Visual puns and mashups

In my opinion, a lot of the work that comes out of the creative universities in England (Bucks and co), while often excellent, is of the “visual pun” variety, ie something that looks like something else. My friend Tom once gave the example that if they were doing an ad about plane fares being as low as train fares, it’d be a plane that looked like a train.

There’s nothing actually wrong with that, it’s just that there are a lot of other ways to do a great ad which seem to be getting lost in this formulaic approach. Last year, when I entered the Guardian’s Cannes Young Lions competition, two of the responses to the Print ad brief were identical. They were from different teams who’d been to different unis and never met, but they’d both been taught the visual pun approach, and it had led to the same work. (The proposition was “HIV is a poverty issue”, and both teams had shown a pound coin inside a condom wrapper in place of the condom itself). That should never happen.

Of course, sometimes combining two visuals in a new way really, really works. Like this:

If only they were all that good.

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).