If This Is A Blog Then What's Christmas?

Here’s a project to get us to change the make up of the overprivileged G8.

They’ve just kicked Russia out so they need a new nation.

Watch this and see if a different angle might help the planet:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oC9rsxTyx8M

Is it an old one?

Funny.

In this information age we’ve been warned of what might happen with all the little personal tidbits we give Facebook and Google by allowing them access to what we discuss with our friends. Apparently they know our buying habits, including when and where we like to purchase everything from groceries to cars, and that knowledge is like gold dust to your average corporation.

Well, I’ve been on Gmail and Facebook for six or seven years now, so they should know me inside out. Their mystical algorithms must have seeped inside my cerebral cortex like smoke, silently extracting every one of my desires, no matter how mundane. Here in 2014 they ought to be sending me emails about things I didn’t even know I wanted until Mark Zuckerberg or Sergey Brin decided to let me know in ads targeted with such ninja-like stealth that I found myself clicking my way to Amazon Prime like an epileptic woodpecker.

You might not be entirely surprised to learn that this has yet to happen. Here are some of the ads on the side of my Facebook page on Saturday evening:

Not sure what the smile one’s about. I’m pretty happy with my teeth (top tip from my dentist: floss every day) and can’t recall a time when I’ve expressed any kind of an interest in getting them whitened. I might have looked up Hungry House or something like it a few years ago, but never took that vague interest any further. And a smart watch? Maybe they’ve seen me occasionally mention Apple stuff, put two and two together and made fourteen. Yes, I’m somewhat interested in getting whatever wearable technology Apple might come up with in future, but unfortunately I’m pretty sure they don’t advertise on Facebook’s small space section, so my Apple devotion will never lead to more accurate FB advertising messages.

One time I went part of the way to ordering a shirt on Matches or Coggles, but for reasons I can’t recall I backed out before final purchase. I was then stalked by the shirt all over the internet, as if the shopkeeper had not been convinced by my final decision and decided to chase me down the street, follow me home and haunt me for several weeks on the off-chance I might change my mind. I don’t want the fucking shirt. All attempts to remind me of its existence irritate me. They make me dislike the company that won’t take no for an answer, and this is what a decade of building up knowledge about my innermost desires has resulted in?

Since yesterday my attempts to play Wordscraper (a Scrabble-like game on Facebook) have been interrupted by an infuriatingly intrusive ad for some Spider-man cartoon on the Disney XD channel. First it shoots a web across the entire screen, then Spider-man swings across the web, then a huge ad complete with shitty cartoons settles above the game board until I click it off. Now, I’m not even vaguely interested in this thing. I have a Spider-man game app on my phone that my son plays, but I bought it several years ago and that was that, and I haven’t even bothered with the new movie. So they seem to have got it wrong. Very wrong. And I repeat: this is with the inside scoop all that juicy personal info has given them, along the super-genius brains that will use that info to get us to buy things we didn’t even know we wanted.

Yes, I’m aware that the stuff we willingly give to Google, Facebook et al might result in us being hauled before a Magistrus of the third sector of the North Eastern Quadrant of the Chinese Empire for thought crimes at some point in the 2030s, but y’know, if they want to know I don’t like racism but do like Arsenal then so be it.

I just wonder if a) these people are much stupider than we give them credit for, or b) knowing what I like on a day-to-day basis doesn’t actually help corporations that much at all, at least not in a way that will allow them to divert me from whatever course I was going to take anyway.

Cosmo’s worst sex tips (thanks, T).

The world’s greatest record collectors (thanks, M).

Quentin Tarantino’s 2014 Cannes press conference (thanks, J):

Why Edgar Wright is a good comedy director (apparently) (thanks, M):

Spielberg’s long takes:

The colour palettes of movies (thanks, B).

Stereotypes of the world, beautifully mapped (thanks, A).

How to swear like Malcolm Tucker (thanks, J).

Misconceptions of the universe explained.

Charles Bukowski’s tips for a kick-ass life (thanks, S).

Alex Trebek has gone mad:

Utterly amazing photos (thanks, D).

Those of you who don’t live in the UK might not be aware of what happened in our European Elections last week.

Well, the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party won the most votes (and are providing the highest number of Euro MPs). Here’s the Guardian’s coverage of that, and, for balance, here’s the Telegraph’s.

There’s a general feeling amongst almost all my friends that UKIP is fascistic, racist, stupid, homophobic, bigoted, intolerant and a massive backwards step for the civilisation of our country. They (UKIP; not my friends) favour such policies as an ‘amicable divorce’ from the European Union; an end to the ‘mass, uncontrolled immigration’ that membership of the EU makes possible; an end to subsidies for renewable energy scenes and a concomitant support of fracking. Actually, I could continue listing them, but you could just read them all in more detail here.

I agree with those friends, but also wonder why so many people want to vote for a party that seems to possess so many of those attributes that we might dislike in a person. Apparently UKIP’s supporter base is mainly rural (a UKIP spokesman famously said last week that they do not do well in London because the people who live there are young, cultured and educated), so perhaps there’s a different mindset that comes with living in the less urbanised parts of the country. Perhaps the settlement of EU immigrants in those areas stands out more, and any event that happens in a smaller place is bound to have a larger effect. Is that why they fear immigrants being employed in positions that British people could otherwise take? Because it hits harder in their communities? But then doesn’t that pose a different question regarding the employability of people from different countries? If you live here you have to work here, and thus pay for housing, clothing, food etc. at British prices. So are immigrants happy to work more cheaply, and if so, what is a fair wage? We’re also richer in London, so the less well-off UKIP voter might well find that one ‘taken’ job leaves them in a much worse position in Rotherham than it does in the capital.

The other strange thing is that it doesn’t seem to matter what faux pas the UKIP politicians make; if anything such gaffes only seem to strengthen their position. When Nigel Farage makes comments about not wanting a Romanian family to come and live next door to him, do vast swathes of the country actually agree, leaving the rest of us to find such suggestions to be offensive? Is that linked to the rural fear? Perhaps some of this attitude comes from the older people who fear change and the pain of having to adapt to it.

What seems clear is that UKIP, like may parties before it, is catering for a viewpoint of many people, but a viewpoint that many other people find abhorrent (I imagine you’ll find similar differences of opinion on Labour vs Tory). But as a wise person once said, what you resist persists, and the urban opposition to UKIP might only succeed in strengthening the resolve of its supporters. If anyone out there really wants to reduce the influence of this party they might be better off having a chat with a UKIP voter, finding out why they’re so scared, and enrolling them in a more palatable alternative.

But then it’s so much easier and more fun to make snarky, indignant comments about how much you loathe UKIP to your UKIP-loathing friends.

When I started in advertising I remember a Campaign editorial saying that if a creative team made a TV ad and press campaign in year they were doing well.

At the time I was at Y&R and that seemed about par for the course, but when I got to AMV I discovered that it was possible to find yourself making much more work than that. Many more briefs went through AMV, but the situation was also far more positive – if you answered your brief well the ad invariably got made. Clients came to the 1998 version of AMV because it was one of the best agencies in the world, so when work was presented to those clients on the understanding that it had gone through AMV’s rigorous internal standards process, then it was surely worth running.

Then, obviously, clients became less in thrall to that halo of brilliance and started to get pickier, but even then I made way more ads there than I did at Y&R.

Which leads me to a comment left on the blog a couple of weeks ago. When I put my first ad up for your delectation and asked for yours in return, an anonymous person suggested that many readers of this blog may not yet have made their first TV ad. Initially I thought that was because my readership is full of youngsters, still hacking their way through the jungles of college/junior life (I should point out that I have pretty much no idea of the readership of this blog. I used to check the stats every day, but then, around five years ago, I got to about 2000-3000 daily readers and it didn’t seem to fluctuate enough for me to keep going back to see if one Wednesday was bigger than another. Maybe there’s only a few of you left; maybe I now rival the viewership of Pornhub. I kind of like not knowing. It feels like the motives for the writing are a little purer as I’m not chasing eyeballs, the number of which doesn’t matter anyway), then I thought again and wondered if the average 2014 creative (or at least the ones who read this blog) is getting much made.

I’d guess that more stuff gets made these days, what with the proliferation of media channels, but are more TV ads happening? More print? Maybe I should categorise traditional media thus: are more ads getting made that are ‘tell-your-mum-worthy’, or are people making more things that are a bit boring to explain to her (‘But the KPIs are through the roof!’)? Or are you making fuck-all and wondering how long you can keep doing that before you get sacked or feel an overwhelming urge to give it all up and become a private detective?

I know quantity ultimately trumps quantity, but then again, practice makes perfect. Fewer opportunities means fewer chances to hone your skills and a slower progression to the next level. So is the current somewhat un-purple patch of advertising anything to do with a reduction in chances to improve, or is that reduction in chances a consequence of clients wanting less of what they might think of as un-purple patch work?

Who knows? No one, but one thing you do know (if you’re an advertising creative) is how much stuff you generally make. So TELL ME HOW MUCH IT IS by using the comments section.

Thanks.

Coldplay are awful:

Funny/unfortunate photos (thanks, P).

Spurious correlations (thanks, J).

Gordon Willis, cinematographer of The Godfather, died this week.

Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ done in a way I can’t be arsed to describe but is really good (thanks, W).

Danny Dyer tweets as motivational quotes.

Neanderthal voice thing that is funny:

Brilliant animation (thanks, S):

All the great commencement speeches, from Kermit to JFK, all in one handy place (thanks, S).

Hunter S. Thompson on finding your purpose (thanks, W).

Rap T-shirts for white people (thanks, A).

The world’s best lavs (thanks, G).

Guy surprises his dad many times (thanks, J):

*In retrospect, the lyrics of this massive number one single are somewhat creepy.