of things’. No, not really. Odd that the people involved thought it would go down well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKUy-tfrIHY

Finally, if you’d like to spew rich, pungent vomit through your nose and mouth for the next three hours, watch this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCmh8cBjUeM

When I first met my wife her dad came round to visit. Somewhere in the living room lay a copy of The Sun newspaper, which, for the unenlightened, is a tawdry tabloid rag that I read every single day from 1987 to around 2004. Now, my father-in-law used to be Head Of Music at the BBC and ran the English National Opera, so he was understandably somewhat aghast at the idea that his only daughter might soon marry a (hold your nose) Sun reader. So when he noticed it and mentioned it I told him that I kind of had to read it in order to have some idea of the mindset of the people to whom I hawked various products. He accepted this explanation, apparently considering my behaviour to be some kind of noble and necessary sacrifice.

But, dear reader, my explanation was a was a barefaced lie. I mean, maybe it had that effect, but in truth I just liked reading the sport section (always read it from back to front) and the showbiz stuff, neither of which, in those days, were much better provided elsewhere. So, Dennis, in the unlikely event that you’re reading this, I fibbed. Sorry. I just enjoyed reading it (until it began to bore me, then disgust me, sending me into the loving arms of the Guardian).

Sorry for the long intro, but that story reminds me of the skepticism I experience when I think of how well qualified us ad folk are to sell things to the rest of the people in the countries in which we live. Even if we grow up under quite average circumstances, anyone who works in the industry for more than five years will undoubtedly become much richer and far wankier than the most of the target markets we aim at. And if that’s the case, how do we really know what the fuck we’re doing?

Although I think a bunch of us enjoy Britain’s Got Talent or I’m A Celebrity.., does that really balance out a working day where you discuss the relative merits of Nadav Kander vs Mark Seliger? Do the visits to the cinema to see Captain America: The Winter Soldier provide some sort of cultural tipping of the scales against watching a movie like Amour? Can you claim a well-rounded cultural education to be a better fuel than a constant diet of the ITV dramas and Jordan novels that entertain many of the people we try to persuade to do things?

And does it matter? Anyone living as an artist is likely to have a somewhat different set of influences to someone who runs a launderette, or mends boilers (not that I’m denigrating either of those valuable jobs), and anyone who has been a successful advertising creative has had to battle through their newly-acquired riches and wankiness to communicate with the ‘masses’. And if a lifetime spent in a less creative occupation were the key to advertising success then we’d have tapped into that resource a long time ago.

But perhaps reading The Sun would help (in most agencies I’ve worked where it’s one of the daily papers it’s usually the most-read). Perhaps going round the National Gallery once a week would help. Perhaps a love of the work of Simon Cowell and Simone De Beauvoir needn’t be either mutually exclusive nor mutually detrimental. I suspect the best creative people like a bit of MacDonalds mixed in with their foie gras, and it’s that collision of disparate influences that helps you to strike gold.

Whatever the truth is, I’m off to watch a really shitty Cameron Diaz ‘comedy’ – for professional reasons, of course.

This film about archery will blow your socks off (thanks, P):

How to fall asleep in one minute (thanks, D).

The essence of marriage (thanks, A):

Calm yourself by looking at balanced rocks (thanks, S):

Yoko Ono sings the Good Life theme (thanks, T):

If you’re not watching Bob’s Burgers, you’re letting the best in life pass you by (thanks, J).

Ang Lee on Ingmar Bergman.

Louis CK has a new $5 stand-up special out and it will make you weep with laughter (especially the bit where he stimulates a rat’s anus to orgasm).

Real life Street Fighter:

Alternative landmarks of Philadelphia:

Here’s an intriguingly different press ad, along with an explanation from Simon Morris, the AD (interest declared, also a friend):

How’s things? Sorry for the intrusion, but we thought you might like to take a look at the attached ad we created for Jungle Sound Studios in London. As you can see, although the ad very much takes the form of a ‘traditional’ long copy ad, there are no words on it at all. The sound waves are actually a translation of 613 words of written English espousing the expertise and love for sound that the people at Jungle have.

We (‘We’ being my copywriter, Dean Webb, and myself) basically wrote a ‘normal’ press ad, recorded the words at Jungle using a professional voiceover artist, and then took the resulting sound wave images and used those to create the ad in place of the original words. It’s the first time any of us had ever ‘recorded’ a press ad and we don’t think we’ve seen anything done like this before. And although there are no words as such, we really feel that the ad conveys Jungle’s dedication to their craft and their sheer love of sound much more than it would had we simply left it in English.

The ad has just come out in the trade press (i.e Campaign) and we really can’t predict how people in the industry will react to an ad with no phone number, no web address, no name and no call to action. We’re hoping that those people familiar with Jungle – most of the advertising creative community in London, the studio has been around for 20 years – will recognise the logo and appreciate the audacity of the approach, and that maybe others will realise that there’s something interesting going on with a sound studio here and be intrigued enough to find out who’s responsible.

I’ve also attached the full translation as it makes quite an interesting read in itself. Of course, not very many people will ever get to read that.

There’s not a lot of money behind the ad so we’re trying to get it as much exposure as possible, if you could help in that respect we would be most grateful, even if it means we’re about to be pilloried for making a long-copy ad that no-one can read.

Will they be pilloried? Only you, dear reader and potential commenter, can decide.

But this takes me back to a campaign I did with Daryl, where we wrote three recruitment ads for a typographer in Wingdings and Dingbats. We didn’t have much cash either, so we did some predatory thinking® and made the kind of ads that would be covered by the advertising trade press. Zero money spent, lots of the right eyeballs on the ad.

Creating work for Jungle work being interesting enough to feature on this blog is another instance of that.

Job done.

A modern phenomenon is the opportunity to unsubscribe from emails sent to you by companies with whom you have done some business on the internets.

Allow me to explain why this gets way further up my nose than it should:

I go and buy a thing from a new site and think nothing of it. A day or two later I receive an email from the company who sold it to me, asking whether I want to join some club or other. My initial thought is always, ‘Hang on, so when I gave them my email address to process the transaction I was actually surrendering my contact details so they could spam me later. Why does this always surprise me? Why can’t I buy something without the email address being handed over? Do they need it for anything other than future spam opportunities?’

Call me naive, but at the time of the transaction it never occurs to me that I’m not just buying a thing like I do in the shops; apparently I’m inviting the shopkeeper to knock on my door every couple of days to see if I want to buy anything else. No one ever seems to say ‘Could you please give us your email address. Please tick this box if you don’t want to hear from us again’. They all assume I’ll love the extra contact, or maybe the benefits of the repeat business generated by the spam outweigh the negative side of annoying a few of their customers. But this seems like a constant version of the U2 album thing from last year. Can’t we choose what enters our lives? After all, I’ve just given the company $35. Why is part of the deal a presumed permission to send me messages?

You might be wondering why I don’t just calm the fuck down and click unsubscribe, and that’s a good question. Sometimes I’m rattling through a lot of emails and don’t have the time, other times I’m on my iPhone so it all gets a bit fiddly. But mainly my response is ‘Why the fuck should I have to?’. I don’t want the message, I never asked for it, and if the company had asked I’d have declined. I repeat: I just gave the company some money in exchange for goods. I have now left the shop. Leave me alone. I’ll come back when I feel like it. Or rather I won’t because you’ve annoyed me, so I don’t like you as much as I did before. You took a liberty in our relationship that struck me as rude. Do one.

Which brings me on to the third point of my annoyance: what happens when you press unsubscribe. Full marks to the companies that take that single click and accept it as your clear decision to stop the emails. Slightly lower marks to those that require another ‘Are you sure?’ click. ‘Thanks for asking. The decision was touch and go, so thanks for giving me the chance to change my mind. I’d actually like to continue receiving your pointless shite in my inbox’. Much lower marks to the ones that then ask you to send an email explaining that you don’t want any more emails. Even lower than that are the ones that want you to type your email address in (the one they just used), then send that to somebody. Still lower are the ones that tell you they’ll process it in 24-48 hours. But the lowest of the low are the tits who want you to fill out a little questionnaire on why you don’t want any more emails.

Just. Fuck. Off.

This pile of irritation brings me onto the real reason this gets so far up my nose: when I go into a shop that asks me if I’d like a paper receipt or an emailed one I choose the paper receipt. I don’t want the paper receipt. I think paper receipts are a colossal waste of paper, ink and electricity. But no matter now much I hate them I hate the email rigmarole more. I don’t know if the shop’s emails are going to make it annoying for me to unsubscribe, so I don’t get into that situation. Instead I choose to waste the planet’s precious resources on something utterly pointless.

There is a MASSIVE gap in the market for companies that either ask you if you want any follow up emails when you hand over your address, or ones that just don’t email you in the first place. Those companies I would clasp to my bosom as I do my wonderful son and daughter. I would love them and tell the world how much I loved them (the companies, not my kids). They would receive this alternative benefit in spades.

(By the way, I know one of you is going to suggest setting up an alternative gmail account for the spam, but I’m too worried that the companies I buy from won’t be able to get in touch if there’s a problem with the order etc.)

Update: I just found this on Louis CK’s website. Thank you Louis: