What makes a bad ad?

It’s widely believed that to be a good creative director you need to know what makes a good ad.

But there’s something far more important you need to know:

What makes a bad one.

The spectre of mediocrity awaits advertising at every turn.

And it falls upon the creative director to ensure their agency’s shit filter remains regularly serviced, in optimum working order and pointed in the right direction.

Many hours of our days are spent preventing disasters happening.

Unforeseen disasters. Unintentional disasters.

They can occur at any time along the production chain.

But the most critical touch-point is always the first one. The first review.

Every day we’re asked to study scraps of paper filled with words and pictures and gaze into the future.

To foretell, in milliseconds, what the finished item will look like in months to come. And whether it’ll work. (Our business cards could read: Company Soothsayer.)

That’s why every time a creative director is presented with a concept a million questions bloom in their head:

Is the work on strategy?

Will it get noticed?

Has it been done before?

Will people like it?

Will it add value to the brand?

Do we have the budget to make it properly?

Do we have to time to make it properly?

Might the client be able to remove the idea and still insist it gets made?

Could research suggest some ‘improvements’ that do anything but?

What client politics would be involved in presenting it?

Etc.

Etc.

There’s no end to the possible pitfalls waiting to crucify an idea as it moves from conception to birth.

And the questions we ask on that crucial first glimpse are what dictate whether the world will be exposed to another beauty or another beast.

Approving great ads is one of the easiest and most enjoyable parts of the job.

Stopping bad ones leaving the building is one of the toughest and most important.

But the only way to stop one scuttling out the door is to recognise it for what it is or could become.

So next time your creative director pauses before giving a point of view bare this in mind: he may well be pondering on more than “Did I make that reservation at The Ivy for 1.00, or 1.30?”

Are we obsessed by awards?

At RKCR/Y&R we recently launched a web utility called the T Minus awards countdown timer: http://www.t-minuscountdown.com/

It’s website and screen saver which lists every single awards competition in the world, alongside their entry dates and the date the work has to have run by to be eligible for entry.

Did we do it because we’re obsessed with awards? Because we’re desperate to find any possible way of winning as many of the things as possible?

Nope.

Awards have always been important to the ad industry.

As a benchmark to judge our work by.

A by-product of doing great work that works.

The cherry on the effective advertising cake.

But then a few years ago a man called Donald Gunn did something that changed everything.

He decided he’d make a list of which agencies were winning the most awards. Globally.

This list became, in effect, the mother of all awards schemes.

Agencies and agency networks became focussed on getting as high up his list as possible, believing it to be a way of proving their worth.

In turn, creative people were tasked with helping their agencies get there.

The pressure for individuals to win awards to get themselves noticed and further their own careers, is now joined, palpably, by the pressure to win for ‘the greater good’.

Having to keep track of all the awards schemes that contribute points to the Gunn Report, their deadlines and their entry dates, adds exponentially to that pressure.

Awards are a fact of life.

And T Minus was consciously created to hopefully make more of that life spent doing award winning work and less worrying about when and where to enter it.

Why I can't wait to watch iGuys 3.

These blitherings originally appeared in Campaign magazine earlier this year, after they asked me what thoughts I had on the future of advertising.




I hope I’m still alive in 50 years time.

Yes, the downsides might be annoying: incontinence, immobility, severe drooling. But think of the upside: I get to watch Mad Men: Season 54.

What fun the 60s must have been to work in. What a cool time to have been around. The time the ad industry found there was a way to do things other than how it’d been doing them for years. When the conventional wisdom of David Ogilvy was superseded by the unconventional genius of Bernbach, Lois and Della Femina.

After having spent years perfecting their skills in posters, press and radio, the dawn of the decade saw admen still attempting to get to grips with a newfangled thing called television. ‘TV specialists’ were employed who knew how this cutting-edge technology worked but the television was yet to be used for anything more than what were, in effect, moving press ads; the public was so in awe of such a technological miracle that just seeing pictures move on the screen was still innovative enough to delight an audience.

The cohort leading the advertising revolution grabbed TV by the buttons and showed no fear. They did things no one had ever done that would still feel fresh today.

It was a different world.

How we chuckle today as we watch Don Draper and his colleagues breakfast on Bourbon and fags. How we titter when lines like: ‘It’s toasted’ are lauded as pure genius. And how we snigger when DDB’s mould-breaking VW ads are referred to as a passing fad.

Change was rampant back then. And like all revolutions it’s easier to spot with the benefit of hindsight.

Of course in 50 years time the show won’t be called Mad Men. It’ll be named something like ‘iGuys 3.0’.

And it won’t be set back in the 1960s, it’ll be set in the second major advertising revolution; the one we’re living through right now.

In iGuys 3.0 the underlying theme will be the ad industry’s attempts to master the new digital era.

And viewers will chuckle similarly at ciphers of our very selves back at the turn of the last century:

“Isn’t it hilarious that they used to have a separate name for what we now just call, well, we don’t have a name for it do we?… And how funny they actually formed separate agencies to do things just for that, full of people they called ‘digital natives’? … Oh look! They’re using an iPhone 4. I saw one once in the Science Museum. How did they live without an iEye (contact lens, nano-processor screen beaming information direct to the retina, produced by the Microsoftapple Corporation, so named after the two companies did ‘The deal of the century’)… Ooh, wouldn’t it be cool to have been around when they still had paper!!... Wow, that must have been before GoogleBook was thought-activated… They used to think 3D TV was cool. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!… Goodness! They’re drinking skinny decaf lattes! Of course! That was when Starbucks still existed, long before the Great Coffee Virus that wiped out half of America!!…”

Like the revolutionaries of the 60s, we at the supposed bleeding edge of everything are gloriously unaware of what the next half-century will bring. When it comes to the tools available to as a business, we’re currently seeing more innovation in one year than we saw in the last hundred. This means that anyone who believes they have mastered this brave new world is deluding himself. It has a life of its own and we must face up to the fact that we will never actually wrangle it to the ground. We will simply keep running to catch up with it, doing the best we can to utilise new stuff until the next new stuff appears. The best we can do is to evolve in parallel with the innovation.

Exciting!

Any ennui felt by those who’ve worked in this industry for a while when faced with a new problem and the same old tools with which to solve it, must surely by now have been transformed into pure, undiluted joy at the mouthwatering array of new opportunities just round the corner.

In the coming years evolution will go hand in hand with revolution. As consumers continue to understand and enjoy interactivity they’ll come to expect it from their brands’ communications. So we’ll have to continue to get better at hosting two-way discussions in all channels. This will be helped by the fact that penetration of Smartphones will continue to rise as their benefits become better understood by ‘the early majority’. This, in turn, will lead to interaction on social networks becoming even more ubiquitous. Meanwhile, the likes of FlipBoard and the Rockmelt browser will make the social web increasingly more accessible and user-friendly.

‘Event TV’ like ‘I’m a celebrity’ and ‘X factor’ will be utilised increasingly by marketers for their real-time social networking opportunities. Equally, IPTV will go mainstream, bringing with it TV advertising interactivity possibilities as never seen before.

The quality of TV advertising will rise as clients see the number of conversations that are going on around the good stuff. What was seen as a high investment five years ago for a commercial that would just see eight weeks of airtime is now increasingly seen as good value for something that will continue to be broadcast forever.

We’ll continue to get to grips with the tablet computers as they become the iTool of choice for millions. The interactive advertising possibilities of the iPad haven’t even begun to be explored and the partnership between Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs could open up whole new swathes of users to target, as well as creating what will undoubtedly become the template for what are currently paper-based publications.

Apps will continue to their stealth attack on the current browser experience, offering brands more opportunities to demonstrate their relevance to their consumers.

We’ll all get just a little bit bored of hearing the words ‘Can we have an Old Spice please?’.

There has, without doubt, never been a more exciting time to be in advertising. Unless spending your days drinking, smoking and shagging appeals (hold on, come to think of it…).

I’m off now to set my GalaxyPlus HyperHD Digi-Box Nano to record iGuys 3.0.

It’ll be such fun to drone on about what an amazing time this was to live through.

And to wet my nappy laughing at how different everything was back now.

Diary from the 'Nam (or at least Barcelona)

Whilst rifling through my hard drive I came across this piece I wrote for Shots magazine back in 2006.

It's a shoot diary of the Boots Christmas TV commercial we shot with David Lachapelle.

Haven't been on a shoot like this before or since.








DAY ONE

7.30 On location, ten miles outside Barcelona.
Well we made it. We survived the pre-prod. David got here all the way from his retreat in Hawaii (an old nudist colony he recently bought) thanks to some expert bi-lateral wrangling by his executive producers Ellen in LA and Nicola Doring in London. The sun is shining and the sets are looking great.

7.37 David’s refusing to shoot. The location we’ll be using for the interiors is a grand but decrepit mansion where Spanish nobility was murdered under Franco. David declares he’s not going to film inside unless we have the building blessed. Fortunately Ellen has brought her nanny from LA, who conveniently happens to be a psychic. She asks the ghosts of family if we can film there. They say yes. David leaves his trailer.

08.00am Chris Doyle, the legendary director of photography, is checking the lighting. Not sure which is more disconcerting; the dark sunglasses he’s wearing as he works, or the beer in his hand. As he cracks open another can from his own personal cooler box we notice it’s non-alcoholic. What a relief. Sort of.

09.00am We turn over. Nice and early. Nicola is smiling at her watch. The first set-up is the turkey-stuffing scene. Suddenly, David Letham, the first assistant director, looks around at us in panic as he hears the way David is directing the girl: “Yeah, yeah, go on. Stick it up your mother!!!” We watch the monitor, discussing the ‘fisting’ action. In passing, production designer Marco xxxx puts us right. “Actually, that’s not fisting. The technical term is punch-fucking.”

1.00 Still shooting the first set up. Nicola is frowning at her watch. Our model is still stoically ramming her arm up the turkey, trying to get just the look David is after. The girl, despite being a vegetarian is bearing up well. The same can’t be said for the turkey.

1.30pm Lunch is called. We’re not feeling that hungry.

4.00pm One of twenty small children gets flour in his afro and throws a diva tantrum that David would be proud of.

1.00am It’s been a long day. And it’s nowhere near over. Realising we’re are shooting eight days worth of material in four, David locks Nicola into his trailer: “Nickles, why am I not getting overtime for this!!”


03.00am We wrap. David is driven off into the night. Nicola and Ellen are hissing into the phone to his driver. We can just make out the words: “We don’t care where he fucking wants you to take him, lock him in the fucking car if you need to, just get him fucking home!!”

DAY TWO

08.00am Call time. The first set up of the day is lit to perfection. Everyone’s ready and raring to get going. Whilst looking over today’s shot list we overhear production talking on the walkie talkies: ‘OK, where’s the director?...... He’s WHAT? Swimming?... In the sea??... NAKED???... “ We help ourselves to another coffee and empty a bag-full of magazines.


09.30am David arrives and stomps straight to his trailer. It looks like we’re about to meet ‘The Evil Stepsister’ we’ve been warned of.

10.00 The model is brought to the David’s trailer for, hair, make-up and wardrobe approval. He doesn’t grant it. Bay Garnett rifles through the eight suitcases full of clothes (£25,000 worth) she brought over from the UK.

10.45 Different hair, different make-up different wardrobe. Same answer.

11.30am Fifth time lucky. We turn over.

10.35pm The sprout peeling scene. After a truck full of sprouts, which has been driven over from England are unloaded, David sits down in front of the monitor and gives a little direction. “Oh yeah, the water, it’s so hot… oh, it feels so good all over my body… oh, my nipples, they’re getting hard… Oh, yeah… oh, oh my vulva’s vibrating.” Sadly the model doesn’t speak a word of English, so one lucky interpreter gets to translate the whole thing into Spanish.

DAY THREE

12.00pm The washing up scene. With ‘Take your mama out’, by the Scissor Sisters blaring from the iPod speakers David shouts out to the crew: ‘Where are my ice cubes?? Get me ice cubes.” Then to the girl: “Shake those titties!! Ok. Pinch, pinch, pinch!!!” The girl staunchly refuses to pinch her own nipples leaving the scene “erect-nipple free’. Then as she picks up a perfume bottle, he screams: “Spray that shit!!” Both ‘Nickles’ and Ellen spin round to the client and mouth “He didn’t mean that…” The client mouths back, “That’s fine, it is.”

23.00pm The carol singing scene and David’s not getting the right eye-line for the three girls who have door-stepped a hot guy. They’re meant to be flirtatiously looking him up and down. David finds a marker pen and, ever so deliberately, draws a circle on the front of the Brad Pitt lookalike’s boxer shorts, telling the girls “This is where you look”. Strangely, the actor didn’t hang around to chat after we finished.


3.30 Last set up of the day: The girl pulling the tree. Everyone’s tired and wants to get home. Everyone, it seems, except David. Having donned a massive white afro wig similar to the girl in the scene, he has taken time out in between takes to have a spot of make-up applied and get some photos taken. The Catalans are cursing quietly. They really don’t know what to make of him. They’re not alone.

DAY FOUR

21.00pm The finale ‘lights on the house’ shot. Our Brazilian model is defying gravity in a Ben de Lisi dress. Apparently they’re natural. “I don’t know what happened. I went on the pill and they just grew”.

21.17pm Chris Doyle nobly offers to pop a stray boob back in for her. He’s such a pro.

03.00am The supermarket. The final set-up of the shoot. The shot is of a girl calmly applying make-up in the supermarket while around her is shopping chaos. Rob Saunders, a life-long fan of Chris Doyle, heard he was shooting with us and has flown out to meet him. David obviously hasn’t been told who Rob is as he’s telling him where to stick the tinsel. Rob is kindly obliging.


4.10 Everything’s been carefully co-ordinated with the supermarket management so as to avoid minimum possibility of damage. We have been given one aisle and only a very small number of food items. David pulls the extras together and calls through a bull horn: “Ok. It’s the end of the world! What do you do?!” Within seconds it’s carnage. People fighting over carrots, stealing each others’ handbags, sliding in the two- foot layer of cake and milk on the floor. Someone sprints past camera with what looks like a light meter round his neck. We realise it’s Chris Doyle, who felt more foreground action was needed.

4.20am Thank god there wasn’t a hair in the gate. One take is all we were going to get. After wrecking £5000 worth food that wasn’t ours, the supermarket manager tells us he’s calling the police.

4.30am Christpher Doyle downs the last Zero Zero lager in his cooler box. He opens a can of the Heinken and the night begins.