Full Metal Writer

Tune in, turn out, drop off...

2011-12-01T02:38:00.001-08:00

It’s been a week of ups, downs, drunken mistakes and sober pleasures. A mix of ridiculous happiness and soulful sorrows, turn-ons, turn-ups and finally, turn-offs.

Billed as “The Huge Turn Off” the commercial; starts with Alanis Morrisette sitting on a huge leather airplane seat clipping her toe nails as she explains about Earth Hour, a time when we can all turn off our lights for an hour and by doing so we will put pressure on all those nasty none green companies. Maybe it’s just me but there seems to be some kind of disconnect here. Are they supposed to be so impressed by a show of mass power, excuse the pun, that they will immediately stop doing bad things to the environment? Maybe all those years of marching up and down roads waving CND banners has made me a tad cynical about the power of the people. Anyway, it’s a pleasant enough spot for the WWF by Leo Burnett, switch onto it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl6jf-pT-dM before everyone switches off, tonight.

A much bigger turn off for those of us who enjoy nothing better than suspicious cow parts squeezed between two skanky bits of bun is the new ad for Arby’s. In a bid to find a new way to mess up the good old burger Arby’s have created the new roast burger, never fried, never greasy. The burger done better. (done better than the grammer did anyway).
To celebrate this devastating invention the ad agency, Fletcher Martin, commissioned artist Phil Hansen to demonstrate how greasy other burgers are by drawing with the them on greaseproof paper. In what is described as a “trans fat on paper masterpiece” he recreates the Mona Lisa, or Mona Greasa as some wag has named it. It’s amusing in a children playing with food kind of way and just tasteless enough to make you watch it. Get a mouthful at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITPQMOt7z10
Or better still visit their own website and win a delicious roasted Arby burger, although you’ll probably have to pay for postage and someone att the post office will most likely eat it, which will serve them right. http://www.burgergreaseart.com/

Leaving a much more dubious taste in the mouth is the new Ford commercial from JWT Sydney. It’s a corporate ad, which means it’s not selling you a product, it’s selling you a company ethos. Exactly. It’s one of those ads that ramble on about soul searching, making nebulous analogies to the freedom of the road and the freedom of travelling around in a 16 tonnes of metal at high speeds. This one is particularly tasteless as it employs Writer fallback position 3, or when you’re stuck without an idea nick a famous song or film track or, as here, a well-known poem. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” one of the most hippy-abused pieces of nonsense since “Desiderata” is read over a series of shots of some young bloke wandering roads and doing crappy macho work on boats and interfering with sheep. It’s all very idyllic and has bugger all to do with cars, still you can get a glimpse of it at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYQc6tYVTaM

Or, to add a dash of Culture to your life you can see the tiresome old git read it himself at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG24ohpacDk
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference….”
It’s hypnotic, if you can stay awake.

Staying awake through the latest Nike commercial is no problem if you’re a fan of Eva Longoria, Sofia Boutella, Fernando Torres, Zlatan Ibrahimovic and Rodger Federer.
In an attempt to reinvigorate the eternal battle of the sexes Nike have launched a “Men vs Women” challenge. If the ad is anything to go by it’s all about running up and down pavements and being a general pain in the arse, or being a jogger as it’s known. (Why is it that the Walk/Run for life people have to move 3 or 4 abreast down our roads? And what’s with the obliue slash thing? Do they change their minds as they go, “Do I run or walk…?”.) Famous people are seen running up and down pavements in that mildly competitive way that Americans are cultivating.
Run the ad down at:: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_W1sP344NM
It comes with a rather pleasant racy track by Mr Gnarls Barkley.

Some young guys are chatting outside of an office. An older guy appears, obviously the boss, and calls one of them over.
“Kevin, can we go for a coffee…”
As the horror of the phrase sinks in we cut to a montage of set ups over a coffee as the boss declares:
“You’re fired…
I love you, I’ve said it,
We need to fake your death
(He strokes his face singing softy),
You have a wonderful body. I’ve made a sculpture of you…
You’ll be based in North Korea.”
Kevin comes to his senses and, to avoid such caffeine driven nonsense suggests:
“Why don’t we go grab a Dare iced coffee.”
Super up line: “The coffee moment, without the moment.”
It’s beautifully paced and funny without being sentimental, just what you’d expect from Mr Warren Brown and his team of strangeness at BMF Sydney. Take a hit at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivzyCgj6j88

Imagine you’re a mini-cam and you’ve fallen into the hands of a Dutch creative team at Grey Amsterdam just as they’re confronted by a TV brief for Lactacyd, pH balance products for intimate feminine hygiene. The results are fairly predictable, but no less bizarre. A day in the life of a lady is seen from what could be described as “a tampon’s eye view,” it’s 30 seconds of film you may not want to watch too often. Catch an eyeful at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uO-qR8-HtY
It’s a tad unnerving for a chap, and for a chappette too as my art director proves, muttering knowingly about “gritty realism” while hiding her tousled blond hair behind her blood red nails.
Time to turn off the brain.

Fame... I wanna live forever.

2011-08-19T02:23:00.000-07:00

With supreme aplomb and hardly a tongue planted in cheek Eamonn Holmes the brekkie guy on Sky news announced that the cricket was “exploding into action.” Now I like the long version of cricket more than any other and can think of no way better to waste a few afternoons than sticking on the telly and drifting in and out of consciousness. But even at its bollock-bashing, sledge muttering best it can’t really be said to be exploding into anything.
Hyperbole, the art of exaggeration and huge overstatement, are not only the backbone of Sky news reports but the heart of many a great ad campaign.
Coca Cola are amongst the greatest exponents of the over-promise, a fizzing drink derived from forcing bubbles through a treacle-like substance and then sent to every corner of the world, wrapped in a huge logo. Spot the relevance in the ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1NnyE6DDnQ

Take a pair of gym shoes, stick some studs on the bottom a big tick on the ankle and flog them to football teams everywhere. But how to make your boots irresistible? Easy, make it a contest between good and evil, or actually, Good and Evil. The commercial featured an all-star bunch of European players against a bunch of extras from 300 tearing chunks out of each other in a Romanesque arena. Hardly exaggerating at all, tune in to it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOM1k4oLGJU&feature=fvw

When I fly I like to relax in the biggest seat I can afford with the deepest glass of Mr. Smirnoff’s best clinking happily in a glass of ice. It’s a personal preference and I don’t recommend it to everyone. However, I don’t believe that being told that bazillions of others fly with the same airline would affect my choice of carrier, why not tell me how many of your planes have crashed, or more to the point, how many haven’t? In Adland of course the consumer’s needs are often trampled under the arty needs of a creative idea. The British Airways ad that showed parts of a head coming together from across the world won many accolades and still looks pretty and is a touch stone of extravagance and style, but are exploded heads the way to reassure your passengers? Cast your eye loving over the very epic nature of this classic and ask yourself one very important question, where did the ear go to? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxs106rp5RQ

In fact there are few things in the modern world that can’t be spun by spin or inflated by the over-heated air of hyperbole. Today, however, is the 91st birthday of Nelson Mandela one of the few who can wear the mantle of hero comfortably. Adland across the planet has produced many tributes to celebrate the anniversary of his birth ranging from the heavy-handed to the throwaway. In New York they have successfully launched Madiba Day, something that must rather stick in the overactive oesophaguses of our own politicians who can’t seem to get their act together, as usual, even to commemorate our country’s Father.
Anyway, perhaps it’s better this way, after all no one celebrates like our American cousins and no one deserves a really big annual birthday bash like Madiba. New York being packed to hilt with stars they all seem to have queued up to hold up their hands and sing his praise. Join the party at: http://creativity-online.com/work/view?seed=18792e44

My only problem is the underlying theme of 67 minutes, one for every year he spent fighting against injustice, they say. I know I’m being dumb but I can’t for the life of me work out the maths here. Are they counting his years of freedom? His years of incarceration? I searched the site: http://www.mandeladay.com. But I still can’t unravel it.

ESPN are hosting a night to award him the “Arthur Ash Courage Award” a gong that will look good on his sideboard beside the Nobel Prize and one he’s no doubt been sorely missing.
Locally adland’s celebrations tend to be rather more ponderous, as if the great man spent every hour of his life sitting and thinking, rather than dancing to his inner spirit dressed in shirts that would have shocked Liberace. My art director is wearing a particularly florid affair to show her support for Elvis' birthday, “Til hamingju með afmælið“ she yells, sugar rushing her way to her whimsical Icelandic roots. I couldn’t have put it better myself.

achieving perfect pitch

2011-07-27T03:49:00.000-07:00

It’s what we put out there that either attracts or repulses people. Sorry if that sounds a tad like a self-help book full of self-indulgent Yankee quotes, but that’s the truth of it.
In the 21st century image is everything, especially when getting your foot in the door and your business card in someone’s wallet or handbag, or both.
Dating sites are the perfect example of this; I was shocked to find that people tell masses of small fibs on them; they elaborate upon their good points and downright lie hugely about their dodgy bits. They’ll perjure themselves about almost anything to get you sitting opposite them in a crap coffee house or a swanky restaurant. Body shape, age, height and the number of remaining follicles clutching to their scalp are just the beginning. And then later they’ll wonder why their relationships flounder and ultimately fail in a morass of exaggeration and misrepresentation. It’s all more than a little disheartening.

But then, of course, self-promotion is rather big business these days.
Ad agencies are like circling speed-dating gatherings cranked up on a large amount of suspicious substances, all gagging to tempt new clients through their rather too welcoming doors.
Adland is full of eclectic behaviour and none more so than when
confronted by a new business possibility. Some guys simply dust off their agency credentials, packed with scintillating facts about staff members and former glories of creaky old campaigns. Others do a lively song and dance basing their presentation on fluffy personalities and a seductive mixture of smoke and mirrors.
There was an agency called Allen Brady & Marsh, creators of the terrible Guinnlessness campaign, that would incessantly dress up in fancy dress for pitches. Anything from stripping bananas to arks full of flashy fur animals and wobbly latex pints of beer would greet clients as they got off the lift clutching their sensible briefs. “Make it memorable,” was carved into ABM’s souls and even the pitches they didn’t win, which weren’t many, left the whole of Adland breathless with legendary, and hard to follow, performances.
That’s what pitching is after all, a form of performance art, packed with subtle nuances that not only show off your own talents but also highlight the failings of the competitors. So we add flash and verve, make ourselves brighter, more colourful with an exciting soundtrack. We throw in some campaign promises that would make a politician squirm, talk vaguely of transparency and cover the gaps with marshmallow sauce and invisible tape.
“Partnerships” and “custodians of the Brand” are much abused buzz phrases, often surrounded by what my granddaddy would have called ‘”high falutin’ words.” The Universal McCann pitch film is drenched in the stuff, listen in awe at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdGFnKTZWrA&feature=related

The clients, naturally, feed it back to us in bucketfuls. With prospective market share graphs, unique product attributes and inflated budgets, it’s a game where the rules are fairly cut and dried but the floor is constantly shifting. At it’s worst it’s a back-stabbing, crony-loaded sham, at it’s best it’s an invigorating breath of fresh thinking and muscle-flexing that puts us all back in the game and brings out our natural combativeness. It’s great.
My art director, for instance, never one to hold her intriguingly pierced tongue, is a particularly gifted presenter and, while scrupulously honest in real life, will gladly spin a yarn of tortuous intricacy to win a point in a pitch.
Pitches can make you a little crazy.

Pitches can also, however, bring out the best in an agency as the people come together to use their often prodigious grey matter to solve the new challenges inherent in a pitch. A new client, or even a new product is fertile ground for people who work on the same stuff day after day and the resulting work is often deliciously exciting.
The really good agencies look for a unique insight into the client and their product, Robin Wight, founder of WCRS, always claimed he “interrogated the Brand until it confessed its strengths.” It’s phrase that has become more well worn than “I know nothing about the arms deal,” but worked perfectly well for decades for an agency at the top of their game.
On the American sit/com/dram, “Madmen,” there’s a great scene that highlights this perfectly when Don pitches to Kodak to win the campaign for their new “Wheel.” It’s a beautifully timed scene climaxing in the agency recommending a new name for the product. Thus, they would have us believe, The Kodak Carousel was born. Catch this moment of calm madness at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY

In these days where we all seem to dance to the organ grinder of reality TV there are now shows where they test agencies with fake briefs so they can do their pitch tricks live on telly. The brief will usually be something controversial, selling guns to kids; a pheromone drenched deodorant, or my particular favourite, encouraging Australians to invade New Zealand. In one Aussie show they posed this idea of down-under warfare and received a few impressive and very typically antipodean, campaigns. Have a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9kkVo7Rv8g
Campaign one got my vote simply because I could imagine South Africans going for it too,

The agencies involved were more than happy to flex their creative muscles on prime time TV. After all there were potential clients on the edge of their sofas out there. And as they used to say to back in the 20th century, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
For most of us this level of blatant self-promotion takes some practice. Personally I’m forever telling people I’m a nice guy, but as my closest friend often reminds me from under her bar stool, nice guys will always finish last, and no one will give a damn.
But I could just be being a little disingenuous.

All together, now?

2011-06-27T00:30:00.000-07:00

When Mr Gates decreed that there was now a Global Village and that no matter where we thought we lived we were all fully paid up citizens, no one really understood the consequences. In the ensuing melee Globalisation has become many things, from the White Knight of the finance markets to the devil incarnate of conservation groups.
In adland it has caused its own brand of chaos as clients stumble about trying to create global messages that are as relevant in Reykjavik as they are in Mombasa. The majority have taken the easy way out, dismantling their core Brand ethos to a simplistic series of words and images that are hopefully recognisable wherever the consumer is viewing them. It’s hit and miss stuff, to put it nicely.

Global world is as brim full of smiley happy people as a crap REM song. They jump and sing and bounce around like a land full of Irish red setters, all playfully bouncing into the furniture and being improbably giddy. Ford World in 2006, for instance was bumper to bumper waving families and fawning lovers woven together with an irritating Charlotte Church ditty, it’s all most too much to watch especially when you reflect upon where it was all headed. Still if you like them big and bouncy park your brain at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9J_SuVrt6PM&feature=PlayList&p=9BB5845199A52F17&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=34#

Global is now a bad word in many parts of the planet, especially the parts that are feeling the heat. Warming and warnings thereof are quite the rage at the moment, which naturally makes them perfect for adland to get up and shout about. Even the Ad Council has a crisis ad of their own floating in the stratosphere, and it’s ok, I mean, not earth shattering or anything, but fine. Have a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOi5FclEh_Q

Combating melting ice-bergs and the like has become the responsibility of every one of us, including, rather improbably, the makers of Vogorsol Gum who employed several penguins and that well-known arctic squirrel to help solve the problem. It’s a tad odd, no it’s weird, but thank god there’s still a place in the world for this type of ad. Look on in amazement at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MKYZtOqTBlE

More annoyingly the backlash to Bill’s Global Village has lead to a resurgence of the lunacy of jingoism that parades around the world in the emperor’s clothes of patriotism and national pride.
Indignation at being preached to by foreigners about how we should behave at home often seems to reach xenophobic proportions since those rather gentile days of the Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem. Enveloped in her red, silk wrap-around sarong dress and waving her Soviet leather handbag in my direction, my own ex-art director often throws a handy quote from him in my direction.
“You will always find, some Eskimo willing to instruct, the Congolese on how to cope, with heat waves,”
Twee, but to the point, as she so often is.
Then again maybe a little international criticism might save us from stuff like the Castle love-in where everyone is best mates and brothers, take a sip at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXfc-0-Y8eIStill, it has a nice pack shot at the end of a bouncing bottle cap.

In the future things will be different, for a start we won’t have a planet to mess up and we’ll live in a very bright post-nuclear Winter. Maybe. Either way at least we won’t have to hear sing-a-long predictions of the ilk produced by Pat and Barbara MacDonald, aka: Timbuk3, back in the crazy days of 1986 in their classic, ”The future’s so bright I’ve gotta wear shades.” Listen, hopefully for the last time at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lputIMecalw

When we fail, the earth, of course, according to all good sci-fi geeks the world will be run by robots who will take turns persecuting the remains of mankind with devilish tin-brained schemes. As with a lot of sci-fi, yesterday’s nightmare futures have already begun to form before our eyes, in this case with the ASIMO humanoid robot. First introduced to humans in 2000AD the ASIMO has since grown in its abilities and can now walk and run after unsuspecting people-kind, albeit only our Japanese cousins for the moment. If you’re the type of person who likes to watch their fellow man tormented by non-organic life-forms then the Honda commercial starring ASIMO won’t seem alien to you, see it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNW51s_tQOE

Laugh all you want, it may seem like an improbable and unlikely future, then just a few years ago a desktop was somewhere you sat your typewriter and glass of Jamesons.

music to a blind man's ears...

2011-06-14T03:46:00.000-07:00

For over a year now. thanks to the creative collaboration between Y&R Melbourne and Mr. Schweppes’ fizzy pop, I’ve been humming the same tune all week, and once again I’ve been left wishing commercials came with track lists and credits. Eventually I tracked it down, well actually young Adam at HowardMusic focused my ears in the right direction, and I can tell you It’s called “To Build A Home” and was recorded by those little rascals Cinematic Orchestra. You’ll want to know because it’s dazzlingly hypnotic and will have your inner i-tunes buzzing for days. You can check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRFfJJjLpqw. The pictures are quite nice too, in that slightly over-powering, special effect, Cannes winner way.

Adland is awash with great tunes, from huge roller coaster tracks that need a full orchestra and hours of baton twitching, to simple little ditties that stick in your mind like chewing gum to your shoe. Whatever the genre advertising has stolen it, re-recorded it, and generally tweaked it before squishing it into a 30, 45 or 60-second mnemonic for toilet paper. Or computer games, if such a lowly title can be applied to the vast entertainment landscape that is Halo. The brutally invasive “Big Sur Moon” by the charmingly named, Bucket Head, swirls and dive-bombs like a futuristic bomb laden aircraft. Sign up at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCKTC50JjIE

These days, of course, a simple song is no longer enough to snare the hearts of the consumer, last week, for instance, I was booked in for something called a Sound-scaping session with the guys at Audio Junkies. Nice blokes and after several hours of “squark,” “bang” “crash” and “parp” I figured out that this scaping thing is all about adding thunderclaps, far-off cars and farting noises to “flesh out” the track of my simple ad. I must say it certainly helps create a real life ambience that makes the whole communication more convincing, right down to the barking dog next door. See what I mean at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V3R0vB12LU The Canon commercial is loaded with SFX and, well, noises, created by Toby Jarvis and Mike Connaris from the mighty sound house, Mcasso.

From the same stable the McDonalds spot shows how the sound-scaping can counterpoint humour to make the point more powerfully, love it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfMryXuRwYA&feature=channel_page

A little spaghetti western type music with a few under and overtones help tell a story of a showdown between a couple in a parked car. The soundtrack is nicely paced and relatively subtle, more than can be said for story itself. Still, It still makes me smile, take a listen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9y9McTwN

Someone, probably the mighty Paul Arden, once said that a great soundtrack is 50% of a brilliant ad. The flip side of this is that a crap track can lose you half your impact and memorablity. Take the new Honda Jazz “I Can”, ad, it has a thin track with a rather clumsy mechanical finger-clicking device dropped over it for effect. The effect being banal. But it’s nothing like as trite as the Vaseline Skin Care commercial which again employs some kind of clicking sound and again seems out of place with the photography. Admittedly neither are as aggravating as that damned song that surrounds the Defy campaign, full of smarmy franglais (“pink, schmink, money, honey…) and annoying noises that seem to make each ad go on forever, and not in a good way.

To drive these impossibly catchy tunes from my inner juke-box I foolishly appealed to my musically obsessed art director, humming something by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs she ran one of Audi’s recent offerings on her Powerbook. “The slowest car ever built,” highlighting the new R8’s hand intensive building process, is under-scored by a deceptively simple track full of angel-sweet voices and a seemingly effortless melody. Tune in and hear “the beep beep song” by Simone White at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDwEE_1ESMU&feature=fvsr Just be prepared to be hated by your loved ones as your incessant humming spreads faster than flu from a pig.

Don't I know You?

2010-09-28T01:10:00.000-07:00

Napoleon once said "no man is a hero to his valet". And he should know, because it was his valet who sold his penis to a museum after he died.

To put it another way, “Familiarity”, as someone else once said rather pithily, “breeds contempt,” and nowhere are these sentiments more apparent than in adland relationships.

Year after year the bias of these relationships has swung from the agency to the client, gone are the days when clients would ply us with drinks and beg us to make their Brands famous, now it’s our knees in the dust scratching at percentages. And truthfully it’s our own fault. Too many agencies have effectively sold out, and cheaply at that, too often we say “maybe”, or “of course we can”, when we should be saying “no”, or at least “why?”

We used to have faith in our own abilities, but we gave it away for focus groups, brainstorms and the belief that an idea had en masse was somehow stronger than something that flowed from the brains of a couple of guys who spent too much time in the pub or from an inspired corridor chat. We lost the spine-tingling, head turning magic we were creating, forgetting it was the only true currency no red-blooded client could pass by.
There’s no wonder we lost their respect and no wonder that ultimately it’s lead to clients believing they can do our jobs better than us.

Take the inimitable, and now according to the Christian lobby, festering in hell, Mr. Lolly Jackson owner and purveyor of the rumpy-pumpy, flesh-pots of Rivonia and other local suburbs. His latest poster on Rivonia Road stars a young buxom lass grabbing her assets and smiling winsomely into camera, a headline covers a few parts of her shiny body and reads, “No need for gender testing.”
The ad has caused a minor storm in the media because of the heavy-handed allusion to the Semenya affair, something that the usually candid client denied vehemently. In a quote which made my post-binge bleary art director spit out her coffee tequila, he claimed, “the ad is self-explanatory” and, “I do not want anyone coming here with the idea that we don’t have women, we have 100% women here, I did a test on them, I’m a professional and they are 100% wo-men.” This, you see, is what happens when we let clients write their own stuff.
More examples of the rot in adland were on show at The Loeries in Cape Town last year, but there was also some pretty good stuff, some pretty pictures and lots of pretty crap stuff dressed up as advertising. In other words it was a typical year. With no elegant Allen Gray commercial to light up the juries TV was a tad bland, but there was some cool illustration in the magazine stuff.

Mr Lolly Jackson’s titillating poster probably will never be attractive to birds especially of the Loerie variety, but at least it was topical, but it was also crap, unlike the rather good, if locally biased, poster for the anti-gun initiative, from an original concept by one, Richard van Zyl.

Taking our Presidents favourite fireside sing-along tune and changing the words ever so slightly he produced a powerful poster for the anti-gun lobby reading “Awu Leth’ Umishini Wakho” it further encourages the people to “Nikela isibhamu sakho esingekho emthethweni ku polisteshi eseduze nawe.” A case for once of familiarity breeding content, maybe.

Open up your mind...

2010-09-13T00:30:00.000-07:00

I’ve always hated open plan offices, let’s face it, everyone does. We hate the noise, the general state of chaos and the feeling of being constantly overlooked by our bosses more blatantly than usual.
Our Australian cousins recently finished a lengthy and presumably expensive bit of research into life in an open plan office. The results were, in the words of researcher Dr. Vinesh Oommen from the Queensland University of Technology's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, “absolutely shocking.”
90% of our antipodean brethren it seems suffered lower productivity and higher stress levels when dragged into bull-pen offices.
The pit-falls of open offices can quickly lead to a hell on earth as shown in weekly bursts on the original UK show The Office, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UESU5bn-s0&feature=PlayList&p=0383DAF518D6D1C4&index=17&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL), it can lead to hundreds of petty conflicts from who stole the selotape to the tit for tat of practical jokes. It’s just not conducive to a creative environment.
Or is it? SCPF in Spain have long been hailed internationally as a major hub of Adland excellence, yet their creatives sit in what can only be described as a barn chewing the cud of joint ideas. (Check out their site at: http://www.scpf.com/).

“Mother” in the UK, the incubator of many a world beating idea, famously work from one long table, trading ideas with insults as they go. (http://www.motherlondon.com/)

Great ideas, it seems can come from anywhere and we can bend our immediate environment to suit our own needs, after all the reality of any modern office space is that the air is thick with telephones ringing, emails filling inboxes and the smog of office politics, whether you’re hiding in your own space or breathing communal air.
Get up and walk about a bit, stretch your brain, who knows you might come up with a nice simple idea like a one shot commercial. If you’re really lucky it might be as charming and insightful as the classic “Ode to a Batchelor’s pea” (Batchelor’s being the Brand not the owner of said pea). Remind yourself of the power of a single-minded idea at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naAzBMgaZqA&feature=related

One shot commercials are all the rage at the moment, especially since last week’s Cannes Grand Prix winner is being touted as the perfect example. In reality Adam Berg’s beautifully shot Phillip’s Carousel commercial is a single shot ad like Christiano Ronaldo is a footballer, ie it’s expensive and shiny and rather exciting to watch. Hold your breath at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQ3D4CqHbJM

Another simple idea that’s once again raised its head is the “only pay for what you want” ad agency. It’s hardly a new idea and previously it has fallen on rather hard ground as clients used it for freebie scavenging. The latest incarnation can be found at www.agencynil.com
This time they claim they have thought it out properly, here’s how they say it works: The would-be client submits a work request form. The agency perform the duties they require within the time that they specify. When the assignment is done, the client decides what it’s worth and pay that amount,(the only mandatory’s would be any costs for travel, proprietary research tools, and/or production, each agreed in advance).
They say that so far no one has suggested not paying for services rendered but I reckon it’s only a matter of time before it happens.
I, for one, think it’s a downright cheek that these little people should be affronting corporate Adland like this, I mean, what if it takes off?

To those people who are really worried about the proximity of their colleagues and the inability to hide their personal foibles within an open plan environment I suggest they look to Germany for support. In Frankfurt am Main there is an ad agency which has won bags of awards for its architectural innovation and inspired working areas. The floors, walls and ceilings are all glass, as are everything from the vertigo inducing lifts to the Escher-like disappearing staircases. It’s no place for the faint-hearted, or the secretive for that matter. A whole new level of adland transparency maybe?

I mentioned the possibility of transferring there to my art director but she just turned up the new Metric CD on her PowerBook and shook her dirty blonde hair in aggressive denial.
Personally I think this new open plan office I’ve been recently transplanted to is rather growing on me. At least now I can see trouble when it’s coming my way.

God only knows...

2010-08-31T01:10:00.000-07:00

In the 60’s John Lennon claimed the Beatles were bigger than God, God retaliated by having the pop stars banned from Israel and Mr Lennon became the unwilling recipient of numerous death threats.
In December the swaggering self-publicity machine that is Simon Cowell was voted the most famous person in the world in a poll of under 10’s, beating The Queen, Harry Potter and God. (Whether God was a person was not debated).
Now, however, it appears God is back in the news again.
A major new billboard campaign, which broke first in the UK but has spread across Spain, Canada, the USA and is picking up speed elsewhere, exalts the beauty of being a non-believer using quotes from famous people.

“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” Douglas Adams
THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD.
NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE.
www.humaism.org.uk www.richarddawkins.net www.atheistcampaign.org

“I’m an atheist and that’s it. I believe there’s nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do what we can for other people.” Katherine Hepburn.

And from the man who reputedly had a thing about God the gambler:
“It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.” Albert Einstein.

Rather tamely, given their usual robust approach to headlines, our Australian cousins have their own take on the ungodly with posters reading:

“Beware of Dogma.”
Freedom From Religion Foundation. (www.FFRF.ORG.)

And:

“Imagine No Religion.” (An interesting cross reference to Mr. Lennon’s words creeping in again there).

The land of Obama rejoined with:

“Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.”

And a special festive one:
“Why believe in God? Just be good for goodness sake.
www.whybelieveinagod.org

It’s strange that even these strict non-believers use a capital “G” to spell his (or her) name.

As you’d expect from some of the richest corporations in the world, the churches have hardly been silent over the years.
Just recently, for instance, the producers of a TV documentary asked international ad agency Fallon to come up with a campaign to re-ignite interest in the Church of England. Simple black and white ads carried headlines like:
"Church. It isn't as churchy as you think."
"More dances are held in church halls than dance halls. And yes, the lord
does move in mysterious ways."
"Apparently there's stuff going on here all week. Even Sundays."
"Why go to India to find yourself? You might be just round the corner."
"The church educates millions of children. 'And not in a what does Psalm
17 tell us' kind of way."
Harmless stuff, and I must confess they’re hardly likely to drag me out of bed and to my knees on a Sunday morning.

The First Baptist Church in Snellville, Georgia takes a rather more direct route to encouraging the growth of their flock.
In front of the church’s large campus is a sign proclaiming “Free Gasoline!.” The church is raffling off two $500 petrol cards, giving free raffle tickets to every attendee of a church event between Sundays and Wednesdays.
“We don’t know how far it will go with these soaring prices,” Senior Pastor Rusty Newman said. “But it will make someone’s night.”

Across the world churches have stepped out of the dark ages and seen the light, learning how to manipulate the newer types of media and communication. Many now offer elaborate websites crammed with sermons and Christian sayings for the day, some even proclaim their messages through youtube trying to catch a younger audience at play. For an interesting take on this tyou can catch a parody of the Mac vs PC commercials called “I’m a Christ Follower” at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RtfNdg1fQk

For congregations languishing by the sea there’s the chance to indulge in the art of “Sand advertising,” creating sand billboards with inspirational messages crafted by the sandals of the faithful.

Try-vertising, as championed by Nike is also being touted to help spread the word. (Nike used “trial vans,” each containing more than 1,000 pairs of shoes. Reps took the vans to strategic spots (popular running paths and athletic events and let people try out their shoes, allowing consumers to make up their minds based on their own personal experience).

“What if churches had trial vans?” asks Kent Shaffer, writer and founder of ChurchRelevance.com. Shaffer concludes that “a church could feed its live or pre-recorded services to trial vans with big-screen TVs, and then show up at strategic places on Sunday mornings where lots of non-churchgoers gather. They could experience church and decide for themselves.”

Unfortunately the need to proselytize comes all too naturally to those on both sides of the fence of devotion often leading to repetition of old, tired and trite stances. The Sandown Free Presbyterian Church in Belfast, for example, was recently slapped by the UK Advertising Standards Authority for using strong biblical references to campaign against homosexuality, with a press ad reading:
“Thou shalt not lie down with mankind, as with womankind;
it is an abomination.”

For true believers however, returning to the home of Mr. Lennon and his fellow Merseybeaters, as you drive into the hallowed land of Liverpool there’s a concrete bridge over the motorway made famous because some evangelical tagger once sprayed “JESUS SAVES!” on it; to which some scouse wit added “RUSH SCORES ON THE REBOUND.” Amen to that.

Brand New World

2010-03-08T02:11:00.000-08:00

When you help build a Brand you get to be a tad possessive about it. Whether you’re the client, the agency or even the consumer it often becomes personal, we want our favourite things to remain the same, indeed, as Garth in Wayne’s World once put it “We fear change.”

And often rightly so. as Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit Inc in California puts it, “Change is never easy. So when you decide to take a company through a major re-launch, you can't do it halfway. It will require all the passion that you can bring to it, and the best communication skills that you have.”

When William Lightfoot Schultz created his first fragrances in the 1930’s they were sensible, mature products, they smelt the way you wanted your father to, or even your grandfather. And their advertising was grown up and responsible too, the most adventure his consumers were invited to have was riding a white horse through the surf. For 70 years Old Spice was the veritable solid backbone of cosmetic advertising, not for it the sexy throw away attractions of younger Brands.

So when in June 1990 that other grand old man of cosmetics Procter & Gamble bought the company it was seen as a perfect match. Until some Brand manager with a glint in his eye for change got his hands on the Brand. The original Old Spice was repackaged as “classic Scent” discarding the traditional white glass bottles for plastic, selling it under the downright racy banner, "The original. If your grandfather hadn't worn it, you wouldn't exist."

And finally the latest offering has reached self-pastiche, it opens on a metro-sexual cappuccino guy in a towel emerging from a shower, as he talks the scene transforms around him reflecting his voice-over:

“Hello ladies,
Look at your man,
now back to me,
now back at your man,
now back to me,
sadly he isn’t me,
but if he stopped using lady scented body-wash
and switched to Old Spice
he could smell like he is me.
look down, back up.
where are you?
you are on a boat, with the man your man could smell like.
what’s in your hand,
back at me, I have it,
it’s an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love,
look again, the tickets are now diamonds.
anything is now possible when your man smells like old spice and not a lady.
…I’m on a horse.”

“Classic Old Spice, Smells like a man, man”

Besides the brilliant Horse line the sheer number of pack shots in a parody commercial can be outstanding. The redesigned bottle was nice but the advertising re-launch, with it’s tongue firmly planted in its cheek, has opened the Brand up to that wonderfully lucrative teenage and early twenties market. Something the old Old Spice could only have dreamed of. Catch a whiff of it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZOm2YhOI4c

Re-invention is a great, if often precarious way to reinvigorate a Brand as Scott Bedbury of Brand Fool in Seattle says, “You need self-confidence. And you need flexibility. You also need to know yourself, especially your shortcomings. Don't try to do something that in your heart you know you can't do.” And he should know what he’s talking about being the driving force behind the Nike “Just Do It” campaign that took them from a $750 million company to a $5 billion, and Starbucks from 390 stores to 1600.

He remains healthily sceptical that everyone can follow his lead and rebrand with success. “I know lots of people who are out there trying to "reinvent" themselves.” He says, “But many of those people won't be happy, because they're not pursuing something that they intuitively love to do. They're pursuing something for money, and they're creating hollow companies, companies with no soul. Doing work that lines up with your values is critical.”

Reinvention and rebranding don’t always work out, even with millions of dollars behind it, a new shiny tin and Bill Cosby as spokesman, “New Coke” was such an appalling disaster in 1985 that it was dragged back from streets leaving Real Coke consumers spitting and belching. See the Cosby commercials at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4YvmN1hvNA&feature=related

What Coke had failed to grasp was that there wasn’t anything wrong with the original. Much the same reason that Crystal Pepsi floundered so spectacularly in 1992, if it ain’t broken, etc.

Given the recent fall from grace by Toyota I wonder whether the CEO’s mea culpa will be enough to reinvigorate the Brand, I certainly hope so, not just because coming clean is a good thing to see in a multi-national corporation, but also because I really miss that grinning boxer in the ads.

More interesting perhaps will be how our own President manages to re-launch Brand Zuma successfully given his recent disclosures. Perhaps he should take a leaf from those politicians of old who, when faced with a crisis, would rush off for a photo op kissing baby’s foreheads, something he seems to have a surfeit of suddenly.

promotional thinking

2009-11-04T23:05:00.000-08:00

Promotions are in the air. Christmas is always the time of the big give-aways in adland and this year is building up to a bumper bunch of presents. To create a really successful promotion you need a campaign that catches the attention of Johnny public and the best way to do that is the “bloody big prize” route. Something that’s not only irresistible but also relevant.

In Somalia, for instance, they recently ran a quiz loaded with local interest, the questions were all local geography and religious, Koran based, puzzles. It was, according to a representative for the al-Shabab militant group, “an attempt to stop young men wasting their time and to get them to focus on defending their territory.” As admirable an ambition as any prayer for world peace from a Miss World hopeful.
Winners of the Somali quiz walked away with anti-tank mines, grenades and that most sought after of consumer durables, the AK-47 assault rifle.

"The reason the young men were rewarded with weapons is to encourage them to participate in the ongoing holy war against the enemies of Allah in Somalia," al-Shabab's Sheikh Abdullahi Alhaq was quoted as saying at the prize-giving ceremony.
The winning team, from the city's Farjano district, won a rifle, two grenades, a landmine and some slightly less incendiary office supplies worth around $1,000. Other contestants didn’t go home totally unarmed by failure, taking away armfuls of AK-47s and pockets crammed with bullets. It was a huge hit with local guys and a solid promotional gimmick I think young Quentin down the Brazen Head could bear in mind next quiz night.

Knowing your audience is everything you see, something that continually annoys my slightly tetchy art director who is constantly being harassed by a local group of Portuguese restaurants via sms having made the error of eating at one of their branches and paying by credit card. This blanket smsing of past customers is fast becoming the junk mail of the 21st century and I urge one and all to answer them with a barrage of abuse, maybe then they’ll go away. But I doubt it.

My very own service provider, an oxymoron as deft as military intelligence or client service, is constantly inviting me to earn more free airtime in their seemingly never ending promotions. I don’t really understand their aim, I am already bound to them with a life-threatening contract for two years of my life I really don’t need a polymorphic ringing tone of a frog singing the national anthem.

Another promotion that was as pinpoint targeted as the Somalian quiz was the “Save Gaza” campaign in the Middle East. No matter what our own personal opinion on the conflict itself we are all privy to its horrors through the harrowing news footage beamed to our homes while we’re munching on our Woolies couscous salads of an evening.
The “Save Gaza” campaign was actually a harsh cry for help to stop the brutal siege of the area by highlighting the need for food and well, everything, with some urgency.
The people who created the campaign slapped “calls to action” on the labels of the actual products, so a tin of beans came with the sticker that read, “These products are needed now in the occupied territories.” Hard to ignore on bread and beans perhaps, harder still on containers of baby milk and nappies. Many shops came to the party donating shelf space and hanging posters supporting the initiative. As with any strong promotion word of mouth increased the message exponentially and the call was taken up by the people on the street.

The reality of course, is that no matter how morally bankrupt or admirable the aim of a promotion might be, everyone loves something for free, which is why no matter how dodgy they might seem I’m always keen on a good promotion.

the eagle has landed...

2009-10-29T01:16:00.000-07:00

On “Murder She Wrote,” an invitation to Jessica Fletcher’s house for the weekend was really just a form of assisted suicide, try; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G63_RDW-cyo for flashbacks.

The invitation to The Eagles awards breakfast was less deadly, perhaps, …but murder was definitely in the air.
The whole affair has a decidedly more grown up feeling than other local award do’s, probably because at 8am on a Tuesday it’s only the really hardcore fun-seekers who are going to turn up drunk and abusive. Actually The Eagles are unusual in the reticence of the judges to hand them over to hard working creative chaps and chapettes, every Tom, Dick and Harriet has a Loerie or an Ad of the Month pat, but not many have a the more elusive bird of prey.

The breakfast kicked off with some sticky buns, bacon and scambled egg, again a civilised touch that goes down well with adland types dragged from their beds into inhospitable Sandton. Next up were the speeches. Local ad guru Rob McLennan introduced the main event, a brace of Creative Directors from London’s AMV BBDO, with his usual aplomb and the two international judges rose to take their turn at the lectern.
First up was Tony Hardcastle, a man with a clutch of international awards from his work on iconic Brands such as BBW, Orange and The Economist.

A diminutive whippet of a Yorkshireman he delivered a presentation entitled “Murder” (you see, I did get back to it), about the death of ideas and those responsible for the genocide of genius. It was a well put together speech, dotted with references to glorious work past and present. A UK government ad banning Pit-Bull terriers from the streets was used as a perfect example of how a forceful concept can be whittled away to almost nothing. Well, nothing but that drivel we are all too familiar with when a committee has shown its collective brilliance in decision making.

Perhaps more interesting were the four, filmed interviews with other alumnae of UK Adland. A guy called Tim, also from AMV BBDO, discussed the difficulty of producing decent press ads over all other media. (You could feel the event’s sponsors, Independent newspapers squirming with pleasure). He showed some excellent examples of why the media remains the most challenging of all, citing the need to rise above the clutter of the newspaper both visually and in headline and copy. It’s a good interview and those of the audience who were listening and not smiling at prospective bosses would have gained a lot from it.

Next up, Nick Gill Exec CD of BBH, was equally erudite, extolling the virtues of a campaign his agency had produced for Banardo’s, the agency that look after abused, homeless and kids who have generally had a bad time. It was good work and Nick’s discussion on the use of white space to cause an impact should have had 90% of the art directors in the room re-thinking their use of the “cover-all exploding image” technique so prevalent locally. He also made a strong argument for intelligent words in ads, something the judges had mentioned over a quiet beer the night before.

Unfortunately I was distracted by my art director’s wacky, if beautifully arty, designer shoes from the hot designers at Iron Fist, and missed most of the next guy. Lastly was Dave Dye, who spoke of honesty and integrity in ads and the need to use simple messages that don’t get lost in the overly designed world of the Mac. I suspect this message went over the heads of most of the audience who firmly believe that turning on their Mac is the same as turning on their brains.
Tony then made a few apposite points about adland, clients and, of course, client service which got a few chuckles.

Richard Dennison was next on his feet. Drafted in at the last minute to replace some other geezer he held forth on the subject of doing ads that looked closer to home than a Cannes jury. He made a few cogent points about the dumbing down of adland by internationalism and “one ad fits all” messaging but the room was packed with people who see international awards as their ticket to fame and fortune and therefore the point went as wide as a Bafana Bafana penalty.
All in all it was a few hours well spent in the civilised company of some of adland’s finest. And that was odd enough to make the morning memorable.

a new voice beckons...

2009-10-21T02:18:00.000-07:00

Adland is a dangerous place to set up your stall for a long-term career, mainly because people are forever muttering about it being a young guys, or gals, business. A myth the bosses love to perpetuate as it allows them to replace older heads with bouncy youngsters they can fob off with a handful of shiny beads and a bagful full of empty promises.
It is, of course, a fallacy, (Over 70% of the work in the illustrious D&AD awards annual this years was created by over 45 year olds), but that is not to say that adland isn’t packed with enough precocious talent to make Roman Polanski think of a career change.
Before heading off to her nut-crunching, carrot juice slurping health spa my appallingly young art director was bemoaning the fact that agencies are becoming more like the Gnostic creature Ouroboros, constantly devouring their own tail in a cycle of rebirth and that the circle seemed to be tightening around our necks.

Certainly there is some prodigious talent sneaking into the business, in my own dear office young Steve O and Kate are constantly flashing genius in meetings. And they come fully loaded with opinions, Kate, for instance fervently believes that, “Adland is no exception when it comes to the chain of command. The lowly team reports to a group head, who in turn must answer to their creative director, it’s passed though the executive creative director, and of course, client service and client have more than their two cents worth. However, even with all these supposed experts working on them, there are still some mighty terrible ads out there that a poor, unsuspecting public gets tormented with.”
Hardly the respect one had hoped to engender in one’s prodigies.
She does, however, have a good eye for crap, her current top hates are the Silversands Casino spots, as she puts it, “The first makes absolutely no sense, and the most entertaining thing about it is listening to viewers’ interpretations of what it’s going on about. You can read some and add your own at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49Et0h2V1GI.)
The follow up ad has more than a touch of the heavy hand of either a client or a careless creative team, “I win my fights, I win my girls, I win my poker,” it’s either genius or, erm not, it’s curiously hypnotic in the same way as “Strictly come dancing” is to the prematurely senile.”

The Kellogg’s Coco pops “Where has all the chocolate gone” campaign also makes it high up Kate’s dissatisfaction list.
“Sometimes,” she says, “an idea might start out as ok, and then it gets morphed into another, boring ‘so what’ ad that does nothing more than provide an opportune moment to get another cup of coffee. Now, I must admit, although not the greatest ad, I was intrigued by their teaser campaign. Relive it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Okq0dyhYTCI. However, I was left thoroughly disappointed when the big reveal turned out to be nothing more than a bland explanation for a kids breakfast cereal accompanied by the terrible line, “It’s where the super chocolatey taste’s at.” (Presumably they can’t actually say “chocolate” as it’s some kind of chemically assembled brown compound), anyway, get a taste of the thing at: http://www.cocopops.co.za/whatcg/.
It’s refreshing to note that the new intake of fresh faces from our colleges are full educated in the arcane craft of brutal criticism, it seems adland’s future is in steady, if harsh hands.

cover your assets

2009-10-14T05:48:00.000-07:00

Bill Bernbach, the thinking man’s thinking man of adland once said, “An agency’s assets all go down in the lift at the end of the day, it’s the boss’ job to make sure they all come back up in the morning.”

There are, of course, many ways to make sure this happens. “Nice offices, swanky, pointless titles and wads of lovely cash” my easily excited art director shouts, twirling in her slinky silk dress. Then there’s the chance to work on exciting, creatively inspiring business, this is a somewhat broader church being so open to subjectivism. Renault clients around the world have been briefing their agencies on the latest Megane incarnation. Someone somewhere, presumably in a brain-storm, came up with the line, “So you wouldn’t buy a Renault?” I can only hope this was supposed to be a positioning line and somehow it found itself on a local layout. Anyway it’s tedious nonsense. Out in the wide world other agencies are approaching the same task with a different slant altogether.
An animated guy, (that is one created by animation nit one who is hyper-active), drives through a small town, everywhere around him we see people who have had their heads replaced with toasters, wellington boots and plant pots. As he leaves town he drives through a forest of swirling knives, but because he is in a Renault Megane with ESP he manages to avoid them and survive to drive another day. I have no idea what ESP is in this context, the car has extrasensory perception and presumably brakes that think for you or something, but it’s a nicely put together spot. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq2G5hvRlq0
In deepest France they used the old “modern car drives through historical cityscape gag, it’s all a bit tired and predictable since Guinness “Evolution” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4sdgvy-pk), but it does have a rather quirky track by The Caesars rather jollily called “Jerk it out.”
Cover your eyes and listen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQDUHdzE7WE&feature=related

From another source, a left hand drive one, we have another offering for this wonderful vehicle. Over a vaguely Dido-esque track a bloke drives around the countryside and is haunted by pictures of a pretty woman, after a night in a motel alone they meet up with a teenage child and take photos of each and the car. It’s all a tad vague and unexplained, maybe it’s a European metaphor, anyway, It’s not offensive but it is daft, take a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5vdwCVqrac

If you’re going to use clients to try to keep your creative staff happy you might need something more enticing than a French car company, an Australian beer producer for instance. Tooheys for instance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yGJVnOwxz0 or maybe the latest in a long line of ads for VB Beer from droga 5 will do the trick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tfv6djceGnY&feature=related
or maybe even the Hahn beer commercials;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=he4fBK3d8hk&feature=related

You’ll have noticed all these temptations are for breweries and, perhaps not too oddly, there has always been a direct correlation between beer and great advertising. I’d write something deep about cause and effect here but the agency bar has just opened, now that’s an incentive I do understand.

posh stuff and nonsense

2009-10-07T09:00:00.000-07:00

There’s a recession on. I know because clients keep telling me, although there seems to be nothing slowing down the luxury market. BMW has stopped making cars, hurrah, and, in case you’ve missed the commercial, are now making “Joy.” Marvellous, although to that guy in the 7-series who tries to kill me every morning on Witkoppen Road I would suggest they conjure up another, altogether darker, emotion.

Anyway the commercial comes in numerous international guises, presumably some countries are more susceptible to the concept of a bunch of Germans bringing them joy. The UK, where I suspect this nebulous nonsense originated, have Patrick Stewart boldly telling us where to for joy over a rather bouncy version of The Lightning Seeds “Sense”. Experience your own bubble of happiness at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSlyK5w8AQg&feature=related

Other countries are playing a rather more explanatory piece, still full of the post “Love Actually” split screen stuff and stumbling with the heavy-handed line, “What you make people feel is just as important as what you make.” (Unless you’re in hurry to get to the shops I would suggest). Anyway catch the non Brit version at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mAJCQIHYLQ&feature=related

Maybe you’ll see what it is that drives South African communists mad about them.
Speaking of conspicuous consumption, Chris Cunningham of Production Company RSA has directed the new spot for the new Gucci smell. Flora. If you ever wondered how they created crop circles then this will help solve the problem. Basically a woman stands in a field and sort of, well, swooshes her arms about much in the manner of my charming art director when she does her Kate Bush “Wuthering Heights” impression. It’s disturbing, (both of them actually), but not quite as weird as the idea that thousands of small Italians spent years developing a new smell and then named it after a best selling margarine. Sniff it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3KXWUvvjo8

If you’re into such things you can even catch a whiff of how the magic was made at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqucYKqeqD0&feature=related
When she’s not out buying children and wearing appalling leotards Madonna still tends to rule the world. Not only does she know a thing or two about spending filthy lucre she can still spin a pretty tune or two. If you’re a fan you’ll have seen many of the techniques used on show in Mr. Cunningham’s video for her “Frozen” track. Although the Mighty Madge is shown walking through the Mojave Desert resplendent in her Henna tattoos it’s definitely the same crazy loon in a space waving their arms about stuff but this one won an MTV Video Music Award for “Best special effects.” Watch her barminess in full spooky flow at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U60AgVeRRhc

There’s a rather splendid remix by those Stereo MC chaps at: http://www.clevver.com/music/video/139035/madonna-frozen-stereo-mcs-mix.html
It’s a good way to earn a few bob, and god knows we’ll be needing them soon.

all give and no take

2009-09-30T04:51:00.000-07:00

Napoleon once said "no man is a hero to his valet". And he should know, because it was his valet who sold his penis to a museum after he died.

To put it another way, “Familiarity”, as someone else once said rather pithily, “breeds contempt,” and nowhere are these sentiments more apparent than in adland relationships.

Year after year the bias of these relationships has swung from the agency to the client, gone are the days when clients would ply us with drinks and beg us to make their Brands famous, now it’s our knees in the dust scratching at percentages. And truthfully it’s our own fault. Too many agencies have effectively sold out, and cheaply at that, too often we say “maybe”, or “of course we can”, when we should be saying “no”, or at least “why?”

We used to have faith in our own abilities, but we gave it away for focus groups, brainstorms and the belief that an idea had en masse was somehow stronger than something that flowed from the brains of a couple of guys who spent too much time in the pub or from an inspired corridor chat. We lost the spine-tingling, head turning magic we were creating, forgetting it was the only true currency no red-blooded client could pass by.
There’s no wonder we lost their respect and no wonder that ultimately it’s lead to clients believing they can do our jobs better than us.

Take the inimitable Mr. Lolly Jackson owner and purveyor of the rumpy-pumpy, flesh-pots of Rivonia and other local suburbs. His latest poster on Rivonia Road stars a young buxom lass grabbing her assets and smiling winsomely into camera, a headline covers a few parts of her shiny body and reads, “No need for gender testing.”
The ad has caused a minor storm in the media because of the heavy-handed allusion to the Semenya affair, something that the usually candid client has denied vehemently. In a quote which made my post-Loeries bleary art director spit out her coffee tequila, he claims, “the ad is self-explanatory” and, “I do not want anyone coming here with the idea that we don’t have women, we have 100% women here, I did a test on them, I’m a professional and they are 100% wo-men.” This, you see, is what happens when we let clients write their own stuff.
More examples of the rot in adland were on show at The Loeries in Cape Town last weekend. This year there was some pretty good stuff, some pretty pictures and lots of pretty crap stuff dressed up as advertising. In other words it was a typical year. With no elegant Allen Gray commercial to light up the juries TV was a tad bland, but there was some cool illustration in the magazine stuff.

Mr Lolly Jackson’s titillating poster probably will never be attractive to birds especially of the Loerie variety, but at least it was topical, but it was also crap, unlike the rather good, if locally biased, poster for the anti-gun initiative, from an original concept by one, Richard van Zyl.

Taking our Presidents favourite fireside sing-along tune and changing the words ever so slightly he produced a powerful poster for the anti-gun lobby reading “Awu Leth’ Umishini Wakho” it further encourages the people to “Nikela isibhamu sakho esingekho emthethweni ku polisteshi eseduze nawe.” A case for once of familiarity breeding content, maybe.

the dark side of the loon

2009-09-17T07:46:00.000-07:00

I read somewhere that people are moaning about the “dark side” creeping into the latest batch of KFC commercials. Dark side eh? Have these people ever seen the Stihl chainsaw New Zealand ad, delve in if you dare: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3r4x3yugn0 or the Alka seltzer “eaten something you shouldn’t have?” “Lifeboat”.
What KFC have plugged into, be it ever so gently, is that rich vein of stuff our Yankee brethren are forever calling “human truths”. A terrible, heavy-handed phrase meant to imply the watcher will go, “Hey, c’est moi!” and buy their chicken in buckets.

What the KFC ads have actually hit is the collective funny bone of anyone with a somewhat left-field sense of reality. OK, we’re not talking Gary Larson here , (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12kTj4q0Q5k), but they will make a lot of people smile while they’re up to their elbows in grease and suspicious chicken parts., They aren’t Grand Prix, but they’re a good step in the right direction.

Humour is the hardest emotion to pin down en masse, so many variables have to be factored in and so often it washes clean the original intent. We all have different ideas of what is, and often more vehemently, isn’t funny. As PJ O’Rourke puts it “…People say you can’t make fun of cripples, but they’re wrong, as anyone who’s ever heard the one about Helen Keller falling down a well and breaking three fingers calling for help can tell you.” You see, half of you are smiling guiltily, the other half are reaching for your guns or blackberry’s to object. Humour divides as often as it brings together.

The Pot noodle ads “Seedy Sanchez” at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuxbnWuP6wM, “It’s dirty and you want it,” at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAmF01Igq3I&feature=related
and, “Bombay Bad Boy Flavour” are so grimy you may need a shower after watching, but well worth the voyeuristic experience at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlCmAqqvG7Y&feature=fvw
The dreadful “Blue Sky Offers” from Ford have achieved a certain notoriety down The Brazen Head as they appear to be spiralling further and further away from their heady humour of the early ads with the bird flying into the solid cloud. As I say, it’s in the eye of the beholder. The usually accurate eye of my own art director has been focused lately on what our Antipodean cousins think is funny. In a cloud of Issey Myake and twirling pearls she points out that the Maxibon commercials are funnier than a Platypus on a waterbed. Each ad tracks the life of normal people who have laboured under famous names. Neil Armstrong: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyeiaQ9LqRE&feature=related
Michael Jackson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaxFiSAkjdg
and a boy called Cameron Diaz; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLTkSTKyT8k&feature=related
all star in these beautifully written and paced pieces.

Comedy can be a risky business as the guys in Scandanavia who penned those now infamous cartoons will tell you. (I’d give you a link but it may mean someone stopping all the imports again and I need my Lurpack). Luckily this didn’t stop those ad fanatics from Nando’s in the middle-east who recently produced a commercial celebrating Ramadan that was funny enough to make you break fast to eat your hat. Feast your eyes at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSVyd4iUHHo&feature=PlayList&p=98AE1E13BF7CD78A&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=6
Maybe if there was more of this so called dark humour and a few less dark deeds we’d all live a safer, happier life. Now that would be funny.

you can't insure against crap ads

2009-09-09T05:39:00.000-07:00

Insurance is a scam. Come on, we all know it is, it’s nothing more than a heartless business predicated on the fears of the individual to be able to look after himself and his family after a tragedy. Maybe that’s why when Adland steps in to build an image for and insurance company the results tend to be vague, or at least shaky.

The “short moments” campaign for Mutual & Federal I’ve covered before, it’s just a technique attached to a ridiculous idea to shoe-horn in the tenuous endline: “The long and short of it.” As convoluted as any insurance claims form: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHjvNFvZl0Q
The new Hollard “We get you” billboard campaign uses the old “ ordinary figure in the foreground throwing a shadow against a wall reflecting the character’s supposed inner personality. It’s an idea as old as the insurance game itself but is almost saved by the stylish art direction. Almost.

Outsurance are doing good in their latest commercials. If I’ve got it right their employees choose charities or socially uplifting programmes and the company dives in and helps out. I think. Anyway it’s an admirable way to get rid of some of those vast profits they make by not paying out when men with guns take your favourite TV and lap-top over the back wall in the dead of night. Actually the best advertisement for Outsurance are those road directional geezers who are constantly leaping out in front of speeding loonies to direct traffic around town.

Women, evidently, need their own type of insurance. The “First for women” campaign was created to offer them just that. As is too often the case my fellow sex are portrayed as sad losers, or something equally belly-achingly funny, anyway it’s another campaign where men prove how dim and pathetic they are, must be why we ruled the world for so long, “sigh.” Actually I’m a bit concerned the campaign is unconstitutional, is it legal to offer services to one group thereby excluding another? Are my rights being violated here?(could I use this to get a Canadian visa?). Anyway watch it and laugh patronisingly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPvza4UjM3E
If you doubt men’s continued pre-eminence in the modern world then catch the Mercator Insurance campaign at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkZLxqnTaSo&feature=related
The first ad has a woman trying to hang a picture using a power drill and hammer. Laugh? I almost started.

Of course insurance is the not the only scam in town, my own dear art director, tossing her new haircut vigorously and batting her shining eyes points out they are only shiny because of her new Garnier anti-eye-puffy stick thing which contains caffeine that wakes your eyes up. Call me old-fashioned but this tweaked my bull-shitometer into the red.
How much do you get per dose? Is it a full on eye popping double espresso, a languid cappuccino, or a frigid blast of frappachino? They have a little coffee bean demo to show how it would work if you can stay awake long enough to see the end of the ad.
People will believe anything nowadays,
Now that really is a tragedy.

It's chaos out there

2009-09-03T01:12:00.000-07:00

The chaos theory is a popular theme in adland, the very idea that a small variation in any given system could produce larger and possibly long-term disturbances in the larger world is somehow an awfully enticing metaphor.
After all it’s a marketer’s dream that a new product should cause such a series of ripples that it alters the normal behaviour of the consumer forever. The makers of that classical foodstuff Heinz Baked Beans must have had such grand ambitions when they launched their Curried Beans variation. Of course it might have had more impact if they hadn’t followed it up quite so closely with Baked Bean Bolognese, Baked Bean Chicken Curry, Baked Bean Chilli Con Carne, and the rather splendid, Baked Bean Sausage Casserole.

Brand cannibalisation, or crapping on your own doorstep, as it’s commonly known, is that curious process by which many major companies seek to steal customers away from their primary Brands by launching sub-lines. Naturally it’s not their aim to pilfer consumers from their own mainstream products, they obviously hope to attract totally new and shiny buyers, Coke Zero, for example, picked up a lot of drinkers from Coke Light/Diet Coke but managed to gather a totally fresh consumer base as well. Maybe that was due to the advertising? It can happen you know, get a taste of life as it should at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BxDcn3Jw0c

Besides the danger of eating your own babies banging out new messages every few weeks even on one Brand can be a tad confusing. Refreshing the Brand image is something that has long been the purview of every new Marketing Director when they reach these dizzy heights. The new broom, or new sheriff, approach is a dangerous ego ride that causes dismay from headline writer to logo designer and all points in-between.
Under the guise of new product lines, new marketing drives and just pig-headed “it’s my train-set” years of great work is often jettisoned for the “next big thing.”
Mind, adland is packed with lazy buggers who firmly believe the tedious mantra that “if something’s not broken don’t fix it,” the poisonous chant of those who fear change.
Between these two poles it’s often hard to see how any new product makes it to market at all. But make it they do, thank god.

“Beauty”, the latest Mercedes-Benz commercial from our German cousins has all the marks, sorry Euro’s, of a new broom. For a start it’s funny, pull in for a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xh73qa99F64&feature=PlayList&p=0D154A57DC7CBD70&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=3
Then again, the latest ad promoting the Las Vegas Convention & Visitors Authority, (It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it), can only come from a life long understanding of the Brand. “ChinChilli Day” is a spot about the excuses guys make to get their bosses to sign off on their long weekends in Vegas, no excuses go watch it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf89N1_uz_A&feature=PlayList&p=46C1231756C5D238&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=62

Sometimes, rather than a new product you have to find a new way of looking at an old problem
A new look at the Army in the UK has created a new campaign from Golly Slater in Wales. A young guy is booking out from his army camp for the weekend, he shouts bye to all his mates and hops onto his powerful motorbike. We see his family at home going through their breakfast routine waiting for him. As he hurtles down country roads his mother hears a noise, she looks out of the kitchen window as it implodes, around her the family are flung about wildly. Cut back to the soldier as he crashes fiercely
Super up lines: “It’s not just you who feels the impact.
British Troops are twice as likely to die on the roads as civvies.
Drive carefully, you’re tough but you’re not invincible.”
It’s a nice ad, beautifully shot and acted. It won a Gold at Cannes so I’m not alone in this belief. Have a look for yourself at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRyEssudteQ. My dear art director, twirling her glossy beads in the air pointed out one major problem with the whole thing; are the British Army really losing so many of their highly trained killing machines to bad driving that they need to run a national TV campaign to stop them? Now that really is chaos.

mispelt youth

2009-08-26T06:52:00.000-07:00

Everyone loves a party and adland is especially fond of a good knees-up. Clients too have always been keen to be seen to be celebrating something, no matter how trivial. Somewhere along the line they got it into their collective psyche that if they’re seen to be having a great time the general public will want to party with them, and by extension, their products. Anniversaries are especially favoured by the larger corporations, you can hardly open a weekend newspaper without some store or other declaring it’s their “BIGGEST BIRTHDAY EVER!!!” usually attached gratuitously to a date, “One Year Old,” “25 Years & STILL GOING STRONG!” I once worked on a major international Brand that couldn’t decide which year was its 100th Anniversary so we created a campaign that started as a BIG BIRTHDAY BASH and ended as a 100 YEARS AND STILL GOING STRONG, only to eventually be told by head office in the U.S. that we were a year out and would have to do it all again. And we didn’t receive a single comment on this from a consumer. Maybe birthdays jusy aren’t as important as we think they are, after all everyone has one, except the Queen who has two, obviously.
A good anniversary needs a good party, something unique and memorable. In the unlikely spot of Billericay, Essex, (as once celebrated by the now late, great Ian Dury, listen at: http://vodpod.com/watch/287251-ian-dury-billericay-dickie-70s )there’s a “Midnight in Monte Carlo” party that promises to be the best party ever. I know because I found it on http://www.bestpartiesever.com/

Billed as your chance to “Join the jet set, avoid the paparazzi and stroll down the red carpet into Millionaires Casino”, it includes Grand Prix simulators, showgirl cabarets, and aerial hoop acrobatics. You can Ride, Drive, Dance, Gamble and Party the night away. Or so the ad says. And ads never lie. Not even that strange Forex commercial that’s running where they’ve mixed the voice over so quietly it sounds like he’s purposely trying to mislead the masses. But I might just be over worrying here, they might just be confusing people, it’s happening a lot lately.
My young, and bizarrely frisky, art director is often confused by labeling, Fruit n Veg City’s juice called “Amazing” is always read as “Ama Zing”, mind this is mainly due to an odd hyphen being bunged in the middle by some dodgy designer bloke, or bloke-ette. I’ve been seeing lots of ads promoting some geezer called FLO Rida, now, putting aside the fact that his music is borderline bland, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VVuMIB2hC0) for weeks I was staring at his posters until I finally saw the word Florida. “Duh,” as young Stevo and Kate in the office would say. It made me feel as dim as Dan Quayle correcting William Figueroa's spelling of "potato" as "potatoe" at that elementary school spelling bee in Trenton, New Jersey, on June 15, 1992. In adland we have copy checkers to correct our stupidity but in the larger world not everyone is as lucky. The guy in Vermont who painted “SHCOOL” on the road outside the local primary school for instance must have been ridiculed for quite some time.

My current favourite is a sign in my local supermarket in the hot food section where some sign writer has run out of space advertising the various types of pastries available and has resorted to the rather marvellous abbreviation “Ass Pies.”

And as celebration is in the air, by the time this goes to press I’ll hopefully be sitting nursing the world’s biggest hangover having spent the evening at the Y&R “Dress to Kill” party. A good old-fashioned rip roaring adland bash to launch their new exciting building with murals and stunning interior designs to match the brilliance of their staff’s thinking. Now that’s something to celebrate. Now that’s something worth celebrating, tap your feet at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwEMxYggoKQ Whoop whoop.

old tricks

2009-08-19T05:26:00.000-07:00

Sometimes you have to do things the old way to really get noticed. A strong, single-minded promotion, for example, can work wonders to peek interest. Take the latest offering from Krispy Kreme, the global doughnut rollers who are celebrating six years of creating snacks with holes in them.
Searching for what they call their “fave fans”, presumably the competition started with our US cousins, they’re inviting doughnut lovers in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Philippines and the United Kingdom to play along. Basically they answer a question about how Krispy Kreme made their lives special, something I’d love to read, and the winners get to design and name their own doughnut.
“Hey, how about round, with a hole in the middle?”
Anyway the winning doughnut will be sold across the world and no doubt some do-gooder will complain they’re adding to the world of obesity and general roundness.
Another good old-fashioned fall back in Adland are children, bless ‘em. Everyone loves a kid, and if you can film one playing, eating or, praise the lord, hugging a product, then it’s worth its weight in
Children, however, can be scary. Remember George Sanders and that bunch of glowing eyed rabid monsters in that 60’s classic, “Village of the Damned?” Cast your eyes back at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aA2HliA1KE&feature=fvw

For really freaky kids though, look no further than the latest Evian ad out of Euro Rscg Paris. It’ll have you hiding behind your rusk packets. A buch of CGI little adults roller-skate around a park in a sort of pseudo West Side Story pre-rumble confrontation. (hum along to the original at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9db5ZvwaAFM).
Anyway the Evian brats throw themselves around to the sound of “Rapper’s Delight” by Dan the Automator, which is almost as spooky as they are. Get freaky with it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQcVllWpwGs&feature=channel_page

“Art for Art’s sake,” as Theophile Gautier once said, presumably before he started designing handbags, but of course “Art for Ad’s sake” has long been a mantra in adland. The impressionists and Old Masters have long been firm favourites for commercial abuse, but it’s the Impressionists and Surrealists that have really been badly reproduced over the years. Salvador Dali in particular has turned up in more ad campaigns than a cheesy grin and a bad hairdo. The latest offering from Perrier is dripping with Daliesque references. The world goes bendy like Mr. Fantastic in the Fab 4, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAGM30xgsxo&feature=related,
bikes melt into roads, staircases melt into houses and fridges into floors, but, and here’s the clever bit, the Perrier doesn’t melt with the fridge. At least that was the clever bit, until it does melt in the end frame. There seem to be two endings floating around the Inter-web, one with the girl leaping out of the window after an escaping bottle of French fizz into a swimming pool, and one where she lands on the back of a melting truck. The latter was presumably changed because someone’s offspring would copy it, as opposed to following their filmic superheroes into raging fires wielding knives and chainsaws. Watch the unoffending article at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntTaVWW33z8

There are many tried and trusted things that inhabit adworld, after all a cliché is just shorthand to the collective consciousness of the masses, but it’s obviously how you treat it that tweaks the world. Using the King Kong/Godzilla model. (Super large creature attacks tower block in major city), is fairly well trodden ground, but for some reason the latest commercial for Oasis flavoured drinks still makes me smile. Dammit, Rubberduckzilla makes me laugh. Drink it in at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO5A8XTUg0Q

My own art director, who is currently feeling the onslaught of all of her 35 years, often comments upon the number of commercials featuring the passage of time. This hasn’t stopped her giggling furiously at the latest Skittles ad out of TBWA/Chiat Day entitled “Warp the Rainbow,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN2iQqYcPpY. I would love to have seen the storyboard they used to sell this to the client. It’s an old trick Johnny, but it sure does work.

ads don't work

2009-08-12T05:01:00.000-07:00

Advertising doesn’t work. I know this true because people are forever telling me it is. Down the Brazen Head there’s always someone willing to drag himself from their Klippies n coke to point this out, usually followed by a lengthy, in-depth and perfectly remembered description of the latest Nando’s or MTN commercial. As I say, advertising doesn’t work.

It didn’t work way back in the 60’s when DDB launched the VW “Think Small” campaign, making it the most famous car launch ever and reinforcing the Brand as a world-wide icon.
And it definitely didn’t work in the early 70’s when Coke gathered a whole Brady Bunch of America’s best on a hillside and had them sing a basic, but annoyingly memorable version of a chart-topping song under the banner “I’d like to buy the world a Coke.” Sing along at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8H5263jCGg&feature=related

Advertising isn’t serious you see. Everyone will tell you, it sells fizzy drinks and toilet rolls using gawky teenagers and bouncy puppy dogs, it uses sex indiscriminately, and stereo types us all into little boxes of ABC’s and LSM’s. It skims the surface. It makes no real difference to the world.

My own art director, who loves nothing better than a good cause, as long as it has a decent T-shirt attached, goes on about that commercial for the anti-fur trade in the 80’s, shot by Bailey it’s still a beautiful pastiche of the fashion world with a gory and unforgettable twist. It may have only been the very tip of a huge wave of the anti-fur wearing, anti-hunting movement, but it was a powerful tip that resonated with the masses and changed our perception of killing carelessly for a generation. As it said, “It takes up to 40 dumb animals to make a fur coat. But only one to wear it.” Remind yourself of what Adland can do when it wakes up its conscience at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THxdJSTiZtE

Advertising is a fly-by-night one hit wonder, it’ll make you famous for your 15 minutes but can’t sustain an image or a personality long enough to make a mark in the collective psyche.
Take the Bud Light “Real Men of Genius” created by writer Bob Winter at DDB Chicago in 1999. It began as a series of 60-second radio commercials paying mock tribute to individual unsung heroes. (The campaign was originally called Real American Heroes but was renamed after 9/11). Since then over 100 different ads have been produced and it has become the most remarked on, memorable and awarded radio campaign in adlands glorious history.
In 2003 it moved to the little screen with the launch of the TV campaign featuring “Mr Really Bad Toupee Wearer,” with Pete Stacker as the announcer and Dave Bickler, of “Eye of the Tiger – Survivor” fame echoing his sentiments in his memorable warble, including the superb line “Mr Stud in a rug,” Relive it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAJYJ9XJH_s

Six years on the campaign still goes on with Mr Really, really, really bad dancer, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bAKp2amjS4

Such has been its success that parodies abound across the internet, some of which are so good you can’t tell if they are the real thing or not, “Mr Iraqi Journalist Shoe Thrower Guy,” for instance was a timely stroke of genius. Catch it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBMiMByMNLM&feature=related

Advertising doesn’t work. It doesn’t fit into boxes of measurable results, despite years of people trying to post-research, post-rationalise and post box the work, most ad campaigns that catch the imagination evade the machinations of mathematicians. According to our American cousins, who love nothing better than a good list, the most famous campaigns ever are Volkswagen, "Think Small", Doyle Dane Bernbach, Coca-Cola, "The pause that refreshes", D'Arcy Co., Marlboro, The Marlboro Man, Leo Burnett Co., and Nike, "Just do it", Wieden & Kennedy.

But, putting aside the Yankee bias, this is a subjective survey carried out in U.S. Adland and not in the hearts and minds of our own dear local consumer. A brief prodding of the guys down the pub brings forth the following list; “Nandos, Tail-Gunner”, “Guinness, White Horses, surfer thingy” and, ‘that Kylie Mynogue one for Agent Provocateur.” Thank god advertising doesn’t work.

with a song in your heart

2009-08-06T06:06:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the creative collaboration between Y&R Melbourne and Mr. Schweppes’ fizzy pop, I’ve been humming the same tune all week, and once again I’ve been left wishing commercials came with track lists and credits. Eventually I tracked it down, well actually young Adam at HowardMusic focused my ears in the right direction, and I can tell you It’s called “To Build A Home” and was recorded by those little rascals Cinematic Orchestra. You’ll want to know because it’s dazzlingly hypnotic and will have your inner i-tunes buzzing for days. You can check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRFfJJjLpqw. The pictures are quite nice too, in that slightly over-powering, special effect, Cannes winner way.

Adland is awash with great tunes, from huge rollercoaster tracks that need a full orchestra and hours of baton twitching, to simple little ditties that stick in your mind like chewing gum to your shoe. Whatever the genre advertising has stolen it, re-recorded it, and generally tweaked it before squishing it into a 30, 45 or 60-second mnemonic for toilet paper. Or computer games, if such a lowly title can be applied to the vast entertainment landscape that is Halo. The brutally invasive “Big Sur Moon” by the charmingly named, Bucket Head, swirls and dive-bombs like a futuristic bomb laden aircraft. Sign up at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCKTC50JjIE

These days, of course, a simple song is no longer enough to snare the hearts of the consumer, last week, for instance, I was booked in for something called a Sound-scaping session with the guys at Audio Junkies. Nice blokes and after several hours of “squark,” “bang” “crash” and “parp” I figured out that this scaping thing is all about adding thunderclaps, far-off cars and farting noises to “flesh out” the track of my simple ad. I must say it certainly helps create a real life ambience that makes the whole communication more convincing, right down to the barking dog next door. See what I mean at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V3R0vB12LU The Canon commercial is loaded with SFX and, well, noises, created by Toby Jarvis and Mike Connaris from the mighty sound house, Mcasso.

From the same stable the McDonalds spot shows how the sound-scaping can counterpoint humour to make the point more powerfully, love it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfMryXuRwYA&feature=channel_page

A little spaghetti western type music with a few under and overtones help tell a story of a showdown between a couple in a parked car. The soundtrack is nicely paced and relatively subtle, more than can be said for story itself. Still, It still makes me smile, take a listen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9y9McTwN

Someone, probably the mighty Paul Arden, once said that a great soundtrack is 50% of a brilliant ad. The flip side of this is that a crap track can lose you half your impact and memorablity. Take the new Honda Jazz “I Can”, ad, it has a thin track with a rather clumsy mechanical finger-clicking device dropped over it for effect. The effect being banal. But it’s nothing like as trite as the Vaseline Skin Care commercial which again employs some kind of clicking sound and again seems out of place with the photography. Admittedly neither are as aggravating as that damned song that surrounds the Defy campaign, full of smarmy franglais (“pink, schmink, money, honey…) and annoying noises that seem to make each ad go on forever, and not in a good way.

To drive these impossibly catchy tunes from my inner juke-box I foolishly appealed to my musically obsessed art director, humming something by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs she ran one of Audi’s recent offerings on her Powerbook. “The slowest car ever built,” highlighting the new R8’s hand intensive building process, is under-scored by a deceptively simple track full of angel-sweet voices and a seemingly effortless melody. Tune in and hear “the beep beep song” by Simone White at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDwEE_1ESMU&feature=fvsr Just be prepared to be hated by your loved ones as your incessant humming spreads faster than flu from a pig.

meeja lovies

2009-07-29T23:48:00.000-07:00

I’m watching the new series of Spooks on BBC Entertainment, well, actually I’m watching the new BMW 7 series ad, one from Standard Bank, and a few DSTV things about programmes I’ll never find before they finish. Oh, and of course, that stupid and intensely annoying Pedigree Dog Food commercial with the appalling child and his incontinent pooch Scampy and an ad spend that seems as bottomless as the pockets of Manchester City FC. All wrapped around Spooks.

Which brings me to my bugbear for the week. Media buying. Now done properly a good bit of properly targeted media buying is a silver bullet into the heart of the unsuspecting consumer as opposed to the shotgun employed by so many agencies.

AR’s and Neilson, are just lists of shallow numbers that can be made to dance
to any tune to prove or disprove a campaign’s success depending on the bias of the questioner. Statistics can be made to show anything, is 2% Fat milk a dairy product containing 2% fat, or one that is 2% less fat than full fat? I have no idea and I worked on a major cow product account for several years. Centralised buying, where the media agency turns the traditional blackmail of the media owners on its head by offering to bulk buy for several clients for significant discounts, is the latest threat to incisive, targeted and creatively bought space.
The luddites who buy airtime and press space by the yard, repeating what was bought last year and the year before will tell you it’s a science. The really good media buyers, who are really planners, know it’s an art form and as difficult as predicting a summer hurricane in a summer of calm.

Now I’m the first to agree that there are a great many ads that should be buried and buried damned deep. The latest Outsurance TV campaign where the old fashioned guys stand around threatening people with old fashioned insurance schemes only to be clumsily patronised by some suave git in a bad pullover is a perfect case.

Or the Med Lemon ad with the rather spooky animated torso, I don’t know if they couldn’t afford a to animate a head or ran into one of those PC moments where the client couldn’t decide what colour the guy should be to appeal to our diverse consumer base. Whatever the cause the effect is garbage. It waves a cup of Lemon drink around, presumably because it has no mouth to drink the stuff, and the VO warbles on rather surprisingly about headaches. Well it is winter after all I suppose and South African defences are naturally down, presumably why Adland chooses now to launch an assault on their weakened collective psyche.

And then there’s the one that makes my art director’s tousled blonde head spin like a scene from the Exorcist, the Verimark ad about de-skinning your feet with their new Pedishaver, or whatever. (I’ve actually never managed to get past the shaving skin off feet pictures to finds out its actual real name). Anyway, some well-meaning media person has booked all the space around my dinnertime to run this appetite suppressor, it is beyond tasteless. Pieces of junk that no one should have to sit through unless they are watching Reality TV and media land are right to try to protect us from them as much as possible.

Finally, a word to my fellow creative types, or indeed anyone involved in the making of ads, the next time you have a great idea go find yourself a friendly media planner. They used to be in the next office but these days it’s often hard to find them in the same town. But when you track one down stick with him, or her, they can make you as famous as the artiest director, trendiest muso or prettiest of avant-garde photographers. Otherwise you might as well just be talking to yourself.

all of a twit...er

2009-07-23T03:36:00.000-07:00

Advertising is a laugh, working in Adland is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. I know because this quote has been claimed by everyone from Bill Cosby and Jerry Della Femina to Richard French and my barber, so it must be true.
It’s also true that it throws up more clichés than a, erm… now how do you finish that sentence without a cliché? Anyway Adland is full of new challenges on a daily basis and, if you keep up, you can be involved at the forefront of every new idea that emerges from the depths of media innovation.

Facebook for instance, though now a veritable dinosaur in the land of social networking, still throws up interesting moments every now and then. If you have a sad social life, for instance, you can join any number of the groups who advertise themselves carelessly on yours and your acquaintance’s pages. Just this morning I was invited to “Support vestas wind turbines on the Isle of Wight” by members of Green Britain Day. A feisty bunch who are always up for an eco-bun fight. Then, a large and gaudy ad attracted my attention, as they always do, for the “Sunday defensive preview in Clapham.” Some kind of jolly event in a “charming theatrical space above a big old pub.” Nearly worth daring an SAA in-flight meal for.

Another bunch of ads to hit my inbox lately have been offers to join the Twittering community. Now Twitter is a whole different kettle of poisson, well poison, mostly, and to tell the truth I get all the pointless celeb gossip I can handle down the Brazen Head on a Sunday lunchtime.
My endlessly amusing art director bombards my Facebook page with pokes super pokes and hyperlinks to the latest commercials that fascinate her seemingly boundless curiosity. The latest Standard Bank offering has caught her pretty green eye so, intrigued, I clicked through and took a look.

I see they have another new endline, again. “Moving Forward” it must have taken a few solid minutes of thinking by some bunch of brainstorming dullards. As far as I can figure out, and I’ve only seen the commercial a dozen times or so, so bear with me here, they are now a bank crammed with egalitarian do-gooders who are falling over their vast profit margins to give the stuff away to anyone who wants it. The ad itself is nice enough and has been crafted to give the least offence, but someone really should have a word with any bank who make such outrageous claims in the face of the worldwide crisis we’re currently embracing.

Then I always was naïve about such things. I used to believe that wearing Nike shoes would allow me to just do it, and, more recently that MacDonalds make real beef burgers and love doing it. Like many of my fellow adland inhabitants I remain terribly gullible when confronted by messages created by my colleagues. Rather than developing a thick skin that poo poos the more inflated ads I am often drawn to their more exotic offerings. My cupboards are crammed with such wonders as George Foreman’s grill-pans, cuddly toy shaped hand warmers and, of course, the old flip-over omelette pan.

One commercial that had me rushing to purchase was for the secret spring deluxe pillow from our friends at Verimark. Certified by international and local experts, and a bargain at several hundred hard earned rand, it now reshapes itself into the exact shape of my dog’s backside every night, after several failed attempts to get it help me enjoy “wonderful nights of uninterrupted sleep. Marvellous.

Ideas that come to a dark end have rather been on my mind of late as several of my friends have taken the strangely luddite step of declaring information overload. In most cases this has meant simply advertising the shutting down of their Facebook, twitter or MySpace pages. Others have committed cyber-hari kari complete with suicide notes posted online and blood thirsty declarations of revenge on all things technological. It’s all very odd and I’ll miss them, but I’m sure they’ll soon have their own online cemetery where I can post wreaths of remembrance.

91 years of fame

2009-07-16T00:29:00.000-07:00

popular promotion...

2009-07-05T23:29:00.000-07:00

Everyone needs a little support, some of us more than others. Manchester United, for instance, are extremely proud that their fan base straddles the known world, Japanese temple bells and Bolivian Guinea Pig farms are festooned with pictures of Rooney and Giggsy. Teenagers in Brazilian slums wear the same number 9 shirt as surfers on Bondi beach, much to the glee of the merchandisers. The Red Devils have recently signed a deal to wear some American company’s logo for three years worth around $135 million, that’s at least Rinaldo’s leg worth, and, handy when you’ve got a salary bill that would make a Hollywood blockbuster seem cheap.
Merchandising is overshadowing adland’s contribution to the fame game at every turn. The New York Yankees, the doyens of hot dog ingesting coke guzzling have realised that the fan who buys the poster, the shirt and the bobbly hat is always looking for ways to show his loyalty. Luckily DeLea Sod farms, the guys who grow the grass for Yankee Stadium pitch have now made their product available to the public. For only $14.99 you can now own a 3oz bag of the same 100% Kentucky Bluegrass that your heroes have trampled. It’s proven very popular so far and maybe after 2010 looms in the rear view mirror we’ll be able to buy Greenpoint Stadium turf. Get your hands on a few silly sod at: www.stadiumassociates.com

These days it can really pay to be a fan. Music enthusiasts in Australia can now earn real money, well Australian Dollars, for supporting their favourite bands. All you do is register with Posse, (www.posse.com), then choose from the list of upcoming gigs, add these to your own personal store, stick it on your Facebook, MySpace or Twitter sites and wait for someone else to buy a ticket using your link. You pick up a healthy 5% commission and keep in touch with what your favourite rock geezers are up to. My wonderful art director, who isn’t short of a few fans herself, is all over this idea like a cheap Jenny Button knock-off suit, her decidedly off-tune voice warbling a little ditty of support by the Mouldy Peaches; “We both have shiny, happy fits of rage, you want more fans, I want more stage…”

Langenfeld has long had its hardcore of fans amongst the hordes of tourists wending their way along the lederhosen trail through the Austrian Alps. Recently, however, the locals have banded together to try to encourage new influx of sturdy boots and knee length socks into the area. They invited over 200 people who registered online to a long weekend of activities from rafting, hiking, climbing and biking to relaxing in the local spa. When it was time to head home the visitors were asked to fill in a survey then to pay what they thought the holiday was worth. Obviously it was designed to give the locals a feel for what tourists were after and what they could charge for it, but for the travellers all it took was a little judicious fiddling and they had a freebie of their lives. Other Live Quality Checks have so far included Singapore hotels and London restaurants, become a fan at: www.live-qualitycheck.com.

Fast food fanatics across the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. of A. are being asked to rise up from their couches and move their capacious backsides over to Burgerville to experience a healthier version of rapid repast. Committed to using only local and organic ingredients they offer such delicacies as Rosemary Shoestring potatoes, Yukon and White Bean Burger and Pumpkin shakes. Backing the front of house offering with a recycling programme that reuses their canola oil for biodiesel fuel and a wind-generated electricity scheme they are trying to reverse the terrible PR that has hit the fast food industry over recent years. Cast your hungry eyes over their website at: www.burgerville.com.

Finally while I’m mentioning fanatical behaviour I’d like to say “2010” and “FIFA,” and dare I go as far as “World Cup?” I just thought I’d get them in now because fairly soon the worldwide merchandising legal beavers will be descending on us and I won’t be able to use such provocative language again ithout shelling out a not so small fortune, until the final whistle has blown on the FIFA 2010 Football World Cup, there, I’ve said it again.

open minded abuse

2009-07-02T01:06:00.000-07:00

No Can Do...

2009-06-17T00:16:00.000-07:00

It’s that time of year when I get to see how many, if any, of the ads I’ve smiled at during the year have made it to the Cannes hopeful list. Without further ado I’d like to point out that I recognised the genius that is the Britvic “Drench” commercial at first sighting. It still tweaks the smile muscle and leaves you humming the soundtrack in inappropriate meetings. Crafted by CHI & Partners, London, and put together production company, Rattling Stick it will hopefully have them all making a song and dance about it. Have another look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60iNado9StU&feature=PlayList&p=2DF49AD9F32DDBA4&index=0&playnext=1

The Hovis “Go on lad” spot remains a breath-taking technical achievement, combining the charm of one of the longest running campaigns with a whole heap of techno-wizardry it might prove a tad obvious for the eclectic tastes of the judging tables but I bet it made many a consumer smile. Enjoy a slice of British life at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv4c4ER8Pzo
The world of “shapes and objects made out of people” may be a tired old stalwart these days with many claiming to have been first with the technique, but surely Publicis Ambience of Mumbai have to take the prize for the most lavish use of bendy people. Their “Man-made machine” ad for Himani is as dazzling as it is tricksy. It lacks the simplicity of its fore runners but as a commercial for pain relief gel it will take some beating. Unfortunately it is the latest in a long line of “guess what we are now” pieces and will probably be overlooked in the South of France. See how it stacks up at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JxkVxBWMSY

The first time I saw one of the Orange commercials for their mobile phones I laughed. And then I sat down and laughed a whole lot more. They are a perfect example of how one great idea can be built upon again and again, which frankly is a breath of fresh air that adland could do with breathing in deeply as we bounce from one off ad to one off ad.
I recommend you start with the Snoop Dog spot at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLQYo7OQVEo&feature=PlayList&p=5E75A6380BD88874&index=30&playnext=2&playnext_from=PL

Move easily onto Rob Lowe:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsBDUe4UPd0&feature=PlayList&p=5E75A6380BD88874&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=29

And end with Darth Vader:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uDcDgnSETs&feature=PlayList&p=5E75A6380BD88874&index=26

There are quite a few other executions you can uncover for yourself or wait for the Cannes award winners reel where they should shine prominently. (Look out for the Angelica Houston one featuring the line, “Ms Houston, we have a problem.”)

The delightfully bizarre “Mini Cab Company” for Fernet 1882 is worth another look too. Created by Madre of Buenos Aires it’s just barmy enough to drive away with a gong or two, and I’d be eternally grateful if someone can explain it to me, preferably over a cold beer or five down at The Brazen Head on a Saturday lunchtime. Take a ride at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPDvelPIH68

In the silly ads that might just make it big category, the James Boag ad, ”Pure Waters” where everything that touches the local river is vastly improved, is a definite contender. Some of the vignettes are utterly delicious, the guy who’s battered guitar goes through a series of metamorphoses to end up a fancy sitar and the bloke who pushes his girl in hoping for improvement are worthy of a grin or two. Dip into it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94syGYcdGcU

The Visa “Running man” ad is beautifully shot in a “naked bloke sprinting along dusty roads” kind of way. And the final joke is worth it, in the long run.
For sheer artistry and craft you’d have to go a long way to outpace the Douleurs sans frontiers, “Stop Pain” commercial. Animated perfectly it hits home with the accuracy of a sniper rifle without resorting to schmaltz and sentimentality. The end resolve is nicely achieved I won’t even tell you about it for fear of spoiling the moment. Run it down at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hf6XpPBuD1Q&feature=PlayList&p=19D9EB70D5C8384D&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=28
It had my usually flint-hearted art director reaching for her Visa card so fast she chipped her “Running Nun” violent red nail varnish.

Finally amongst my hopefuls for glory, the Adidas “Break up service” ad deserves a serious pat on the back. The idea itself would be worthy of recognition, but the pace and energy of the film, without too much overt branding, is masterful. Make a date with it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUtB9_TypuI
Hopefully it’ll have the guys from TBWA London racing up to the stage again and again for a quick Can Can or two. You heard it here first.

beyond comprehension really

2009-06-10T04:39:00.000-07:00

I’m often told, adland’s single purpose is to get a clear and concise product message to consumers so they’ll rush out and buy in frenzy, then I must be in the wrong business. My favourite ad is currently one for a Samsung cell phone and the lead character is totally incomprehensible. Given that it’s Ozzy Osborne that is both understandable and probably a relief, but it’s also very, very funny. Dial it up at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qrUEG29Tuc.

At least that is supposed to be incomprehensible.

Have you seen the Nivea commercial where a pert young thing lies on a beach towel and thrusts parts of her comely form at her man friend demanding him to name his favourite body part? Besides sounding like one of those female bear-trap questions of the “does my bum look big in this?” nature, it really is facile. She proffers parts of her lithe form up for inspection including one shot up her inner thigh that even for a red-blooded writer is a focal point too far. Finally she comes to rest on her underarm. Now pardon my lack of fetishist understanding, but if that really is her most attractive area then I really am getting old.

Every time it hits the screen my dear art director hits the roof, threatening to put her exquisitely tattooed ankle through her shiny new Sony Bravia in a rage of post-feministic angst. She thinks the line “Nivea pearl extract deodorant gives you beautiful underarms,” is simply designed to give womankind another area to be competitively self-conscious about.

Back in the 80’s when Mr Osborne was making as much sense whether you played his records forwards or backwards, it was fashionable to write ads with animals in them, everything from sheep to elephants and lions to badgers were pressed into commercial employment. And now I fear we may be trekking inexplicably back to those days of stars called Bubbles and Butch. For instance there’s been a lot of talk around town lately about an ad featuring a three-legged cheetah, so I finally hunted it down for a viewing. Now, I know that South Africans have a soft spot for wild animals, as you’ll see any Friday night down The Brazen Head, but this spot really is going too far. In a cross between Jock of the Bushveld and Born Free, an unconscionable amount of schmaltz is laid on with a trowel about the big cat and its missing limb. Eventually we are allowed to dry our eyes long enough to focus on the VW logo and end line: “For the love of the drive.” Track it down at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8QgXdoLCMM

Well, all I can say is it’s a shame this feeling of bonhomie hasn’t spread to the sod driving the blue Golf who ran me down in Bryanston last week and drove off.

Ok, so you’re throwing a party but you’ve got heartburn, you rush to the bathroom cabinet, take a spoonful of some relief potion and hey presto, you’re well enough to get on with the dancing. In Adland, of course, nothing is quite so easy. In the wacky world of ads when you take a spoonful of medicine… you get a whole tribe of firemen rushing down your oesophagus carrying a big hose. They then spray the “fire in your belly” with a long stream of white, viscous liquid. You pause, with a post-orgiastic sigh, then turn up your hi-fi to pump out that 80’s “Flashdance” nuisance song, “What a feeling.” It’s a Gaviscon commercial and it really is beyond understanding. Calm yourself before clicking through to: http://www.tellyads.com/show_movie.php?filename=TA1815

Of course sometimes an ad aims to mislead on purpose, just for fun as it were. Take the Coke Light spot shot on a sunny beach somewhere exotic, (probably Hout Bay), featuring a buff bloke strolling slowly out of the surf towards a pretty young girl. She sips carefully from a can as he begins to dress in front of her. They eye each other predatorily as they move closer. Finally he pins on a priest’s dog collar and she looks crestfallen. He runs his finger along the condensation from the can and uses it to draw a cross on her forehead. It’s enough to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window, as Mr Chandler once put it. Fall to your knees in approval at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyxJwYV1a6s&feature=related
I think that’s clear enough for anyone to grasp. Probably.

just plain daft

2009-06-08T08:52:00.000-07:00

Mistakes are there to make us stronger, so every whimsical gift card from Hout Bay to Nuuk will tell you, repeatedly. But that only really works if you can spot your errors. Many of us compound our cock-ups by failing to recognise them and boring our closest friend with pale, thin ideas that have somehow made it to telly-land.

There are times when you should just curl up in a ball and hide in the corner, like the creators of the latest spot for something called “Katjes” hopefully are. Previous incarnations have shown Heidi Klum sticking Katjes between her toes before eating them. It was an odd idea even before I discovered they were some sort of yoghurt based gum, I think. Anyway, the latest offering takes place inside one of the huge space-mobile vehicles that people buy to get away from their children by sticking them in the far distant rear seats. One of the little darlings pipes up with “The question that embarrasses adults,” “What’s artificial insemination?” she spouts, causing a pregnant pause in the car as the super- model lookalike mother swerves dangerously while considering her answer. The other passengers, all of who are barely out of kindergarten, wait, exchanging knowing looks as she battles with the answer. “That’s when fruit gums come with artificial colours, luckily there are others that don’t.” She proclaims, dangling a bag of the offending sweets over her shoulder as the voice-over sings the instantly forgettable ditty, “Katjes, yes, yes, yes…” “No, no. no it has me shouting when I’m treated to it, again.
I would like to think that a whole smorgasbord of creatives were killed in the making of this ad.
To see how beauty can be used with brains take a look at the now old but still lovely to look at Agent Provocateur viral. Maybe I’m biased by the sight of Kylie thrusting her body all over the place while attached to a bar room bucking bronco dressed in skimpy underwear, maybe I’m just human after all. Recharge your batteries at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgX8gOV4x6w, personally it leaves me breathless and moaning, “I wish that was in my portfolio.”

Hopefully the brains behind the latest Salton flat wall heater thingy ad will be thinking twice before claiming bragging rights down the Brazen Head. In this a family are driven to sleep by the comfort of the heaters, or maybe by being forced to watch the commercial a few times, either way they are caught deep in slumber on camera. As we move over each of them we see fluffy type appear telling us what they are dreaming of. “A hole in one,” for the father, a daring “007” for his dozy wife, something called “Smackdown,” for the nasty looking teenager and finally even the family pet doesn’t escape with the predictable “rabbits” hovering over his head. It’s a horrible, sickly family pastiche that is beyond terrible and should be buried somewhere deep where it can live out its radioactive half-life without infecting other half-witted clients. My art director, flashing her new sparkly ring acquired on a dodgy holiday down South, growls loud enough to wake a sleeping hound every time this piece of rubbish comes on, I sense it angers her slightly.
There are easier, and more powerful ways to catch the consumer’s attention. The top and tail inserts on both sides of the Sky weather report are constantly of a high standard. Small smiles highlighting the many high standard offerings on board Qatar airways, beautiful close-ups of tea pouring shots are accompanied by a languid voice; “This afternoon over the Pyrenees we’re expecting a torrent of Earl Grey Tea, lifting later…the weather sponsored by Qatar airways.”

Used to having the last word, the political commentator Adam Boulton often pops up on Sky news harassing the great and good with carefully sharpened jibes so adept and apposite that his interviewees don’t know what hit them. His towering moment, however, is in the ad where, after exchanging sound bites, he dismisses the British Prime Minister with the words, “I think the BBC are waiting for you over there.” Super up the line, Sky, always first with the news.”
It’s neat, clever, and topical stuff, make no mistake about it.

2009-05-27T05:31:00.000-07:00

My dear sainted mother has never understood what I do for a living. When passing round the afternoon scones and Chianti with her sisters she has for many years now simply fudged the question with a vague “he’s in advertising” and passed onto the more recognisable achievements of my siblings. I can’t say I blame her, some days I hardly know what I do myself. But I do know I love it. Mostly.
People from Bill Cosby to Jerry Della Femina have claimed the quote “Advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.” Which is all very well but they obviously weren’t involved in Adland in 80’s London where you didn’t have to bring clothes to have fun, not even of the Emperor’s kind.

It’s a terrible cliché but if you’re doing it right then it’s all about the “F” word. It’s fun, and that’s fun with a capital “F”. After all, how many of our parents had this kind of job, where you hear about someone called Cameron Diaz who not only is an outboard engine fitter, but also a bloke, and then you get to meet him and put him in an ad. The brilliant self-effacing way the stars of the Maxibon chocolate ice-cream commercials talk about living with famous names is perfectly balanced by the films themselves. With a flick of her Bic lighter and a billowing cloud of Dunhill Menthol, my art director, a girl who’s often funny even when she’s not trying to be, was gasping for breath when she watched the Michael Jackson spot. Stalk them down at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLTkSTKyT8k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyeiaQ9LqRE&feature=related
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaxFiSAkjdg&NR=1

Writing funny ads is a special feeling, knowing you’ll get an instant reaction when it’s on down the Brazen Head makes it all worth while. Humour in car ads is unusual in these days of transmogrifying metallic monsters but I did catch my funny-bone on this Mercedes ad.
“An attractive dark-haired young thing is seen allowing herself to be man-handled by someone other than her husband. “Will your husband be home?” he asks.
“Not in this weather,” the hussy replies. Outside we see a blizzard is blizzarding and the husband is driving fearlessly through it.
Again, she cries, “Not in this weather.” The husband ploughs on, snow and sleet pulverising his car, he slides to a stop outside of the house behind another car.
He glances in through the house window, then opens the front door and steps in. A buxom young blonde steps out of the firelight dressed in next to nothing, “Won’t your wife be expecting you?” she asks, “Not in this weather he replies.” Super up line: “The Mercedes E Class 4Matic, At least there’s something you can rely on.” Navigate your way to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9r865NvVv8 it’s a well-produced smile.

Of course, those of us lucky enough to do this and get paid know how gut-churning, real terror provoking the job can be. A new client, a brief that everyone pretends to understand and the big white page. And no one else can help you, there’s no “dog eating homework” or “let’s pass it on to young Kate and Stevo” here. But when you get it right and get an ad out there, no matter how long you’ve been doing this job, it’s heart-thumpingly exhilarating.

Of course, if you’re really stuck you can swipe an idea from someone else. The Hallmark, “Brother of the Bride” commercial borrows liberally from Four Weddings & A Funeral but does include a nice twist of its own at the end. And the casting is very cool. Get attached to it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZdIjnkDpMo&feature=related

Great humour like great ads often comes from real life observations. For those of us who have ever woken up not only on the wrong side of bed, but the wrong side of town the AMP commercial “Walk of no shame,” will not only resonate nicely but may having you raise a can of the stuff in admiration:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqc26yfxyH0&feature=related

Of course I could be totally wrong about the whole Adland thing, after all the great George Orwell himself once said, “Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.” But then again he thought pigs could talk.

Effective FX

2009-05-20T01:03:00.000-07:00

Commercials are a collaboration, the agency team has an idea, the director adds his eye and elaborates upon the story, the music guys craft a natty track and you all head for post-production.
When you find yourself in a room with a logo that looks like an exploded wart or some kind of post-revolution communist poster hammering out a name like “BLAST!” or “BLACK MIST” then you know you’re in the hands of one of the bright young, or not so young, things who might just be able to resuscitate the corpse of your idea. Post-production is alchemy. It can breathe new life into an addled, over worked concept adding new distinctive layers of colour and texture, or it can be the final straw that breaks the pachyderm’s back, like lip-stick on a pig.
Sitting in a dark room looking at four screens of varying size play back an ad I’m either really proud and happy with or worried and hate, depending on which knob the geezer in front of me twiddles. I’m in turns frustrated and amazed, but all I’m really asking for is genius. Some of that stuff that took the Guinness Evolution ad from beer mat concept to all singing and dancing extravaganza, in reverse. In case you missed this potted history check it out at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1t4sdgvy-pk&feature=related
While you’re there take a look at the Guinness White Horses/surfer commercial. A piece of beauty in its simple idea and stunningly brilliant achievement: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcdDg30VBgo
Water-born SFX have come a long way since Cecile B D’Mille had Charlton Heston do his best Moses and part the Red Sea while clutching some heavy commandments, but it’s a miracle that’s still worth a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fE5lXjEFbF8

Not all SFX take place in darkened cellars, however, take the new Sony Bravia ad, it’s just brilliant. Actually that’s not true. The idea behind the commercial is brilliant, and all those crowding the shores at Cannes soon should be expecting to see it, a lot. However, the commercial is overshadowed by the film of the making of the commercial. Art abusing art, perhaps, or at least amusing it.

The guys from the unstoppable creative force of Fallon London thought it would be a neat idea to build a huge zoetrope to show the superb smoothness of the latest Sony Motionflow 200Hz TV picture. A zoetrope, for those who didn’t go to a proper school, is one of those old things that have still pics in and when you spin it shows something moving, usually something really dull like a horse. Or as grown-ups will tell you: “A zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. Beneath the slits on the inner surface of the cylinder is a band, which has either individual frames from a video/film or images from a set of sequenced drawings or photographs. As the cylinder spins the user looks through the slits at the pictures on the opposite side of the cylinder's interior. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together so that the user sees a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, the equivalent of a motion picture.”

Cool eh? Well it is if you can convince your client you have to build one in the ancient town square in Torino, Italy. And it has to be huge, big enough to show a life size footballer striking a ball perfectly. And that footballer has to be AC Milan’s Kaka. Stare in wonder at the ad at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oufVyx2WFA
Better still; see it being built with some natty time-lapse stuff at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoDFmAGyeOI&feature=related
As I say, SFX can make a great idea shimmer and pirouette. It can even make a tedious idea do a decent tap dance. One in the line of “cars that transform into things that can go places cars can’t usually” ads, the Nissan commercial where the big square car becomes a mechanical spider and scorpion etc straight out of Quake III is ok, but it leaves you wondering which came first, the idea or the technique. Steer your way to it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOCSCxL7Z0Q

There’s also the Nissan Dualis commercial. Again a Nissan that changes into something better looking and shiny, (a decent car perhaps?), this time some kind of robotic post-transformer skater. It shoots up walls in tunnels and whizzes around other cars leaving you with the distinct feeling that Nissan drivers are crap at staying on the road, test drive the ad at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fogayHVbkkg&feature=related

It takes some serious keeping up to remain anywhere near in touch with the myriad of sensory inputs that can be sucked into the making of a commercial of any stature. Attaching yourself to Shots reels and other Adland promos helps and even plugging your life into Youtube has its benefits, if you can stop yourself pinching ideas along with techniques.
But nothing can replace a good eye and a sparkling imagination when it comes to the original idea.
My art director, a girl with an eye for a good thing, loves nothing better than surrounding herself with guys called Shaun and Gert in small dark cellars and tweaking their knobs. Her green/grey eyes closed to slits as she dictates eye-boggling colour balances and cutting-edge techniques tossing her glossy black beads about like a metronomic banshee.

To see SFX at it’s most elaborate, of course, you have to go to Hollywoodland, and the best place to dip into is always the trailers where they steal all the good bits and make mini movies to tantalise the public’s saliva glands. The new Star Trek movie looks like a stonker and you don’t have to be a life-long trekkie or an admirer of William Shatner’s unbelievable acting skills to appreciate the wonders of explosions in space. Beam up a couple of examples at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScHxUopDlKc&feature=fvst
and: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w4vk5OZmn8&feature=fvst

Hopefully the film will live up to the glory of the trailers, unlike Wolverine where the best bits were glued together by endless dull stuff and hours of tedious soul-searching, why can’t these guys just get on with killing people? “Beam me up Scotty.”

shiny happy people

2009-05-13T07:28:00.000-07:00

So product Zuma is up, running and on a shelf near you now. And about time too I say, it’s such a bore when a launch takes so long to get off the ground, and whatever you think of our new Pres he’s at least got what it takes to make a splash on the world stage. Something a new idea needs and what we’ve been sadly missing for a long while, an air of authority and power.
With a flick of her dirty blonde mop my art director looks up from a bowl of her home made hot & spicy Chinese soup to fill me in on what she thinks of our fearless new leader’s launch on the world-stage.
“Whether elected or appointed,
He considers himself the Lord’s anointed,
And indeed the ointment lingers on him,
So thick you can’t get your fingers on him.”
She has long been absorbing Ogden Nash from the puddles of beer flowing freely across the Brazen Head’s bar.

A great launch has a lot of complex components melded into one spearhead and like most things in Adland it’s a precarious undertaking.
You only get one shot at it. Bugger it up and you’ll go the way of some of the biggest cock-ups since Ford launched the Nova in Mexico significantly failing to notice that the car’s name translated locally to “No go.”

Over hype can ring the death knell for a new product as surely as no hype at all. In the 90’s the world of computer gaming was on the edge of its collective ergonomically designed seat awaiting the launch of “Battlecruiser 3000AD.” Billed as the most amazing and mind-blowing experience ever created it was all set to be “the last thing you’ll ever desire.” Famous last words indeed. For seven years, (probably equivalent to 30 or 40 in gamers years), it remained parked in development as they ironed out creases in design, technology and packaging. By the time TakeTwo Interactive released it to frankly disinterested public it was all but ignored. For a start it was a DOS game and the world had moved onto Windows 95, the bugs and out-moded graphics were ridiculed by trend conscious gamers worldwide and Battlecruiser 3000 sank without a trace.

Inauspicious launches are not a modern invention. In the 1950’s Ford went all out to create a new line of car to compete with zooty machines rolling off the General Motors conveyor belts. The “E-Car,” (E for experimental), was packed to the hilt with marvellous innovations never seen before to the level where it was being punted as the first new and original car for years. A teaser campaign ran for months hinting at the sheer brilliance of the new Edsel motor vehicle. A TV special ran for an hour called the “The Edsel Show” featiuring such hot talent as Frank Sinatra, and Bing Crosby. And then finally the curtain was raised on September 4th 1957, or “E-Day” as the ever-hopeful guys at Ford attempted to christen it. To say it flopped would be an understatement. It had everything inside but nothing out, it was styled too conventional for the progressive market of the time. The workmanship was sub-standard and the pricing so hard to understand that no one knew if it was an economical, mid-market or high end vehicle. It was a $400 000 000 failure. And thus became a legend anyway.

To really mess up a launch you have to go a long way to beat that red devil of the marketing world, Coca-Cola. In 1985 with nothing better to do than to watch their huge market share get swallowed by competitors they decided to act. In an amazing move of self-destruction they changed the formula of the product upon which their 100 years of considerable prosperity was based. Without a thought for their highly loyal fan base they announced on April 23rd that they were launching the reformulated fizzy drink under the line “The best just got better.”
At first the ad campaigns seemed to be working and the great American public were happily swallowing the new stuff. Unfortunately for Coke their massive consumer base in the South East States were less than impressed and started a campaign expressing not only their dislike of New Coke, (although surprisingly not the taste), and their feelings of betrayal and disappointment in the company for messing with the iconic Brand. Needless to say on July 10th that year Coca-Cola returned to their original formula leaving many people confused by the whole saga and conspiracy theorists seeing shadows about the company’s role in the affair.

If you were looking for something to go with your tasty beverage then the McDonalds Deluxe line would have been perfect for you. Launched under the dubious line, “Especially for grown-up tastes,” they were a range of sandwiches created by a specially hired Executive Chef to add glamour to the fastest of fast foods.
Backed by a marvellously daft ad campaign which set them back a tasty $100 million, the idea eventually cost around $300 000 000 before McDonalds swallowed their pride and withdrew the whole thing.
On the web-site you can still find a step by step guide to the “Deluxe Line Dance,” choreographed by Debbie Allen who can be seen teasing the world into McSteppin.

Some products you would swear deserve to fail and fail badly just seem impervious to the abuse and laughter, which they receive and continue on to make millions.
My own current favourite is the “Folding omelette pan” a device for those of us who become hot and disorientated when called upon to turn an omelette over. As the ads say “Let the pan do the folding!” Ingenious really, if your idea of food is some mushed up eggs and diced additives. Flip out over one at:http://www.theafternoon.com/100330.html

achieve perfect pitch

2009-05-05T04:54:00.000-07:00

It’s what we put out there that either attracts or repulses people. Sorry if that sounds a tad like a self-help book full of self-indulgent Yankee quotes, but that’s the truth of it.
In the 21st century image is everything, especially when getting your foot in the door and your business card in someone’s wallet or handbag, or both.
Dating sites are the perfect example of this; I was shocked to find that people tell masses of small fibs on them; they elaborate upon their good points and downright lie hugely about their dodgy bits. They’ll perjure themselves about almost anything to get you sitting opposite them in a crap coffee house or a swanky restaurant. Body shape, age, height and the number of remaining follicles clutching to their scalp are just the beginning. And then later they’ll wonder why their relationships flounder and ultimately fail in a morass of exaggeration and misrepresentation. It’s all more than a little disheartening.

But then, of course, self-promotion is rather big business these days.
Ad agencies are like circling speed-dating gatherings cranked up on a large amount of suspicious substances, all gagging to tempt new clients through their rather too welcoming doors.
Adland is full of eclectic behaviour and none more so than when
confronted by a new business possibility. Some guys simply dust off their agency credentials, packed with scintillating facts about staff members and former glories of creaky old campaigns. Others do a lively song and dance basing their presentation on fluffy personalities and a seductive mixture of smoke and mirrors.
There was an agency called Allen Brady & Marsh, creators of the terrible Guinnlessness campaign, that would incessantly dress up in fancy dress for pitches. Anything from stripping bananas to arks full of flashy fur animals and wobbly latex pints of beer would greet clients as they got off the lift clutching their sensible briefs. “Make it memorable,” was carved into ABM’s souls and even the pitches they didn’t win, which weren’t many, left the whole of Adland breathless with legendary, and hard to follow, performances.
That’s what pitching is after all, a form of performance art, packed with subtle nuances that not only show off your own talents but also highlight the failings of the competitors. So we add flash and verve, make ourselves brighter, more colourful with an exciting soundtrack. We throw in some campaign promises that would make a politician squirm, talk vaguely of transparency and cover the gaps with marshmallow sauce and invisible tape.
“Partnerships” and “custodians of the Brand” are much abused buzz phrases, often surrounded by what my granddaddy would have called ‘”high falutin’ words.” The Universal McCann pitch film is drenched in the stuff, listen in awe at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdGFnKTZWrA&feature=related

The clients, naturally, feed it back to us in bucketfuls. With prospective market share graphs, unique product attributes and inflated budgets, it’s a game where the rules are fairly cut and dried but the floor is constantly shifting. At it’s worst it’s a back-stabbing, crony-loaded sham, at it’s best it’s an invigorating breath of fresh thinking and muscle-flexing that puts us all back in the game and brings out our natural combativeness. It’s great.
My art director, for instance, never one to hold her intriguingly pierced tongue, is a particularly gifted presenter and, while scrupulously honest in real life, will gladly spin a yarn of tortuous intricacy to win a point in a pitch.
Pitches can make you a little crazy.

Pitches can also, however, bring out the best in an agency as the people come together to use their often prodigious grey matter to solve the new challenges inherent in a pitch. A new client, or even a new product is fertile ground for people who work on the same stuff day after day and the resulting work is often deliciously exciting.
The really good agencies look for a unique insight into the client and their product, Robin Wight, founder of WCRS, always claimed he “interrogated the Brand until it confessed its strengths.” It’s phrase that has become more well worn than “I know nothing about the arms deal,” but worked perfectly well for decades for an agency at the top of their game.
On the American sit/com/dram, “Madmen,” there’s a great scene that highlights this perfectly when Don pitches to Kodak to win the campaign for their new “Wheel.” It’s a beautifully timed scene climaxing in the agency recommending a new name for the product. Thus, they would have us believe, The Kodak Carousel was born. Catch this moment of calm madness at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2bLNkCqpuY

In these days where we all seem to dance to the organ grinder of reality TV there are now shows where they test agencies with fake briefs so they can do their pitch tricks live on telly. The brief will usually be something controversial, selling guns to kids; a pheromone drenched deodorant, or my particular favourite, encouraging Australians to invade New Zealand. In one Aussie show they posed this idea of down-under warfare and received a few impressive and very typically antipodean, campaigns. Have a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9kkVo7Rv8g
Campaign one got my vote simply because I could imagine South Africans going for it too,

The agencies involved were more than happy to flex their creative muscles on prime time TV. After all there were potential clients on the edge of their sofas out there. And as they used to say to back in the 20th century, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
For most of us this level of blatant self-promotion takes some practice. Personally I’m forever telling people I’m a nice guy, but as my closest friend often reminds me from under her barstool, nice guys will always finish last, and no one will give a damn.
But I could just be being a little disingenuous.

spreading a viral

2009-04-29T02:24:00.000-07:00

People in adland have standards, they’re not our own, obviously, they’re enforced upon us by various bodies of subjective censorship and puerile arbiters of “good taste and public decency.”
No swearing, no fart jokes, no bad taste and definitely no random bare bum extravaganzas. A general sense of decency pervades, then.

Or has done until we discovered viral. A place where the only rules are no rules and the only requirement is to have your communication passed around cyberspace until the world has been regaled by your genius. This is achieved by being funny, offensive, innovative or violent, although of course a mix of all of the above would work perfectly.

Of course like most things, what is or isn’t worth sending on to your ever-suffering list of email contacts is purely subjective. Offensive, for instance these PC driven days, can be anything from a cartoon featuring someone’s God to a joke about a minority group or satirical commentary on a political leader or two.
Or it can be an add-on to a successful campaign that’s a tad too risky to try for conventional TV spots, like the Marmite “Breastfeeding” viral, where the mother eats Marmite on toast then her breast-feeding baby vomits up her mother’s tainted milk in a scene that makes The Exorcist look like a light gip. Swallow it down at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoRcU0Ul7tU&feature=related

Offensive really is in the eye of the beholder, the LG “Secret KF750” spot is something else. It’s either the ultimate, and rather creepy, stalker film, or it’s a natural extension of a little light voyeurism. Confused I mentioned it down the Brazen Head where my views were swept aside as dangerously heretical and total New Man crap.
My art director, seldom impressed by the sensitive, sharey/carey guy, sighed into her Jameson’s, bemoaning the lack of real men, well, real men who will do as they’re damned well told, of course, and ordered a plate of nachos to go. Have a sneaky peek at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWp4MkzLsC4&feature=related

One of the more transparent tricks that advertisers float across your inbox is the “filming your idea so it looks rough as if a real event of rebellion has been shot usually on a cell-phone.” A bit of grainy footage, a scratchy soundtrack and a tiny logo and you’ve got it. Sadly most of them are so heavy-handed that no one is fooled and they end up in cyber trash cans. The Sprite ad just about makes it, your finger might just be hovering over the forward key. Click on it and see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX1-650KIsU&feature=related

Disaster and violence play well to the masses and the x-travel ad is backed with enough of both to make your inbox sigh with bloated pleasure. Take a trip to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXA5rBQVtQE, unless you’ve just booked your holiday.

A bit of good swearing travels well across email world. The Observer spot is really rather charming, it uses the copious linguistic talents of Alan Ford, of Snatch fame, and it’s well worth blowing someone’s inbox with. The suppressed violence is very funny but the swearing is what carries the day. Catch it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qsh-2LAG0QA
You won’t have a bad word to say about it.

The Durex “Famous bad guys in history” campaign is nice. Well, it’s an ok,if over populated idea. (The old, if they’d used condoms these guys would never have existed idea). But it would have been more fun to use more obscure baddies, stuck with Bin Laden, Hitler and old GW Bush where do they go next? It’ll be interesting to see if they’re demonising Obama in four years time. See them in all their evilness at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV-Hyp5FUjQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am4VjANAhi4&feature=related
and:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZZmUprDrhk&feature=related

Humour works especially well in viral-land. But, unlike the worldwide web thingy, not all humour works in all places. The Thai mobile phone ad is based on the old concept of “what would we do without them,” and uses carrier pigeons to show how the world without mobile would work. It’s a story full interesting insights into Thai humour, including a curious moment when the pigeon has a heart attack and the guys declare “hey it’s got as vibrating function just like real phones.” You kinda have to see it to get the full story:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJQeaovt8mY&feature=related

Some ideas are thrown onto the internet in a hope to enlarge their poor show on TV and cinema, others because the client or agency are convinced their ad is too brilliant to keep to themselves. Most of them are sadly mistaken. The Captain Morgan spot is ok. It’s a bit old fashioned and doesn’t have the immediacy of the best work created solely for the viral medium, but it’s worth a look just for a bit of a laugh. Pour yourself a shot at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy4STqBhVS8&feature=related

One of the funniest and most widely viewed viral ads of recent times was the Pot Noodle “Gollum” ad. It’s perfect in its bed-sit squalor and throaty, post-binge-drinking voice, but was also brilliantly timed for release after the last of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It’ll have you banging your head on your keyboard muttering “I wish I’d done that.” Catch this precious moment at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wlAEZPOr5s&feature=related

Finally there’s the Coke Zero viral, ”The gnome and the Boob,” a film that will make any mouse twitch with delight. I’ve watched it twenty or thirty times and I can honestly say I have no idea what it’s about. It’s marvellous in its insanity and basically tells the story of, well, a vertically challenged chap and a large breast. It’s brilliant. Or crap. I just can’t decide. Stare in wonder at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNhZxosMiTY&feature=related
The guys who spend all their time crafting these viral ads constantly tell us that they are the death of traditional advertising. That TV ads are dead, Radio obsolete, and Radio and Press work, history. The best thing about this modern version of junk mail isn’t that it makes traditional media a thing of the past; it’s that anyone who finds them unfunny, offensive, non-innovative or too violent can simply hit the delete button.
That’s one up to date idea that will keep a lot of people clicking.

in it for the long run...

2009-04-22T23:41:00.000-07:00

In an unstable world like ours what we all seek is a sense of continuity, a feeling of never-ending stasis, that, to paraphrase that god-awful Celine song, that “You are safe in my heart, and my heart will go and on.”
An idea that resonates with many clients in adland who, having found a formula for their advertising stick with it, no matter what.
This sounds dull, but often it can lead to great work. After all if the agency has a framework to build on it frees up the need to create from the feared white page up. This can be as simple as an endline, a technique or even a spokesman.
In January of 2000 Sean, the man from “Trunkmonkey Racing” in the USA created the “Trunkmonkey” concept as a mascot for his race team and the North American Subaru Impreza Owners Club.
It proved to be a major hit with his teams’ supporters, so much so that they put together a commercial.
“Road rage,” plays upon that all too common situation where the seemingly helpless driver is confronted by the huge raging loony who feels he has been the victim of bad driving and stands banging on your car window demanding some kind of justice. With the press of the “Trunkmonkey” button a barmy chimp is released from the car boot, or trunk to our American cousins, and proceeds to beat the crap out of the big guy with a wheel spanner thing. It’s a very fulfilling commercial for those of us who have ever been confronted by purple faced giants intent on tearing us limb from limb.

Catch the monkey at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9tj3xnsqfY&feature=PlayList&p=655C6917AEE67806&index=9&playnext=9&playnext_from=PL

The crazed chimp, however, was such a big hit that the Trunkmonkey guys realised they had lucked into a viable company image. In fairly rapid succession they created an excellent campaign of ads. “Alien Abduction,” “First Aid,” “Chaperone,” “Pediatric Edition,” ”Want a Donut?” “Throwing Eggs.” And my own favourite, “Thrown off a Bridge, in which a car thief is dragged from the car and thrown bodily from a high bridge. Very satisfying indeed.
And it achieved two important things; it made the North American Subaru Impreza Owners Club famous, and created a sense of anticipation amongst the consumer as they waited to see who the mad chimp would assault next.
Locally our most successful version of this is no doubt the every youthful Nando’s campaign which, like most long-term formats, has it’s great moments and its lows. The latest political voting ad featuring the ANC youth leader as a puppet talking of great change is a timely, well thought out piece.
One of the touch-stones for longevity in ad campaigns for a long time was for Hamlet cigars. With the instantly recognisable musical mnemonic they featured people to whom a small misfortune occurred who rose above it with “a mild cigar from Benson & Hedges.”
From 1966 until 1997 they reigned supreme as an example of how to keep a great idea fresh and distinctive, yet remain true to the central concept.
You can inhale a comprehensive collection at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIckHmwZAeI
You’ll find not only the early stuff like “Music Teacher,” featuring members of the “Carry On” squad of comedians, but also “Robots”, the response to the original Star Wars film, “Tennis” and the ultimate Bald bloke horror, “Photo-booth.”
The genius of the agency Collett Dickenson Pearce was that to keep the idea fresh they backed it up with topical executions, not only on TV but on radio and in the press. Famously when the English cricket captain Ian Botham was dragged through the press for smoking a little recreational cannabis they ran a photo of him smoking a cigar with the “Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet” line under it. A quick reacting agency and a brave client are a powerful mix.
Great ideas come from anywhere, people are constantly telling me. In 1968 Hamlet ran an ad showing a bloke undressing in front of a bunch of scandalised women in a laundrette, popping his clothes in the washer and calmly smoking his cigar.
Twenty years later the exact same scenario was used by Bartle Bogle & Hegarty to re-launch a seemingly dying brand of jeans to an uncaring public.
Featuring model Nik Kamen and the Marvin Gaye classic “I heard it through the Grapevine,” it was admittedly a steamier version. Not only did it help push a lot of denim, it also was the start of one of the most successful campaigns of commercials ever seen which continues today around the world. Both in commercial and in adland fame there has probably never been a campaign with such diversity and longevity.
One of the latest, is a bizarre tribute to the 80’s classic “Tainted Love.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ne4X6ucn_Q

I include it not only as an example of the ongoing greatness of the campaign, but because my art director, sweet girl that she is, hasn’t stopped giggling and twirling her beads ever since she saw it last week. And if it can make her smile it can do the same for almost anyone.

As campaigns that make you smile go the long-running Castlemaine XXXX beer campaign is not often surpassed. Starting with two of our Aussie brothers who drop their cans of lager into a croc infested river: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc3TGbZmMfU&feature=related
It has run successfully from the 80’s constantly maintaining its ability to poke fun at the flaws in the character of the Antipodean male. (it would probably go down very well here in S.A.).

Continuity in advertising is a strong and often neglected thing as clients and agencies alike struggle for “the next best thing.”
The overpowering urge for change, even in the midst of great successes it niggles at the back of even the sanest brain, “could I do better in another job/country/relationship.”
However, the cry of “if it’s not broken don’t fix it” is not always one of nervous protectionism from an agency, often it’s based in the knowledge that truly memorable advertising comes from powerful, single-minded ideas carried across campaigns that grow with time rather than fade away.

just for effect

2009-04-15T03:47:00.000-07:00

Commercials built on an effect all too often end up as nothing more than a vehicle for the effect itself, a marvellously pointless visual feast from the director and his post-production guys. This in no way negates using the many sumptuous effects lurking out there, adland has a long and often stunning history of bending them to embellish a good tale. The Rhapsody Music ad by Droga5 New York, for instance is a good idea well achieved, of course it also has tracks by Kraak & Smaak and David Bowie to help it bounce nicely along, but the idea is the key not the FX. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hBN4roSRwg

New Zealand. A place of calmness, home to zillions of sheep, a couple of dozen people and a handful of hobbits. And The Dark Lord, of course.
Maybe it was the filming of Mr Jackson’s trilogy of middle-earth that awakened something dark and disturbing in the national psyche, or maybe they’ve always had a darker side but have been too far away for anyone to give a damn. Whatever the truth, the ad for Stihl power tools by DDB positively drips with the dark side of humour.
Put together by creative team James Tucker and Simon Vicars and directed by Adam Stevens of Robbers Dog Films it’s an interesting take on a real life moment, it appears to touch a significant spot somewhere deep within my ex-goth art director who growls approvingly from behind her Versace sunglasses, watch it to death at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJUalKcORbM
Adrian Cooper of Media matters, a New Zealand standards watchdog, feels that DDB and Stihl have crossed the good taste line. "I was really horrified,” he says, “I thought, this is not good enough, it's simply not good enough, and it's not the New Zealand I know."

The ad prompted a flurry of complaints to the Broadcasting and Advertising Standards authorities. "I think that any mature, responsible, thinking adults looking at that would find it offensive," says Mr. Cooper.
Personally, and I realise there’s not a whole heap to do in New Zealand, but if this is the sort of imagery that troubles him so deeply, I think he should get out more.

God knows what he’d make of the viral commercial billed as “THE RARE AND ELUSIVE CONDOM FAIRY.” Brought to us by “THE BEST COMPANY EVER, INC. AND LIFESTYLES SKYN CONDOMS.” It’s a tad raunchy for the first 15 seconds or so, (I can feel Mr. Cooper’s fingers twitching over his keyboard already), and then the elusive condom fairy appears. He’s elusive in the same way Mr. T was elusive in the “A Team” and is actually disturbingly reminiscent of him. Laugh your way to protection at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV4WDBM7N3c

Fairies are featuring large in Adland at the moment. In the excruciating media space that is Celebrity Apprentice, (are they practising to be celebrities?), Sun Products were featured in a particularly gory episode.
Teams where challenged to create a viral video for their all® small & mighty laundry product. What they created needed to be on brand, appeal to the target audience and be interesting enough to pass the viral test, (ie: be worthy of people sending it on and on to friends).

Not only did both teams fail to produce a video that the client could feasibly run, but all of the videos they made were deemed to be in poor taste, (presumably Mr. Cooper has a U.S. cousin), packed with crap jokes and terrible innuendo, like a room full of junior creatives who’ve been told to “go wild” with a brief.
Eventually “Razorfish” were asked to step in and create a solution.
The result was the ‘LFU 320’. Starring Melissa Rivers it’s a mockumentary of the Laundry Fairy’s Union 320, an off-beat collection of stain fighting fairies who aid over-stretched women everywhere. All of course meant to punt the Laundry Fairy’s weapon of choice - all® small & mighty. Fairy small. Mighty clean.™ it’s worth a look just to see some of the decidedly disgruntled fairies. See them air their dirty laundry at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8qoUySSAto

Leaping out of planes for no good reason has been a bit of a thing lately on airwaves across advertising too. The Emerald Nuts “Falling” spot is all about banishing something called the 3pm slump, some kind of sugar low that appears to be the bane of companies across America. Created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, it’s an amusing piece where the guy is so distracted by this malaise he walks out of a plane door into the sky. It’s funny. Dive in at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-rKMBMVsQs

One ad that’s proven very popular down the Brazen Head of late is the Johnny Walker “Crossroads” commercial. This may be because it’s about booze and therefore goes down quicker than a two finger shot with lime. It’s one of those Mr Johnson at the spiritual crossroads sort of films. Full of beautiful post-Paris Texas shots and quirky little visual asides and it sort of brings the whole “Keep walking” idea home full circle. Shot by Walter Stern of Academy and created by Pete Bradley of BBH London it’s a classic piece of well-shot, not overly scripted advertising.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlKLoAOlPfs

Ever since the Axe campaign began it’s become a world-wide competition to make each ad progressively sexier and steamier, and it’s often been a pleasure to behold. The latest offering from agency Vegallmosponce in Buenos Aires is a slight move away from bursting blouses and hormones to erm, the world of what at first appears to be post-its.
These coloured squares of paper are all over the guys flat and car and well, everywhere really. Suddenly, a pretty, sexy, Axe girl appears attracted presumably by the deodorant rather than the smell of glued notepaper pieces. As they start to grapple the paper squares come to life and cover their unseemly behaviour in a sort of censoring manner. It’s a technique blended with an effect to very little effect indeed, chase it down at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgrZqX2DAXA
Time to see if Mr Smirnoff can still take effect as usual.

the politics of dancing...

2009-04-07T00:04:00.001-07:00

The price of real estate in the U.S. is still rising; a nice place at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, NW Washington, recently got new occupants after they spent around R 2,220,665,950.00 to secure a minimum four year lease.
That’s a lot less than it costs to get into the Union Buildings on Government Avenue, Pretoria. At least I hope it is, or Mr Shaik’s wallet will be getting another airing, allegedly.
Political advertising is a huge money-spinner for adland and media land alike. But in a one party state, which S.A. effectively remains, be that the NP or ANC, does advertising really have a role? Posters of candidates grinning like fools are just basic propaganda tools as employed by every big-wig autocrat from Hitler and Mussolini down to Castro and Eternal President of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea Kim II Sung.

There’s a general feeling that there’s no reason to spend vast amounts on ads packed with campaign promises when there’s no sense in the voters wasting their time voting for outlandish promises from parties who aren’t getting in anyway. It’s like F1 used to be with Michael Schumaker it’s dull, it’s predictable and you know who’s going to win.
It’s terribly sad because if there’s one thing that elections are good for it’s interesting advertising.

Back in1990 Paul Wellstone ran his first campaign to get a seat on the US Senate. In a parody of Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me” he spent his commercials searching for the incumbent, Rudy Boschwitz, to challenge him to a live debate.
Not only did they generate more free PR space than almost any political ad ever has, but they also picked up masses of free airtime and made Mr Wellstone the only challenger to beat the incumbent. Give it your vote at: http://www.bestadsever.com/2007/06/best-political-ad-ever.html

There was a time all you had to do to get your backside safely in the power seat was kiss a few babies in front of the local newspaper photographer and munch your way through a couple of hundred chicken dinners. Now to get your message out there you have to blaze your name across the NFL and NASCAR and other major sporting events. Not at the actual stadiums of course, that would be far too 20th century for modern guys like Barack and friends. Last year, for instance, while you were racing your kids through their Play station 7 games, complete with mind control devices and hands-free cell phones, you might have noticed that the posters on the walls you kept smashing into were crammed with “It’s time for a change,” campaign message.
To hit the first time voter market the Obama-Biden ticket bought ad space inside nine of the world’s most popular titles produced by Electronic Arts, the world’s number one leading games publisher.
The Obama-Biden ads, which urged voters to cast their ballot early, formed part of the Democrat's campaign to drive young supporters to the polls. An EA spokeswoman confirmed that most of the players being targeted were men in the 16-32 age bracket, a group which although strongly favouring Obama, often choose not to vote.

Not all of Obama’s PR showed quite so much political nounce. Nature magazine’s front cover had the two candidates, McCain and Obama, in all their svelte glory, perfectly styled and groomed, smiling magnanimously at each other. Directly opposite, on the back cover, they ran an ad featuring two dogs, perfectly styled and groomed… the magazine was very apologetic about what they called the “unfortunate advert.”
Catch it at:http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/062EC3EC-10C0-4BD0-85E8-E8472D6EDA4D/

Like a teenage son with a volume button The British National Party are a bunch of boors who believe they are the first rebels in the world. They pout, strut and posture all over the political landscape, spouting their silly, badly thought out range of racial and misogynist slurs. Lately they’ve taken to riling the non-Christian element of society with their advertising.

Their most bizarre to date features a visual of Jesus Christ on a cross with the line, “If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you."
In an E-update, they’re quoted as saying: “The British National Party is the only political party which genuinely supports Britain's Christian heritage. It is the only party which will defend our ancient faith and nation from the threat of Islamification.”
Ironically the poster headline comes from John’s Gospel (John 15:20) and Jesus’ teachings about love.
http://www.bnp-chronicle.com/2009/03/bnps-jesus-billboard.html

The lobbying party “Making Poverty History,” a group which consists of some 530 different charities, succeeded where the BNP couldn’t and got itself banned from advertising on TV and Radio on the grounds that it was political.
This was even though the British Prime Minister praised the campaign, saying it was successful in convincing the G8 to write off more than $40 billion in debt.
Advertising watchdog Ofcom, however, said the goals of the campaign were political and therefore outlawed it. In case you were living in a Bono-free area, (and if so, please forward your address to me and expect lots of visitors), you can catch the ever appealing rock God at:
www.makepovertyhistory.org/video or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eih_ybKdVXU

Back in 1979, when baby-kissing was still all the rage, Messer’s Saatchi & Saatchi produced a poster for the Conservative Party proclaiming “Labour isn’t working.” The poster was so effective for Margaret Thatcher that Lord Thorneycroft, Conservative party treasurer at the time, claimed that the poster had ‘won the election for the Conservatives’.
It’s certainly haunted political advertising briefings since then, nearly as much as the tiresome little git that wrote it.
Thirty years on, and with unemployment teetering over the psychologically important two million mark again, the Conservatives have released an updated version, this time attacking Gordon Brown instead of Jim Callaghan. See if it still ticks the right boxes at:
http://whippedsenseless.co.uk/2009/03/30-year-old-poster-attacks-brown/

Politics is all about who shouts loudest and as bellowing goes it would be hard to shout down my art director as she gets into full swing about all things political.
“Would it not be simpler,
If the Government
Dissolved the people
And elected another?”
Tightly wrapped, and more than a little tight, in her Woolies Melton coat, she expounds from her soap-box, well, beer covered table-top in the corner of The Brazen Head. Carelessly quoting Bertold Brecht and proving once again that advertising and politics do indeed make strange bed-fellows.

art for heart's sake

2009-04-01T02:31:00.000-07:00

“A belief in creativity for the sake of creativity is a necessary condition for the success of creative companies,” says Gordon Torr in his excellent “Managing Creative People.” (Wiley Press),

Diesel, the purveyor of all things cool, trendy and grungy, have long believed this. You can see it in the post-eighties, industrial broken-downess of every store, it positively drips from every edgy company press release and, of course, runs riot across their advertising.
The latest offering Farfar, their Stockholm agency, is rather bluntly called “Hairbath,” it comes in three episodes and involves, well, a bath full of hair and a voluptuous young thing writhing in the huirsuit clippings sent to her by admirers. It’s very creative. You can tell because it’s shot black and white by someone called “Legs” of production company “Legs” of New York. I have no idea what to make of it all. It is as beautiful as the model is. However, by donning the hair-shirt of “creative for creative’s sake” it rather confuses the any advertising message, unless it’s saying, “our clothes feel hairy.” Slip into at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqflNCQmHi4 episode 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1VBsbHMxhg&feature=related
episode 2
and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipD0iUqDrgM&feature=related
episode 3.

Some time in the 60’s the Kinsey report declared that we think of sex 40 times a minute or some such nonsense. The latest two commercials from Durex, the creators of rubber barriers, certainlty show that when given the chance adland’s creative forces can certainly bend their talents in that direction.
From McCann Madrid we get a film where our horny Spanish cousins can’t seem to stop themselves thinking of a bit of afternoon rumpy pumpy. They see jack hammers pounding and think, “time for a shag,” or cups vibrating on tables and go, “well, time for a shag,” and….
It’s all rather amusing but a tad old-fashioned looking. Get a look at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXIZUUKFXZk
In Altanta they have squeaky clean sex.
Two balloon rabbits made from different coloured condoms approach each other cautiously, sniff each others behinds, as you do, and then, erm, get it on. In a frenzy of rubberised squeaks they shag in various positions until a third bunny joins in. It’s very funny and nicely produced and might even sell a few life-saving contraceptives. Have a laugh at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4cgqiolkkE

Creativity for its own sake is in show in Brazil, where Almap BBDO have decided that what every VW drive needs is a pet, in this case one that’s half dog, half fish. It frolics in the waves, gets chased by cats and caught by fishermen in nets. Actually it seems that owning one would generally be a pain in the arse, maybe that’s the subliminal message, the new VW ……. Is going to give you sleepless nights. Anyway, the ad is funny and nicely achieved and was probably a good laugh to put together. What else can you ask from your job? Reel it in at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9g2Fex04Ic

Animation has come a long way since Donald quacked his first spluttering hello. In the hands of talented creatives it can make a whole world of Pixar driven wonder and create more magical dreamscapes than otherwise possible with real life filming. In the hands of JWT Paris it can create pointless drivel. Their “Fight for Kisses” spot for Wilkinson Sword uses that annoying type of 3-D imaging that is neither reality nor fictional, the smooth skinned androids with too big eyes, too smooth movements and a decidedly spooky demeanour. It’s long and dull and it’s a technique disguised once again as an idea. Bore yourself stupid at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kOJ6d4LdXM

The Guggenheim in Bilbao is crammed with proper Art of the modern variety. The agency realised that many people are dubious about the integrity of anything that isn’t a lovely bowl of fruit or a half-naked woman lounging around a picnic area. The commercial opens on a security guard making his way through the collection to his allotted space. As he walks he mutters to himself.
“259,200 minutes guarding this…”
He reaches his exhibit and we see Dali’s “Lobster telephone.”
“…a telephone with a giant prawn on top… who would ever steal something like that? Sure I could make that!... or a gas bottle with a bra…or an anchovy wearing a tux at a computer… that’s it, I’m a genius, it’s no joke. But how would I face my workmates?”
He bends to look closely at the Lobster telephone and muses, “Does this thing ring, or clack, clack?”
Super up line “Guggenheim Surrealist stuff. Dreamers welcome.”
It’s a nice piece with just enough irreverence to highlight the genius of the artists rather than pour scorn on the exhibit.
The thing about giving creatives their head, as it were, is that while most of us are calm, grown up types who dream of Volvos and weekends with family, some of us are altogether different animals.
The guys from McCann Singapore are obviously not to be messed with, their ad for X-Box entitled “Hunting Season” is an odd number. Two red necks go hunting in the woods for deer, they chase droppings and finally track down… a sheep. They build a fire and toast marshmallows on twigs, then, fool about using twigs as antlers to act as deer, until one of them is shot in the backside. It’s ok. Not great, and definitely not as ground-breaking as other X-box work. Actually to be brutally truthful, it’s a waste of a decent brief and a client who loves challenging work. Track it down at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StOJr2k5Y-U

In the Brazen Head the other night things were a tad hectic, the air heavy with sarcasm, stern words were exchanged over a pint of Pilsner or three. The Heineken promotion is in full swing, showcasing the German grasp of creativity fully there are lanyards, and bottle openers and bags and dog tags and rather oddly, flip flops.
My art director is flopping around in them, flips flops the size of the Bismarck with the Brand name imprinted on the soles, it’s funny what a few bottles of bubbly will bring out in a girl, but that’s what happens when you release the creative spirit.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out...

2009-03-24T00:33:00.000-07:00

This is the End...

2009-03-18T02:36:00.000-07:00

We’re sipping our way through our third, or fourth, jug of margaritas at Tequila Cantina, someone has turned up the sound system and incongruously Led Zepplin are pouring out Stairway to Heaven, the mood is restful. As Mr Plant reaches the final line, after 10 sublime minutes, someone starts to sing along, off-key and grating, taking the line apart one syllable at a time, to the obvious disgust of all present.
It’s me, of course, under the baleful eye of my art director who lashes out in a flurry of Tank Girl boots and Issey Miyake, severely curtailing my karaoke and any chance of fatherhood in the near future. Catch the real unhampered power of a perfect end line from the maestro himself at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81eSIwsLcWg

An end line is like a final retort in a conversation, something that should underpin everything and leave you feeling complete and satisfied. Like a satisfactory argument with your bank manager, or telling your boss to sod off.
Having a superb product can definitely help when you’re writing a line to sum up the whole of your offering. The BBC iplayer lets you view all your favourite BBC TV and radio programmes in one place, it also remembers the last seven shows you watched and picks up from where you stopped watching last time. Pretty nifty stuff, and, of course, it helps to have a quality back catalogue of the depth of the BBC’s to choose from. Even the ads for it are of the highest standard, the spoof penguin wildlife one for instance is a perfect representation of the end line: “Making the unmissable, unmissable.” It’s beautifully understated, just what you’d expect from the BBC. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l0GUTCNn4g

Back in 1966 Y&R took the humble baked bean into the public lexicon with the immortal “Beanz meanz Heinz,” from the creepy “Village of the Damned” casting of the 70’s: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fct-TeisMM&feature=related
To the seemingly impossible realm of a Heinz Beans sex change commercial today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THYDLwR9sEE&feature=related
the end line has survived endless ill conceived to kill it off by over zealous admen to finally achieve its final resting place amongst the icons of adland.

A line that created a million unfunny spin-off t-shirts and schoolyard jokes, the Pepsi end-line was so convoluted you had to practically start it half way through your ad to make sure you got it all in. “Lipsmackin' thirstquenchin' acetastin' motivatin' goodbuzzin' cooltalkin' highwalkin' fastlivin' evergivin' coolfizzin' Pepsi.” was the brainchild of BMP and a direct descendant of “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” as written by the Sherman Brothers and warbled by Dame Julie Andrews. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b-Z0SSyUcw
The Pepsi version was sugarcoated enough to lay a diabetic out at 40 paces. Get your fix at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01SeIRtB4hM

End lines, like all advertising, are an art, not a science, but that doesn’t stop number crunching semiotic searchers from trying to dissect them looking for some golden egg of generality. The most popular words used have always seemed a good place to start such a journey.
Omitting words such as "the" and "and," these are the 20 most frequently used words in end lines, (percentages represent the number of lines using that word out of the total number of ad lines):

1. you - 11.15% 2. your - 7.94% 3. we - 6.03% 4. world - 4.18%
5. best - 2.67% 6. more - 2.54% 7. good - 2.43% 8. better - 2.12%
9. new - 1.90% 10. taste - 1.85% 11. people - 1.54% 12. our - 1.49%
13. first - 1.42% 14. like - 1.41% 15. don't - 1.36% 16. most - 1.19%
17. only -1.16% 18. quality - 1.15% 19. great -1.13% 20. choice - 1.08%

Using the logic that the most used must have some correlation to the most popular, and therefore most successful, I proffer up my own end line based on these results.
“We offer you and your good people only the best quality and more choice with our great, better taste, the first of our new range like you don’t find anywhere else In the world.”
Catchy it isn’t. I believe, as someone famous once said, “there’s less to this than meets the eye.”

Some end lines have moved with the times, using popular catch phrase and vernacular to fire the imagination. In the early 80’s Gold Greenless Trott employed what could be called an East end swagger to their lines with classics like: “You can break a brolly but you can't k-nacker a Knirps.” A technique which spread to other agencies leading to the much vaunted “Milk's gotta lotta bottle” the Milk Marketing Board’s appeal to get the great unwashed to drink more of their cow extraction.
Then onto HHCL in 1994 for the hugely successful, “You know when you've been Tango'd.” And even today it continues, with the rather enigmatic, “More gobble, less wobble” for the stomach churning Matteson’s Turkey Rashers and "You'll never want to l'eggo,” for Kellogg's Eggos Waffles.

For the more esoteric amongst us Muller have produced a commercial starring both a 100 year old geezer, a one year old nipper, and a selection of in-betweenies, all cavorting under the line’ Lick the lid of life,” have a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fykEdIt0zvk but beware, like the line it’s not for the squeamish.

Then there’s the curious use of a single word to convey a company’s ethos, examples are far ranging from “Driven," as used by Nissan in the USA, to IBM’s "Think," and United Airlines rather hopeful "Rising”. It is difficult to convey much with a single word, unless that word is the “F” word and the man explaining it happens to be Billy Connolly:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q41eoZXDb64
This minimalist approach reached its zenith with Nike, of course, who get a big tick for dropping their end line all together.

My own favourite line comes from back when The Flintstones were the raciest thing on TV. To trade on this popularity Brylcreem produced a shining example of the end line that stood head and shoulders above their competition, “A little dab'll do ya!” was a cry that filled the nation’s bars, and you can say it perfectly no matter how many Mexican cocktails you’ve waved goodbye to.

Putting It Out There...

2009-03-10T23:24:00.000-07:00

“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” mutters young Bill into the depths of his Jurgemeister bomb as the S.A. Irish Pipes & Drums band blast past the bar window.
“Dinkum.” agrees my art director, smiling approvingly at him as she slams her fifth tequila down and looks decidedly unfocused in her Ladytron
t-shirt.

There’s no point in putting yourself centre-stage if no one’s going to notice you. Back in the dim and distant, London ad agency FCO created what was widely regarded as the first, or at least the first great, 3D outdoor poster campaign for Araldite glue. The series began with a real Ford Cortina (shows its age) stuck to poster sites around Britain with the understated headline: “Also sticks handles to tea-pots.” The second had two cars with the line “The suspense continues.” And the third had gaping holes in the posters where the cars had been and the line “How did we pull it off?”
Through the mists of time it all sounds a bit parochial but it was the first inventive use of outdoor posters and creamed the awards worldwide, -check out old D&AD annuals to see them, - and was the first advertising ever referred to in a positive light in Pravda. (Well, except for a few million Stalinist posters maybe).

Back in the here and now, adland still tries continually to find that single cut-through idea that will hold the public’s attention long enough to flog them a perfume, a loaf of bread or a dead horse. Or a Chevrolet Aveo.
In London a poster went up made entirely of pennies to launch this value for money car. Purposely located at street height the pennies, nearly 20 000 in all, were fairly quickly removed by passing pedestrians of all shapes and ages, revealing the little getabout. It was good gimmick and was rewarded with hundreds of column inches in the press and news stories across the electronic media. Worth its weight in copper you might say.
This being the 21st century you can watch the ad be picked to pieces at;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juIpvn9nuuM

An even more rewarding poster was unveiled in Sydney where 10 000
$1 scratch cards, (scratchies to our wallaby worrying cousins), were fixed to a specially built 12m by 3m billboard. In a winner takes all competition to find the Best Outdoor Ad in Australia someone could walk away with significantly more than $10 000 with each card being a potential $20 000 winner. Some sad bugger has worked out that it will take 20 days to scratch them all at one a minute for 8 hours a day, that’s a bit of Repetitive Strain Injury that might be worth risking.

In adland, a world where gorillas play drums for chocolate and millions of coloured balls bounce merrily untethered through city streets, it’s hard to stand out from the madding crowd.
Sometimes you even have to create your own stage to get your message out there. In 2006 for Folgers Coffee Saatchi & Saatchi turned the manhole covers on New York streets Into steaming coffee cups with stunning street drawings. Drink them in at:
http://www.therawfeed.com/2006/04/nyc-manholes-turned-into-coffee-for.html

Taking the painting theme a tad further, for the World Cup in the same year, as part of their worldwide “Impossible is nothing” campaign, Adidas created a huge fresco in Cologne’s train station.
Commissioned by TBWA Germany, the 40 meters long and 20 meters wide piece shows 10 football icons exactly how millions of enthusiastic football fans around the world see them. As Gods.
Created by Hamburg-based illustrator Felix Reidenbach, (who in a creepy nod to its biblical origin took 40 days to finish), it contains a veritable pantheon of players including Michael Ballack, David Beckham, Zinadine Zidane, Kaka, Nakamura, Lukas Podolski, Lionel Messi, Juan Roman Riquelme and Djibril Cisse. Cross over to:
http://www.frederiksamuel.com/blog/2006/06/adidas-fresco.html
to see it in all its glory.

The same agency, the same client and the same campaign.
A billboard placed over a bridge construction site on the way to the Munich airport, featured a magnificent, stretching dive by the German goalkeeper, Oliver Kahn. As powerful as it was dramatic it branded the whole city as the centre of world football and made the creative team of
Stefan Schmidt, Kurt Georg Dieckert and Boris Schwiedrzik the toast of the town. Catch it at: http://advertisingforpeanuts.blogspot.com/2006/05/adidas-bridge.html

It used to be that only irritating fiancés wrote stuff in the sky where, luckily for all concerned, they soon dissipated back into the ether. Nowadays, however, even the skies aren’t safe from adland adages.
Honda’s Skydiver commercial takes place, well, in the sky. A sky near you perhaps. Anyway a bunch of people throw themselves rather recklessly out of a couple of large airplanes. The pilot informs them, and us, “Remember gentlemen, difficult is worth doing.” Then, in that rather self-conscious manner of all skydivers, they all join hands in little groups. (Is it only me that thinks jumping out of planes is supposed to be a way to get away from throngs of people?). They form into something that might or might not be a recognisable shape; more people leap out of other aircraft and make more indecipherable symbols.
Eventually they line up in a sort of pyramid shape and we can read the name Accord floating rather pointlessly across the sky and the endline says “The Power of Dreams. “ I can’t help thinking that this is a pretty crap dream, to say nothing of a dull ad, judge for yourself at:
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1503371/honda_accord_skydiver_commercial/

I mention this to the guys around the bar as the S.A, Irish Pipe Band swirl and squirl around us, one of the lead pipers has collapsed in a drunken blur his pipes quietly deflating with him. “We have a piper down…” shouts the lead pipe bloke echoing perfectly Mike Myers in the wedding scene from “So I married an axe murderer,” a classic pre-Austin Powers moment. See what I mean at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7564788953512686636

As Mr Shakespeare might have put it, “That ends this strange eventful history,”
Exit stage left, pursued by bear.

2009-03-09T00:58:00.000-07:00

"Can You hear me...Mother?"

2009-03-05T03:51:00.000-08:00

Looking out of the plastic curtain that surrounds the Brazen Head’s drinking arena a guy catches my eye and smiles uncertainly. He’s neither old nor young, just beaten up by life. He ambles over holding up a paint roller and a sign that says, “SID THE PAYNTER, ALL TIPES OF WORK.” It’s bright yellow on cardboard, with lots of drips and splodges. Even though you know it’s probably not representative of his window-frame and corner work, nor his Dado-rail filigree finesse, it does rather give one pause for thought.
So often, it seems, we undersell ourselves. The career changing interview where we forget our most famous triumphs, the babbled list of achievements to the prospective father-in-law, or the poorly remembered raison d’etre behind a wild, but possibly highly successful, campaign.
Let’s face it, most of us are crap at selling ourselves.

When broadcasting companies chose to advertise themselves they often start with the misguided idea that they know the medium because they are intrinsically involved in it. Luckily there are a few enlightened guys out there, like Shizuoka Broadcasting who turned to Dentsu Advertising for their self-promotional commercials the best of which is situated in a Sumo locker room.
Two body builders are talking after a competition, one is looking very dejected, the other is trying to talk him around. As they talk they start to flex their torsos.
1st guy: “Don’t be disappointed,
…you’ll win next time.
Well, I saw on TV…
Capybara also goes to Spa…”
(Here we cut to a shot of said super-rodent climbing into a pool of water)
2nd Guy: “I saw it too…”
1st Guy: “Isn’t he cute?”
2nd Guy: “I love him.”
1st Guy: “Very cute.”
Super up endline: “Very helpful programmes. Shizuoka Broadcasting”
Catch this inscrutable offering at: http://www.theinspirationroom.com/categories.html#category=latest&keywords=&id=2682
A nice cheap ad with a bit of a laugh in it, it’s one of a series of excellent little ideas that sell the whole that is Shizuoka Broadcasting.

It’s also about as far away as you can get from something that stars; Lou Reed, Bono, Skye Edwards (from Morcheeba), David Bowie, Suzanne Vega, Elton John, Sir Andrew Davis, Boyzone, Lesley Garrett, Lou Reed, Burning Spear, Bono, Sir Thomas Allen, Brodsky Quartet, Heather Small (from M People), Emmylou Harris, Tammy Wynette, Shane McGowan, Sheona White (tenor horn player), Dr. John, Robert Cray, Huey (from Fun Lovin' Criminals), Ian Broudie (from The Lightning Seeds), Gabrielle, Evan Dando (from The Lemonheads), Emmylou Harris, Courtney Pine (soprano saxophone player), BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sir Andrew Davis, Brett Anderson from Suede), Visual Ministry Choir, Joan Armatrading, Laurie Anderson, and even that Welsh warbler, Tom Jones.

The BBC accosted this rather curious cross section of performers to appear in their commercial punting their music programmes and reminding the great British public that their licence fee is being well spent.
Between them they sing, play and talk their way through what is certainly the best rendition of Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” since his original on the perilously old “Transformer” album. It’s all rather magical and makes me fancy a nice cup of tea and a digestive biscuit or two. Be charmed at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXgRepmpmYI&feature=PlayList&p=07D36B8F5657A196&playnext=1&index=1

Closer to home the DStv Fire station Pole dancing Commercial, part of the
“Guess who’s been watching DSTV?” campaign is a rare delight. If you haven’t seen it, a fireman sweeping floor, checks he’s alone then performs his own private pole dance show before getting a deserving kick in the bollocks from his mates sliding down the pole.
It’s as good as the History channel ad where the little girl builds the sphinx in the sand-pit and far better than the irksome girl-child receiving the award with a predictably long thank you speech. Slide over and catch the show at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UGpMNqHXvI

It’s not only the mighty TV companies that need a little awareness raising.
The memorable campaign for Radio Scotland, created by Scottish agency Mightysmall, (nee 1576), is a dazzling display of what can be done with a small budget and a willing client.

To quote their own website, from I suspect the ever erudite pen of Adrian Jeffery, “When you watch TV, 70% of what you remember is visual and 30% audio. So how do you create a TV campaign for a radio station and make the viewer remember what they hear? What we did was to source real, emotive audio from the Radio Scotland archives. Then commission the world's best typographers to use that audio as their brief for the visuals, so, the words became the pictures.”

If it sounds ambitious check out the final ads, I think they’re excellent and deliver brilliantly on the promise, as did every awards jury in the world making them the most awarded ads in Scotland’s flamboyant history, (including 2 D&AD Silvers and 8 nominations). Tune into them at:
http://www.mightysmall.co.uk/work
Flirting with the concept of self-publicity, of late, I’ve come to realise it isn’t only a tough game for corporations.
Have you ever sat in a bar and looked up to find yourself making eye contact with a total stranger? And enjoyed it?
Wandering through the ultimate in putting yourself out there horrors, the colourful world of on-line dating, I dropped in on my current favourite http://www.eyegazingparties.com/ created by a spooky if oddly engaging guy called Michael Ellsberg.

Eye-gazing, which has taken off like snogging at a teenage party, has become New York’s hottest dating trend. Similar to speed dating but different in one fundamental respect, there’s no speaking permitted.
As Ellsberg himself puts it, “After a fun mini-lesson in the art of eye contact, the group splits into pairs, and each pair spends two minutes looking into each other's eyes, silently, just soaking in each other's essence through the windows to their soul.” Interesting, if a tad 60’s San Francisco.

These sessions are perfect for the easily tongue-tied, be warned though, most people are very uncomfortable holding eye contact for any length of time. I tried it on young Emily in the office only to be greeted by the cry of “Freak,” the flash of a dodgy tattoo and a certain stony silence around the percolator.
Next time I’ll just try it in the mirror, at least I know what reaction I’ll get.

"It takes two, baby."

2009-02-25T00:50:00.001-08:00

Since Adam and Eve played snakes and apples the urge to pair off has been a powerful driver. Antony and Cleo, Romeo and Juliet, Abbott and Costello, two have always made a better story than one.
Even in the back-biting arena of adland it’s been that way from the late 40’s when Bill Bernbach opened the doors of DDB bringing with him his idea that writers and art directors should pair up in teams to combine their mighty talents in one office.
And it works. Sometimes you get a stupid partner, which allows you trample their ideas under the force of your intellect and ego, or you get a bright one whose coat tails you can grab at as they speed towards fame and fortune. More often though, especially when the teams have some say in the matter, you get a more equal meeting of minds, if not always personalities.

“Trust me”, the latest sitcom/dram to deal with all that is adland comes ambling out off the US of A. Centering on the relationship between Mason, the art director and Conner, the writer, played by Eric McCormick and Tom Cavanagh, it’s well enough observed to cause more than a few uncomfortable squirms of recognition. Particularly the tension between the pair as they try to come to terms with Mason being promoted to Conner’s boss will bring many a nod of recognition across adland.
Catch a trailer at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JolkpxOR2E

People are always making the analogy between a creative team’s relationship and a marriage. This is of course rubbish. It’s much, much harder to maintain a decent working relationship than a marriage. For a start, you’re stuck mostly in the same room for longer than 9 hours a day, you hear the same stuff, music, client service babble, arguments, and you deal with it as a team, ie: tantrums, sulking, and jubilation. It’s not healthy.
For one thing there really is no place to hide, so you either rant your way through your differences or you crash and burn. And it only takes a few failed partnerships before you get labelled a problem partner. The divorces can be equally as messy however, skeletons tend to come crashing out of cupboards as both sides seek to blame and claim the upper hand, as well as the credit for any decent work that might have been created.
But, surprisingly, some of these teams do stick together, changing agencies, jobs and even countries to add new spice to their lives.

No one gets between a great team, bad blood is leaked behind closed doors and a united front beats back the most ardent of attacks. And great teams create great work. They scoop the fame we all crave and the rewards we all feel we deserve. They also get their names on the doors of agencies.

Duos have always haunted advertising. From Mac man vs PC man with their cutesy little jibes. (all very PC, as it were), and sterile environment.
Boot up a couple of examples at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgzbhEc6VVo

To the sheer brilliance of the Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins in the classic Cinzano ads (which include the rather fabulous line: “The Aroma wasn’t built in a day.”) LOL at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PirMZGL-0mQ&NR=1

One of the worst things that a creative team can find on their desk is a brief that comes complete with its own built in salesman, or worse, men. You have to spend half your day trying to shoe-horn some new, pithy and supposedly humorous responses into the mouths of these guys with one eye over your shoulder at the “character intrinsics” which have been built up over years of crushingly bad scripts and careless thinking.
Believe me there is nothing worse than having some humourless planning guy hanging around your office door extolling the benefits of the Brand equity he has built up over the years through a couple of two-dimensional drivel spouting prats which he insists are central to every commercial.

Take the blight of CTM’s now dead and unlamented Bob and Nige with their puerile sexist humour and pathetic asides. I bless the day they were finally laid to rest and hopefully cast into a pit of grout. (I would give you a link to some examples of their sub-human chit chat, but that would just be nasty).

Naturally there are exceptions. If you’re dynamic duo happened to be the couple of actors attached to an old Carling Black Label brief then your luck was definitely in. You could pack your bag and buy that ticket to Cannes to roil in the delights of being up to your derriere in awards when these two guys put your script to the test. Have a look at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVSBtivbUs4 to see how an ad can be well written and crafted but still hold the basic daft humour. (Even the pack shot is a laugh).

Of course for a team to be really effective they need to work seamlessly, to read each other’s minds and even anticipate each other’s actions and reactions. This takes a bit of time to get right but can pay great dividends if achieved properly. Take those old gag men The Two Ronnies, in their most famous sketch, “Fork Handles,” they balance each others frustration perfectly as the tension between them builds. It may be old but it’s gold:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saP127nVfSk

To prove that teamwork is alive and kicking I’d like to thank my own art director for suggesting the topic for this week’s column.
But then she’s full of good ideas.

please join in, mr client

2009-02-18T00:00:00.000-08:00

Do It Yourself. Just the initials make me shiver. D.I.Y. Tank-tops, sore thumbs and self-collapsing shelves, it’s no place for a grown man. Invariably you’re going to get a half-arsed job covered by that worst of phrases “cheap n cheerful.” Why is it so hard to understand? The reason we have experts is because we need them, desperately.

When you need something building, get a builder, when you need something fixing, get a fixer and when you need something advertising, get an adman, or woman, better still, an agency.

Bad advertising. It fills our lives like corrupt politicians permeating every part of our daily lives, from our breakfast paper to our night time TV it gets everywhere, leaving a bad smell and an evil taste in the mouth.

When I see bad ads I feel cheated. And not just of the wasted revenue. Of the opportunity, “who did this shit?” I shout from behind clenched fists. Who thought it up? Who sold it? And most of all which damned, irresponsible client bought it?
There’s a much trampled cliché that says clients get the advertising they deserve, a phrase which causes rabid scorn amongst clients world over
who believe it’s nothing more than another excuse from adland’s self-justification machine. And they may be right. But it doesn’t negate the truth underlying the cliché, clients get the ads they deserve because they expect too much of advertising.

All too often it’s expected to be some kind of all-soothing panacea, something to cure a company’s ailing balance sheets overnight or somehow fix a tired and lame business plan. If it was that easy our budgets would be soaring through recessions not being sliced as the first sacrifice.

A great failing on the client side is to take the proposed campaign around the office to garner reactions, “The Chairman’s Wife” theory as it’s known is based in the belief that anyone involved in the client company (and their spouses), could and indeed should have a say in the advertising. It’s a crap idea at best, would you let your plumber fix your lights? Or a painter fiddle with your pipes? Why then does the finance director get to comment on the advertising?
Advertising is a critical business tool, one that should only be undertaken by skilled and well-practiced professionals.

How about a bit of respect out there? As a client you hire adland talent because it can offer you expertise that you don’t possess yourself. So please, when your agency has a strong point of view they’re always being protectionist, sometime they’re being right, as you’ll discover if you listen. You hired them to make great ads, they want to make great ads and many of the great campaigns came from the agency “winning the argument.” By all means argue, and don’t for God’s sake always give in, but if you listen to their point of view and consider that they may be right occasionally too you may just form a working relationship that is productive rather than starting a war of attrition.

Take the creative approval process; if as a client you have been involved from the beginning and actively engaged in the creation of the ad then you’ll hopefully be familiar with the intricacies of the brief. This will obviously give you a big vote in the approval or otherwise of the campaign, you also have a responsibility to work with the agency to produce the best work possible. As one of the decision makers you need to make your opinion heard while sitting together with your team; it’s no good nipping off for a third or fourth arse-covering opinion round the water cooler and presenting it as a fait accompli.

There was a time, not in the dim and distant, when a marketing director sat on the main board of most companies, a seasoned professional trusted by the company to call the shots when creating and managing their public image. They had the ear of their fellow board members, so marketing/advertising were on the table as part of the central budget, not some grudge add-on as so often happens now.

On that note, if you happen to be sitting at the big table without a marketing director of your very own you might want to try a radical approach, like trusting your marketing team. More importantly, be willing to approve ads you don’t personally like. This is a real toughie. After all you’re probably a bright senior executive person surrounded by MBA’s and B.Comms and the like, you’re a strong business leader and your opinion is oft sought on matters of import. Which is great, but it doesn’t make you a great judge of ads or of which ads are going to work best for your company’s needs.
To trust the team who work on your image and respect the collective creative judgement of them and the agency requires both humility and self-confidence. Some would say the perfect mix in a far-sighted boss.

Let’s face it, it's hard to approve advertising you don't love.
But if you must say no at least give more of a reason than "I don't like it." That is unactionable feedback, please think through your responses with the care you expect your agency to have lavished on your Brand, and give logical reasons for hating the work.
(I’ve sat in meetings where the client has been adamant he hated pink and wouldn’t have it in his layouts, only to be gently reminded it was his key corporate colour.)

While you’re at it you might want to stop importing films made in Hispanic or Far Eastern countries where they talk ten to the dozen and expect us to lip-synch a nice South African voice onto it, se..am..les…ly.
Bad synch and hairy Latino blokes flogging fizzy drinks and sundry dairy products just make clients look cheap, like they care so little about local markets they don’t think it’s worth investing in an ad of their own.
Overall the rule is simple, “Don’t buy a dog and try to bark yourself…”
Got to go, there’s a self-build wall unit in the garage with my name on it.

so long, and thanks for all the badgers

2009-02-10T23:48:00.000-08:00

It’s the beginning of the month, again. A time when events tend to come to a head in adland. True to form the door to my office bursts open and in strolls one of my young protégées swaggering like John Wayne heading for his horse. (Actually more like Nathan Lane doing his John Wayne in Birdcage; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfrhCvDLlCg&feature=related). With an air of defiance that can only mean one thing he tosses a letter on my desk and declares, “I’m outta here…”
Well, I don’t mind telling you I was shocked, not by his resignation, but by the letter itself. It was concise, made cogent arguments about why I was morally and intellectually dysfunctional, lightly touched on the legality of my parents’ marriage and was peppered with humorous and often poignant references to the agency’s management style.
All in all it was the finest piece of writing I’d read in a long time and by far the best thing the lad had ever pushed across my desk.

It was full of passion you see. Something it appears that young Bob had trouble translating into babies, beans and batteries ads. Passion, of course, has become one of those doomed buzz words so often beloved by the RaRa squads with their “quotes of the day” and inspirational bloody emails. Usually propagated by HR, PR or some evangelist you’ve never met from accounts, they pack the recycle bins of every computer in adland and beyond.
It’s all very well these desktop deliverers of drivel rambling on about pulling together, win, win situations and talking the talk but what of the guys and gals staring at the blank piece of paper confronted by a brief to sell over-priced cars to underpaid workers? It’s not just the passion that can go, it’s the will to live. Luckily the modern world has a response forr virtually everything, even crap jobs.
Artists Anne Elizabeth Moore and Steve Lambert, at Rogers Park cultural centre in Chicago, have founded the Anti-Advertising Agency Foundation for Freedom to counsel disgruntled ad people

Lambert says they want to help people find work that won’t compromise their ethics. “Most people in advertising have a line that they won’t cross or don’t like to cross and the agencies themselves don’t have that. They are there to sell whatever the companies want. And so there is always some sort of conflict and we want to give those people opportunities to work where they won’t have to make those kind of compromises to there values or be put in those positions.”

To do this they’ve created a competition to help push people who’ve been thinking about quitting to cut the cord. To win the award, which is currently about $700, you must provide proof you’ve quit, describe your sleaziest ad campaign, and write about the hopes and dreams you had for the world when you were five.

It may sound like a joke and they admit that they probably won’t see a mass exodus from adland. But Moore says they are reaching people. ”We started this crazy idea and we immediately got these sort of adoring letters from advertisers who are like “I’m so glad you guys are doing this. Oh my god, I’ve wanted to quit my job for so long.” And they are not necessarily committed to quit but that the emotional impetus is there for them to even write to us to me is just so telling.”
http://antiadvertisingagency.com/category/projects/foundation-for-freedom

Of course disillusionment with the daily bread earning is hardly the sole property of whinging creatives, but few would be resignation wavers have quite so much encouragement.
If you’re going to quit, do it well. With style, panache and single-minded bloodiness. Better still do it for a reward. The International YoungGuns Award’s call-for-entries “Quit in Style” campaign – a collaboration between Droga5 and a group of filmmakers and graphic artists from around the world, features its own site, www.quitinstyle.com.

It’s a chance to become instantly infamous in adland. Think up the perfect resignation scenario, film it and post it. The category requires creatives to submit work they’ve created specifically around the ‘Quit in Style’ theme, and is open to anyone with an axe to grind against their employers.

The project was overseen and directed by Droga5 Sydney’s Creative Heads, Matty Burton and Cameron Blackley, as a launch-pad for young creatives and directors to host their own content. This will ultimately be judged within the newly created “Craft in Quitting" category and will go on to win a specially made Matt Black Bullet at this year’s YGAward.
It’s the first advertising award dedicated solely to rewarding the colourful world of User Generated Content, an area that many assume sits at the forefront of the industry’s future, yet has been largely ignored on the global awards circuit. So far creatives have been posting a wide range of ideas from taking the boss out drinking and photographing him naked and drunk, to decorating his lunchtime sandwich with pubic hair.

As Matty Burton explains, although the tone of the campaign is outrageous, the idea behind it is firmly based in reality: “Some of us are still young enough to remember the lashing we got as juniors coming up through the business. It’s a bit of a rites of passage thing, like army boot camp, but with less sleep and more beatings! Quit in Style is designed to become a sort of secret 'Fight Club' for junior creatives, where they can meet to compare war stories and more importantly ideas of getting one over on their slave master CDs before they move on to the next challenge. It’s basically a tool-box for the underdogs."

It’s all rather entertaining, unless you’re a boss of course, in which case watch your back out there, I’m off to write a letter.

bowled over, or not

2009-02-02T03:08:00.001-08:00

“Whatisit?” hisses the girl behind the bar as all heads are swivelled towards the large flat screen TV glued to the wall. “Superbowl 2009,” someone whispers back.
Indeed, it’s that time again, a time to gather our friends and colleagues together to pay homage to that most Yankee of affairs the Superbowl. There was a time, when the invasion of burgers and fries were new to the world at large, that we would sit up all night to catch every throw and dive of never-ending rows of guys dressed in what looked like Sumo suits.
Now, of course we just record the action and watch it the next night down the Keg & Minstrel.
Not the actual game you understand, in what may be seen by civilians as a perverse reversal of the use of PVR recorders we have all the commercials spliced together and dump the game, revealing a glorious celebration of American life.
At an average of $3 million just for a 30 second media slot at Super Bowl XLIII it was interesting to see how the economic downturn had affected this advertisers’ haven.

Kicking off with an ad nodding to the worries besetting workers across the world, the Wieden & Kennedy CareerBuilder.com commercial begins with the statement;

“It can be hard to know when you need a new job…

as a rule if you hate going to work every day…”
[woman in car screaming and banging head against steering wheel]

“and your co-workers don’t respect you…”
{Guy walks past and says “Hey dummy]

“and you always wish you were somewhere else…”
[guy sitting on back of a leaping dolphin]

“and you cry constantly…”
[large bloke at bus stop crying inconsolably]

“and you daydream of punching small animals…”
[stuffed koala has it’s glasses knocked off]

“and you sit next to this guy…”
[half-naked geek picking his toe-nails]

“if you make loads of money it may not be time.”
[ guy in smoking jacket is handed a large glass of gold liquid as his man servant feeds gold bars into a blender]

But if you make loads of money…It can be hard to know when you need a new job as a rule if you hate going to work every day, and your co-workers don’t respect you, and you always wish you were somewhere else, and you cry constantly, and you daydream of punching small animals, and you sit next to this guy…it’s probably time…as a rule.”

Get a look at it at:
http://commercial-archive.com/commercials/careerbuildercom-it-may-be-time-2009-60-usa

Better still go to; http://www.anonymoustipgiver.com/ where CareerBuilder.com allows you to send useful tips to your co-workers regarding such delights as personal hygiene, work ethics and toupee wearing.

As usual the Superbowl ads attracted more than a fair smattering of famous faces, this year we were treated to the versatile visages of Tiger Woods, Ray Lewis, Muhammad Ali, Alec Baldwin, Bob Dylan, MC Hammer, Derek Jeter, Michael Jordan, Ed McMahon, Danica Patrick,Troy Polamalu, Will.i.am, Serena Williams and Conan O’Brien.

Mr O’Brien’s spot for Bud Light was as good a use of celebrity as you’ll see. It’s a commercial playing upon the habits of famous people to star in commercials in foreign countries to protect their image at home while quietly raking in the cash. Created by DDB it contains the spoof pay-off line “Vroom, vroom, part starter,” something that may well come back to haunt the star for quite a while.
Watch it sail into the end zone at:
http://video.yahoo.com/watch/4408533/11822557

Celebs also pop up throughout TBWA/Chiat Day’s Pepsi-Cola commercial. In “Refresh” we are treated to an onslaught of split screen images reflecting a now and then scenario contrasting 2009 with 1969. It’s all very interesting and not a little amusing, worth a look if only for the brief clip of John Belushi and Jack Black arsing about side by side. Under scored by Bob Dylan’s anthem “Forever Young,” sung by rap star Will.i.am, the commercial suggests there was a close link between the fizzy drink and the laid back, hippy beatnik counter culture of the 60’s. An interesting historical rewrite given that at the time PepsiCo was run by Donald Kendall, a close mate of Tricky Dickie Nixon, and was regarded as the drink to quench neo-Republican thirsts as they led baton charges.
Sing along at: http://commercial-archive.com/commercials/pepsi-refresh-anthem-2009-60-usa

Probably the best way to use celebrity with any force is to take a well-known character from a popular programme and transpose their personality onto a product. It’s a notoriously hit and miss game.
Hulu,com offers computer users the chance to see an array of programmes from NBC and the News Corp. The ad, by Crispin Porter & Bogusky, stars Alec Baldwin in his persona from the award winning 30 Rock series. He explains how “TV doesn’t rot your brain, it only softens it, like a ripe banana. To take it all the way we’ve created Hulu.com.” The often bizarre sense of humour from the TV series translates perfectly to this commercial peppering it with phrases like “celebral gelatinising shows” and “Hulu, an evil plot to destroy the world.” It’s just silly. Which is why is works so well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m71m-LBqFQ

On a slightly more bizarre note a cable television provider has apologized to Tucson-area customers over a 30-second porn interruption during the Super Bowl. Philadelphia-based Comcast issued a brief statement Monday saying the company is "mortified" and is conducting a thorough investigation. See it all at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIadW_Mgrqo
This should finally put Ms Jackson and Mr Timberlake to bed, as it were.

One sign of the parsimonious times is that most of the commercials aired during the Big Game were for once not created specifically for the day. Hardly any make even an oblique reference to Superbowl or indeed any football game, the majority of large corporations seemingly happy to just air their latest offerings on the biggest stage available.
Billed as “airing in 27 top markets during Superbowl,” the media has often become the only message as this years’ selection of over 50 different ads failed to deliver the once-off punch and humour of previous years.
It’s all a tad disheartening really, if the world’s biggest consumers of advertising have stopped throwing their considerable weight behind their favourite Brands in such purpose built arenas then where does that leave the rest of us?
I mention it to the young bar maid, her tongue-piercing glistening disturbingly in the light of the bar taps she considers my concerns, “Yeh, but whatisit?.”
Exactly, I think.

do do. do do, do do, do do...

2009-01-28T02:59:00.000-08:00

“My name is Ian Franks. I had an accident and I woke up in 1973. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever's happened, it's like I've landed on a different planet. Now, maybe if I can work out the reason, I can get home.”

The first thing I notice in this alternative world is an ad for Cadbury’s. Reassuringly it’s the usual montage of runny chocolate being poured over a saccharine soundtrack and lots of purple foil type colours. And odd response to the genius that was the Gorilla ad. Ahhhhh but the 70’s are a great time to be alive and advertising.
Then a Tiger Wheel & Tyre commercial crammed with an end to end super fast voice-over bounces on and whips off with a frisky jingle ShowaddyWaddy would have been proud of.

Adland sure is a simple place, nice big product shots, some of them even in focus, lively voice-overs peppered with soothing, often vaguely illegal sounding, promises,
A Sunlight Washing up liquid commercial pops up, mam and other family members are still racing to see whether an “alternative” detergent will wash as many plates as our hero. I wonder if they’d be as keen and smiley if they knew that in 30 years time they would still be washing the same pile of plates, adlands’ own Groundhog Day.

Like Michael J Fox in his DeLorean, I race back to the future in time to catch the new Guinness ad from Saatchi’s Capetown, created by Tim Hearn, Anton Crone, Alice Gnodde and Larissa Elliot and directed by Martin Krejci of Stink London, it’s an epic. Well, it’s quite big.
The effects are quite good, the shot list is mostly Twister and other leaving the road to chase big windy things films, but it’s ok. The link to the guys in the bar is odd but once you’ve read the publicity blurb about a modern African storyteller you kinda get the idea. Catch it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inc44ReRxQk

The commercial for Neotel called “No Restrictions” goes on, and on. It’s one half-arsed technique stretched over 60 seconds with those annoying little symbol guys turning up everywhere. It’s ok but if this is the challenge to Telkom’s Do It stuff then I fear it’s hardly going to scare the competition.
If you’ve been away on Mars and missed the massive media spend take a look at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Z8l9k9Ch8

Great ads come from great ideas. Simple? You can’t get any simpler than the new Harley Davidson Cologne commercial by Fran Luckin and Tetteh Botchway of Ogilvy Johannesburg. It’s well shot, beautifully timed and very, very funny. And for those parochial idiots who warble on about “local content” all the time, the joke is as local as the shop in “The League of Gentlemen.” Catch a sniff of it at: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1244284/harley_davidson_cologne_smell_like_a_bad_ass/

If local is indeed lekker then the DDB Vancouver spot for Midas tyres is a perfect example of why. Set in a Canadian high street it’s a car chase in deep snow that goes nowhere fast. It’s a daft joke that makes its point quickly and effectively without a special effect in sight. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibWO6KaYXfI

At the other end of the scale there’s the new Barclaycard commercial out of BBH London, created by Pete Bradly, Gary McCreadie and Wesley Hawes and directed by Peter Thwaites of Gorgeous Enterprises. To that well-loved classic tune “Let your love flow” by The Bellamy Brothers.
We see a young guy in an open plan office as his mates are all heading for the door home. He strips off his clothes and walks through the office in some very fetching under-wear, his work mates smile knowingly at him.
He opens a store cupboard and we see an opening to a waterslide,
He slides down and we cut to the outside of the office skyscraper and see the chute runs down the side of it at a hair-raising angle before shooting off across the city taking our guy with it.
The waterslide takes him through other offices and and across the cityscape, before he shoots through several stores, swiping goods from shelves then swiping his card as he goes.
It’s all about some new “contactless technology” that Barclaycard have introduced to make payments simpler evidently. What it really is, however, is a water-sliders dream and a bit of a laugh to boot.
Make contact with it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUDtkD_CjLg

With the recession lumbering around us there’s the usual panic in adland that clients will be hacking away at budgets to save their pennies. As always we will respond by citing studies and reports that show why this is short-sighted and how it’s the companies with the foresight to maintain and even increase their ad-spend in difficult times that are the ones who are left standing afterwards. New media pundits will punt their wears as the final solution and traditional media will circle the wagons and shoot protectionist arrows at all comers. And as always it will come out sounding something like The Emperor’s clothes meets Chicken Little.

Those who’ve seen it all before will nod sagely and keep their heads down muttering how they’ve seen it all before. But this is a new world, brave or not, and there’s a lot of new stuff to consider this time.
Many of the things in this 2009 world I find confusing, the fakeness of Reality TV, the popularity Paris Hilton most of all why is the Dakar Rally racing across South America?
All I know is they never had these worries in the 70’s.

"Let there be light"

2009-01-20T02:16:00.000-08:00

2009-01-12T23:26:00.001-08:00

and so that was christmas...

2009-01-12T02:43:00.001-08:00

Friends from the YooK arrived with schooners of Christmas cheer to prop up the bar down Molly Malone’s. As always there was much to catch up on including the wonderment of festive offerings from adland on the sceptred isle.
Amid the shimmering tinsel and gargling egg-nog a few ideas sparkled.
For a while now the famous PG Tips tea Brand has used a stuffed monkey to promote itself, appearing alongside Al (comedian Johnny Vegas), the commercials have a cult following amongst the English TV viewing public. For Christmas they launched a parody of the Queen’s Speech with Monkey as the Queen trying to tell the world about his and Al’s Christmas day special, but one too many sips of bubbly played havoc with his performance.
See it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkHwhz-3yJg&feature=related.
Monkey’s message, voiced by Ben Miller, gets more and more convoluted with every toast to the past year. Luckily the super at the end tells us what we need to know. “There should be one thing on one’s telly that one shouldn’t miss this Christmas. It’s Monkey’s Christmas Sketch, shown on ITV1, Channel 4, Five, Sky1, Sky3, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4, E4, More4, Film4, Virgin1, Gold, Dave, MTV One, TMF, 4 Music, Nickelodeon, Jetix and Many More.”
Go to www.pgtips.co.uk. and catch Al and Monkey’s 90 second remake of the classic Morecambe and Wise breakfast sketch from the late 70’s, using the same music (The Stripper) and some of the same moves, ending of course with a great cup of tea.
Developed at AKQA by executive creative director James Hilton, creative directors/copywriters Colin Byrne and James Capp, copywriters Ben Oliver and Leo Thom, Shot by director Chris Balmond via Red Bee and AKQA.Film.
It’s fun, in a slightly quirky, good old-fashioned romp kinda way.

M&C Saatchi London entered into the spirit of Boxing Day with a charity-focused Christmas promotion. Boxing Day, December 26th, a public holiday in the United Kingdom, is based on the tradition of giving gifts to the less fortunate members of society.
Staff at the agency this year filled 400 boxes to be given to the UK charity Action for Children and delivered in time for Christmas. Because even the simplest piece of corporate responsibility deserves to be preserved for posterity, the agency shot a stop frame animation film showing how the idea came together in their reception area. It’s ok , if a tad dull, in a typically MC Saatchi stark, clean lined way.
The M&C Saatchi team included creatives Nick O’Brien and Paloma Reed and agency producer Charlie MacPearson.
Filming was shot by director Dan Lumb via th2ng with producer Mark Farrington. Post production was done at “th1ng.”
Music was provided by composer Lorenzo Piggici at Felt Music with executive producer Dominic Buttimore.
See the whole thing at : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMIstLztiPM&eurl=http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2008/mc-saatchi-boxing-day

New year, of course, is a time of reflection, a time to review our time on this wonderful planet. The new Audi commercial by BBH reminds me of many things, the simple pursuit of origami perhaps, that ads don’t have to look expensive to be interesting and most of all, why Woodie Guthrie remains a cult figure after all these years rather than a mainstream artist.
Created by Maja Fernqvist and Joakim Saul and put together by Aaron Duffy and Russell Brooke of Passion Pictures and 1st Ave Machine it’s a simple little idea about unboxing the box that is the Audi Q5 accompanied by the enigmatically named “Car Song” by Mr Guthrie. It’s on show at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eng7lG9OME

Flying into 2009 with a “Flock of seagulls” haircut, an Asteroids arcade game, a Rubik's Cube, a yuppie banker with a cell-phone bigger than his briefcase and a newspaper headline shouting about the miner's strike. It can only be the 80’s, again. 1984, in fact.
The commercial celebrating the launch of Richard Branson’s Virgin Atlantic Airline 25 years ago this year was put together by Y&R/RKCR in London. Looking like a sey from Dynasty It’s crammed full of 80’s iconography and some slinky flight crew in bright red gear. If nothing else it’s a timely reminder that even in times of trouble a good idea can really take off. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFz2-b3NrA4

Speaking of good ideas, I must admit the concept of “Guitar Hero” sounded a tad lame to me, after all what can it achieve that I can’t get out of an old tennis racquet and Led Zep III on vinyl?
The new commercial for the latest Guitar Hero World Tour game, however, did change my mind a bit. It’s a homage to Tom Cruise’s scene in “Risky Business” but instead of the couch-bouncing Christian scientist we’re offered Ubermodel Heidi Klum in lacy black lingerie for our viewing pleasure.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BddCq1zFI4, it certainly had me banging my head against the wall.

To round off the festive season, one of the younger guys hovering around the bar the other day was muttering darkly about how he’d “gone large” over Christmas, presumably building himself up for a bit of a new year’s gym resolution. Anyway, looking for health tips myself, somewhere between the turkey and chips of Boxing Day and the suspicious turkey curry of two days later I came across a commercial for the British Food Standards created to remind us to watch out for food poisoning.
There’s no other way of putting it, it really is a fart-laden online offering. The video, complete with retro colour grading and 70’s typefaces, is designed to make us think twice about how we use the turkey leftovers, and includes the rather frothy line, “A fabulously festive feast of faeces.” Marvellous.

The Safe Christmas campaign was developed at Farm London, by creative director Gary Robinson, art director Raymond Chan, and writer Simon Cenamor.
Shot by director Mark Denton via Coy! Communications with producer Sara Cummins. Catch a whiff of it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSyWWVNiuTU&eurl=http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2008/diarrhoea-for-christmas/
I’m off for a little well deserved cold turkey.

Ooooo missus that's a big un

2008-12-09T04:00:00.000-08:00

A doctor’s lounge is a good place to watch ads. If you’re lucky the sound will be down, which is often a benefit these days, and you have a captive audience of other sad sickos muttering darkly about the commercial offerings and coughing their approval into mouldy hankies.
So it was with a certain anticipation I snuggled down amongst a rather motley collection of sniffles, coughs and an alarming case of boils to hear their comments. Big ads go down well it seems. Big effects, big stories and big music.

The commercial by Ogilvy London supporting Burma’s peaceful protests against their overbearing Junta is big. In fact it’s massive. It was created by the unlikely sounding force of Carl Le Blond and Andre Stringer, shot by the enigmatic Shilo with a track by Good Sounds. It’s rather good. I wish I’d seen it in a mega cinema. Go to the Free Burma website for a look:
http://www.noneofusarefree.org/ you might even find a petition or something to add your name to.

American Express are keen to show the world that they don’t just do things nicely but also for the benefit of the community at large. This urge to give back can only be a good thing so even if you have to listen to a certain amount of chest-beating about them doing good it’s worth it in the end. T
he whole idea is that as an American Express cardholder you get the chance through the Members Project to come up with a suggestion about how AMEX can help the world. The winning entries are funded up to $5million.
The first two commercials are of such a scale and so well shot that you’ll probably enjoy them just for themselves. The first features people like the Great Muppet himself Jim Henson and talks of great individuals and great projects. It’s charming and sets up the campaign well. Have a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyvgsQYYscU
The second was knocked out by Old Marti Scorsese. It has a nicely lit and art directed set with the improbable gathering of Alicia Keys, Sheryl Crow, Andre Agassi, Ellen and Shaun White sitting around dressed in subtle greys. Between them they say”
Alicia Keys: It's a great gift to be in a position to make a difference.
Sheryl Crow: Being in the public eye enables us to draw attention to things that matter, like the environment.
Andre Agassi: Children at risk.
Shaun White: African relief.
Alicia Keys: Medicines for those in need Martin Scorsese, who's directing, questions who this guy is that just walked on the set. Tim explains that he works in the office next door. Shaun White says he's been to the Lake once, and Scorsese agrees to let Tim stay in. Then Ellen adds "I swam in it once. When I got out I had to take my bathing suit off and it burst into flames. It happens any time I swim." Catch it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV6U_ujddnE&feature=related

Of course the biggest ad of recent times was “The Big Ad” for Carlton Draught Beer.
This award winning extravaganza was created by George Patterson and Partners (Young & Rubicam) of Melbourne, and features two armies, one dressed in maroon, the other in yellow, marching towards one another singing "O Fortuna" from Carmina Burana by Carl Orff.
The lyrics have been carefully replaced by such subtleties as "It’s a big ad/...expensive ad/This ad better sell some bloody beer".
A heroic figure on horseback leads the charge. Viewed from the air, we see the armies form a glass of Carlton Draught and a human body. The glass is then lifted to the mouth, and the audience sees the beer (the rushing, ecstatically leaping yellow-clad men) flowing into the stomach of the figure.
The ad obviously parodies the visual style of battle sequences from such epic films as Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings. However, it also harkens back to the visual splendour and grandiose direction of the 80’s and 90’s British Airways commercials, which set the scene for so many other huge scale ads.
Pre-empting the launch of the commercial on TV by releasing it two weeks before online was a master-stroke. By the time it hit the small screen it had been seen by over one million people in 132 countries. Uniquely at the time the launch was so successful they were able to cut the actual TV budget to avoid overexposure. Drink it in at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH3GH7Pn_eA

Another commercial that began life on-line, the Guinness Domino ad was originally only available to be viewed by those who could unravel the puzzle on the website. It’s well achieved and okay, not in the league of White Horses or Evolution but it certainly fills the criteria of “Big ad.”
Apparently, in between munching on their pet guinea pigs and growing mountains of nose candy for fashion models to snort, the villagers of a Peruvian/Columbian village use their leisure time constructing elaborate Mousetrap like set-ups using everything they can find to fill their days while they wait for the great god of Guinness to appear amongst them. It’s a small idea hugely achieved now available to everyone at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiZuTkAk2js

Evil Dead is a monstrously large franchise. And now there’s a musical. And therefore an ad for the musical by Tyler Serr, Lyranda Martin-Evans, and Deric Moore of Saatchi Toronto. The endline is: “Just like all the musicals you love, but evil.” That alone makes it worth a look:
http://adsoftheworld.com/media/tv/evil_dead_the_musical_street

I should mention that it was my doctor who pointed me in the direction of this ad as an example of what he sees as “bloody great advertising.” And I’m not going to argue with a man who prescribes laxatives to his girlfriend for a joke.

Words, Smith?

2008-12-02T05:41:00.000-08:00

Sitting at a desk in a large agency deep in adland on Monday when a very pretty young lady bounces up, thrusts a candle and a condom into my unexpecting hands, and declares, “Happy Aids Day.”
“World Aids Day,” I shout, “It’s World Aids Day, not Thanksgiving, or Divali or my bloody Valentine’s Day.” “Ok,” she beams over her shoulder, “Gottcha.”
As her comely form disappears out of the office I can’t help thinking, “That is wrong, in so many ways, that is wrong.”

Language is important. Pictures are all very well but as Clive James once put it, “If you want to describe something really well, the best thing to use is English.” You can, of course, overdo it.

“One day a man woke up and thought,
Today is the day the fight will be fought
And he set his sights on a far away place
And started to run
No matter what was put in his way
He kept going and going day after day
He run further and further on and on
Men in streets stopped and stared
They questioned the man, he didn’t care
Walls he saw but every wall
Was just a door to a better place than before
He wouldn’t give up,
He would not give in driven by forces deep within
Though men like him were hard to find
They’re the ones we stand behind.
ABSA CAPITAL – Born to redefine.”

What on earth is that about? It wanders around like a junior creative at a Christmas party, full of pointless verbiage and unexpected nonsense. As someone famous once put it, “I know what the words mean but I don’t know why they’re in that order.”
It’s a shame because it’s a very pretty, well-paced commercial, beautifully achieved.
Created by TJDR team of Jonathan Deeb, Theo Egbers, Lisa Bayliss John Withers and Jelena Jovanovic it was directed by Greg Rom at Egg Films, and animated by Macguff, Paris. Have a look at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wttVJ38eMbc

Sometimes, of course, you can underwrite a thing.
The Radox commercial with the Barry White-esque voice over is odd. It totally ignores the lyrical quality of words that made him the Walrus of Lurve. It was the way the words continuously flowed with honey-dripping bass that made it unique, running into each other as they rumbled on. This Voice over is full of gaps and pauses giving the soundtrack a stumbling almost wheezy quality, very uncool, unlike the man himself.

Looking like something from an early Steve Barron video, a load of TVs come wandering down the early evening Berlin road. They move in a post-Sony Bravia manner, as they travel they show different scenes of lifestyle type nonsense on their screens.
They pass a wine bar looking like an ad man’s idea of a modern drinking venue with a few overly art directed individuals sitting around looking equally sterile.
Eventually, (and I use the word advisedly), the TVs part with Moses-like ease and one of the ugliest cars ever created trundles into view.

The all-new Ford Fiesta ad by Ogilvy Advertising London for the all-new Ford Fiesta, shot in Berlin, directed by Noah Harris. The music is by Pluxus, it's a pseudo soft porn track called "Transient" with a superbly bad moment of synching when the car turns the corner and the track makes a decidedly “exhaust falling off” noise. It’s all rather splendid in its retro-Kraftwerk styling and builds up to the ridiculously nebulous endline: “This is now.” Actually I think this is 1986, which fits the car’s styling perfectly. Sit through it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87nDEUscky8

A kid plays football by himself. He kicks the ball into the net then retrieves it and stomps off the pitch. In his house he puts on a pan of pasta, lays a table and tries to open a bottle of wine. His parents arrive home and he ushers them to the table for a romantic dinner. 9 months later in the hospital he’s introduced to his new baby brother and presents him with a pair of football boots. He eats hero chocolate bar. Super up line: Stratos, Makes good better. Wonderfully underplayed, perfectly told, all the words were on the script not in a lazy voice over. Have a look;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bggFBWn7YoI

Words you see, as Steve Martin tells Darryl Hannah in “Roxanne” “They’re all used up.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_RjHrvCcKo
Or maybe that’s how we should treat them, with a little more respect. Online Thesaurus, Spell checks from Mr Microsoft and dictionaries crammed with words no one knows how to use properly, fill our daily lives. The more access we have to more information, the more carelessly we use it, the craft of writing is suffering badly. And that’s before the art directors get their hands on the stuff.

Luckily there is hope at the end of the tunnel of words. Our American cousins have developed something called a swipe file, according to the website this is “a collection of winning ads. Sales letters, space ads, headline collections, plus bits and pieces of copy that have been marketplace proven to make big money. A carefully collected swipe file is the essential starting point for most new copywriting campaigns.

It’s a bit like why lawyers begin with a basic form when drafting a new legal document, or why web designers start with a basic code structure. Start with something that has proven efficacy, and customize from there.”

Which is great. And in many ways, when I’m sweating over a hot keyboard with a deadline from hell, I wish these sort of toys would really work, a programme that writes everything for me and I just pick out the relevant bits for each client? Bloody marvellous. But I fear we’re quite a way from the day where machines can tell us what and how to do things. I’d say more but my Mac tells me I’ve reached my allocated word count.

More than my job's worth

2008-11-25T05:55:00.000-08:00

“A what?” the long haired, denim-clad bloke unfolds his legs, tucks his hand-tooled cowboy boots back under his desk and leans forward so his badge shines dangerously in the fluorescent light. “John Gibbon, Careers Advisor,” it reads.
“A what? An art director? There’s no such job son.” He mutters.
“They work in advertising,” splutters the 17 year spotty youth. “Doing the pictures and stuff.”
Mr. Gibbon tosses a large book on the desk entitled “Careers 1977,” “Show me, go on show me in the book.”
It’s no good, they both know that between Agricultural worker and Zoo keeper there is nothing as glamorous as a job in advertising lurking in the well thumbed pages.
“There’s an opening for a fitter & turner in the steelyards, I’ll send your name.”

Getting a start in adland isn’t quite as complex as it once was. Advertising has been scrubbed and disinfected, rebuilt, repackaged and turned into a profession, albeit a slightly dodgy one. Now there are courses at colleges where young people can learn stuff that occasionally relates to the business.
Diplomas and degrees are now to be had on the way to your first agency, neither of which will be of the slightest use, but you should have a good time at college before you have to get a job, it broadens the mind and let’s you get started on that all important overdraft.
http://www.vegaschool.com/ http://www.aaaschool.co.za/
http://www.redandyellow.co.za/

Creative people come in all shapes and sizes, but in adland they come, mainly, in two types, writer and art director. Words and pictures, if you will.
Obviously nothing as clean cut as this delineation actually exists and cross-pollination is a fact of life

Or as wikipedia puts it:
“The team usually works together to devise an overall concept (also known as the "big idea," etc.) for the ad, commercial, mailer, brochure, or other advertisement. The copywriter is responsible for the textual content, the art director for the visual aspects. But the A.D. may come up with the headline or other copy, and the copywriter may suggest a visual or the aesthetic approach. Each person usually welcomes suggestions and constructive criticism from the other.” Sounds like fun, nearly.There’s a lot more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_director and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copywriter, if you’re trying to find out what you are best suited for or if you want to find out what you actually do in adland.

If you’re going to be “a creative” then it’s a good idea to put together a portfolio of work. A few simple ideas that show you can think in a structured, reasoned way with a lump of originality thrown in. The accepted way to do this is to take a product that exists and produce a campaign for it. At this point the game really begins, you can tell a lot about someone by the product they choose to advertise. There’ll always be the obvious candidates who go for “Axe” or “Nando’s” or “Nike,”
or charities like anything to do with AIDS, and violence against women/children/dogs/badgers.
Foolhardy choices, because in reality only the truly exceptional will create a campaign to stand against what already exists, and the exceptional are very few and far between.
By making an intelligent choice of product you start off by saying, “Hey, I had an original thought.”

These days students turn up with portfolios full of viral TV ads, risky, in your face, often downright offensive little ideas that wouldn’t see the light of day on traditional media but can be slipped into the public arena on the mighty internet. Which is fair enough, more and more clients require us to fight on-line and on the streets. However, a half-arsed idea is still a half-arsed idea, no matter where you put it and a student’s primary motivation must be to demonstrate strong, original thinking. I keep saying original because in these overly media savvy days virtually anyone can have “an idea.” Not everyone can have a strong, well thought through idea that can be carried across media and country barriers delivering a single-minded idea as it goes. One that hasn’t been seen before.

Of course to become an agency creative you have to actually get in the door of an agency, something that can seem impossible, Creative Directors, Executive Creative Directors, Chief Creative Officers or actually anyone who can hire you tend to behave like Lord Lucan’s shadow, and that’s on a good day. Even the creation of HR has only led to another layer of never returned calls and cancelled meetings.

Over the years this has led to students showing a certain amount of ingenuity in capturing adland people’s attention. I once received a week long torrent of body parts in small brown parcels delivered to my desk. Ears, a nose, lips (with part of a face attached) and eyes, until finally on the Friday there was a hand laying bleeding on my layout pad. The fact that they were latex and the oozing blood was theatre fake stuff didn’t help settle my early morning bacon sandwich. And I have to admit I ignored the attached body tag that read “If you want to see the rest of me call John on…” as much as I did the guy who followed me into the agency toilets and started slipping pages from his portfolio under the cubicle door while whispering intense descriptions of his work.
This urge to drama appears to have fallen off in recent years, which is a bit of a shame. Although most of my clients don’t appear to miss me arriving still covered in tiny shiny silver paper stars from early morning exploding packages. These days I’d send an email, at least you can keep pressing resend until someone answers.

Working in adland isn’t a real job, your parents will describe it to their friends with an indulgent roll of the eyes, another phase that hopefully will pass through on your way to becoming something worthwhile.
It is, however, a vocation, a calling, a form of self- abuse and because of this, if you do it right, it’s highly addictive. Putting aside all the “it’s not as much fun as it used to be,” stuff that the lads down The Rose mutter into their Guinness, I’d thoroughly recommend it to any bright young thing with a dangerous mind. It’s better than working for a living.
It’s true that as the business has become normalised so the amount of eccentric personalities it attracts has dwindled, presumably they’ve all headed off into local government.
But there are still enough of what our Australian cousins would call “Mad as snakes,” types left to make it an interesting days work.
Bear in mind, many agencies promote what they like to call a “family atmosphere”, which is fine as long you realise it’s more likely to be the Borgias than the Waltons.

"Who knows where the time goes..."

2008-11-18T04:26:00.000-08:00

1546 AD Somewhere in Rome, Italy.
Pope Paul III, “Look lads, what we need is a really big church, something that says “we’re here to stay” maybe with some kind of freestanding dome, but like, the biggest in all Christendom.”
Cardinal 1, “Good idea your holiness, but who can we get to design such a glory?”
Pope Paul III, “Well, there’s only one man for the job really, let’s get Michelangelo he did a nice job on that chapel ceiling.”
Cardinal 2. “You mean Michelangelo Buonnaroti sire? But he’s 70… “
Pope Paul III, “A mere whipper-snapper around here then, he’s still the best around when it comes to new ideas, to say nothing of being a dab hand at a bit of painting and decorating, go drag his Zimmer frame over here.”

Age and experience have long been venerated across civilisations. Shamans, medicine men and oracles, our spiritual and political leaders have come from those who have lived long enough to garner wisdom and experience. Even in an age when 40 is the new 20 we still turn to our elders for their received wisdoms. As Barrack Obama lowers his much-heralded backside into the Oval office chair he’s being lauded as a youngster but in reality he’s closer to 50 than 40.
There are, of course, exceptions that prove the rule. Adland for instance has its own take on the idea.

“Top creative agency with Blue Chip clients is looking for a Senior
Team. Four years + experience.

Requirements: Professional, very strong conceptual skills,
producing outstanding award-winning creative work. Must have
Diploma Art Directing/Graphic Design and great track record.
Details: Remuneration: R25k CTC
Please submit CV and portfolio.”

Notice anything unusual? No? That, unfortunately, is because there isn’t anything. For several years now local adland has laboured under the ridiculous belief that someone who has been in the business for “four years +” can be classed as “Senior”. Which effectively means that someone who leaves college at 20 is a “Senior” at 24+. Senior is, of course, Latin for elder

The underlying problem here is that advertising is projected as a “young person’s game”. This has been a fallacy perpetuated by managements who seek to control their staff and believe that “keeping them hungry,” sometimes quite literally, is the way to make them push harder and throw themselves into every new project.
There are agencies out there that resemble kindergartens. Specially geared to the young, with beanbags, bean bags I ask you?
Obviously It's deliberately difficult, if not downright dangerous, for anyone over 30 to try to get up from these things.

They use the out dated argument that young people know how to talk to young people. A great idea when your core consumer base is young, but as we all know we have an ever-aging population that is continuing to spend as it grows. Yet still agencies cling to this facile concept that young brains think up fresher ideas. Something that would have surprised Goethe and Simone de Beauvoir until their last scribble and I dare say Mr De Bono will still be thinking laterally until he’s finally horizontal.

Luckily there may be light in the middle of the tunnel. In the U.K. leading creative agency Bartle Bogle & Hegarty, (BBH), have joined forces with the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, (IPA), to launch a campaign highlighting ageism in adland.
Based upon an extensive qualitative and quantative report instituted by the IPA and carried out across the UK business the campaign was created to react to the feeling amongst many advertising employees that the current age bias is strongly detrimental to the industry.
The report highlights the view that "older people are not always as technologically astute as younger people, nor are they so willing to put in the extra hours in the evenings and at weekends".
However this is easily counteracted by “the breadth of experience and emotional intelligence of older staff.”
The results show that 72% of respondents to the survey agree that agencies risk becoming out of touch to what appeals to older consumers.

Hamish Pringle, IPA director general, said: "Adland is way out of line in terms of age. For a range of reasons; burnout, work and life balance, and increasingly commonly, pressure on agency payrolls, agencies shed the over 40s relentlessly. This results in a massive loss of valuable experience and is a real cost to clients."

The IPA's Agency Census 2005, published in January, found that 48.1% of employees were aged 30 or under, with another 33.4% in the 31-40 age bracket -- meaning more than four out of every five agency staff are aged 40 or under. The average age for agency employees is 33; only 13.6% are 41 to 50, with a mere 5% over 50.

There are very few places in which age is so obviously used against us in society as in adland, although the actor Rupert Everett believes he has a similar problem with ageism. Now he’s 47 the gay actor is worried he may never find a long-term boyfriend because he thinks nobody would want to date a man his age and no longer wants to meet potential partners in bars.
He says, "Unfortunately, I am single. But I'm too exhausted for anything else and being gay is a young man's game. Now no one wants me. Being gay and being a woman has one big thing in common, which is that we both become invisible after the age of 42.

"Who wants a gay 50-year-old? No one, let me tell you. I could set myself on fire in a gay bar, and people would just light their cigarettes from me. I don't want to be carried out of a club wearing a tie-dye T-shirt and a cap on the wrong way round when I'm 70, but I would like to settle down a bit. Maybe with a partner."

I should say I mentioned this to a few of my gay acquaintances down the Red Room last week and they were collectively of the opinion that if I could get hold of the address where Mr Everett sups then they’d be right along to help dissuade him of beliefs.

Personally, although I’ve been loitering in the corridors of adland for a fair while now, and I’m looking forward another couple of laps around the block yet, as George Bernard Shaw once put it “I want to be thoroughly used up when I die.”
Ian franks; CV ~ age 19 ¼

It's a game of two halves

2008-11-11T04:40:00.000-08:00

Last year Christiano Rinaldo scored 42 goals, more than some clubs, he was awarded the FIFPro World Player of the Year, Uefa Club Forward of the Year, Uefa Club Player of the Year, the European Golden Shoe, and probably some other stuff I missed.
He is quite good.
Then again it’s what he’s trained to do, every day he’s out there kicking balls into nets, practicing lobs and volleys and stuff. He doesn’t do anything else, it’s his job, like my dad’s was building ships and mine is flogging stuff to a bewildered public.
Admittedly Rinaldo couldn’t do his job well without all the other guys running around behind him passing and tackling and generally being good at their jobs too. But it’s his inspirational play that turns half chances into great goals.

In adland great ads are created in many ways. Occasionally by lone shark opportunists who see a chance, tear through the clients defence and put away a stroke of genius before anyone really notices. More often though, the great sustainable campaigns are created by a team building the right environment within which individual talent can flourish. This means, not only building an agency team that recognises and supports inspired thinking, but also fostering the same respect and understanding within clients. Like all good game plans it sounds easy but is seldom practiced.

Even so we still need something else to get our ideas out there and into your homes, and most decent players know that a little fancy footwork and flashy technique can often help us hide a lack of substance, to say nothing of a certain breath-taking audacity.
The emperor’s clothes are currently on show in the latest Telkom “Do” commercial, it’s a real triumph of technique over concept. A booted & suited guy stands around in front of a green screen and acts out the differences between playing games, going shopping etc and “Doing” them.
The campaign was ill conceived originally and has now been stretchered back on for a bit of extra time. Admittedly for Telkom the production values are fairly high, (presumably they’re feeling the threat of the new team at Neotel warming up on the bench).
But they’re still a tad yesteryear. The thing about relying on technique is you’ve really got to have the newest, shiniest stuff around, or you’ll find yourself using that tedious screen-grabbing device that looked good in Minority Report back in 2002.
However, even with these drawbacks the ad would be ok, until someone let the client loose to “Do” the voice-over, either that or there’s a writer out there who deserves a bit of a slap.
“Do” it for yourself at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhAXOimWqNQ

The technique stick has also been out giving the latest Bakers Biscuits commercial a good beating. A whole host of fairytale type critters womble about playing with biscuits while a bunch of eerily wholesome Narnia-esque kids wander through the woods. As someone once put it, “There’s a lot less to this than meets the eye.”
“Precious Biscuits,” was created by Bridget Johnson, Monique Kaplan,
and Amy Auret of Ogilvy Johannesburg and animated by Blackginger.
It’s a dreamy little piece with no substance but plenty of beautiful animation, maybe that’s all you can ask of a biscuit commercial. Have a look yourself at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yg2BDaewcGY

If you can’t go out on the cutting edge then a little retro might be a good substitute. Coming out of the wings bobbing and weaving like George Best in his heyday, the Sony Bravia Rabbits commercial is a technicolour festival of 70’s Claymation and 80’s stop action filming with a 60’s Rolling Stones track thrown in.
Bunnies climb out of bins, manhole covers and drainpipes in New York, (as they do), reproducing madly as they go, and morph into big balls of playdoh, which form waves and whales and a big red bunny then some multi-coloured cubes. Conceived by Fallon London, (the guys who brought us the drumming Cadbury gorilla), it took 40 animators and 2.5 tonnes of clay and it makes decent viewing, but be warned if you’re settling down for a night of Sony TV channel you’ll be seeing a lot of bunnies before the night’s out.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLUAbkRUvVQ

The guy’s down the Raj Tandoori have insisted I mention their favourite current commercial, so, to keep the Peshwari Nan’s from flying, here goes.
Nando’s latest offering is a double chicken breast burger and is launched with their usual light-hearted affair.
The commercial features a young lady who can’t see her chips on her plate because her breasts are in the way. It’s single-minded, in the tradition of the great Nando’s ads, and saves itself from a sexist own goal by the performance of the lady with the straw. Perhaps.
The bigger, fuller, bouncier, double-breasted burger from Nando’s is available for viewing at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDycbuhyp44
It proves once again that sometimes you don’t need a wonderful technique, just a bawdy joke, some decent casting and a good idea will do.

Lastly, what do you do when you have a small budget, a “same as all the rest” product and no idea? (It’s some kind of pool cleaning stuff I can’t remember the name of). You produce a commercial where you show the bloke’s body on a sun lounger, (presumably after reading the script he decided not to have his face filmed). Then you get a shrill, irritating, teeth grinding woman to scream at him about fixing the pool. Except the pool is already bluer than John Terry’s heart, and more sparkling than a Stevie Gerrard pass. Not only does this sort of drudgery make no sense, if they’d channelled some of their seemingly endless media budget into hiring a few decent creative players they could easily it could have been game on.
I’m off for an early bath before this over-laboured analogy gets me a red card.

"run away, run away..."

2008-11-05T00:42:00.000-08:00

By the time this goes out there’ll be a new grande fromage in the Whitehouse, and, hopefully, a new party with a decent name closer to home. With such monumental questions to ponder over my mind tends to wander, as does my body. It’s time to think of a break, time away from the comforts of home, decent priced alcohol and recognisable food. But where to? Travel mags are as useless as travel websites, taking my mates advice about preferred destinations has proven as flawed as the time they sent me to an Argentinean restaurant with a vegetarian date.

Obviously adland is the place to turn to when a break is in the offing.
A great ad can take you places. Give you a taste of something new and different, tempt you to new experiences, all without abandoning your TV remote and favourite Chinese take-out.

What you’ll notice first is a certain pomposity to most tourism commercials, it comes in two different types. There’s the “copywriter goes Hemmingway” version where the writer rambles on about the bluest oceans, empty, golden beaches and, of course, the warmest of local welcomes.
Then there’s second type of ad where you can sense the hands of rooms full of civil servants prodding and poking until most of them give up and allow themselves to be deconstructed to a few glib sentences and some clichéd photography.

From the first batch comes the lure of the sunny, clear seas of Barbados, “a fusion of British and African cultures.” It says proudly.
“This island has powers, a mystical allure that has drawn travellers for centuries, an amazing world where green monkeys and flying fish mingle with laughter and innocence and sugar cane…”
Hemmingway must be turning in his mojitas. Take a look at;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GJRs3M8uKQ

(There is an alternate version with Rihanna rolling around in the surf like she’s lost her umbrella and warbling on about some ethereal rubbish. It’s just about bearable if your ears are full of sand;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DP2sFsqpSm4&feature=related).

To get a taste of what’s in store before you set off you can test the waters by dipping into a few of the slogans chosen to underpin campaigns across the world. You can hear the committees thrashing out the kinks in most of them.
There are the rather wistful like: “Croatia. The Mediterranean as it once was,” “Greece. Beyond Words”, and “Pure. Natural. Unspoiled. Iceland. The Way Life Should Be.”

Or if you prefer something a little more ambitious try: “Ireland. Awaken To A Different World.” “Cyprus, a whole world on a single island.” And, “Smile! You are in Spain! Everything Under the Sun.”

And then there’s the downright strange: “Lancashire. It's a real pleasure.” “Wales. Big Country.” And the post-communist drivel, “Estonia. Positively Transforming.”

Finally, how about a bit of candour; Andalusia. There's only one.”

There is, of course, one country that stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world when it comes to a unique way of punting itself.

Imagine this:
A cross section of people are seen preparing for visitors to their country. It begins in a rural pub with the barkeeper saying, "We've poured you a beer." A young boy on the beach saying, "We've got the sharks out of the pool," a guy is seen driving down a long dusty road as a woman says, “Dave’s gone to open the front gate”. Party-goers watching massive exploding fireworks display over a brightly lit harbour shout, "We've turned on the lights".
The commercial ends with a beautiful, bikini-clad model, Lara Bingle, stepping out of the ocean onto a deserted beach, she smiles coyly and asks, "So where the bloody hell are you?" fade up title “Australia.com.”

Yes our Antipodean cousins certainly know how to sell their country.
The AU$180 million advertising campaign launched in 2006 by Tourism Australia was created by the Sydney office of London advertising agency M&C Saatchi.
Initially the campaign was banned by the Broadcast Advertising people in the UK, fearing the word bloody would be too much for the delicate British ears.

However, following some good old fashioned lobbying by Tourism Australia, and a timely visit to from the commercial’s star, Lara Bingle, the ban was lifted, although a 9pm "watershed" was imposed.
Rather more bizarrely the commercials were also banned by regulators in Canada and America, owing to the implication of "unbranded alcohol consumption" in the opening line, "We've bought you a beer".
See if it gets you dusting off your passport;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn0lwGk4u9o

As the dust surrounding the campaign was dying down, an ad promoting Australia’s Nine Network's television coverage of the 2006-07 Ashes series, came bounding out of left field.
“We've rolled the ground, we've put in the stumps,” it proclaimed, side-splittingly following up with, “We've warmed up the beer”, "We've hidden the sunscreen,” the Australian captain descending the steps of a cricket ground stating, "And we've been waiting all year.”

This commercial also ends with a bikini-clad Bingle asking, "So where the bloody hell are you?" with Lara on the pitch at the Sydney Cricket Ground, holding a cricket bat and wearing nothing but a green and gold bikini, white shoes, and leg pads. All rounded off by the dulcet tones of Richie Benaud murmuring “Marvellous.”
I must say it rather makes me want to start polishing my balls.

Never to be outdone by a bunch of feckless marsupial punchers, in the aftermath of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, British newspaper “The Sun” created a poster campaign aimed at Australians asking "Where the bloody hell were you?" in reference to the number of gold medals Great Britain won in comparison to Australia.
Terribly childish I know, but it made me chuckle into my Special K.

Back to our holiday snaps.
As an immigrant I would like to point out that unlike most of my friends I chose to come here to live. And, other than the navel staring stupidity of SA’s politicians, the ludicrous assumption that everything is based on race and that bloke in the Audi A4 who insists on aggressing me in traffic every morning, I’ve been thoroughly vindicated in my decision.

For some reason the “It’s Possible” commercial designed to tempt wily foreigners into giving up a wallet full of their hard earned for a couple of weeks in glorious South Africa, leaves me oddly uneasy. Maybe it’s the shots of inner city life and what seems to be bike cops that make me question the choice of icons. Anyway the visuals are stunning, although my six year old god-daughter would be hard pressed to take a crap shot of most of the country. They will leave you breathless, just like the drivel that some committee has the poor selection of Voice-overs read out. “A city that never sleeps, genuine angels… journeying deep into rainbows,” It’s all too much like an ANC newsletter. Take a look yourself; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g_Ccwul8ME

As to holidays, I don’t know where I’ll end up this year. A pocketful of Rand these days is more and more unlikely to get me a New Year’s eve in Time Square or Sydney Harbour, but it will get me a spot on a golden beach watching the sun drip slowly into the azure mercury of the Indian Ocean sipping an ice-cold beverage, I think old Earnest would approve.

Songs of praise

2008-10-28T23:25:00.000-07:00

Over a quick half of shandy and a handful of severely suspect biltong deep in the bowels of “Billy the Bums” last week myself and several other patrons were commenting upon the sheer artistry of the new Britney video for “Womanizer” track, when I thought, “That would make a great soundtrack for an ad,” and filed it in my internal jukebox.
Anyway, Brit’s back, and a good deal of the rest of her are available for viewing at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZSLIq6YiRY

“Pepsi Cola hits the spot,
12 full ounces that’s a lot,
Twice as much for a nickel too,
Pepsi Cola is the drink for you.”

In 1939 Pepsi produced what is widely regarded as the first real jingle called “Pepsi hits the spot”. It was a big hit on the jukeboxes across the land and sales improved significantly. And adland had rhythm. Well, sort of. Jingles flooded air waves, everything from toothpaste to baked beans had a its own sound from full blown songs to playful mnemonic. Then something spooky happened; adland discovered popland and a marriage of convenience was quietly arranged.

IThe 70’s were ushered in with Coke’s revenge “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” a rather plaintive, whimsical, post-hippy affair by The New Seekers, featuring probably the first crowd on a mountain top idea. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mOEU87SBTU&feature=related

In the 80’s BBH in the UK re-launched Levi jeans with a beautifully retro chic commercial featuring Nick Kamen taking his kit off and stuffing it in a washing machine. “Launderette” became an icon of adland setting the bar for stylish visuals, but perhaps more memorable was the use of Marvin Gaye’s “I heard it through the grapevine,” as a soundtrack, which soared to the top of the charts. It still looks good today, and Marvin will always sound great; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q56M5OZS1A8

This was followed by a plethora of beautifully shot commercials with cool tracks backing them up. “The Swimmer” shot in startling techno colour by Tarsem underscored by the classic “Mad about the boy.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgGfvkaoGpc&feature=related

By the time the 80’s were over the symbiosis was complete with the charts packed full of tunes re-introduced by, or often created for, successful ad campaigns.
Haunting pieces like the SAAB anniversary commercial with a track by Swedish band “Oh Laura,” continued to show the power of music to elevate a nicely shot film to a memorable ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQQDwxmnwvA&feature=related

Things, however, have moved on a bit since then. For a start ads are no longer just 30 seconds of film stuffed between the Sunday film and some tortuous game show. They’re graffiti and guerilla, viral and virtual, they’re on the streets, and in one case they are the street.

Drive along Avenue K , six miles west of downtown Lancaster California, between 62nd and 70th streets West and you’ll come across a whole new idea in musical advertising.
To compliment the current worldwide campaign celebrating their creative engineering stance Honda have turned a quarter mile of asphalt
Into a musical instrument. When you drive over the stretch of road, which has had a series of special grooves cut into it, your car acts much like a needle on a LP, producing a tune, in this case The William Tell Overture.
Half-inch-deep, 1-inch-wide grooves were notched into the road at specific intervals so that a vehicle traveling over them produces tones, said Ray Hunt, Lancaster's capital engineering manager, “The grooves were configured to create the music at 55 mph, the posted speed limit.”

Honda spokesman Chris Martin said the singing road was designed to be heard optimally in a Honda Civic. "It's engineered for the Civic, for that type of tires and length of vehicle," Martin said.

The ad agency for Torrance-based American Honda, RPA of Santa Monica, decided to incorporate the peculiar music-making method into a Civic commercial that has been airing nationally since late September.

"Honda is an advanced engineering company, and we thought it would be fun to connect that to the Civic marketing campaign," said Gary Paticoff, RPA's senior vice president and executive producer.

The road has produced several different reactions among locals "I hear it every day. It's kind of cool to be part of history," said David Gilroy, 43, a local carpenter.
Lancaster resident P.J. Walker on Friday snapped a picture of her silver 2002 Honda Civic parked next to the sign marking the start of "The Civic Musical Road."
It would be fun if they did it in different places with different songs," Walker said.
"Something from the Beatles maybe, like `Yesterday,"'

Llano resident Peggy Hager said it sounded like a "high-pitched whine." She couldn't identify it, but knew it was a tune because it had a beat and rhythm.

"I think it’s kind of cool," Hager said. "When you are driving out on Avenue K, you're going out to the middle of nowhere. It's kind of a nice surprise to come across this thing."
Hear it sing at; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30StTQAUPtg

Unfortunately the Californian singing road has had so many complaints from other residents citing sleepless nights and that age old adland complaint, boring repetition, that the city officials are planning to pave over it.

But fans can still get their fix of road music as "melody" or "singing" roads have also been created in Japan, South Korea and Holland by Honda.

Tuning back into a TV near you, the new commercial for Pick n Pay is 60 seconds of finely tuned post-production, Shot by Jason Xenopoulos of
2point0 it bounces along with the classic fast moving rock n roll pace of Jerome Patrick Holan & Mr. Chuck Berry’s “You never can tell.”
You’ll catch yourself singing it while you make dinner and walk the dogs, I know I did. Which is the point after all.

"Lies, damned lies I tell you..."

2008-10-22T02:05:00.000-07:00

I’m not allowed to lie to you. I know you expect it and If I had a large glass of Mr Smirnoff’s best for every time I’ve had to bite my tongue and listen to friends and strangers accuse me of telling fibs for a living I’d be drunk on my politeness.
I can offer you a bra that puts your breasts up near your ears and gives you and instant, erm, allure, or a deodorant that is so packed with “come get me chemicals” that women will tear their clothes off and throw themselves at you. But I can’t tell you they’ll make your life better and give you a happier, longer life.
I know. I know you’re frothing over your Saturday cappuccino muttering darkly about semantics and splitting hairs. And you may be right, or not.

Which is why adland has rules it’s governed by.
There’s the tireless work of the ASA, The Advertising Standards Authority of South Africa; “An independent body set up and paid for by the marketing communications industry to regulate advertising in the public interest through a system of self-regulation.” Or so their website informs us.
It works closely with government, statutory bodies and consumer groups, so as you’d expect it has a set of rules that a high court judge would find beguiling.

In recent times the ASA has banned an ad for “A miracle crusade with Reverend Angley.” Due to lack of evidence that Jesus (and Mr Angley), could heal Aids. Evidently this was one of the many claims central to the good reverend’s preaching, along with his ability to help by having his congregation touch their computer or TV screen to be cured of a wide range of ailments, presumably not including naivety.

They also banned one of six ads for Teazers gentlemen’s emporiums. While approving pictures of scantily clad young ladies with headlines like “our girls stop traffic,” and a fluffy kitten saying “ours are playful,” as well as a pole dancer with “always in pole position,” they refused to expose our delicate eyes to a pleasant young thing with her hand in her pants which informed us she was “ready for action.”
Personally I think they should have been banned for being obvious, boring and crap. I mean, given the product is this the best the creatives could come up with?

More importantly I can’t quite figure out how the last ad could be construed as having “a reference to sex which was found to be too clear,” while the pole dancer was just a girl playing with her pole.

Censorship exists because some people apparently don’t have the ability to walk past a cinema showing a slightly racy number without popping in to be offended, or they’re to stupid to find the TV remote and turn off the allure of Nigella licking a chocolate covered spoon and causing hot flushes amongst their offspring.
But if we must have a body to tell me when another body offends us then surely it has to ensure a truly level playing field is maintained. Often there seems to be too large an element of personal taste involved in their judgements.
(This is the point where some tedious bureaucrat will start preaching chapter and verse from his little book of rules to prove his case.)

Can there be a bigger waste of time and money than the setting up of an arbitrator to dispute the 20 year old end line of thousands of Duracell ads?
This was deemed a worthy task and god knows how much money was wasted pursuing little pink bunnies across the world until finally it was proven that the statement was false. Aha… Gotcha. Another great day for world justice.
So just how long does the barmy little bunny bang on longer than other lesser batteries? We’ll never know because the then chief of legal and regulatory affairs at the ASA; “Didn’t want to elaborate on the arbitrators report. We look at a specific claim or advertisement, in this case it was whether the 'six-times-longer' statement was true or not.”
As the late Charlie Brown would have put it, “Good grief.”

The ASA is not a local idea. There are similar associations at work across the world, saving the public from all sorts of evils perpetrated by nasty adland critters, although a few little devils have been sneaking through of late.

In the USA the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News and their website www.philly.com ran a campaign for an airline, called “Derrie-Air,” which charged customers by the amount they weigh. (“The more you weigh, the more you’ll pay).
Although obviously offensive to a large part of our overly large American cousins, the ads ran for just one day and generated 2.7 million website hits and over 210,000 page views.
Sadly it proved to be a fake as the company later revealed in its statement online.
‘We recently ran ads for a fictitious airline that were designed to put a smile on your face and to address the timely issue of carbon emissions. But we also did it to make a point. Namely, that advertising in The Inquirer, Daily News and philly.com can be a stunningly effective way to reach the people of the Philadelphia region.”
Shame, I’d have paid good money to watch those guys get weighed at the ticket desk.

“Can my ring tones make you sexy?" asked an ad posted on the Hollywood gossip blog www.egotastic.com. A comely young red-haired doctor complete with white lab coat was shown extolling the benefits of something called Pherotones (www.pherotones.com).
“Experience the ring tone secret I discovered in Denmark that's too hot for mainstream science," she promised temptingly. Cell phone users could visit the site and download ring tones that attracted the opposite sex.
To the dismay of many a hormone-overloaded teenager the ads turned out to be the beginning of a buzz marketing campaign using a fake product to entice people to a website where they were introduced to the real offer. In this case Oasys Mobile, a little-known cell-phone content provider that sells games, wall-paper and ring tones.

The ads were created jointly by ad agency McKinney & Silver, in North Carolina and Viral Factory, London, to introduce the brand inexpensively with a non-traditional campaign that it hoped would grab the attention of its desired 18-to-24-year-old demographic.
The viral ad features a wedding ceremony where a male guest’s cell-phone rings a pherotone tune and the groom runs from the altar and passionately embraces him.

Oddly, even when the truth was revealed and the real reason for the ads was revealed, consumers kept on visiting the site in droves. Which brings us neatly to the question; “Is it fair to trick people for commercial reasons?”

A study by North eastern university in Boston recently found that “even when participants who pitch products in word-of-mouth campaigns identify their commercial affiliations, it usually does not affect consumers' willingness to pass the marketing message on.”

People, it seems, like to be engaged in a conversation by marketers, to contribute to a discussion, argument or even an advertising campaign. It appears they’ll easily forgive a little trickery to catch their attention. It’s this realisation that lies at the heart of what is now called buzz marketing.
According to Marian Salzman, executive vice president of JWT in the USA, “nearly 80% of marketers are now spending money on buzz marketing” with a spend last year of over $150 million.
But then everyone always did love a good snake-oil salesman.

This one's for charidee...

2008-10-13T06:55:00.000-07:00

Adland loves a good charity. The chance to show off our soft cuddly side, to prove we’re not the venal sharks we’re portrayed as in every TV show and film ever made. In fact we revel in the chance to give back to our community and positively thrive on giving up our time and money for a just cause. And it’s tax deductible.
Utilised properly adland’s talents can be a powerful ally in the fight against poverty and injustice. Face it, iif we can make you react to a woman spreading margarine while her children look on, then I’m damned sure we can evoke a stronger reaction with pictures of dying children and abused puppies.

Whatever the reason an agency decides to get involved with a charity or cause it can only be for the good. By its very nature the more people that hear of the plight of veal bound calves in Belgium, boy soldiers in Sudan or saving the badgers of rural Sussex, the more likely that some action will be taken.
Like any hard working ad, however, they have to make their point succinctly and powerfully, and when you’re working with real-life stories it’s important to tread the line between bald fact and sensationalism with more than a little sensitivity.
Take this spot for anti-sex trafficking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=BdW05BC4emw
It was shown in a very limited cinema run before heading online where it was passed from computer to computer at a hair-raising speed. It was deemed a bit too harrowing for TV, which is a shame as the more it’s seen the better the chance of some sort of legislative reaction.

“I am Elena,” was the idea of actress Emma Thompson and Dr Michael Korzinski, a director of the Helen Bamber Foundation, which works with survivors of torture and cruelty.
Elena is a real person, a patient of Dr Korzinski, and a former sex slave from Moldova. All the dialogue in the ad is based upon their dialogue and sessions with other rescued sex workers.

The ad was shot at Thompson's house, reputedly written in two hours and shot in three.
In the commercial we see Thompson’s face in close-up, shot from above. This combination produces a feeling of suffocation and unease as we are treated to what would be the perpetrator’s view of the situation. The film is as stark and stripped back as the script, which resonates with Thompson’s struggle between the duality of the Maria and Elena personalities that have been created within her mind and her repeated appeal, “Help me.”

If there is one criticism it’s that there is no final call to action, no number to call, website to visit or place to send support to. But then this was more probably aimed at politicians and governments than individuals so I’m probably just being overly fussy. It’s a powerful use of adland’s talents:
Following the launch of the commercial Thompson gave her time to
support the “Journey” installation, which recently appeared in front of London’s National Gallery.
“Journey” took seven rusting shipping containers, the kind often used for trafficking people, and lined Trafalgar Square for a week. Each container was presented by a different artist, and depicted elements in the life of a London sex slave. Most visitors to the installation left disturbed, if not downright unnerved.

Closer to home, both geographically and often emotionally, the VUKA! awards are in their tenth year, offering the chance for amateurs and professionals alike to bring a charity of their choice to the fore. Between them they have given a voice to the hundreds of thousands of non-government and charity organizations who rely on public exposure for fundraising and support.
Last years winners in the “best overall professional” category also produced a spot focusing on the horrors of human trafficking. Whilst it has none of the terror and outright bile rising forcefulness of “I am Elena,”
it does present a more local take on the problem, with the slightly older sister figure taking a young girl under her wing and convincing her to become a “model” in S.A. There is a great bit of acting when the older woman appears to reflect upon her actions, (as if she becomes aware sh is repeating something that had previously been done to her), as the message “no one to turn to” appears on a guy’s t-shirt.
Created by Louis Maass, Gift Manganyi and Alison Stansfield, of Saatchi Johannesburg, and directed by Amy Alais of Fresh Eye Films, it’s a thoughtful piece, see for yourself at: http://vuka.multichoice.co.za/winners_2007.asp

In September 2000, at the much-lauded United Nations Millennium Summit, world leaders agreed to the Millennium Development Goals.
An admirable set of time-bound and measurable goals for combating poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women around the world.

Whilst the governments have since hummed and hawed over the small print and their individual liability, many companies have joined forces crying out for a recognisable start to achieving these Millennium Development Goals. They include Oxfam, GCAP, Save the Children, Comic Relief, Engender Health, March of Dimes, 1Sky, CARE, Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation, Global Campaign for Education, Concern, ONE Campaign. Together they back the “inmyname” programme.

The deadline set by the world’s leaders was September 2015, by starting to act now these companies believe we might just achieve these goals in time.
The “inmyname” initiative created a series of commercials to prod governments into action. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLjUlptB6ZM&NR=1
Many are the usual famous talking heads stuff, there’s even the ubiquitous Bono sound-bite, but there is a lot more to “inmyname.”
With the magic of the user content/U-tube generation the campaign has already spread across the internet, you can now upload your own video and join the chorus of voices supporting the movement including John Legend, Scarlett Johansson and the intriguingly named Will.i.am.
Join in at http://www.youtube.com/user/inmyname

The one thing about charities that causes a lot of problems in adland is there are just so damned many of them. And while most of us will always try to get out there and do the right thing, unless our government steps up to the plate a bit and take responsibility for the less fortunate of our society it’s only a matter of time before even the most philanthropic amongst us has to start saying, “sorry I gave at the office.”

It's All In The Story

2008-10-10T03:08:00.000-07:00

Over a bowl of excellent tamarind prawns and banana blossom salad in deepest Saigon last week I was drawn into an odd conversation between two web designer blokes.
“This guy,” Stefan, the beardy bloke starts, “This guy grows up in a small town.”
“North or South?” asks Matt, ever the tubby pedant.
“South, South USA. Anyway, his dad is in prison for some undisclosed but really violent crime.”
“Like rape?”
“No, more like assault or something; his mother we don’t know anything about.”
“Shame.”
“His dad makes him promise not to go around causing trouble or he’d end up like him. But everyone in the town just thinks he’s just chicken, right.”
“I take it this is going somewhere?”
“It’s a tale of morality. So, anyway he marries some local girl.”
“Who likes chickens?”
“Yes, she thinks he’s a good man, the strong silent type perhaps. So they marry. Then one day while he’s at work..”
“What’s his name?”
“Errmm… Thomas, Tommy. Anyway he’s out at work and three local thugs break in and beat her up then take turns raping her.”
“Nice guys.”
“Yeh, they’re brothers.”
“Nice family.”
“Anyway he comes home and his wife is like sobbing and crying and stuff, so Tommy gets a bit annoyed.”
“As you would.”
“Exactly. So he turns his dad’s picture to the wall and heads off to the bar where these thugs hang out.”
“Dangerous stuff.”
“When he walks in they taunt him, calling him yellow and all that kind of stuff. So he turns around, but when he gets to the door something snaps and he locks the door.”
“Good man.”
“Then he beats the living shit out of all three brothers.”
“Nice twist.”
“Yeh, then in the final scene he apologises to his now dead dad for resorting to violence.”
“Hey, sometimes a man’s got to fight for what he stands for, right?”
They both take thoughtful bites out of their spring rolls and nod in agreement.

Balancing glass noodles on chopsticks is difficult at the best of times, so you’ll forgive me if it took me a while before I finally realised they had just walked me through the storyline of that country classic, “Coward of the County” by Mr Kenny Rogers. The strange thing was I never tried to stop them going to town, Ruby, sorry.
Actually, in a certain light Stefan looks like the country warbler, he should post his photo on-line; www.menwholooklikekennyrogers.com

Everyone loves a good story, especially one that’s well told.
Something light and frivolous, like the new VW Golf commercial where the guy borrows his wife’s dress in revenge for her nicking his car. It’s nicely cast and put together, although there is an odd shot as he runs into the park and appears to jump in the air for no real reason, maybe he’s just happy to be wearing a dress. Anyway, it’s another in the seemingly never ending line of excellently written tales from VW land.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzCqTasYCqY

Stories, like history, are open to interpretation, hidden meanings lurk everywhere and you don’t have to subscribe to every conspiracy theory to see the odd shadow within a shadow. But it doesn’t take much to go from idle questioner to full blown paranoia.

There’s a commercial by Graeme Hall and Gavin Siakimotu of DDB London that has more than an element of twitchiness about it. It starts out with a cinema usherette sitting in a chair talking to the camera about one of her favourite films and what it really means.
“Toy Story, it’s a meditation on the trials of puberty and sexuality. Andy has a, erm, “Woody” who comes to life whenever his mother goes out.
However, all is not quite what it seems, because Woody is in fact limp and ineffectual, particularly around Bo Peep, showing his sexual inadequacies.
So, suddenly Buzz appears, he is a shiny, 10 inch battery operated toy, and is guaranteed to take Bo Peep, and anyone else who comes along, to infinity and beyond.
It’s really a film about how, despite being occasionally limp and unresponsive, what men do provide is variety. They’re not going to be giving you the same thing over and over again like Buzz Lightyear is.”
The end titles read: “See Films Differently. Volkswagen Support Independent Cinema.” Neat eh? Track it down at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F30PYWYdkZ4

Of course, given the nature of adland these days, stories are more often told as a visual narrative. This can lead to some pretty strange tales bubbling out of your TV in the name of commercial enterprise.
The Australians, for instance, are currently being treated a delightful little number where we see people inside large balls of bubble-wrap. They bounce and cavort around the place, on streets, down car park ramps, in parks and on water. Besides evoking a definite sense of “Bugger the i-phone I want one of those right now,” it turns out to be a story about living without fear. A big thought, living without fear, presumably it’s an anti-crime message, or a cancer treatment story?.
Unfortunately the fear in this case is that your cell-phone might run out of airtime while you’re talking to your loved ones, or even spouse, so you should avoid this by switching to something called Hutchinson 3. (Something which, disappointingly, turned out to be nothing to do with door handles and oranges and instead a rather large service provider.)
It’s all very jolly and was put together beautifully by Paul Fishlock, Guy Lemberg and Justin Theng of The Campaign Palace, Sydney.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRf8XAZbYbY

Africa, naturally, is packed full of great stories. Tales of strength, of character, of pulling together and of winning against the odds. If anything, of pride. To call it a rich tapestry undersells it in so many ways. But not as badly as the seemingly endless versions of drivel we pump out locally when asked to portray our continent, the notion that everything north of Johannesburg is a 4th world wasteland waiting for S.A. to save it from itself.
If we can’t get it right here how can we really expect other continents to produce a true picture? Advertising, like any other form of media, cannot exist in a vacuum, no matter how cosy and self-serving it might be. A strong neighbour has responsibilities that have to be honoured or the smaller, less politically powerful nations will suffer in the shadows. I know, I was born in Canada where Kenny Rogers once topped the charts for 6 months straight. But that’s another story.

What Would Bill Think?

2008-10-10T03:07:00.000-07:00

"Logic and over-analysis can immobilize and sterilize an idea. It's like love -- the more you analyze it, the faster it disappears."
Sorry, it’s just that when you write about adland and its rich cornucopia of talent you will one day find yourself quoting Bill Bernbach, it just happens.

Just quickly, for those of you who spent the 20th century hanging with Franciscan monks in a silent up a mountain gig, William (Bill) Bernbach, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Bernbach), made advertising great.

There was a time when you couldn’t spit without hitting someone, usually someone in middle management, quoting Bill’s words. He was the source of so many epigrams you wondered how he got any work done at all, never mind create so many seminal pieces.
The reason I dig up the great man now, is that in a meeting last week someone quoted him, (the one that goes, “Advertising isn't a science. It's persuasion. And persuasion is an art.”), and everyone nodded sagely as if the Dalai Lama and Ghandi had just made a joint statement.

Bernbach, of course, was the first to declare that advertising was an art form, he also believed in the radical notion that the public had to be respected. This underlying respect would encourage favorable reactions to intelligent and imaginative advertising, he argued.

Or, inevitably, in his own words, "All of us who professionally use the mass media are the shapers of society. We can vulgarize that society. We can brutalize it. Or we can help lift it onto a higher level."

Noble ideas for shifting a bit of soap powder and a few German motors.

A bit of a late starter, he didn’t get his first copywriting job until 30, before he became the creative uberlord of DDB he was the consummate ad writer. While spawning his million quotes he, more importantly, created a thousand acolytes who carried the word according to Bernbach to the wider world, always asking, “What would Bill think?”

Even as pictures have become the modern temple creatives kneel att, luckily, there are still sufficient numbers carrying the word, those that understand a well turned phrase can move anything from mountains to hearts.
Mr Bernbach believed, “Advertising doesn't create a product advantage. It can only convey it." Say, for instance, you have the fastest internet connection around:
“A rabbit.
A rabbit genetically engineered and bred with a panther,
A rabbit genetically engineered and bred with a panther, with turbines attached,
A rabbit slash panther with turbines backed by an unusually strong tailwind, on ice,
The rabbit panther thingy with turbines and tailwind on ice shaved, with a cold forged high glide surgical razor,
The whole rabbit, panther turbine tailwind hairless scenario driven by an over-caffeinated fighter pilot, with a lead foot, all travelling down a ski-jump, in Switzerland, under better than ideal conditions…”

Doesn’t that make you want to see the ad? More importantly, want to try the product? It may not be Shakespeare but it could easily be Dylan, or Coldplay. The words do what they are designed to, they torment you, if you’re in the room you’re going to look up and see what they’re on about. You might even pop in from the kitchen. Believe me, the visuals are as curiously dynamic as the words.
As Bill put it, "Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling."
Created by Goodby Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco and directed by Noam Murro, you won’t want to miss this, if you’ve got a pulse it’ll make you laugh.
http://motionographer.com/media/biscuit/ComcastRabbit640.mov

Of course even the most masterly crafted script can be improved upon by a great read. At the risk of populating this column with dead guys, Don LaFontaine “The Movie Voice Guy” read his final scrip last week.
You’d recognize his voice from over 5000 film trailers and ads including Independence Day, 24 and T1, T2, and T3. His voice lived in a curious space in recording world where its tone cut through even the loudest pyrotechnics, something that made him invaluable to the more explosive modern film makers.
One of his crowning moments was the self-parodying title sequence to “The Comedian” a Jerry Seinfeld film, relive it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgMUYlDz4uc

Copywriters used to be the intellectuals of adland. Some of the cleverest people with the smartest degrees wandered the halls of the world’s agencies dripping with learning and encyclopedic knowledge, idly tossing off one crossword after another.

Ten years of Googling has now made everyone experts. The gap between knowing and understanding expands with every click as the need to immerse ourselves in a specialist subject is overwhelmed by the opportunity to skim the surface of the knowledge pool. But then advertising is after all a mirror of society and it’s no good us moaning the demise of long copy ads pulsating with sub-poetic cadence and rich with little known facts if the people don’t want to read it.

Many of the truly talented writers simply extended their thinking onto TV commercials. You must have seen the ad for Exclusive Books where the guy goes for an interview and narrates the experience, it’s beautifully paced and worked. Put together by Ogilvy Johannesburg creatives Catherine Conradie, Mike Groenwald, Fran Luckin and Gerry Human and shot by Michael Middleton of “Jump” it’s at:
http://video.aol.com/video-detail/exclusive-books-fanatics-book-club-interview/966290411

And finally, because some ads just speak for themselves, If you have never seen it, catch “Survivor” parody their own mega hit “Eye of the Tiger” for Starbucks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14qeu7JRwt0
as refreshing a pick me up as any double full-caff mocha-latte with a twist. What would Bill have said? "An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it." Exactly.

Mediocrity Kills

2008-10-10T03:06:00.000-07:00

Some of my best friends are in Client Service, the best man at my wedding is, and hardly a week passes when I don’t remind him of it. Many of the brightest people I know are involved in advertising, in agencies, as clients, buying media. Even in client service. Sorry. Sometimes it just slips out. This inbred antipathy, god knows where it comes from I suppose it’s really just the old “actually why not shoot the messenger?” thing. I know it’s old fashioned and tedious, but someone has to take the blame for an agency’s cock-ups, and let’s face it it’s not going to be the creatiives.
What a pleasure. To sit in a meeting and watch someone else do their job not only professionally, but with obvious enjoyment and to be very good at it.
Selling ads to clients is notoriously fraught with pot-holes; you’re balancing a million egos, not only across the table but back in the ever suspicious agency creative department. I really do wish this moment wasn’t so rare it needed commenting upon. It’s not easy being part of the client service department, crammed full of account managers, suits or bag carriers, as they have affectionately been known over the years. Those whose job it is to interface on a daily basis with our beloved clients.
I love advertising, I love the challenges that each new brief brings. As that infamous American adland geezer Jerry Della Femina put it, “I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.” Then again he did once write a book called “From those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbour,” (Pocket Books. ISBN 0-671-78052-2).
Damn it, it's fun. Okay, it's not a nine to five job, it really is, as our dear American cousins would say, 24/7. (Did we always speak like this? The first time I noticed was after 9/11 then the UK had 7/7, is it really so hard to say a whole word out loud? Anyway I’m tired of counting months on my fingers, it’s a tad wearing.)
My fairness alarm is flashing, so I should point out that the best, most intuitive client servicers will often be right, because they really know their stuff. Not, as many of them assume, by mouthing the sad old line, “I know my client,” something that really means, “don’t make me ask the client to do something different from the dullness I’ve trained him for,” but by really understanding what the clients’ business.
Unfortunately there are people in adland who believe they have a proper job, worse, a career. They’re growing in numbers; these job journeymen, spreading the mediocrity of their tiny minds, covering their inabilities with layers of bureaucracy and petty excuses. Dammit they’re spoiling my fun.
A few years ago, when these things were in vogue, I was invited by my then boss to take part in a little socio-experiment. Myself and the rest of the creative dept, around 15 unwashed, dishevelled types with dangerous hair and undisciplined wiles, were to swap jobs with an equal number in account handling. The ugly beast called Team Building had sidled into our lives, never to totally slain.
The purpose of the exercise, we were informed, was to gain appreciation of the complexities of each others contributions to the agency as a whole and thereby engender a new level of mutual respect, a spirit of espri d corp, if you will.
Well it was a hoot. The creatives, briefed to dress smart, wandered round preening their Paul Smith suits, black, obviously, complete with deconstructed white shirts hanging loosely, like Reservoir Dogs rejects. The de-suited suits dressed down in that studied manner of people unused to casual wear, with Pringle jumpers draped over shoulders and Woolies camouflage trousers pressed with sleek creases razor sharp down each leg.
We bumbled around for a week writing terrible briefs full of pointed recommendations, littered with phrases like “The headline should be something like…” and “The visual could be…”
Which the ex-suits neatly sidestepped, before producing ads full of such excruciatingly painful bad jokes and ludicrously tortuous analogies they would make a grown client weep.
Well, needless to say everyone involved couldn’t wait for the week to end and get back to our own designated corner. And it worked, there was a genuine respect for each others abilities, a feeling of “how do you do that so well?” combined with more than a touch of “rather you than me.”
And it lasted at least till lunch.
No matter what the HR gurus and well meaning management do to tear down, mess about with and generally bugger up the existing hierarchies in adland, good ideas still manage to slip out into the glaring light of consumerville.

The new Hovis Bread commercial is one of those epics that turn up every few months. This one takes the long established line “As good today as it’s always been,” (made famous in the 70’s and 80’s by CDP’s “Top of the world” ad http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFLBvLxLJMI,
allegedly directed by Ridley Scott when he was still an adland art director), and plays it out across a 122 years of history.
It is beautifully shot and achieved without too much post-prod magic and a lot of superb timing. It was put together by MCBD of London, shot by Ringan Ledwidge of Rattling Stick and is all rather nice indeed, have a look yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_suyZb5mDk

For sheer fun and watchability it’s hard to beat the Britvic Drench commercial, created by Ewan Patterson of CHI, it takes two legendary icons, Brains from Thunderbirds and the 90’s dancefloor classic “Rhythm is a dancer”, and combines in them a 90 second magical spot.
It’s not just a very funny and frivolous piece of creative whimsy however, it’s based in a serious bit of strategic thinking; “Your brain’s 75% water.
Brains perform best when they’re hydrated. Britvic Drench. Stay drenched.” See it at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nATEqsvXl1k&feature=user

The KFC commercial where the kid and the father meet at breakfast, one getting up for work one going to bed is played very well. It’s based in what they used to call “A human truth” and makes me smile whatever time I see it.

Crap, too, slips out into the world on a surprisingly regular basis. That strange Standard Bank Corporate Investment commercial, (sorry, I can’t find a link to it anywhere), is simply drivel.
Okay so it’s not badly shot, (if you like your ads full of 80’s strutting business people in trench coats looking like they’ve saved the world), but have you ever stopped and listened to the platitudes the poor voice over is forced to mouth? I hope not or you’ll presumably still be banging your head against a wall somewhere. I can’t even quote it as my brain shuts down every time it comes on. I think I need a couple of litres of Drench.

Hubble, bubble toil & trouble…

2008-10-10T03:05:00.000-07:00

When I’m out drinking with my civilian friends any question to do with adland is hastily diverted in my direction.

Which is just what happened the other night over a quiet couple of Stellas down the Brazen Head when, during a lull in the middle order collapse of the Proteas, we were treated to the new Mutual & Federal commercial in all its glory.

As I attempted to explain, it’s a classic example of a creative team discovering a technique somewhere, usually these days on U-tube, and rubbing it liberally over a flimsy idea. In this case it’s the old super slow motion exploding water that takes centre-stage.

Fish tanks and windows burst slowly asunder emptying their contents on various unsuspecting actors, it’s all very nicely shot and stuck together.

They also employ that other adland stalwart of creating your own language to fit the situation. Here they’ve created something called a “Short Moment”.
Like my bar room acquaintances you may well ask, “what the hell is a "Short Moment?””.

“A Short Moment,” according to the Facebook competition developed by the agency to extend the campaign through new meeja: (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=33385817834 ) “is an instance that could occur at any time, and which is usually, but not always outside the control of the individual(s) involved. It is a moment when something happens that could result in you having to claim from your short term insurance policy.”
Personally I would contend that a short moment is an excruciating misuse of the English language designed for the sole tenuous reason of squeezing in the hardly scintillating campaign line: “And that's the long and the short of it.”
Anyway, it’s a nice use of exploding water imagery and an interesting move by a usually more staid client.

Which is probably what TBWA in Belguim thought last year when they employed the exact same technique to develop their idea for Telenet - a Belgium Internet Provider. Entitled “The Fly” seeks to show that digital TV is “great in every little detail.”

Although they do employ a very nifty fly and a seriously pointy needle the affect, or is that effect, is much the same, lots of very slow moving water.
Catch this admirable piece of work at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhjyWnT-rr8

For truly great use of the technique, however, the grand daddy, or grand pop, of them all has to be the commercial George Patterson Y&R, Melbourne have recently put together for their Scwheppes client.
Using our now old friends, the balloon full of water, ultra high speed, hi-definition film, (bursting into life at a breathtaking 10 000 frames per second), and some serious lighting, they created the cunningly entitled ‘Burst’.
A single-minded spot that brings to life the central core message of all Schweppes branding, its very “Schweppervescense”, as Creative Director Ben Coulson puts it.
The Director, Garth Davis said: "This campaign is one of those rare gems. It’s not very often in a commercial realm, you can be truly artistic.”
Rather than pour cold water upon such high ideals I suggest you have a look for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRFfJJjLpqw .

By now you’ll be expecting me to make some cutting comment about copycat concepts and the lack of originality in many ads. But is originality really the bedrock of genius? Is there not something to be said for adaption and integration? It can be a lot tougher call than you might expect.

The three commercials mentioned above for instance. Three totally different clients, insurance, internet connectivity and fizzy drinks; three different analogies drawn from the same technique, unexpected accidents, details within details and, erm, fizzyness. All we can really accuse them of is employing a common visual treatment, a bit like noting that Citizen Kane and Casablanca were a tad film noire, maybe.

Originality, clients clamour for it. “Give us something new” they say, “something brave and original, oh and funny, like the Nando’s stuff.”
Someone from the agency dutifully writes down “something original, like the Nando’s campaign…” and feeds it into the system.
Sometime, always too soon, there’s a client meeting where the new campaign is shown. “It’s a bit like the Nando’s campaign isn’t it?’ ” One client says, “But not as funny, or brave,” pipes up another, finishing with that most hated phrase, “Let’s face it, it’s been done before.”

As the sadly late and often great ad man Paul Arden used to say to us lads over half a pint of Adnams Best in the Carpenters, “If you’re going to steal, steal big…It’s not where an idea comes from, it’s where you take it to that counts.” He’d expound, fearlessly stealing from Antoine de Saint Exupéry.

Or as the art critic John Sloan put it in “Gist of Art” in 1939, “Don't be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody. Witness Shakespeare and Rembrandt. They borrowed from the technique of tradition and created new images by the power of their imagination and human understanding. Little men just borrow from one person. Assimilate all you can from tradition and then say things in your own way.”

Adland people have long been surprisingly self-critical of perceived idea theft, something that often makes me wonder if this happens in other fields of creativity? Did Robert Ludlum have someone standing over his shoulder muttering. “A spy who loses his memory? Bob, Bob, Bob, come on, that’s been done, and by the way, why do all your book titles start with “The?” Or Alex Fergeson telling a young Beckham, you don’t want to bend it in the corner Dave, you did that last week, they’ve seen it before laddie.”

Of course the honourable theories of imitation being flattering and all that tend to crumble under of pressures of the banality of reality. Lazy people don’t borrow, they copy, untalented journeymen are not inspired by other people’s work they rape the original and create a shallow, two-dimensional facsimile.

The difference between the real thing and the poor copy is often glaring, as you’ll notice if you catch Gabriella Cilmi’s – “Sweet about me” video. (I’d give you the U-tube link but it’s really not worth it).
Imagine Amy Winehouse cleaned up, polished and dipped in a bucket of saccharine, Gabriella is a PR man’s version of raunchy talent.
“There’s nothing sweet about me,” she warbles, with about as much baddass street cred as Julie Andrews on a Swiss mountaintop.

Of course Amy, unlike her ever expanding list of doppelgangers, can write incisive lyrics, a catchy tune and she can carry it off perfectly with a certain unique trashiness. But I would hate to burst their bubbles.

When Old Is New

2008-10-10T03:03:00.000-07:00

When Old Is New.
I’m getting old. I can tell because more and more ads seem irrelevant to my life, sorry my “life-style”, whatever that is.
Coming from a generation where “I (HEART) N.Y.” was one contraction too many, being assaulted by SMS-speak at every turn makes me downright queasy. It’s not that I don’t get it, even I have slipped the odd “u”, “btw” and “omg” into a late night message, if only to avoid repetitive strain syndrome on my ageing thumb.
It’s not just this dyslexic abbreviation that worries me, although I’d hardly be the first to note that reducing language to the lowest common denominator means that everyone can understand you but you aren’t able to say what you mean. Would Shakespeare have been the same if Richard III had exclaimed “ggggUK4gg.” Maybe it would.
Anyway, what’s bothering me I think is a lack of love, under appreciation, the feeling of no longer being the centre of attention, which has always been my birthright.
You see, I’m a Baby Boomer, one of those people who exploded into being between 01 January 1946 and 31 December 1964. We were the first to grow up embedded in the mass media, the first of the “ME, ME, ME,” generations, and the first to be the target of every modern marketer in the world.
We were the first to have our buying habits shaped by TV, radio and other mass media in such an obvious and often painfully blatant way.
The first 45 years were easy. They could sell us any new fad that came along from blue jeans to stretch jeans to black jeans, stiletto shoes, platforms and running shoes for walking around in. Together we created the consumer generation.
Then we grew up, well some of us, something that advertisers decided to ignore. We were locked out of the target market, banished from media Eden, as younger, fitter, and fresher buyers stepped into our Jimmy Choo’s and Doc Martins.
Which is a shame, because I’m just about hitting my stride in the shopping stakes, and I’m far from alone.
For example, 95 percent of advertising is still aimed at the under-35s when the average age of a Porsche owner is 49 and a Harley Davidson rider 52.
Baby Boomers are not going into retirement quietly.
The reality is that we started aging all together and it shows, and we’re still the most powerful demographic in society. We’ve gotten to the age where now we know what the world really looks like and how to get the best out of it.
Take Melanie Ulricksen of Greenpoint, for example, she likes being 53 and likes the way she looks. What she doesn't like are the pleas and products trying to make her look younger.
"I don't want to be 55 trying to look like I'm 35. Give me something that just makes what I have look nicer," she said.
Some Brands have responded, the cosmetics giant Revlon launched what it calls the first mass makeup line specifically for women over 50, called Vital Radiance.
"It is a large group of women," said Stephanie Peponis, Revlon's chief marketing officer. "It is growing all the time. I think they are underserved today."
Baby boomers have reshaped what it means to grow older. Compared with our parents, boomers are healthier, better educated and living well into their 80s and beyond. The increasing lifespan has given us the chance to reinvent ourselves and pursue new passions at any age.
Look along any South African Beach, every second pair of Nike are carrying someone over 50, and every one of them is a gold card carrying consumer used to the luxury end of the market.
They also drive decent sized cars, Audi’s, Lexus and BMW’s. Which makes me wonder what relevance the latest wonderfully crafted BMW commercial from Ireland Davenport has to them. It’s pretty, it talks about holding your breath in a curiously Scandinavian sounding voice, and it draws a tortuous analogy between using oxygen sparingly and saving petrol. It was shot in Egypt. As I say, it’s pretty. I’m repeating myself, maybe I’m getting senile, and maybe they’re right to ignore the biggest spending segment of their consumer base?
Still even this carelessness is nothing compared to the outright stupidity of those campaigns that show us fumbling to get our new cell-phones to function properly and being baffled by technology. (Who the hell invented this stuff anyway- it wasn’t some spotty kid, well ok, it was but they were spotty baby boomer kids).
More thoughtful Brands response seek to provide options specifically tailored for a market who have been part of every fashion trend for over 40 years, without making them look ridiculous.
Nike, for instance, launched an ad campaign focusing on "real" women - one that celebrates big butts, thunder thighs, and "shoulders that aren't dainty," (AdAge.)
The campaign is a direct assault on the growing number of people with real bodies, carrying many triggers that we are all familiar with.
They are authoritative and bold, and importantly in this market, with a bite of humour.
The six different images represent six different parts of the body, including an ad that shows a well-rounded bum and copy that reads: “My Butt is big and round like the letter C, and 10,000 lunges have made it rounder but not smaller. And that’s just fine. It’s a space heater for my side of the bed. It’s my ambassador. To those who walk behind me, it’s a border collie that herds skinny women away from the best deals at clothing sales. My butt is big and that’s just fine. And those who might scorn it are invited to kiss it.”
Now that’s advertising.
The N.Y. based Trends Research Institute notes that between 2005 and 2030, the Baby Boomers will become the dominant growth area in consumerism as they reach 60 and over. The sector will grow by 81%, vastly overshadowing the remaining adult market (18-59 years of age) which will grow by only 7%.
Even acknowledging that any number of figures that can be made to dance to any tune, this is a significant market to ignore.
Wander through Sandton City or The Waterfront, those beautifully tailored pockets aren’t bulging with guns, (well not all of them), they’re packed with spending power, and if your Brand is talking to the Baby Boomers, then we’re more than happy to hear from you. And if you don’t we’ll just sulk and buy someone else’s toys instead. Lol.