The Chip Shop Awards nominations are in…

…and one of them is for the ambient ad for a dentist I spotted in situ last month.

But that pales in comparison to some of the other entries there. It was a revelation flicking through them all: so many laugh-out-loud, shouldn’t-find-it-funny-but-really-do, swap-your-whole-portfolio-for-it ideas. Maybe that doesn’t say much for my portfolio, but it does say a lot about us creatives. We get pretty roundly lambasted by popular opinion, the media and everyone else in the industry who isn’t a creative. In fact, some of us get lambasted by other creatives – see the comments on pretty much any Creative in London post for examples.

But we’re not rubbish. None of us want to make those crappy ads you keep seeing, with cheesy straplines, painful copy or even ideas stolen wholesale from the internet. It’s just that often, the clients won’t let us make our good ideas. Or they agree to them, and then chip, chip, jackhammer away until it’s one tiny fragment of idea and a whole mosaic of “improvements”. It’s not their fault – they have to protect their jobs, and good ideas are scary. But it can be mighty frustrating sometimes, and the Chip Shop nominations are a timely reminder that actually, London’s collective creative department is excellent at what it does.

You can see the whole list of nominations yourself here, but these are the three that stood out the most to me:

The “how did you make a dog look morose on cue?” award for best use of model:

It’s a lovely use of medium and everything, but that’s been addressed already. So I’m giving this one an award for somehow depressing a dog to the point that it was able to communicate its balefulness despite having no eyebrows.

Actually, I think that might just be what happens when someone slaps a sandwich board on you and says “Off you go then, lad”.

The “I’m definitely going to hell for laughing at this, but it was worth it” award for tastelessness:

(That’s Josef Fritzl, in case you, like Planbot, utterly failed to get it). This is in a completely different universe to work that would ever run. This would never ever run in any country, for any client, ever. But that’s why it’s hilarious – it’s practically an anti-ad. “Josef Fritzl shops here” isn’t the greatest message to send out, but I like to think that in the parallel universe where ads are this un-PC all the time, it still increased sales of shame-hiding ring binders.

The “you’re making me rethink my position on puns, and that’s dangerous” award for inspired wordplay:

Everyone loves it when competitors get bitchy with each other in their adverts, and this one is a prime example. Not only have they stuck up a poster outside Tesco saying “Fuck this, go to Lidl”; they’ve actually nicked Tesco’s slogan to do it. Which makes the high school gossip queen portion of my soul rejoice. Good work, Saatchi & Saatchi X (or as I like to call them, Saatchi Kiss. They probably wouldn’t appreciate it, much as M&C Saatchi don’t like it when I call them McSaatchi’s. Can’t think why).

A palindromic video

This is pretty impressive, particularly because it’s so seamless. Apparently it’ll play identically backwards as it does forwards, though I haven’t tried it. Makes me wish YouTube had a reverse button, but only if I could guarantee that no nutjobs would use it to reverse Barack Obama’s speeches to find the one tiny segment that sounds a little bit like “Satan”.

Expect to see this technique pillaged in a TV ad shortly.

One of these ads is not like the others

What’s this ad trying to say? (click for bigger)

a) That the extra-strong condoms they sell will insure you against having a kid with terrible hair?
b) That their condoms will insure you against having a kid with terrible hair and a mole?
c) That their condoms will save you from giving birth to Chairman Mao?

It’s the third one. Did you get that just by looking at it? No? Me neither. But it was a lot more apparent when I saw it in series, after the first two executions from the same campaign:

and

So I get it now. But no-one else will. Because very few people ever see two or three executions from the same campaign, much less mentally link them and use the one to make inferences about the other. So if one of them can’t stand on its own, that one is going to fail for pretty much everyone who sees it.

Here’s another example – Saatchi & Saatchi Amsterdam’s work for hiddenviolence.nl, an anti-child abuse charity. These are copy-based ads and I’ve had to shrink them to make them readable here, but you can click to see the full version:

Verbal abuse in childhood leads to suicide. And addiction. And obesity. Wait… obesity? How does that fit?

I’m pretty sure if I saw the obesity execution by itself, I’d be baffled. I’m not going to give my money to a charity who think portliness is as significant a problem as suicide. I’d give it to a charity that took the issue a bit more seriously*.

Here’s what I think the problem boils down to. You’ve got three scamps on the table. Sure, one of them is about a less serious aspect of the problem than the other two, but that’s OK, isn’t it? Because you’ve covered the serious stuff with the other two.

No.

In the mind of someone looking at the third execution, that ad is the only ad of yours that exists. It might as well be the only one you’ve ever done. This is your one chance to convince them to give you some money, and you’ve blown it because you used up one of your precious opportunities on a weak message. At this point, the consumer couldn’t care less if the other parts of the campaign are amazing – it won’t make up for anything. They saw your ad, it was rubbish, money lost.

It’s often really hard to look at an idea objectively, without all your innate knowledge of the client and the product and the campaign and the brief. So enlist your colleagues. Take the one ad that you’re not sure stands alone and show it to creatives, planners, whoever you can find, but without any mention of the brief or context. Does it make sense? No? Scrap it.

Before this week, I would have recommended perhaps showing it to some laymen too. But since the man in the street’s just voted a Craig David album the second best album ever, I think I’ve changed my mind about him.

*Speaking of taking the issue seriously, has any abusive parent ever said “You’re such a pain. Can’t you simply die!”? That seems excessively polite to me.

Disturbing things I’ve found on the internet

Work-safe ones, I mean.

Here’s number one of probably many – a baby’s dummy with plastic teeth on it.

You reach down into the cradle for a cuddle with your little bundle of baby, and that’s looking up at you. Jesus.

If you can’t work on the brands you love…

…do you love the brands you work on?

Not everyone’s in a position to work in an agency with big, sexy, globally-salivated-after brands. Nike and the like. The ones that you’ve loved since before you wanted to work in advertising. The ones that made you want to work in advertising.

But whether they’re glamorous or not, an awful lot of planners and creatives seem to really love the brands they work on. Even if they were indifferent to them before. Even if the rest of the world still is indifferent to them.

Why is that?

It’s probably because we only see the positive stuff. As a creative, my briefs come with “reasons to believe” that don’t mention the downsides of the company, or what the competition’s doing well. It’s all about why they’re brilliant. And planners get really hands-on with the brand. Everyone knows putting your hands on something makes you more likely to buy it. Spending all that time and effort on a product that turned out to be wank would cause some major cognitive dissonance.

Account handlers don’t seem to feel quite the same way about their brands. Maybe because they tend to only work on one, and get so close to the clients (and therefore the business) that they see the more negative bits. Maybe the client says things like “We’re doing this campaign because Competitor X have a way better product and are outselling us by miles” that never reach the creatives.

I’m definitely crazy about my brands. See that? My brands. I feel as involved as if I actually worked for the client. I evangelise to my friends about them and I use their products myself, with a reaction of horror if anyone suggests switching.

That might be overkill. But I can’t help it. When you get inside a brand, learn its tone of voice and start speaking and thinking that way, it’s hard to separate yourself from it. I see campaigns for “my” brands out in the world, including ones that had nothing to do with me or my agency, and I feel part of them. It’s a nice place to be.

But what about you? Do you always end up loving the brands you work on? Or does familiarity breed contempt?

The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia

Deep in the bowels of the internet, I came across an exhaustive list of interesting Wikipedia articles by Ray Cadaster. It’s brilliant reading when you’re bored, so I got his permission to post the top 50 here.

Bookmark it, start reading, and become that person who’s always full of fascinating stuff you never knew about.

The top 50 Wikipedia articles by interestingness

1. Marree Man
2. War Plan Red
3. Vela Incident
4. Tybee Bomb
5. United States Numbered Highways
6. Wow! Signal
7. Tube Bar Prank Calls
8. Kola Superdeep Borehole
9. Back to the Future Timeline
10. Year Without a Summer
11. K Foundation Burn a Million Quid
12. Sokal Affair
13. Blue Peacock
14. Veerappan
15. Person From Porlock
16. Eternal Flame
17. U.S. Color-Coded War Plans
18. The Wedge (Border)
19. Mohave Phone Booth
20. Stanislav Petrov
21. Valery Sablin
22. The Man on the Clapham Omnibus
23. Special Atomic Demolition Munition
24. Piracy in the Strait of Malacca
25. Prometheus (tree)
26. Zone of Alienation
27. Fan Death
28. Outlawries Bill
29. Raymond Robinson (Green Man)
30. Scoville Scale
31. Kardashev Scale
32. Larry Walters
33. Joshua A. Norton
34. Fabergé egg
35. Issei Sagawa
36. Joseph Jagger
37. Traumatic Insemination
38. James Joseph Dresnok
39. Ivy League Nude Posture Photos
40. Jim Corbett (Hunter)
41. Just-World Phenomenon
42. Nicholas Bourbaki
43. Humanzee
44. Old Man of the Lake
45. Alexamenos Graffito
46. Fairy Chess Piece
47. Michael Fagan Incident
48. ETAOIN SHRDLU
49. Palomares Hydrogen Bomb Incident
50. As Slow as Possible

*Copybot is not responsible for the hours and hours that disappeared while you were exploring this list. But she is responsible for the fascinated responses you get at the water cooler tomorrow.

Edit: If you enjoyed this list, I’ve since posted 50 more of Wikipedia’s most interesting articles. The second list is less war-focused than this one.