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.

Kiss me, I taste like brands

Well, here’s a strange new trend: branded lip products. I’m not sure why lips specifically, but first there was this:

Virgin Atlantic’s ‘Upper Class Red‘ lipstick, to promote their redesigned Upper Class cabins. All their stewardesses now wear it, they’re giving samples to everyone in Upper Class on the inaugural flight, and you can buy it, too. If you want.

Then there were these:

(Pictures via The Gloss Goss)

Coca-Cola ‘Lip Happiness’ lip balms. They come in regular Coca-Cola, Cherry Coke and Vanilla Coke flavours and are on sale at Boots.

Then the other day, I picked these up:

A quid each in Primark. The height of class.

Now I’m obviously cheating slightly because these are Coke branded again (Sprite being one of Coke’s drinks) but still, it does seem like a bit of an influx. The Vanilla Coke and Sprite balms are pretty true to taste, but the Fanta one (not pictured) is a bit gross so I gave it away.

It seems like a fairly understandable move for a drinks brand to start creating products with their patented taste, but I’d be wary of putting out anything that doesn’t taste exactly right – the weird-tasting Fanta balm put me off the drink a bit. It was really obviously flavoured with that fake orange stuff used for so many ‘orange’ things, rather than whatever they use for Fanta. I also thought the balms were lacking something – maybe a tingle to emulate fizziness.

The Virgin Atlantic lipstick, on the other hand, is a great PR idea except that it reminds me of their ill-fated makeup brand, Virgin Vie. Their products were pretty rubbish and downgraded the whole Virgin brand in my eyes – I suppose that’s probably why they’ve teamed up with BareMinerals for this lippie. I wouldn’t buy it if I thought it was the same quality as the stuff they put out before, but from BareMinerals, I might.

It’s certainly an original way to promote an airline, and I think it works in this instance. Maybe no more branded lip products for a while now, though – that’s probably enough. We don’t everyone to get carried away with the whole branded lip thing and start doing stuff like this:

Yeah.

The problem with copywriting, exemplified

This post on beauty blog Temptalia caught my eye, because it perfectly demonstrates a problem I’ve had many times since I’ve been a Copywriter.

The post is a review of a Chanel lip gloss, which looks like this:

 

And is described by Chanel like this:

This brilliant pink lipgloss delivers the ultimate pop of colour, along with subtle shimmer and a high-shine glow. Part of the limited-edition Knightsbridge Collection, its striking hue is named for a thriving artistic and cultural area of London.

And now the problem. The gloss actually looks like this:

Are you seeing ‘brilliant pink’? A ‘striking hue’? ‘The ultimate pop of colour’? No, me neither.

Christine, who writes Temptalia, wonders how Chanel could see something in this gloss that clearly isn’t there. And I can tell you exactly how.

The poor copywriter was given a photo of the tube, just like the one above, and if they were lucky, a few notes about the product. These probably said something along the lines of ‘shimmer, high shine, pink’. Not much to go on. I bet you a fiver they’d never even seen the product in real life, let alone tried it out. Which is how they understandably missed the fact that outside the tube, this gloss is weaker than Anthony Worrall Thompson’s resolve in the Tesco cheese aisle.

I can sympathise because it’s happened to me many, many times. I’ve written gushy descriptions of mobile phones I’ve never touched, drinks I’ve never tasted, and cars I’ve never driven (I can’t even drive). In fact, I once spent a whole week writing a massive manual for a fairly important piece of technical equipment that I’d never even seen a photo of. I had to describe how to operate the thing, including what buttons to press when – despite not knowing what the buttons said or even what colour they were.

How does this happen, you might rightly wonder? Well, no one’s under the illusion that it’s an ideal situation, and there have been plenty of times when I have seen the relevant product and even tried it out. But in the current workplace culture, where deadlines are constantly squeezed and everyone’s overworked, there often just isn’t time to do things properly. You can try to insist on seeing and trying the product, but all you’re going to do is massively delay the project, getting innocent account managers into trouble with their bosses and expectant clients, whose deadlines have also been squeezed.

I don’t know how useful anyone found the manual I wrote blindly, but I know I did everything I could under the circumstances to make it accurate, and hopefully it was a great deal more useful than no manual. So yes, it’s a big pain in the bum for all of us when you buy a hot pink lipgloss and it turns out virtually transparent, but if you’re going to blame anyone, don’t make it the copywriter. They were probably disappointed too.

Stencils to make sketching websites much, much easier

I spend a fair amount of time drawing websites on paper – coming up with an idea for a new one, showing how something might work on Facebook, and so on.

If I had this nifty little stencil set, it’d be a whole lot quicker:

This browser pad wouldn’t hurt, either:

They’re by UI Stencils, who also make stencils for iPhone, Android and Windows phone apps, iPad and iPhone sketchpads and a few other bits.

Not strictly necessary, but a time-saving godsend for someone like me.

Etsy ‘Gift ideas for Facebook friends’ app

I’ve seen loads of people present this idea – an app that suggests gift ideas for your friends, based on their Facebook profiles. And every time I’ve seen it, I’ve thought ‘That wouldn’t work very well, surely it’d all be based on favourite bands and movies’.

Well, it’s just been done for Etsy, and what do you know? I was right.

I just tried it with one of my FB friends and got results like this (click for bigger):

And worse, completely stupid results like this:

Have a go yourself here, but know the results can be summed up as ‘buy something related to a band or movie they like’. Disappointing.

£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.

Ocado wants to see the end of local shops

Just spotted this ad for grocery shopping service Ocado, on a YouTube video (click for bigger):

See that? ‘No need for the local shop’. For a brand that’s known for its progressive, benevolent attitude, that’s pretty harsh. Surely there are better ways to extol the virtues of your business than wishing bankruptcy on someone else’s?

I’d be interested to hear Ocado’s comment on this. I’ll be tweeting it at them, so we’ll see if they respond.

UPDATE: Ocado’s response on Twitter:

Thanks for highlighting the error – the ad was meant to refer to supermarkets, not local shops, and has been corrected. Apologies.

‘Apologies’ is a bit weak (what’s wrong with plain old ‘sorry’?) but at least they responded. Hopefully we won’t be seeing this anti-local ad for much longer.

If you could work any hours, what hours would you work?

London and New York agency Mint Digital’s website says:

‘There are no office hours. Work when you want, where you want.’

Interesting. I’m not sure how I’d feel about working for an agency with no set hours. In theory, I’m in favour of the idea, but in practice? I’m pretty sure I’d still feel bad if I came in at midday every day. Or only worked nights. Surely the expectation is still that you’ll be there for the core daylight hours – 9.30 – 5.30ish?

And as for ‘where you want’, again it’s a lovely idea, but would they really keep someone on who never came into the office? What if no-one ever came in? Would they abandon the office and enjoy the savings, or mandate that at least some of their staff needed to actually come to work?

I’d be fascinated to know how it works in practice. I suspect all their employees are – like everyone else in advertising – driven by guilt and actually work fairly long hours, starting and leaving at the usual times. But perhaps not – anyone from Mint Digital want to comment?

Some great advice for advertising and design graduates

I love this series of images from the fabulous Bora Demirbilek. Very inspirational, and great advice for graduates and just about everyone else. Click an image to see it full-size.

Isn’t that last one brilliant? I’ve got it on the wall by my desk. Raaaa! Heart’s gonna get you.

Writing between the lines

This is the rather beautiful ‘Inspiration Pad’, by Marc Thomasset:

In all honesty, the pretty patterns probably wouldn’t inspire me. But they would encourage me to spend inordinate amounts of time writing very very neatly in fountain pen, exactly on the lines, so it looked really cool.

Yeah, I’d better not buy one.