Why Does Everyone In Advertising Have These Trainers?

Some kind of meme, I suppose.

Women Take It In The Face For A Brand

This web film for Polaroid Glasses is maybe over-long and familiar (objects getting whacked in slo-mo) but there's an integrity to the cod science that I like. It's a bit cheeky too.

Hidden Gems Of D&AD

So the Annual's been out a few days now, I've had a sift through.

Not too painful this time. There's an unbelievable amount of non-UK work in there, which doesn't have the power to upset me like a great ad by someone I know does.

Anyway, here's my hidden gems - ads that were not multi-award winners at all the big shows, but which nevertheless are, in my opinion, great.

(You may need to click on some of the images to make them bigger)

Topical, hilarious. Love it. And I'm a vegetarian.



A profound thought, about peace being fragile. And very poignant images. Plus I love the contrast of making a hand grenade out of something as gentle and staid as Wedgewood.



I've always loved really detailed, complex images. The autistic side of the male brain, I suppose.



Death is always funny.



I think this is my favourite one of all. It's unbelievably cheeky, and yet unarguable. In case you can't read the small type, the idea is this: the South African anti-piracy organisation made their own pirate DVD's, and sold them at markets. But their videos stopped after five minutes. And then displayed an anti-piracy message, and a 'thank you for your donation to the anti-piracy cause' tag. What a gotcha.




Finally, this one's from my good friends at Lunar BBDO. Surprising, and appropriately shocking. 'Nuff rispeck, guys.

Nike Judge The Mood Just Right

It's England v South Africa in the Rugby World Cup tonight, our most important match for 4 years.

I love this Nike tactical ad, scanned from today's Sport magazine.

A manly yet honest thought - "Yes, we're going to lose, but we can at least go down fighting" and an awesomely bombastic 'they shall not pass' -type image.

One thing though. Lawrence Dallaglio is gurning something rotten, like he's just dropped a couple of E's. I do hope he hasn't.

Tuesday Tip No.25 - Look Creative

Whenever I raise this topic, I seem to get a defensive reaction.

Along the lines of "no one gives a shit what you wear" or "that's a silly thing to care about."

But is it?
In any job, what you wear is vital - it helps establish your credentials.

We of all people should know that, because we're experts at presenting brands in the best possible light. So why do we never think about how we're presenting ourselves?

And it's especially important in a business like advertising, because what we do is largely subjective. No one knows for sure if your idea is any good or not. The main thing that will convince them is you telling them it is great. And if you look creative - i.e. you just look like the kind of person who has good ideas - then that will make a difference.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting you go out and buy a 'uniform'. (Although if truth be told, there is one).

There's more than one way to look creative. Pick the one that's right for you.

'Writer' With A Capital WWear this kind of gear and no one will ever re-work your headlines. And they will automatically think the dialogue in your TV commercials is brilliant.


TrendyThis look says "I know what's hot right now." How can an account team question your choice of track for a commercial, when you look like this?


ArtyBecome unassailable on all matters relating to typography.


Okay, these are extreme examples, but I hope I'm making my point. Please don't think I'm being tongue-in-cheek here, because I'm not.

How you look does make a difference. Make it make a difference in your favour.

P.S. Yes I know it's Wednesday today, I was very tired last night

Tip No.24 - Don't Be Afraid To Ask
Tip No.23 - Your Idea Has To Be 120%
Tip No.22 - Read Iain's Tips
Tip No.21 - Don't Behave
Tip No.20 - How To Discuss Ideas
Tip No.19 - Read Hugh's Tips
Tip No.18 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part IV - How To Turn A Placement Into A Job
Tip No.17 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part III - How To Approach Agencies (re-print of Tip No. 7)
Tip No.16 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part II - How To Put A Book Together
Tip No. 15 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part I - FAQ
Tip No. 14 - Make Friends With Traffic
Tip No. 13 - Get Reference
Tip No. 12 - Don't Stop Too Soon
Tip No.11 - Be Very
Tip No.10 - Breaking Up
Tip No.9 - Working Well With Your Partner
Tip No.8 - Finding The Right Partner
Tip No.7 - How To Approach Agencies
Tip No.6 - Never-Seen-Before Footage
Tip No.5 - Dicketts' Finger
Tip No.4 - Two Blokes In The Pub
Tip No.3 - Play Family Fortunes
Tip No.2 - Should You Take A Bad Job?
Tip No.1 - Don't Overpolish

Cadbury's Gorilla - How Viral Is He?

In today's Media Guardian, Naresh Ramchandani offers a smart write-up on the drummer du jour.

I particularly like the way he answers some of the ad's plannery critics by quoting the rather less highbrow language of the YouTube commenters - "Dis adverts funni." "Best ad ever." "Love this ad made me laugh proper bad hee hee."

However, his article is headlined "How a gorilla and chocolate bar went superviral."

Have they?

The most popular version of the ad on YouTube has only 10,101 views.

Admittedly, the score is fragmented because several people have posted the ad. But what's going on?

A Second Cracker Already

Just a few days since the drumming gorilla, and already, another cracking TV ad.

Yes, it's from my agency so you could accuse me of favouritism if you want. I don't care, I think it's brilliant... even though it makes me look bad 'cos it's so much better than the last Vodafone ad, the one I did.

It's a clever idea (written by Nick Gill, who has more good ideas in a month than most of us do in a career), beautifully shot (great job by Frederic Planchon) and it's a long time since I've seen a commercial as genuinely romantic. The last example might be that animated French AIDS ad.

Anyway, here it is.

Okay, So There's Another Ad With A Drumming Gorilla

Did Juan nick the idea? And if yes, is that a problem?

In my opinion, he's probably never seen it, and it's definitely not a problem.

Why? Because an idea is not the same thing as a piece of film. An idea is the connection between the images and the product.

Example: take the footage for Guinness 'Surfer', and change the endframe to 'Visit Cornwall' (Note for non-Brits, Cornwall is a UK surfing destination). Now the ad is predictable and quite shit. Because what makes it great is (among other things) the unexpected connection between surfing and Guinness.

The connection between a drumming gorilla and a shop having a sale is quite unexpected, I grant you. Actually I quite like the ad, though the execution is v. shonky. But it's nowhere near as interesting - or dare I say it profound - as the link Juan creates between a drumming gorilla and a bar of chocolate.

This Is So Good I'm Not Even Angry

Here is the new Cadburys Dairy Milk ad, by Juan Cabral at Fallon London.

It is so obviously brilliant, I don't think there's any need to do a Private View-style description of what makes it brilliant.

But it does beg the question - "what does an agency have to be like, to produce work like this?"

Well, here's the Fallon model:

1. Great planning. Someone has to have the balls to say 'Cadburys Dairy Milk = Joy And That's It'. A big, simple, unitary, true, thought. It's that easy, Planners. And that difficult.

2. A culture that says "the creatives are always right." This ad would have been incredibly difficult to sell, let's not be under any illusions about that. At the vast majority of agencies, the account people would refuse to even present it to the client. So creatives end up not writing breakthrough ads in the first place; they know there's no point. But at Fallon, the culture dictates that the account handlers have to persuade the clients to do what the creatives want, rather than vice versa. The culture says "the creatives are always right".

3. The creatives actually have to be right, time after time. Seems at Fallon, they are.

The Ad Blog Charts For August 2007

Here are the world's most popular ad blogs, as measured by traffic rankings from Alexa.

Top 25 Ad Blogs		(world
		ranking)
1     (1)	AdRants	28,723
2     (2)	Advertising/Design Goodness	49,570
3     (3)	Adverbox	62,866
4     (4)	Adverblog	70,064
5     (5)	AdFreak	73,487
6     (6)	Duncan's TV Ad Land	78,545
7     (9)	Ad Punch	125,593
8     (7)	Logic + Emotion	127,410	↓
9     (10)	Adland	137,651
10   (12)	Copyranter	140,324	↑
11   (11)	AdPulp	140,668
12     (8)	Coloribus	146,898	↓
13   (13)	Jaffe Juice	222,840
14   (14)	Twenty Four	264,031
15   (15)	How Advertising Spoiled Me	356,592	↓
16   (16)	AdScam	357,618
17   (20)	Experience Curve	373,782
18   (17)	Make The Logo Bigger	399,741
19   (19)	BrandFlakes for Breakfast	403,513
20   (18)	AdArena	406,765
21   (23)	Hee-Haw Marketing	414,772
22   (re-)	Advertising For Peanuts	438,273
23   (22)	American Copywriter	459,612
24   (21)	Beyond Madison Avenue	518,555	↓
25   (24)	Welcome To Optimism	569,585	↓

Brilliant to see Copyranter in the Top 10. He's a god, isn't he? An angry god.

An ↑ means a blog's traffic has gone up by 15% or more in the past month, and a ↓ means it's gone down 15%.

Top 10 UK Ad Blogs		(world
		ranking)
1   (1)	Welcome To Optimism	569,585	↓
2   (4)	Adliterate	621,484
3   (3)	Scamp	630,337
4   (2)	FishNChimps	636,110	↓
5   (5)	Crackunit	656,933	↑
6   (6)	Faris	767,712
7   (7)	Northern Planner	1.1m
8   (new)	Serendipity Book	1.4m
9   (10)	TV's Worst Adverts	1.5m
10   (8)	Living Brands	1.5m

New in at No.8 this month is the wonderful Serendipity Book by Lee McEwan. Well worth clicking on over.

UK means UK-based. Ad blog means ad blogs not marketing blogs, so that excludes Gapingvoid. Paul Colman doesn't class Life In The Middle as an ad blog and Russell Davies no longer blogs about advertising. Much. Also, I'm only counting English language blogs.

If I've missed anyone out, please tell me and I'll put them in next month.

Permanent Advertising

An extremely sad person has had adverts tattooed on his skin, and apparently is making good money from it. Story here.

Thanks to Doc Rogers for the tip.

Tuesday Tip No. 24 - Don’t Be Afraid To Ask

When you’re a junior and you’re in the process of making an ad, whether it be TV, radio or print, and you’re sitting in a sound/editing/retouching studio, it's easy to feel pressured into saying ‘yes that’s looking good’, when your inner voice is thinking, ‘hmmm... i’m not sure... something doesn't feel right.’

Just come out and say it. Even if you’re not sure what’s wrong, it's better to register your concern there and then, rather than let it go. Because if you don’t, it’ll niggle at you, and you may regret it later.

And quite often... that little inner voice is right.

Thanks to RM for this one

Tip No.23 - Your Idea Has To Be 120%
Tip No.22 - Read Iain's Tips
Tip No.21 - Don't Behave
Tip No.20 - How To Discuss Ideas
Tip No.19 - Read Hugh's Tips
Tip No.18 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part IV - How To Turn A Placement Into A Job
Tip No.17 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part III - How To Approach Agencies (re-print of Tip No. 7)
Tip No.16 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part II - How To Put A Book Together
Tip No. 15 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part I - FAQ
Tip No. 14 - Make Friends With Traffic
Tip No. 13 - Get Reference
Tip No. 12 - Don't Stop Too Soon
Tip No.11 - Be Very
Tip No.10 - Breaking Up
Tip No.9 - Working Well With Your Partner
Tip No.8 - Finding The Right Partner
Tip No.7 - How To Approach Agencies
Tip No.6 - Never-Seen-Before Footage
Tip No.5 - Dicketts' Finger
Tip No.4 - Two Blokes In The Pub
Tip No.3 - Play Family Fortunes
Tip No.2 - Should You Take A Bad Job?
Tip No.1 - Don't Overpolish

Why No Scamp For A Bit

That Thriller Video

Is it more sinister than it appears?

Tuesday Tip - Your Idea Has To Be 120%

I owe this one to Andrew Fraser, formerly of DDB London, now ECD at Rapier.

I once showed an idea to Andrew - I think it was a print ad for The Guardian - and what he said was: "Yes, it's fine, it's good, it works."

But his tone of voice was a 'no'.

I asked what the problem was.

He replied: "Your idea has to be 120%, to survive the weakening."

I learned a good lesson that day. Here is a diagram of what I think he meant.



Tip No.22 - Read Iain's Tips
Tip No.21 - Don't Behave
Tip No.20 - How To Discuss Ideas
Tip No.19 - Read Hugh's Tips
Tip No.18 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part IV - How To Turn A Placement Into A Job
Tip No.17 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part III - How To Approach Agencies (re-print of Tip No. 7)
Tip No.16 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part II - How To Put A Book Together
Tip No. 15 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part I - FAQ
Tip No. 14 - Make Friends With Traffic
Tip No. 13 - Get Reference
Tip No. 12 - Don't Stop Too Soon
Tip No.11 - Be Very
Tip No.10 - Breaking Up
Tip No.9 - Working Well With Your Partner
Tip No.8 - Finding The Right Partner
Tip No.7 - How To Approach Agencies
Tip No.6 - Never-Seen-Before Footage
Tip No.5 - Dicketts' Finger
Tip No.4 - Two Blokes In The Pub
Tip No.3 - Play Family Fortunes
Tip No.2 - Should You Take A Bad Job?
Tip No.1 - Don't Overpolish

Two New Creative Blogs

Oh happy day.

Where's My Jetpack has been around for a while, and I really should have linked to him before.

Mr. Jetpack is a copywriter in what he calls the Sub South (Deeper than the Deep South) of the U.S.

In a great post about billboards, called "No One Is Writing Down Your Number", he points out that no one EVER wrote down a phone number while they were travelling in a moving vehicle. Furthermore, you don't need to put www. in front of a word that ends with .com or .org or .biz - it's totally obvious you're talking about a web address. Quite right. He provides a telling before-and-after using the Jetpack method.



The second new creative blog is The Toad Stool by a New York-based copywriter/creative director.

Toad, as he styles himself, has a nicely snarky tone to his blog, and brings us this funny story about the sadness of Second Life:

In real life Mr. Hoogenstraat is an aging hippie who suffers from diabetes and chronic joblessness, in Second Life he is a muscular young entrepreneur with a fortune of some 1.5 million Linden (SL’s virtual currency) and a hot young Second Life wife. (Mr. Hoogenstraat’s SL avatar married a female avatar in a ceremony that was attended by several dozen other avatars. Really.) Mr. Hoogenstraat is able to “employ” a virtual security guard for one of his virtual malls. Which means that someone is logging on to SL to pretend to be a mall security guard.

I doubt we'll ever catch the Planners, but it's good to see more Creatives tapping away out there.

Clients Sabotage Their Own Ads

Say readers of this blog.


I asked a couple of clients of my acquaintance to defend themselves. Here's what "Anonymous Female Client" said:

So clients are to blame according to a poll amongst advertising creatives...now there's a surprise!

In reality I think everyone's a little bit to blame when an ad goes wrong, but to even out the scores I'm
going to vote for account management.

Account management is one of the most undervalued roles in an agency. You have to be a revolving ball - representing the client to creative and creative to the client. They have to be a mediator and negotiator. They have to communicate and provide the clarity which prevents the need for compromise on either side later on (when it is often too late). It's not an easy job. But I would say that poor account management skills are often to blame when ads don't turn out the way you want them to be.

And this is what an account-man turned client known as "Boggy" had to say:

Planners always take the credit when a campaign has been proven to be effective (but then it's them who's collated all the evidence), so you could argue that they should take the rap when it is ineffective.  If only it was that easy.

Each department has a different role in the ad process. The thing is, ineffective advertising can come if any part of that process breaks down.  Creatives can seduce teams and clients into buying the wrong creative, planners can deliver the wrong strategy, account men can fail to protect the idea from worried clients, and clients can get any part of their bit wrong at any stage.  The trouble is, its easy for creatives to blame clients, because ultimately it's they who buy the work, or fail to buy the obviously brilliant idea that they should have bought.  

In an ideal world, clients should get the work they deserve - brave clients should get great work and dull clients get crap work.  We all know, however, that that is rarely the case.  Plenty of brave clients have been sold short by poor work, and supposedly dull clients have had very effective work (Cillit Bang anyone?).

Long answer to say that there is no one culprit, but perhaps a plea for agencies to understand a bit better the pressure a client is under buying work. 

The process most commonly breaks down when the client doesn't trust the agency.  That can be because he loses faith in the creative, or disagrees with the strategy, or feels that the agency is just interested in awards/glory, or because under time pressure, the battle lines become drawn when there is no time to debate the issues or search for alternative approaches.

Clients often ask for alternatives to give them confidence that there will be at least a viable solution, whereas agencies always want the one perfect solution.  This creates tension, and this can cause the trust/faith to break down.  If agencies accepted the reality of the need for alternatives, and managed the situation from that reality, then they could probably avoid clients forcing the wrong solution due to fear..  Also, creatives should learn to talk to clients as partners in the process, and not the enemy - this will help build the trust/faith/understanding!

My own view? I don't blame account management that much. Yes, maybe sometimes they fail to sell a great campaign. But not often. I think creatives like to believe that everything they come up with is brilliant. It isn't.

Clients sometimes play things too safe, and buy the more conservative of two routes, or water work down, so that it ends up being too boring for consumers to be interested in. So they must take some blame too.

But the group that must shoulder the most blame, in my opinion, is the Planners. And surely this is fair? Effectiveness is their explicit responsibility. And it is the strategy that makes the work work, or not work (the power of the creative acts as a kind of amplifier, in most categories).

Sorry, Planners.

I still love you.

Giant Fucking Rabbits Are Coming

As seen on Talent Imitates Genius Steals

Tuesday Tip - Read Iain's Tips

It would be remiss of me - nay, positively neglectful - if I failed to include The Seven Deadly Sins Of Digital (by Iain Tait from his Crackunit blog) as part of my Tuesday Tips series.

To be a successful creative you need more than just talent, Converse trainers, and the hide of a bullet-proofed rhinoceros.

You also need knowledge. Not a lot. But some.

And the most important knowledge you need is a comprehensive knowledge of what has already been done.

Why? Quite simply, so you know what not to do.

Iain Tait's 7 Deadly Sins is a wonderful primer for that. Make sure you've read it.

Tip No.21 - Don't Behave
Tip No.20 - How To Discuss Ideas
Tip No.19 - Read Hugh's Tips
Tip No.18 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part IV - How To Turn A Placement Into A Job
Tip No.17 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part III - How To Approach Agencies (re-print of Tip No. 7)
Tip No.16 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part II - How To Put A Book Together
Tip No. 15 - How To Get A Job In Advertising Part I - FAQ
Tip No. 14 - Make Friends With Traffic
Tip No. 13 - Get Reference
Tip No. 12 - Don't Stop Too Soon
Tip No.11 - Be Very
Tip No.10 - Breaking Up
Tip No.9 - Working Well With Your Partner
Tip No.8 - Finding The Right Partner
Tip No.7 - How To Approach Agencies
Tip No.6 - Never-Seen-Before Footage
Tip No.5 - Dicketts' Finger
Tip No.4 - Two Blokes In The Pub
Tip No.3 - Play Family Fortunes
Tip No.2 - Should You Take A Bad Job?
Tip No.1 - Don't Overpolish

The Hype Starts Here

It seems filming has begun in New York City on the latest Bravia ad, the follow-up to "Balls" and "Paint."

Not much is known about the script, except that it involves Play-Doh. I must confess that I (along with everyone else in adland) am eager for news.

Fortunately, one of the Sony clients is Twittering from the shoot.

She has already revealed that she spent her first night in New York sipping gin & tonic at the Soho House rooftop pool bar.

Let's hope Frank is ready for her incisive comments...