Ad bash

Let's mock some adverts. Sorry if this is boring to people who don't get British TV... actually no, I'm not sorry at all.

1. 8x the size. Could be "8 weeks worth of stuff", not sure, can't remember

No idea what brand this advert was for (FAIL!) but the premise is something like "What if you had to buy 8 weeks worth of stuff in one go?". Not a particularly daunting idea, really, especially since the first product they use to illustrate this ghastly scenario is a gigantic tube of toothpaste - like 2 metres long or so.

Toothpaste.

A product you use maybe 3g of per day. I don't know about you, but a tube of toothpaste 2m long would probably last me a decade. I can proudly boast that a standard tube easily lasts me eight weeks.

How come the agency was allowed to get away with this?? Who is the client? How come I can't find any pix or videos to illustrate my frustration? Why are you all looking at me like that? IT'S AN INCREDIBLY ANNOYING ADVERT!

2. Dulux - What would you change?

I dunno, it's something about the link between colour and emotion, so therefore... buy paint!

Except that even after the crying woman has had her room repainted (probably by her henpecked husband who we never actually see - I suspect he's down the pub by now) - even after that, and even though by the end of the ad her mouth is smiling, she still has a look of such empty desperation in her eyes, plus that apologetic little mouth motion... hot damn, it makes me want to adopt an abused puppy to redress the balance of good and evil in the world.

This execution FAIL is the most horrific thing I've seen in ages. Conspackulations, Dulux!

3. Glade's "I want to do a poo at Paul's" abomination

I know this was invented by the Germans or something, cos it looks funny and is clearly dubbed, but even they should have realised that children don't give a fig what a bathroom smells like after they've relieved themselves. Concept FAIL.

Even so, a lit match is a far more pleasant solution than some airborne chemical stink. Product FAIL.

DOUBLE FAIL!

Plenty more where this came from, if I can be bothered. In case you can't wait, read this neverending thread of other people letting off steam about dreadful TV commercials.

Adidas 12th Man

Another, "I did that" post.

It's the Adidas 12th Man campaign. As produced by 180 and seen all over the place. Hopefully. 

If you haven't already seen the "virals" (hate that term), no worries, what do you think I'm here for?

I didn't write these web-spots, I can't take any credit for them. Here's the Chelsea FC one anyway.

What did I write? This Liverpool quiz! And this Chelsea quiz! And - hopefully coming soon - more quizzes for some other clubs which haven't gone live yet as far as I can work out, so I'm not about to fuck up any potential elements of surprise / chances of being rehired by mentioning them here.

Screenshot!

Desperate to know what the answer to question 7 is? Don't come running to me, fatso. Work it out for yourself.

(And the questions are randomized every time, anyway, so...)

Cyber-cock bonanza

Rejoice! A fun project that I worked on has gone live. 

The Pacifico Alarm Clock is a joint production by Perfect Fools Stockholm and Creature Seattle for Pacifico beer. They were responsible for the concept, design and build of the website, iPhone app and Adobe Air desktop app.

Me... I wrote the words. Yes indeed, El Gallo de Pacifico is all my own work. Well, mostly. As tends to happen with interactive projects, especially ones that are produced by various groups worldwide, there's a certain amount of "teamwork" involved. But hey, I got the main bits sorted and set the tone of voice, so I'm happy.

Below is the blog widget that you can snaffle from the site. Enter your date of birth and enjoy live rooster streaming action!

And here's how the iPhone app looks - check out that little night vision dude :-)  

Finally, there's this clever little bit of behind the scenes backstory / seeding action via the Claudio and I blog - written by the Swedish guy in Mexico who's taking care of Claudio, running the webcam and comissioning Mexican sign painters to do rooster murals. 

Clock-a-doodle-do!

Best advertising this year

Honestly, much more exciting than the usual eye pollution you have to suffer:

Make your own stupid bus advert. 

Go on, I dare you.

Intelligent Idiocy

Rather nicely done integrated campaign for Compare the Market, one of the 13000000 car insurance comparison sites currently vying for the attention of UK drivers. Difference is, this one has a bit of fun with it all.

The telly spot does a loopy Compare the Meerkat riff featuring "Russian" meerkat Alexsandr Orlov. (Do they even have meerkats in Russia? Who cares? Me, obviously - I checked - they don't).

And lo! There it is on the internet, complete with a functioning meerkat comparison system, all wrapped in LOLkat-style speaks. Nices.

Most impressively they've got a Twitter account with almost 2000 followers, and - almost unbelievably - someone is actually tweeting regularly, and responding to followers' tweets. In my long experience, this is the thing that clients can never be bothered to do for themselves, and are too tight to pay agencies to do for them. Well done, you lot.

Even more amazing: the Twitter stream isn't full of corporate promotional bollocks - in fact, our little furry friend refuses to discuss his paymasters because "it cause him great pain". Instead he prefers to post crudely photoshopped pictures of him stuck in a lift with Stephen Fry and bicker amicably with the general public. This sort of behaviour usually makes Marketing Managers twitch uncomfortably and mutter about USPs, monetization and driving sales. Bravo!

They've got Facebook too, but I can't be bothered with that nonsense.

My friends used to tell me I looked a bit like a meerkat. I don't talk to them any more.

I'm not joking.

[Peripherally interesting aside: The real Alexander Orlov turns out to have been an NKVD man who managed to survive Stalin's bloody purges and defect to the West. Coincidence? I think not...]

[Pedantry: No self-respecting Russian would call his site "comparethe..." anything, cos Russian doesn't have articles - "a" and "the". Isn't that fascinating?]

Amuse-a-thon

Thank you Dawn for pointing me towards Business Guys on Business Trips.

Dawn is a Project Manager :-)

Self-promotion the internet way

I'm a freelancer. I don't have to get up and go to work 5 days a week, or at least, not that often. But I do have to get myself hired pretty regularly. So I have this blog, and various other channels here and there all of which you can get to via my professional website. And I was wondering if it was worth doing anything a bit more official.

Then - as if by magic - I got a free €50 voucher for Google Adwords, so I thought I'd give it a go. Signup's easy, and using the provided tips and tricks I picked my keywords, wrote my ad, and had it live within about half an hour. Here it is:

After about a month, I get a bit of a wrist slap from Google:

"Your ads are showing too rarely to spend your full budget. You may need to add keywords or raise your click price limit." 

Bugger that. 40% of my (free) money has been spent on something like 23 clicks through to my site. The reporting's excellent though. I can see which of my keywords gets the most hits - "Amsterdam", and how all the rest get bog all attention in the first place, which convert into zero clicks. Most of these non-clicky terms are variations on "interactive copywriter", by the way.

I enjoy the disapproving, pull-your-socks-up tone, but I shall respond by thumbing my nose, farting, and cancelling my Adwords Campaign. Nice system, but pretty useless for me.

By far my most powerful self-marketing tools at the moment are my personal network and word of mouth, and - believe it or not - LinkedIn. 

Therefore, my tips for successful self-promotion in these connected times are as follows: Be present online. Keep your sites up to date. Talk to your friends and contacts. 

Also, give people cakes. Everyone loves a good cake.

Via media

I'm chomping my way through these two books at the moment, one eye each...

Luke Sullivan's "Hey Whipple, Squeeze This", and Tom Hodgkinson's "How to be Free".

The first one tells me that advertising is a rich and wonderful source of creativity and ideas, which drives the engine of commerce and capitalism, making us all more comfortable and happier.

The second refutes all that, tells me that all is vanity, and I'd be much happier slacking off, and spending the rest of my life smoking a pipe and brewing my own beer in rural Dorset. 

Having just spent a work-free year exploring the world, I fully understand the appeal of spending time rather than money, and finding pleasure in the mundane.

But right now I rather like having money, primarily to buy yet more effects pedals. I also have a mortgage to pay. 

Therefore I will forge a clever path somewhere between the two, developing myself as a writer, flexing my creative muscle, and spending my time off in enriching pursuits, like taking a walk around Marken with friends, and baking my first batch of bread in almost a decade.

Note to self, stop watching so much TV.

Skin, skateboarding and sex pests

There's been a bit of a hoo-hah recently about Clearasil's moderately racy "May cause confidence" adverts. I quite like them, and can't really see what all the fuss is about.

I'm more worried about the current Clearasil Ultra ad, which finishes with what can only be described as a sex attack: a freshly spot-free lad trundles across an almost unskatablely bumpy pavement then deliberately falls off, knocking his victim to the ground and forcing himself on her! 

OK OK, it's in German but you know what it says...

Does this reflect the true state of modern flirting? I think we should be told.

Mine / not mine / maybe mine

Hooray, another award I sort-of-but-not-really won for that same site I've already not-quite-won an award for (see also "Did I win this award?"). 

This time it's the 2008 W3 Awards, as adjudged by the International Academy of the Visual Arts. The Canon EOS 400D site as made by Look.nl won Silver for creative excellence on the web. 

Opinion among my friends and colleagues is divided between "No way would I claim that!" to "Who cares? If you worked on it in any capacity, it's yours."

Me, I'll just talk about it in an amusing / awkward way and stick the logo on my blog. 

That'll do nicely, as Alan Whicker used to say. 

And I definitely didn't write that line, by the way ;-)

Broken supermarket zombie staff

Have you seen this advert for (English supermarket) Somerfield? The whole setup's quite annoying, but the worst bit is the slo-mo scanning scene about halfway through. 

It makes it look like the scanners on their cash tills are in-cre-di-bly slooooooooooooow:

Also, their tills are apparently staffed by monged out zombies who move at sub-glacial pace.

Not something I'd shout about if I were them.

One of these words is mine

Nice to see this pop up on the intratubes - I had a small hand in the new JFK/climate change video for Greenpeace:

What exactly did I do? Well the idea was already there, and the script had been written by a professional speechwriter, but it needed a little tweak, which is where I came in. 

I chopped a couple of lines near the beginning, added "as this new millennium dawns", and went for "climate change threatens our very existence" in preference to some stuff about climate change pounding our fragile Earth. Nip and tuck stuff, and it has changed a bit between then and the version which actually made it to production, but still, I've got a little bit of proud in my hip pocket right now.

This feels something like The Long Tail of achievement. Small parts, loosely joined, everybody does their bit, but there's no one overall owner/creator who can claim absolute credit for it. (See also "Did I win this award?")

Er... except the agency (AKQA), to whom all rights of authorship and ownership are signed away.

Coming soon: something I did that I can take 100% credit for! 

Transcreation

Multi-language advertising campaigns are a royal pain in the ass for copywriters.

Why? Because metaphors, puns and jokes are almost impossible to translate, and if copywriters aren't writing that sort of thing, we're carving out carefully manicured, short, sweet phrases with subtly shaded meanings and connotations in order to communicate days and days worth of thinking and meaning in 5 words or less... which also happen to be next to impossible to translate.

Here, for example, is a quick run down of various options for translating the wonderful word Schadenfreude. Especially good is the Thai: "I'm laughing at your bad luck," which also demonstrates the twin tendencies of inflated length and loss of coolness, post-translation process. For more LOLz, try babelfishing "guilty pleasure"... or pretty much any colloquialism you care to mention. 

All this is bad enough when the text is translated by professional, human translators. But what usually happens is that it gets fed through a machine translation process, then tidied up by a person at the end. Unfortunately, that person is rarely included in the thought process behind the words, so all you get is a workaday, word-for-word translation, which usually completely misses the point, and occasionally makes such a balls of things that you might as well have asked the nearest 5 year old to do the job for you.

What's the solution? Get your translations done by copywriters who natively speak your target language! This has two drawbacks: price and process. It will cost a bomb, and you also have to think about it upfront and plan in a lot of extra time and work to make it come off successfully. 

Most important is to make sure the thought behind the phrase to be translated gets to the translator, and that you get the original copy signed off by the client with plenty of time to spare.

Some bright spark has named this process "transcreation" which is kinda clumsy but gets the point across well enough until someone thinks of a better term. (Any offers?)

The alternative (read: more economical) route is to write a backup "safe line" to be used if all else fails. But, beware! If you go down this route, be prepared for the safe line to be the only copy that gets through, unless you have a great deal of patience and commitment (really, like years), a very forward thinking client who understands the above... and the internal agency connections and vision to pull it off.

More "woe is me" stuff about the trials of 21st century copywriting later...

Whose line is it anyway?

Let's play spot the difference! First of all, Sony's brand thought:

And now, Newcastle Brown's latest banner headline (spotted at the Onion):

How come someone at the agency/client didn't realise? Or did they realise and just not care?

Quite a good time-saving method for lazy creatives though - simply swipe an existing line and add a word!

Next week, Durex's new "Don't just do it" campaign, and the aubergine marketing board's "Go to work on an eggplant."

And the rest...

Signs and ads around the world

On my recent trip round the world I spent most of my time sweating, eating or looking at things. One of the things that constantly caught my eye was the way other cultures do their marketing, advertising, and other forms of social and public communications. 

Here, at one end of the spectrum, is a perfect piece of "please be a good person" public information advertising in the Tokyo Metro:  

My favourite bit is the "NEGLECT" part of the diagram.

At the other end of the spectrum is this hand-made / handwritten / hand-drawn "No swimming in the river! Dangerous currents!" mural from Hampi, India:

How charmingly and immediately simple white paint on a rock conveys the message. Even if you can't read the text, the image tells you everything you need to know.

Of course, there's loads I missed because I was looking for "advertising" from a European point of view. I'm sure there were various information displays and signposts that I completely failed to recognise due to cultural blindness.

Then there are the ones I forgot to take pictures of, including:

• A billboard ad for flour in Fiji, featuring a cute little kid holding a spoon and licking his lips with the line: "Honest, it tastes real good!"... he eats raw flour? Really?
• Indian arranged marriage ads in the papers. Really amazingly specific details of the individual's attributes and qualifications, with an equally detailed list of what they're looking for in a bride / husband.
• Mexican wall painting on shops and stuff. Beautiful, colourful and individual. 
• Actually, wall paintings are big in lots of places. Why don't we do this over here any more?
• Handwritten chalkboard menus in Indonesia. Basic and great.
• India (again) is big on pictures of faces. People are big! The best thing was the end of year posters where schools advertise how well their pupils have done. Gigantic banners full of smiling kids (just the heads) with 276! 284! 289! printed underneath. 

Anyway, I made a Flickr set of the vaguely relevant photos I took around the world. It features anything to do with communicating information - signs, icons, logos, adverts, murals etc. Only 30-ish pix so far, so it's quick to check em out.

I'd love to do something that mixes the simplicity and charm of wall paintings with the new and exciting "internet of things" stuff. Less overthinking the messaging, more sophistication and richness in what people on the receiving end can do with it. 

Who's buying?

Hi there! Gissa job then...

How to get work as a freelance copywriter (interactive work a speciality)? 

Let me count the ways:

The phone call

• How: Pick up the phone, call the agency, get fobbed off by the snotty receptionist, send an email to the recruitment guy.
  
• Ideal for: Getting disappointed.
  
• Results: By and large completely pointless unless you're already in touch with the right person.
  

The "be yourself" intro

• How: Send an email to the recruitment guy. It's short, sweet, informative and a little bit funny. You attach your CV and direct them to your website to see lots more stuff. You never hear back from them. They never answer your calls or emails.
  
• Ideal for: Fans of copying and pasting.
  
• Results: Signal 0 / Noise 100.
  

The attitude attack

• How: "Hi, I'm all that and I'm surprised you guys haven't contacted me already. Actually wait, fuck you! I don't even want to work for you. BTW, here's my details, give me a call if you feel like grovelling for mercy." Do this in person at the front desk for extra points!
  
• Ideal for: Ad agencies with great big balls.
  
• Results: Don't know, I'd feel like too much of a dickhead to do this in the first place.
  

The creative campaign to sell yourself

• How: Demonstrate how brilliant you are by doing it, instead of talking about it.
  
• Ideal for: Cross-media, through the line, big ideas type places.
  
• Results: Works a treat if you get it right. Doesn't matter if you get it wrong, cos nobody will notice anyway.
  

Pulling your network's strings

• How: Be bold. Be brazen. Respectfully demand that your friends, contacts, former colleagues  - anyone you know in fact - get you a job, and pronto.
• Ideal for: Anyone, any time, anywhere (as long as you have a network).
  
• Results: This one works!
  

Pure chance

• How: Up at 11, breakfast and morning stuff till 12, browse the web a bit, do some emails, lunch at half 1. Columbo's on at 2 (sometimes) and lasts 2 hours! 4 o'clock's almost the evening so you can start planning your meal, then go shopping and stuff. A skilled practitioner can stretch this out until about 6, when it's OK to open a beer, and it's downhill all the way after that. Check the phone around midnight in case anyone called or texted you today.
  
• Ideal for: Lazy bastards.
  
• Results: I wouldn't know.
  

Any other ideas? Bring em on in the comments.

Back in the jug agane

Goddamn, I got a job! 

This time last week I had little on the horizon and was beginning to run out of strings to pull in my extended network of lovely people (hello everyone!)... so on Thursday I sent a blunt email out to my fellow freelancers, which pretty much went "Er, got any jobs?"...

And before I knew what was happening I was catching a 7 a.m. flight to London yesterday to meet, get briefed in, and start working. Here I am, raring to go at 5 a.m. in Amsterdam:

Today I spent the day in Amsterdam beavering away on banner, email and site copy for a sweet little campaign.

It's probably pretty unprofessional to go into detail until the project is actually live, so suffice to say I'm working at "an agency" for "a client". Can you handle the non-specific sense of excitement this news generates? 

Oblique hedging aside, I'm enjoying myself: moreso now I'm back in Amsterdam after Monday's baptism of fire in the London HQ. Debs, meanwhile, is busy being a housewife, resisting the temptation to crack open a bottle of Alsace at midday, 2 p.m., "Put 3, that sounds better," (she says). 

I was going to end with a flippant "Life is tough" but being honest for a moment, the reality is that working full days for the first time in 14 months is tiring. Life is tough!

...but rewarding :-)

Warts 'n' all

This young man has more to worry about than warts:

His skateboard's got no griptape on it - he's going to fall off and hurt himself. Will he be worrying about his warts when he's lying in hospital with a broken ankle? I don't think so.

Bad ad

Back in civilization and watching western ads on telly for the first time in a year. Have you seen the one for Kia's new cee'd? What a stinker!

All they've done is take the brief: "Uh, it seems people are kinda indifferent to this car... we gotta make 'em desire it", and just visualised the process of moving from indifference to desire. That's it! There's nothing here that makes sense, engages my imagination, or even makes the product look good:



Endline: The new Kia Cee'd, "Designed to change your mind".

The car may be; the ad certainly ain't.

Dumb dumb dumb.