If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Brian Blessed explains his beefs:

Director’s cuts that improve on the original (thanks, A).

Map Men: dropping funny knowledge (thanks, D):

Track Scotland’s beautifully named snowploughs.

Drive and listen.

The world’s gold, visualised.

Books.

I’ve read quite a few: long, short, exciting, dull, fiction, non-fiction, for pleasure, for obligation, for my English A-Level, War and Peace, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Katie Price: My Story…

But through all those letters, words, paragraphs and pages, I don’t think I’d ever really considered why reading books was such a worthwhile pursuit.

Fortunately, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a copywriter called Nigel Roberts explained it to me again and again through the unexpected medium of advertising:.

This one is my favourite:

‘Why learn from your mistakes when you can learn from someone else’s?’

In a single sentence, the most compelling reason to read books (and watch TED talks) that I’ve ever come across.

On the technical side it does something I’m very fond of: it takes a cliché and turns it on its head. ‘Learn from your mistakes’ in one form or another has been attributed to many people, from Henry Ford to Winston Churchill, but it’s a bit of an arse. It means you have to make those mistakes then suffer the consequences.

What if you could learn without suffering? That would surely be far better. Well, buy a book and the discomfort of others becomes a five quid paperback that gives you a painless head start in any subject.

Who can argue with that? It’s actually a better piece of advice than than the inexplicably tenacious ‘learn from your mistakes’, and if you can write a line that makes Churchill look like a bit of a thickie, you’ve done your job very well indeed.

The truth and the construction are faultless, but I also like the ‘surely this must have occurred to you before?’ tone of voice of a friendly mate down the pub. Such a big thought needs a smaller delivery, and that’s what Nigel has given us. Not off-puttingly pompous or condescending. Just a little nod in the direction of a better life.

The entire campaign deserves a pat on the back (as does the quite brilliant art direction from Paul Belford). Find it here, along with lots of other great writing by Mr. Roberts (and my podcast interview with him can be found here).

But as I’m on the subject, a few quickies:

Escape from prison with a book? I might apply the same benefit to a boring train journey or trip to the in-laws (not my in-laws, obviously. They’re all very entertaining). I also like the use of the unwieldy, almost onomatopoeic word ‘shovel’. It makes the digging process seem more of a drudge than the ‘spade’ a lesser writer might have employed.

The physical and literal versatility of books, all summed up in a sentence. I think Nigel made good use of ‘and vice versa’ as a line construction in other campaigns, but this was the first. If you can do a perfect vice versa you have written a good line. If you can do it several times, you’re a very good writer. I’ve seen plenty try their hand at it and simply add confusion.

Let’s end on a high.

Imagine starting an advertising headline with ‘Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao Tse-Tung were right about one thing’. That is a flying trapeze quintuple somersault over a pool of crocodiles that you’d better land perfectly. And Nigel did. With just four words he turned something that’s probably tattooed on Nigel Farage’s bum into another great reason to buy a book in Waterstones.

Why learn from your mistakes when you can learn from Nigel Roberts’ copy?

I wasn’t expecting this to happen so soon, but thanks to a excellent contribution from multifaceted writer extraordinaire Mr. Paul Burke, I already have my first guest post in this series.

And it’s kind of ‘guest posts‘ because Paul has offered up two examples of the finest in advertising copywriting:

I have two submissions, both from CDP around 1980.  Rawlings is one of the best posters ever.  The only trouble now is that, if you’re under 40, it’s impossible to appreciate just what a popular and enduring catchphrase Schweppes had in “Sssh. You know who”.  Everybody in the country knew it.

In one short, perfectly balanced line, it explains why Rawlings is a better tonic than the brand leader whilst not actually mentioning Schweppes by name but still using their own famous catchphrase to denigrate them.  There is nothing I can fault in this ad.  And the copywriter was also an art director: Ron Collins.

Then some body copy which – examine every word – is faultless.  A long forgotten ad for a long gone travel company.

First, it’s a good visual idea that works perfectly with the headline which, in turn, makes you want to read the copy.  So much product information crammed in but you don’t mind because it’s written so perfectly in such  a friendly but intelligent tone of voice. I love the use of “Mind you”  and “Correction:” and all rounded off with a wonderful endline.  

My only criticism (and it isn’t the creative team’s fault) – this should have been a nice big colour DPS.  But then you could point to the fact that this team put so much thought, care and intelligence into a small B&W single page.  Just wonderful.  And the team:  John Horton and (of course) Richard Foster.

Thanks Paul. A pair of crackers.

That first one is annoyingly clever. It’s one of those ones where the copywriter’s skill has made it seem as if the elements fell serendipitously into place, but anyone who has slogged over a line knows how rarely that happens.

Sorry to get a bit wanky here, but the start and finish match as neatly as the lines of a haiku, and the turning-its-own-weapon-against-it use of the competition’s endline? Chef’s kiss perfection, as the kids (probably don’t) say.

The second was given an added degree of poignancy as the writer passed away on the day Paul sent it over. So let’s take a moment to appreciate Richard Foster, one of the best copywriters of all time.

Richard and I worked in the same creative department for several years. I can’t say I knew him particularly well (if you want to get a proper insight into the person and his work, this post and podcast from Dave Dye should be your first port of call), but of course I knew how brilliant he was. Just read his page in The Copy Book; it’s everyone’s favourite: a succint explanation of how he went about writing the copy for a Sainsbury’s ad. No philosophical musings or ancient anecdotes. Just the job and how it is actually done by the best in the business.

I’ll leave you with my favourite of his ads, one that took pride of place on the back of my bathroom door for a few years. Sometimes great headlines just make you like the company behind them, while imparting some fairly prosaic information. The brief was dull, but the result was as memorable as you could hope for. Thanks, Richard, for this one and for so many others.

The size of space.

Explore the radio garden all over the world.

Fun with Reggie Watts:

Locations from the movie Colors, then and now (thanks, A):

Paul Belford is currently writing an excellent blog. It explains in detail why certain print/poster ads were so good, but with a focus on the art direction.

I think the ideal complement would be a similar blog about copy, written by an equivalent master of the art form.

But in the absence of Nigel Roberts, Mary Wear or Richard Foster, you’re left with me. Sorry.

I know I’m not a ‘great’ in the sense that I’m not in the Copy Book, not have I won a Copy Pencil, but until I start asking people far better than me to write guest posts, this is it. Feel free to stop reading now, or carry on and see if you agree with my assessment.

Now that I’ve got the admission of under-qualification out of the way, let’s start with the ad on this page.

Of course, choosing one of David Abbott’s Economist ads is like shooting a Great White in a barrel, but let’s not ignore the perfect just because everyone knows that it’s perfect. The point of this post is to explain the reasons behind the perfection.

Longtime visitors to this parish will be aware that I trod the boards of this account in my youth. That qualifies me to explain that it’s an arse to work on. Too many excellent predecessors. Too much competition from one of the best creative departments in the business. Too many areas already explored, and therefore obsolete. Smart Cars, Smarties, pictures of brains, Brains from Thunderbirds, Latin, lightbulbs, Venn Diagrams, Blue Plaques, paint colours, Einstein, shredders, keyholes, jigsaw pieces, long headlines, pros and cons, pregnant pauses etc. etc. etc.

And yet the stone would always accommodate one more squeeze.

I’m not the only one who would actually trawl through a thesaurus looking for different angles on ‘read this and be successful’. Then again, Jeremy Carr was apparently at lunch with the Economist account team when the waiter asked, ‘Still or sparkling?’ and unwittingly wrote a headline for the next batch.

But back to, ‘Would you like to sit next to you at dinner?’ Why did I chose that one over all the other superlative Economist lines?

First, because it expresses a truth. All the best art does this, but to convey so much of life, and inspire so much introspection in ten simple words is remarkable. Yes, we’ve all considered this situation for our own selfish wants, hoping our next-door neighbour won’t bore us to death over the seafood risotto, but how many times have you considered it from the other side? Think about it right now: have you ever been the dreaded, unwanted dinner party partner?

Now you’re considering it: how interesting am I? How funny and insightful are my anecdotes? How witty is my repartee? How many subjects do I feel comfortable discussing? Am I up to date on the current affairs, or am I going to look hopelessly out of touch?

A marvelously subtle dagger’s jab of fear, and expressed without the distracting self-congratulatory ‘cleverness’ of a pun.

Now I love an Economist pun as much as the next man, so long as the next man is Dave Dye, who hates them so much he was willing to piss off both his boss and his boss’s boss just to avoid running one. I think they’re only good if they also express a truth (‘Great minds like a think’), otherwise they tend to go an inch deep, but no further. Punless truths get to the point faster by removing extraneous obstacles of expression.

The edge of a conversation. The loneliest place in the world.

Lose the ability to slip out of meetings unnoticed.

What exactly is the benefit of the doubt?

So the insight is compelling. What about the way it’s expressed?

Well, no one ever says ‘Would you like to sit next to you at dinner?’, but they might say, ‘Would you like to sit next to Trevor/Susan/Joe at dinner’. So Mr. Abbott has taken a familiar sentence construction and turned it on its head. ‘Would you like to sit next to you’ sounds just odd enough while remaining easy to understand. This makes it penetrate a little further: your brain races away with the presumed ending, but then it has to put its brakes on and recognise the difference. So it thinks harder, stays with the ad longer, and goes through a process that lives longer in the memory. The line wasn’t just noticed, it was implanted.

Tonally, it’s perfect. The meaning of the line is, ‘Are you boring?’, but it’s said in a way that leaves it all up to you. It’s not nastily implying that you are a dullard; it’s merely asking the question. It welcomes you by presupposing that you are the kind of person who has friends that might invite you to dinner. It also suggests that this has happened to you often enough that you understand the situation, and its potential to go wrong. It invites you in with warmth, then turns the whole thing on its head by asking if you’re worthy of that invitation, all in ten words.

It also works so well with the construction of the entire ad: ‘Would you like to sit next to you at dinner? The Economist’. Question and answer, problem and solution. Twelve words that sell you a magazine with deft simplicity.

How else could it have been written? Perhaps something addy that tries too hard, such as, ‘What do you bring to the party?’. Or a ham-fisted attempt at the effortless elegance: ‘Would someone be happy to sit next to you at dinner?’. How about, ‘Be first on a list of dinner party guests’?

All dreadful, but they demonstrate how having the thought isn’t enough. The idea of being an interesting dinner party guest is the first part of the process. The real skill is in landing the plane so well that you get a round of applause from the passengers.

That’s what David did: concept and execution in perfect harmony.

He also made it look effortless. Then again, if you’ve read anything about how he worked, it probably was.

Go visit a random website.

Need a synonym for penis?

Learn to type while reading a classic novel.

Good animation:

To be an artist is to be dysfunctional:

Visit Ireland without going there.

Just vent.

Bongo Cat.

The cube rule of food identification.

10bn pixel scan of Girl With A Pearl Earring.

Star Wars Uncut: Director’s Cut:

Draw and get judged by AI.

Simulate playing the lottery.

Calculate everything easily.

Some of the year’s best from Vimeo:

The 22nd of September 1955 saw the launch of the first UK television commercial:

It was a big change for an industry that had hitherto been used to nothing but press, posters and radio. TV production departments had to be assembled, commercials directors had to be invented, and creatives had to learn how to write and art direct for an entirely new medium.

Actually, it wasn’t entirely new. These creatives had presumably been watching films and TV shows for most of their lives, and the structures didn’t have to stray a million miles from what they’d already been writing for radio. Even so, it took a good few years for the industry to really master the medium.

It would be forty years before another seismic change arrived, but this one was very different. In its early days internet advertising was a bit of joke, with banner ads that looked pretty pathetic in the shadow of TV commercials and 96-sheet billboards. But little did we know, that was only the beginning…

It’s fair to say that the ensuing 26 years have been quite the rollercoaster: Second Life, BMW Films, Subservient Chicken, Lynx Feather,  The Viral Factory, microsites, Google, Myspace, Napster, Friends Reunited, Facebook, the Carling Pint app, programmatic, whitelisting, mobile-first, 140-character Twitter, move fast and break things, native, SEO optimisation, Snapchat ads that disappeared as soon as you watched them, other ads that lived forever online, skippable pre-roll, Dunk In The Dark, Instagram Stories, 280-character Twitter, 360-degree campaigns, podcasts, carousels, Vine, The Ice Bucket Challenge, digital OOH, AI, VR, experiential, 9×16, post copy, Tik Tok and on and on and on.

A whole new vocabulary, a whole new set of jobs, a whole new structure with above-the-line agencies obliged to play nice with the social specialists and the Belgian network CCO that runs the domestic account for the global brand that needs an ad that can work in fifteen media, twenty languages and 106 countries.

The new ability to speak to a couple of billion people simultaneously has been a blessing and a curse. What do you say when you can say it to 1/3rd of the planet? Should Snickers be on Twitter, Instagram, Snap, or all three? Should its funny barb at Maltesers drop now, or ten minutes’ time? If a kid on Youtube can get 14 million likes for free, why should anyone pay an ad agency to get 100,000?

(I’m not even going to mention open-plan offices, holding companies, the further rise of strategy, comms planning, HR and a million other ad agency alterations that sit inside and outside the creative process.)

So it’s been a lot. And it’s not over, not by a long shot.

Sure, we’ve all adapted to a different reality of literally everyone carrying hundreds of pounds of electronic equipment in our pockets, only to come home and second or third screen while we live tweet the football game and chat on WhatsApp. But that was a fairly surface adaptation, spread over 10-15 years. The industry has had to rework itself in response to several fundamental changes a year.

Creating great ads with memorability and cut-through was difficult in 1995. Making sure it happens in 2021 is, without doubt, even harder. Multichannel touchpoints are now entirely normal. So you came up with a great idea for a TV ad? Never mind choosing a director and making sure the shoot goes well. Where’s the landing page going to live? What’s the hashtag? Who is creating the assets for the carousel?

Yes, it’s a headache, and headaches are annoying. And spreading creativity’s time and money increasingly thinly is not a walk in the park. And it may not be what you signed up for. But there is a tiny chink of light at the end of the tunnel. 

Contrary to appearances, the difficulty of the current situation is not a fathomless chasm of doom and gloom. It’s the beginning of a new way of doing things (or 67 beginnings of new ways of doing things), and that is unavoidably uncomfortable. Change is awkward and painful, but it’s the only way progress happens.

Look at what isn’t brilliant and see how it could be done better. There are agencies out there who are succeeding, both financially and creatively. Those of us who don’t work in them should learn from what they are doing and apply it to our own circumstances. 

No one knows how long it will take for things to settle down, but that process will accelerate when we take situations that aren’t working very well and do our best to improve them.

Maybe there should be fewer people in your meeting. Who will you ask to make that change? Maybe four high-quality media placements is better than fifteen mediocre ones. What facts will you need to back up that suggestion? Maybe the attendant fame of a billboard is better than the efficiency of SEO. When are you going to start a billboard-specialist ad agency?

Eventually, people will come up with new ways of tackling each problem, and that will help others to follow them down a more workable path. Sure, not every issue will be ‘solved’ –  some may be intractable – but we’re currently in 1955 to the power of a thousand, so the sooner we get to our equivalents of CDP, Ridley Scott and Alan Parker, the better.