If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned how fantastic I think this ad is:

It’s a brilliant reworking of the tired old tropes of charity advertising. It stops you in your tracks an demands you read, and, if you have a heart, give a shit.

And it’s a proper charity ad with lots at stake (not a freebie paid for by an agency so they can win awards). Here’s the story behind it.

Anyway, the question is, what do you do next?

Well, the creative responsible sent me an email yesterday to explain:

I feel a bit wanky typing a title like that, but let me explain…

Of course I don’t mean the kind of bravery that involves the removal of neophyte humans from fiery edifices, or storming the Normandy beaches on D-Day. But all creativity involves the possibility of ridicule, and, despite what Adam Ant suggested, ridicule is something for many of us to be scared of.

Let’s just take a small example: you’re sitting with friends in the pub and a remarkable witticism occurs to you. Timing it just so, you send it out into the conversation with its best foot forward only to watch it fall sadly flat, necessitating a self deprecating reference to tumbleweed as you try to internalise your embarrassment. And that’s just one little bit of unsuccessful ‘bantz’; not too much riding on it and plenty of chances for another go during the rest of the evening, but it still stings a little. As with all creativity you took a chance: would your bons mots bring the house down or become the proverbial fart in the lift? Only one way to find out, and you had a couple of seconds to formulate the gag and decide whether or not it was too near the knuckle, safe and dull, or of a high enough standard to meet with your friends’ approval. You had to judge your audience and the moment, then write and deliver the gag as brilliantly as possible.

And I say again: this is a joke in a pub.

What about when it’s your job? When you have much of the above riding on what you come up with (probably not the pressure of spontaneity) along with your ability to pay the bills, raise your family, be professionally fulfilled, get the next (better?) job etc. And have you wasted the last week/month/year/decade of your life with a an ad/article/screenplay/novel that no one wants?

That’s a hell of a chance to take.

I’ve probably littered the conversations in my life with many thousands of attempts at humour, big and small, funny and flat, and it still amazes me when I have a little go with a nothing comment that I don’t think much of only to see it bring the house down. Equally, I can fire what I believe to be an Exocet missile packed with the ghost of Richard Pryor and every great gag Louis CK ever wrote, only to watch it slide to the ground like a turd that’s thoroughly ashamed of itself.

So imagine what it was like when I sent my first novel out to the 29 agents who said no to it. That was literally years of work that I might have had to consign to a dark and shadowy corner of my desktop. Fortunately it didn’t turn out that way, but when I embarked on the three years when I could have been skipping through tulips with my wife or not ignoring my son’s formative experiences, it might have been an utter waste of a large chunk of my life (educational experience aside), and that’s a BIG chance to take.

So that’s what I mean by bravery. If you spend your time doing a job where there is a definitive, objective right or wrong then you don’t have to go through that. You can add up numbers or ride a bike or mop up the floor of a peep show, and as long as you put the hours in you know you’ll complete your task with success. But if you write music or design houses or come up with headlines that translate Brazilian shampoo ads for a multinational conglomerate, you’re taking a chance.

And that’s bravery (kind of).

What paintings see (thanks, V).

Springsteen does Staying Alive:

Facebook ad from 1995 (thanks, D):

Kubrick interview.

Richard Dawkins reading hate mail (thanks, J).

Stock photo photobomber (thanks, J).

Ten days ago I decided to see what life would be like without Facebook. I’d been thinking about trying it for a while but hadn’t got round to taking the plunge. I think I’d describe myself as a regular-to-frequent status-updater, averaging about five a week, but as a tool for procrastination I was finding it second-to-none. If I had a bit of free time I’d often check out the notifications (or more likely head to Twitter, about which more later). Would I describe that as ‘addicted’? Not really. It wasn’t so much that I missed it when I wasn’t doing it, but more that it was an easy choice when there was nothing pressing to get on with.

But whatever my devotion to Facebook I’ve generally been more of a tweeter. Over the last five or six years I’ve written over 12000 tweets (that seems like an awful lot now I’m writing it down; I guess it comes down to maybe eight a day. Some tweet more; some less). Anyway, it’s an even more ‘addictive’ procrastination, since you can almost justify it as some kind of news or inspiration feed, and it’s updated all the time, particularly if, like me, you follow a lot of people in the UK and the US.

With both I would experience a mild feeling that if I didn’t check in regularly I might be missing out on a really interesting or helpful post/tweet. This manifested itself most strongly in the morning, when my first act would be to check emails, Facebook and Twitter, a process that would take up to half an hour. I could justify this (the Twitter portion, at least) as some version of the morning paper, where I would find out what had been happening in the news/sport/etc. while I had been asleep. If I’m being honest, though, much of my feed could be described as ‘pointless’ and/or ‘shite’.

So I’m sure you’re gagging to know what the last ten days has been like. Well, I haven’t missed it one iota. Most days Facebook only enters my consciousness because my wife often checks hers somewhere near me and starts a conversation about someone’s update. But I’d go further than that: I feel as if a cyber-weight has been lifted from my shoulders; as if an odd kind of freedom has cleared some portion of my mind, and I like it very much. I left with the suggestion that my absence would be temporary, but I currently have no desire to return. (Perhaps it was quite telling that two of my good friends are not on Facebook, and I’ve always been kind of jealous and admiring of that.)

So far, so good, then. Serendipitously, I found this fascinating article in Sunday’s Observer. It confirms many of the feelings of which I’d been vaguely cognizant but goes even further explain the very real damage social media can do to our effectiveness and brain functions. My immediate response was to leave Twitter, too. It’s only been a couple of days, and I’m a little disappointed not to have enjoyed a celebratory tweet about Arsenal’s magnificent victory away to Manchester City, but I’ll have my fun on the Guardian match report comments, and if I can get the same beneficial effects as the Facebook cold turkey it’ll be a small price to pay.

(By the way, an unfortunate side effect of this experiment will be an emaciated Friday links post. I get most of them from Twitter and Facebook, so unless you (plural) send me good stuff by email, that post will be going on a crash diet.)

I hope a positive consequence will be more time to devote to the thinking and writing that goes into this blog. The longer format works well for me to be able to explore things in more than 140 characters, and the responses you give are often longer and much more thought provoking. Let’s see…

And I’m interested (as usual) in whether or not you’ve tried the same thing, and if so, what happened.

I was watching this mini documentary the other day:

For those of you who don’t have time to watch the whole thing, the upshot is that there’s a guy who’s kept Putin in power for fifteen years by supporting his friends, enemies and random parties who don’t have much to do with anything. He’s let it be known that he’s doing this and the result is that no one who wants to oppose him has the first clue what the hell is going on. It’s a constantly moving target that can’t be grasped, let alone attacked. The doc then goes on to say that the same thing is happening in the UK: we’ve pulled out of Afghanistan, but did we win or lose?; we practice quantitative easing at the same time as austerity; we prosecuted DJs who felt up a fifteen-year-old on Top Of The Pops forty years ago but not the bankers who brought the country to its knees.

Interesting…

I often find myself scratching my head and wondering why people who commit such obvious crimes get away with it. Sure, they are powerful and in that amorphous bracket we refer to with the phrase, ‘those kind of people always get away with it’. But it happens again and again without consequence. A prime example is what’s happening with the Chilcot Inquiry, which has now taken five years to properly explain what happened in the illegal, hated and disastrous Iraq War of 2003. We hear of messages between Tony Blair and George Bush that can’t be published, so now we’ll only bet getting the ‘gist’ of them. Clearly, every intelligent person who hears that then thinks, ‘Bloody hell, there must be some incredibly dodgy stuff in those letters. I wonder what it could be…?’. My guess is the financial divvying up of Iraq’s oil reserves, along with allocation of arms contacts that enriched the US and UK to a massive extent, and still do.

But what can we do about it? I’m not sure I agree with Adam, who says we tend to greet our impotence in these situations with the words, ‘Oh dear’. Instead I think we tend to come at it from the angle of ‘Fucking hell’, where we know lots and lots of terrible things are happening behind the scenes to exploit the less well-off and powerful so that they/we might benefit those who are pulling the strings, but we feel entirely unable to do anything about it.

–It’s obvious the NHS is not being supported so it can be called a failure and placed in private hands for people to make money from, leaving the care of the unwell as a lower priority than the generation of cash.

–No one can rationally agree with the ridiculous proliferation of gun ownership in America, but the ‘powerful’ gun lobby prevents all calls for reduction. How? And why do supposedly intelligent people happily go along with extending this terrible situation?

–£80bn in bankers’ bonuses and £80bn in austerity measures. WHAT THE FUCK? People have to go without food and education so incredibly rich people can become even more incredibly rich? No one is stopping that? No one capped the bankers’ bonuses after the crash they created? And no one was jailed for that crash?

–The newspapers vilify supposed benefit ‘cheats’, who cost the country £2bn, while doing nothing about the giant corporations (Starbucks, Amazon, Vodaphone etc.) dodging tax worth £25bn. We can’t change the law to make them pay that tax? Why the fuck not?

–HSBC laundered drug money for Mexican cartels. Did anyone get in trouble for that beyond a fine which represented a tiny percentage of the bank’s income?

And EVERYONE KNOWS THIS IS GOING ON. It’s in massive newspapers like The Guardian and the New York Times, in hugely popular magazines such as Rolling Stone, on millions of Tweets and Facebook posts. None of it is hidden and yet it still happens all over the world, every single day.

Fucking Hell…

Sorry. WordPress wasn’t playing ball last night. That’s why this is late.

Admojis (thanks, R).

Ship your enemies glitter (thanks, J).

The last five years in Peep Show quotes (thanks, F).

Rare Robert Frank photos now available (thanks, T).

World leaders on the shitter (thanks, J).

Bowie haircut gif (thanks, J).

Karen Carpenter’s beautiful vocals, isolated (thanks, S):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OEgz-t5ZFg#t=63

How to, er, leave homosexuality behind (thanks, J):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXKRS7JZeag&list=PLsVfRPj98A4HxKWop07o8cgVgAtwP_WmA

Vice interviews Paul Thomas Anderson:

News finally reaches me (I’m 5500 miles away) that D&AD is introducing Pencils for the In-Book and Nomination levels of award.

That’s nice.

But what about the poor sods who entered their work and didn’t get an award at all? What about a pink pencil for them? One that’s been slightly chewed. And then there’s the people that didn’t even make any ads, what about them and their empty shelves? I’m stunned D&AD has yet to launch a compensatory red pencil with a little monster gonk on the end.

I remember when I first arrived at AMV in 1998. Walking around the creative department, stuffed as it was with Yellow Pencils, and even the odd Black, I had something to aspire to. There were only a few awards in the industry back then and these creatives had won the lot, many times over. That was a big achievement because these baubles were rare, very hard to win and judged by the best creatives in the country.

Now there are so many Lions, Pencils and assorted golden figures reaching up towards something or other that they’re worth less (or worthless, depending on your point of view). I can see a good reason for the proliferation of Lions: they are a great money-making exercise that grows ever greater with each additional category. But why the extra Pencils? They can only cost D&AD cash, and it won’t be long before certain creatives have shelves so heaving with wood that they’ll be declared a fire hazard. If your work is lauded in many different categories you could easily get fifteen pencils in one year. Whoopee…

Sorry, D&AD, I can see absolutely no merit in doing something like this. It’s simply a physical manifestation of this sentiment:

Commenter Greg dropped that truthbomb on last week’s do-gooder ‘experiment’ from Ikea.

I think that he makes a great point. This new genre of ‘we’re so nice, and we can make you nicer’ advertising leaves an excremental taste in my mouth for a number of reasons, all of which I’m going to blather on about right now:

1. The arrogance, the fucking, fucking, massive, revolting fucking arrogance of these giant corporations and their high-handed de haut en bas didacticism, as if it’s their place to correct the public’s erroneous behaviour in the name of furniture, or soap, or ‘feminine hygeine’:

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

2. None of them means it. They’re only doing it for money. If you doubt that in any way please bear in mind my oft-mentioned observation that Unilever makes Dove (all women are amazing and beautiful) and Lynx (all women are nowt but holes). Of course many corporations are now doing the CSR shiz that they ought to, but let’s not forget that Nike and The Gap happily used sweat shops to make most of their stuff before someone pointed that out to the rest of us and they changed their ways. I’m sure some companies are run in such a way that they always do the right thing, no matter what the cost, but most will just do whatever makes them the most money, so if they think they’ll lose sales because we hate them then they will try to make us like them.

3. The way these ads fool people into thinking they’re a new, nicer company (even though they really aren’t) is another nail in the coffin for truthful, believable, trustworthy advertising, and that coffin has so many nails it might as well be made of iron.

And it’s the disguises don’t just come in the form of those delightful experiments; they also sneak in by making a straight ad that enshrouds the collective of shitbags in a cloak of niceness. But when a company does all this shitty stuff (and this) then hits you with this…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V-20Qe4M8Y

…You have to do a little sick in your mouth. I mean, if they were really the kind of lovely folks who ‘sponsored mums’ with that plinky music in the background they probably wouldn’t pollute the planet or treat their workers like poo.

*Sigh, vomit, etc.*

Our office is full of dogs. Generally of the small-to-medium size, but there are often at least 20 around here and they’re all well behaved and welcome.

While distracted by one of them the other day it occurred to me that a dog breed has many of the same properties as a brand: we like some more than others, but we’re often not sure why and there’s unlikely to be a rational reason; we neither know nor care about most of them; a new one can really make you stop and take notice, as can one that simply stands out by virtue of its difference; you rarely think about them unless something prompts you to do so; people can be fiercely loyal to some, while others can hate those same ones; when it comes to that moment of acquiring one you will often make your choice based on what you perceive to be no more than a gut feeling (although some will do plenty of research beforehand);

As far as I’m aware, there aren’t many dog breed advocates that could equate to ad agencies, so the choices are probably made mostly on experience or word of mouth. And if that seems arbitrary, so are the choices made in the newsagent or Selfridges.

You could apply the same arbitrariness to music, movies, books, food, wallpaper, furniture, exercise, property… in fact, pretty much anything you have to choose to acquire.

The point I’m making? Well, I think it’s interesting that we spend ages trying to figure out something that seems to tap into a fundamental human process of arbitrariness. No one really knows with any great accuracy why we do anything, but we’d love to find out, so we spend millions on trying to do just that.

I have a sneaking suspicion that we’ll never, ever know.

And I kind of like it that way.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that when you check out the jury for an upcoming award show you inevitably despair at the number of no-mark fuckwits from Micronesia who have been allowed to run the rule over your lovingly-crafted works of genius.

So thank you Creative Circle, who have noticed, pointed out and wittily skewered this bane of the modern era (interest declared: they’re the work of my mate Adam Tucker):