New Look to fans: judge each other’s looks for prizes

What the hell, New Look?

The UK clothes brand, popular with teenagers, are running a competition on their Facebook page in conjunction with the new ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’ film. It’s called ‘Are you the fairest of them all?’ and involves uploading a picture of yourself for other fans to judge.

That’s it.

There’s literally nothing to judge entries on except attractiveness. You can’t even pretend it’s about clothes, because you can’t see what half of them are wearing.

The voting page is a sad gallery of impressionable, mostly young girls smiling at the camera in the hopes their peers will judge them pretty enough to win cinema tickets. What a great message.

Don’t we have enough snarkiness and judgment in the world already? Do brands really need to encourage and even incentivise it?

I didn’t want to make a blog post about this, but after posting a comment to this effect on their page (which got over 50 likes and lots of agreement) and being completely ignored, I’ve decided a wider audience needs to know about this competition and tell New Look how not-OK it is.

A brand that caters to young women should know better, to be honest. We all spent our teenage years being savaged by our peers for our looks, our clothes, our hair, our backgrounds – and while the media always get blamed for this sort of thing, you can’t deny that New Look’s competition is normalising that behaviour. And enforces the idea that prettiness means you deserve things more than other people.

I’m pretty disgusted that New Look haven’t even tried to dress this up as anything other than a looks competition. They seem completely fine with hosting such a shallow, damaging promotion. How are those young girls going to feel when they don’t win? When they see that they don’t have many votes? When they see the faces of the winners judged more appealing than them?

If you agree with me, leave a comment on the New Look Facebook page and let them know. Perhaps together, we can convince them to pick a healthier, more positive mechanic for their next competition.

Bastards.

Oh hi dad, welcome to the disco: memes in ads

Here’s a trend we could all have done without: internet memes plucked from the web and slapped, contextless and out-of-place, on ads.

By far the worst offender here is Virgin Media’s new campaign by 18 Feet & Rising (sorry BBH, someone in the comments corrected me!), using the ‘Success Kid’ photo:

(Image courtesy of Gene Hunt)

Oh and here’s O2 using the very same image on their Facebook page:

Not. Cool.

Another recent offender – Ritz Crackers:

(Apologies for my craptastic smartphone photography – that says
“The wheels on the bus go NOM NOM NOM”)

So how does this happen?

It goes like this. Mr Person works in the creative department of an ad agency, and is a big internet geek. He knows about and likes memes, and rarely sees anything in mainstream culture that reflects them well (articles about planking in the Telegraph six months after it died do not count). So when he’s creating concepts for whatever brand he happens to be working on, he thinks “Wouldn’t it be cool if they used X meme? It fits here” and puts it in his idea.

But what he forgets is this: when someone walks past that ad, they don’t see the cool creative person who came up with it. They see a big, hairy Virgin Media logo and a sales message. And those things together just don’t work.

Plus, with the amount of time it takes to make an ad, it’s been months since that meme was relevant, resulting in even more of a late-to-the-party vibe.

Memes come from of a mindset of having fun and creating things for the sake of it. Ads come from a mindset of needing a vehicle for a sales message. And when the latter uses the former, it pollutes that innocent fun with self-interest, taking something that had group ownership and using it for their own ends.

And what happens when your client says “OK, the Success Kid ad was a huge hit, we want to make him a brand spokesperson”? You can’t, because Success Kid is no longer a toddler but a school-age child, and you only ever had one photo of him. You didn’t even do a shoot that you can take leftover images from.

This sort of thing is fucking lazy, and a big risk. Piggybacking on existing social currency means the idea didn’t originate with the brand/their agency and therefore isn’t controllable or ownable. This is how we ended up with two competing businesses using the exact same image. Where’s the branding? Slapping a logo onto something you found on the internet doesn’t make it yours, especially when it’s been around for years and has its own preconceptions.

Preconceptions like the fact that memes are made to be mixed and re-mixed. Which means thousands of versions of Success Kid  already exist, many of them with captions that Virgin Media probably wouldn’t want associated with their brand:

And brilliantly, that happens even when you stick the meme on a billboard:

Serves them right, to be honest.

£450 to get your makeup done for the afterlife

Relatively new makeup brand Illamasqua have established a reputation for being outrageous, but I think they might have overdone it this time.

They’ve just announced a service in conjunction with a funeral directorship to get one of their makeup artists to do-up your corpse for the eye-popping sum of £450. They’re calling it ‘The final act of self-expression’, and I can see that argument, but if you didn’t spend most of the days of your life with £500-odd of makeup on your face, why would you want to be buried with it? And god only knows why you’d do it if you were being cremated. So your ashes come out rainbow-coloured with melted eyeliner and lipstick…?

Open-casket funerals are apparently gaining popularity in this country, so I imagine they’ll get the odd taker or two (and of course a whole lot of press and blog attention), but aligning themselves with death still seems a bit of an odd move. Especially when some of their makeup looks would scare the bejeezus out of anyone peering into the coffin:

Hands up: who wants to be remembered like this?!

Perhaps that’s the idea. Illamasqua’s Creative Director, Alex Box, has more than a touch of the spooky about her:

Note: not a Cruella DeVil costume. She always looks like this.

Even if you wanted to use this service, would you trust your family to pick out the right scary makeup look to take you into the beyond? I’ve found that people fond of the Illamasqua brand of self-expression are often doing it in spite of their families, and to their utter confusion. You might feel like a an emo she-devil or whatever, but your mum’s thinking some Clinique neutrals and a bit of lip gloss would be much nicer. So unless you’re leaving precise instructions in your will, you’re probably not going to get your 450 quid’s worth.

And speaking of that price – yowzers. A professional makeup artist for your wedding day is about £100 – why is this so much more? I’m guessing it might be danger money for the artist having to work with a corpse, and partly because they’d need to chuck away all the brushes and products used on the deadie afterwards. Or you’d hope so, anyway. Wouldn’t like to think the blusher brush on my cheek at the Illamasqua counter was last used on someone past their sell-by date.

Blatant thievery at the Chip Shop Awards 2011

I’ve posted before about how I think the Chip Shop Awards are brilliant and a chance to recharge your creative batteries by showcasing ideas that would normally get shot down.

However, no-one takes the awards particularly seriously or considers them as much of an accolade as, say, a Cannes Lion or a D&AD Pencil. So why do agencies risk their reputations by sending in blatantly plagiarised work for the chance to win such a minor award?

This year, there are at least three entries that are blatantly ripped off from elsewhere. In reverse order of heinousness, here are the three I’ve spotted:

3. ‘Great white teeth’ for Colgate by Dinosaur

The ad:

The ‘inspiration’:

The idea from this ad pretty clearly came from a series of sharks photoshopped to have human teeth, posted by c_kick of totalleh.com on B3ta. However, the agency at least seem to have written the line themselves, so that’s kind of OK.

Edit: It’s just been pointed out to me by @adambodfish on twitter that this entry is actually from last year – it’s rather confusing since it’s featured prominently on the Chip Shop homepage! Oh well, the point stands.

2. ‘Every Lidl Helps’ by Walker Agency

A direct rip-off of not only another agency’s work, but work that won a Chip Shop Award in a previous year. Talk about diddling on your own doorstep.

Walker Agency’s ad:

The original, from Saatchi & Saatchi X in 2009:

And a third ad created specifically to take the piss out of this apparent, er, coincidence by Thinking Juice, entered into this year’s awards under the category ‘There’s no such thing as a new idea’ (fairly generous in my opinion, I’d have gone for ‘Copycuntery’ after this great blog):

And the winner:

1. ‘We Sell Fridges’ by C21 Advertising

This one takes the absolute cake. Behold ‘their’ ad:

And then this photo of a real shop in Liverpool, which has been floating around the internet for donkeys’ years:

What an absolute pisstake. It’s even the same photo with the same guy standing in front of the shop. Ironically, this is entered in the ‘best use of plagiarism’ category, because of the use of Selfridges’ branding. Not because they admit they’re thieving gobshites. I’d love to hear their justification for this.

I have to say, stuff like this makes me lose a bit of faith in the industry and the awards. For every ad born out of an original idea or insight and slaved over, there seems to be one stolen wholesale from somewhere else and shamelessly entered with an agency’s name plastered over it. Thankfully it never seems to be the good agencies, and lets us all know never to submit our CVs and portfolios to C21 Advertising. Because you just know your first brief on your first day would be ‘The client likes this YouTube video, can you just do another one of those?’.

For shame.

EDIT: In adding the agency links to this post, I discovered that Walker Agency’s website bears a striking resemblance to Rainey Kelly’s, particularly in the colour scheme and lettering style (click for bigger):

(Walker Agency on the left, RKCR/Y&R on the right)

Really classy, guys.

Washing your parts is just as important as a healthy breakfast, ladies

So say Summer’s Eve, manufacturers of ‘feminine hygiene’ products, and purveyors of appalling euphemisms like ‘feminine hygiene’.

(Click for bigger)

I don’t even know where to start with the things wrong with this ad. I can kind of see the clean bits = more confidence = securing a raise logic, but come on. Who’s ever genuinely sat in a meeting with their boss, totally fluffing their words because all they could think was “Man… my flange absolutely honks”?

Personally, I’d like to see a much more honest ad for this kind of product. We all know what it’s for, and it’d be so refreshing to see a more realistic approach in its advertising. I’m not saying it needs to be explicit or coarse – just that there are much more creative ways to advertise Summer’s Eve without making people cringe. Who knows, you might even strike a chord with the real, actual vagina-owning people in your audience – because they’re sure as hell not seeing themselves in this ad.

Come to think of it, what a lovely brief this’d be. I might work up some spec ads and present them to my male Creative Directors. Should be interesting.

Loving the copy on this Etsy popup

(Click for bigger)

And yes, I was looking at a wall tentacle. What of it?!

Probably the only time you’ll ever hear the word “vageener”

Who remembers Jamie-Lynn Spears? Little sister of Britney, teenage mother? Yeah, that one.

Well… here she is, in a thoroughly baffling rap about how reproduction works. Yep.

I guess I should congratulate her for being able to send herself (and her sister) up, but… why? Why do this? Is she trying to break into music? Surely not with this. Is it some sort of misguided attempt to make anti-teen-pregnancy messages cool? Possibly… but Jamie Lynn, ask yourself – would this video honestly have stopped you going behind the bike sheds with the quarterback? Yeah… didn’t think so.

If anyone out there knows the rationale behind this, please do enlighten the rest of us. Because I’m too busy thinking about ureters now.

WTF of the day

This is the only broadband advert I’ve ever heard described as “possibly not safe for work”.

It’s by Albion for Be Broadband, and how they got it signed off I’ll never know.

It’s… well. It’s certainly original and different, and worth sharing. It rectifies the fact that despite the internet being basically propped up by the porn industry, porn is never mentioned or alluded to in broadband advertising. I’m not sure that’s a good thing, though.

On the whole, I’m speechless and a little bit traumatised. If anyone needs me, I’ll be in the shower.

Disturbing things I’ve found on the internet, round 4

From Craigslist.

What. The. Christ. I have no words. Well-disguised troll? Genuinely crazy person? Or maybe that research he does for the Department of Defence is poo-related?

Disturbing things I’ve found on the internet, round 3

That right there is a t-shirt with nipple tassles on it.

Not so disturbing, you might think.

Except that it’s for kids. From 0 – 6 months up to 4 years. Yech.

According to its creator, it’s supposed to be a comment on the sexualisation of children’s clothes. Does it say “I’m rallying against sexualisation of children’s clothes” to you? Because to me, it says “Look at my nipples!”. Lovely.

[Via Sociological Images]