“Is it okay to pray for an orgasm?” – J.P. Donleavy, author of Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule
You can blame the clients for buying the stuff. But the real culprits are the agencies that serve it up. Dreck, dreck and more dreck. Dreck thinking, dreck briefing, dreck creative, dreck execution, dreck media, dreck everything.
Criticise it as much as you like for its rapacious profiteering and its mendacious medicalization of the trivial predicaments of everyday living, but here’s an industry that ploughs billions of dollars into R&D for the drugs that help us to survive diseases like HIV, Alzheimer’s, hepatitis, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, liver cancer, lung cancer, kidney cancer, bowel cancer, prostate cancer, testicular cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, cholera, malaria and a thousand more plagues upon our modern houses, that help to sooth the worst of our sufferings from chronic pain to obdurate depression, that palliate our collective plight from the trauma of childbirth through to the appalling angst of old age. And who among us hasn’t been there and benefited? Who among us would be prepared to tear down its arrogant edifices and rebuild it in the image of the Dalai Lama on the foundations, say, of homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, stewed leek or goat worship? – all of them fine in theory until the day your CT scan reveals an unexpected tumour, or the morning those rosy streaks in a spring sky at dawn crumble into the black ash of your failing neurotransmitters.
Here’s an industry that’s prepared to gamble hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on clinical trials that may or may not get a new molecule to market yet that’s apparently content to trust the marketing of the few that do to two-bit advertising suppliers who make invasive fungi look like the most evolved intelligence in the known universe, who think that brands can be built by locking product names into cages of curvilinear shapes in nauseous violets, sickening oranges and off-colour blues, bound by guidelines that restrict their expression to dull propositions in tasteless typefaces plastered over narcoleptic stock images of uncles and aunts from Central Casting, who think that a drug’s indication is a more than satisfactory simulacrum for its brand positioning, who think that AIDA is a contemporary planning template, who hold firm to the model of healthcare professionals as people who’ve never seen X-Factor, never played Xbox, never watched an X-rated movie, who’ve never fallen in love, never had to counsel a child through a nightmare, never looked in the mirror and wondered what they were doing with their lives, who’ve never had doubts about their ability, their religion or their sanity; advertising suppliers who have no respect for design, no passion for craft, and no appetite for courage, who appear never to have looked up from the appalling drivel on their desks to compare it with the advertising they find so engaging or insightful or impactful in their favourite magazines, whose notions of originality are evoked in metaphors so tortured you can hear them screaming on both sides of the Atlantic, and who excuse their inexcusable creative excrescences by quoting the regulations, the Code or the quasi-intellectualism of their science. Worse still, many of these suppliers operate under the names of otherwise respectable agency brands whose masters appear determined to look the other way, no doubt in fear of the basilisks they might inadvertently discover lurking in the sealed ghettoes of their corporate organograms.
The Clio Healthcare Awards will help. They’ve set the bar high and they say they’re going to stick to it. In this, only their second year, they’ve already succeeded in embarrassing most of the agencies who pride themselves on their specialist healthcare skills, and in shaming almost all of the big healthcare networks. The winners came from tiny shops in out-of-the-way places, golds for Tel Aviv, Hamburg and Stockholm, and – most tellingly – from agencies who spent some of their time making advertising for real people.
Then again, this little specialist healthcare shop tucked away in Windsor won three bronzes, the biggest haul of the lot. Oh yes, and a record four Globals last week. And almost fifty percent of all the healthcare awards handed out by the IPA. And so on.
Andromeda:Have you seen what’s happening out there? Have you even bothered to look?
Clash of the Titans, Warner Bros., 2010
Is it just me or did last Thursday’s Battle of Big Thinking feel as though it was more about big battling than about big thinking? Or less about being clever than about being clever about being clever?
Organised by Campaign on behalf of the APG, this year’s event pitched the winners of the previous five BoBTs against one another, hence the epic title, and hence my epic expectations. In an industry as famously fickle as ours the idea of asking the speakers to re-present their original thinking (which most of them elected to do) or to present new thinking (but only if, well, they really had to) set up the fascinating prospect, and the very worthy challenge, of sorting out the failed fashionistas from the true futurists once and for all.
If it didn’t quite turn out that way it was hardly the fault of the APG. Like professional footballers at the end of a long season turning up to play an exhibition match, (say, Corinthians v Barcelona on a Tuesday night in Qatar), the speakers turned up to dazzle, not to dig in. So there was plenty of fancy footwork, but not much in the way of bone-crunching passion. The closest we came to gladiatorial blood-letting was the tiff in the bar afterwards when Jeremy Bullmore took Robin Wight very publicly to task for brazenly ignoring Stephen King’s role in the development of the planning discipline. You had to be there.
All of which was hugely entertaining in its own ironic way, but just a little too, well, self-conscious for those of us who turned up hoping for Planning’s Next Big Theme, Planning’s Next Big Challenge, or even Planning’s Next Big Idea. Instead we got a lot of familiar tropes in a mostly minor key, embellished in the form of intricately amusing self-referential fugues, as though nothing that needed to be said hadn’t been said already, and that in the absence of a brief requiring a coherent debate about something in particular, (e.g. Do Clients Behave Rationally? Or What’s the Meaning of Stephen Fry?), the event somehow modulated into a post-post-modern rhetorical coconut-shy with all eyes firmly on the prize.
Of course, the planner’s remit is as broad and varied as life itself, and there’s no good reason to spoil a fun day out at the British Library by taking anything too seriously. But it did mean that speakers who had something important to say, or those who went so far as to intimate that they might have something important to say, were made to look rather silly by those who admitted with charming self-deprecation that they had nothing important to say, thereby inviting us to lean back (not lean forward) and simply enjoy the ride, a strategy that acknowledged the wisdom of Daniel Kahneman’s observation, tellingly quoted by Chris Forrest, that “we are to thinking as cats are to swimming – we can do it if we have to, but we don’t particularly like it”.
It became clear from the first few rounds that that eventual winner would emerge by default from among those speakers who a) skillfully refrained from saying anything as though they actually meant it, b) avoided mentioning the word digital (it was billed, after all, as a post-digital debate), and c) correctly gauged the audience’s lack of appetite for the strident, the contentious and the polemical. It wasn’t about choosing the right topic; it was about choosing the right tone.
So the sincerity of Greg Nugent’s measured reminder of the principles of the Rochdale Pioneers as a model for 21st century business didn’t stand a chance against David Hackworthy’s deliciously seditious petition for more sex and death in brand genetics. Claus Moseholm, sandwiched between them, was doomed from the moment he was introduced as co-founder of goviral, and it looked as though he knew it.
Angie Moxham of 3 Monkeys didn’t show, so Session 2 was a straight fight between Fru Hazlitt of ITV and Ivan Pollard of Naked. A year or two ago Hazlitt’s plangent invocation of the power of “Big & Live”, i.e. the “shared experience” of TV as a “mass aggregator”, especially in the form of , say, X Factor, would have had the digerati storming the stage. It was rousing and convincing, but much too much, and much too late, coming across, in the end, as little more than a reminder to watch ITV’s coverage of the forthcoming royal wedding; tired and defensive, in other words, when we all know now that big and live can exist quite happily alongside intimate and virtual. Pollard, by contrast, settled for a nice joke about a newt and a charming little story, set in the future, about a rugby team in a pub after a match forming a “pop-up consumer co-operative” to negotiate the price of their beer.
Derek Day and Helen Edwards of Passion Brands won their round by subverting the discourse itself, as they usually do, arguing with the clinical intellectual precision that is the hallmark of the Day-Edwards partnership that we’re all spending far too much time worrying about communication and not nearly enough time worrying about the things that clients worry about, like pricing, distribution, service delivery and gondola ends, a sober and chastening fifteen minutes that made Jeremy Ettinghausen’s hilarious description of his first 39 days at BBH (like ducks swimming upside-down, ie. all action on the surface with not much happening underneath) seem trivial by comparison, and Robin Wight of Engine, who was still trying to save advertising from something, sound (and look) much, much too loud.
The obligatory client, this time in the form of Ian Armstrong of Honda, scared us witless with some weird and creepy story about wiring up Honda salesmen and Honda customers in an attempt to monitor their telic and para-telic reactions during the sales pitch (or that’s what it says in my notes). Chris Forrest of The Nursery got the topic right – “looking deeply into the surface of things” – but was no match for the admirable James Mitchell (BBH), last year’s winner of the three minute “open mic” session, who is clearly someone to watch, and not only because he is so damn young. His case for telling brand stories that reflect “the full spectrum of life’s fortunes and misfortunes” (as opposed to the “endless climaxes” of traditional brand advertising) was as touching as it was salutary.
If the number of pages of my notes per speaker had been anything to go by, Les Binet of DDB Matrix would have been the clear winner on the day. His analysis of “System One” meta-communications that trust creative intuition to invent brand “reverberations”, as opposed to the rational messaging of “System Two”, strikes at the heart of the planner’s traditional role in advertising development, raising all sorts of Very Big Enduring Questions that no one in the audience appeared to be in the mood for. His opponent, Mark Cridge of Glue, tried to get us to think even harder, and that was the end of him.
I loved John Willshire’s description of how everyone at PHD was involved in making something, arbitrary projects that had little or no commercial application, and I wished he’d gone on to make the point that I’ve been trying to make for some time, i.e. that you can’t get the best out of creative people unless you truly understand the terror of the blank page; but he glossed it and lost it. David Golding of Adam & Eve did himself and his company a grave injustice by telling us that brands didn’t need ideas, by which he apparently meant slogans associated with company logos. And if Les Binet was my personal pick for best content, Peter Sells of BBH (again) was my personal pick for delivery of the day. Drier than a Namibian shiraz, Sells should go straight to stand-up. His wonderfully reductionist summary of the end-game of the all our intellectual effort – “Ooh, I like this one!” – is clearly wasted in an industry that is so serious about not taking itself seriously.
Then the big one, Russell Davies v Guy Murphy, for the champion of champions. Davies was brilliant, Murphy was brilliant. Davies was self-deprecating, Murphy was even more self-deprecating. Davies had a toy helicopter, but Murphy had a toy in the shape of Russell Davies. Davies argued that our business was to create platforms that allowed people to express themselves. Murphy avoided arguing about anything. Davies had a profound post-digital line, “We have broken your businesses; now we want your machines”. Murphy had us throw juggling balls at the stage. Murphy won.
Later I found myself in conversation with the most senior person there, in the venerable form of Jeremy Bullmore, and the most junior person there, the exceptional James Mitchell. Bullmore said to Mitchell, “I hope you don’t regard the outcome of today as an example worth following.” Mitchell wisely said nothing.
Epic.
Spyros: One day, somebody’s gonna have to make a stand. One day, somebody’s gonna have to say, “Enough!”
You would not think to look at him but he was famous long ago, for playing the electric violin on Desolation Row – from Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan, 1965
Now that video’s back it’s a kinda shame we killed off the generation of people who were good at it.
The controversial Cisco/Caida/Odlyzko chart that Chris Anderson used to support his recent headline-grabbing thesis in Wired (The Web is Dead, October 10, 2010) has whipped up such a storm of geeky debate about the technical difference between the internet and the web that everyone, including Chris Anderson, seems to have missed its most obvious implication, which is that computers are finally giving us the TV we’ve always wanted. Anderson’s rather tame take on the dramatic decline of browser-centric activity relative to the explosion of video since 2005/6 is that the online world has become “less about browsing and more about getting”, as though there was a time when this distinction represented some sort of deliberate choice.
When the unexpurgated version of the history of the internet comes to be written by some clear-eyed anthropologist who didn’t have to live through its messy post-partum years, the decade and a half from 1990 to 2005 will be characterised as the time we did other things while we waited for the really interesting stuff to download. Browsing was never all that interesting; neither, it turns out, was blogging, except as some kind of displacement activity* to relieve the emotional stress of waiting for that tantalising video to buffer. These days heavy recreational users of broadband seeking to assuage their guilty consciences by actively contributing something useful to the cybersphere are resorting to Twitter, but even that, one can’t help feeling, is becoming just a little too onerous to sustain. Here’s a certain Graham Salmon, for example, commenting on a post by Noisy Decent Graphics entitled Let’s Make Blogging Good Again: “Blogging has gone the way of letter writing. I’ve tried to blog again but haven’t got the enthusiasm for it any more. It’s too much effort writing more than 140 characters”.
It’s not simply that it’s “less about browsing and more about getting”, it’s that it’s less about producing and more about consuming, less about the effort of creating and much more about slumping into that comfy couch with a beer & a piece of cold pizza and zoning out in the cathode rays, not all of them emanating from a 50-inch plasma.
Video is back not because we chose to spend fifteen years pursuing a cause more noble than passively consuming audio-visual clips revealing the infinite creativity of human behaviour, it’s back because the time it takes to buffer is getting shorter every day. And it’s back because it’s just a whole lot more interesting than all of the other gimcracks we pretended to find fascinating while we waited for the technology to satisfy our natural proclivity for the audio-visual medium: animated banners, for example, or those endlessly amusing mouse-pointer games.
An unintended consequence of these video-challenged years was a corresponding decline in the skills required to do video well, a waning of the reputational value of those who did it for a living, (especially, but not only, those advertising creatives and commercial directors who had inherited the filmic traditions of Alan Parker, Ridley Scott, Hugh Hudson and company), and the enfeeblement of the auteur in Hollywood and beyond. ***
Now the creative generation that grew up believing that designing a website was somehow cooler and more challenging than writing a thirty second spot finds itself having to answer a steady stream of briefs for snackable YouTube clips, and it’s fairly apparent that they don’t know where to begin. They can handle the technology all right. They just don’t understand film grammar, they can’t tell a story, and they’ve lost the ability to have an idea.
There’s simply no other explanation for work as embarrassing as this:
It’s as though they can’t get it up anymore.
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*“A displacement activity is the result of two contradicting instincts in a particular situation. Birds, for example, may peck at grass when uncertain whether to attack or flee from an opponent; similarly, a human may scratch its head when it does not know which of two options to choose. Displacement activities often involve actions to bring comfort such as scratching, drinking or feeding.” GBW**
Anderson’s rather tame take on the dramatic decline of browser-centric activity relative to the explosion of video since 2005/6 is that the online world has become “less about browsing and more about getting”, as though there was a time when this distinction represented some sort of deliberate choice.
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