Photofit

If the Daily Mail is anything to go by - pedophiles, rapists, murderers and misc bad guys/gals are running wild on our streets - with newspaper front covers littered with photofits inviting us to play a more serious over-breakfast edition of Guess Who.

It's going back afew years, but I wanted to share a project photographer Giles Revell did in 2008, called simply 'Photofit'.

"In providing each sitter with the same tools – a 1970s police Photofit kit, the process by which they created their self-portrait was democratized; the immediate, tactile qualities of the kit enabling them to tell their own story as a likeness falls into place, piece by piece."

Great photographer with some truely awesome projects : http://gilesrevell.com/

It's made out of fucking cookies

This video was doing the rounds last week. If you haven't seen it, you must. Makes me laugh every time.

Utterly Meaningless Adjectives in Marketing

Craft
Real
Artisan
Proper

Na na na Batman

Saw this advert for the new Batman: Arkham Origins game the other day.

I quite like it.

It immediately stood out from all the adverts that had gone before.

The sheer simplicity of the idea and the creepy almost-real-but-kind-not CG grabbed my attention and kept it.

Maybe could have done without the fist fight at the end.

All in all, quite a good advert for what is a pretty shit franchise.

Russell Brand On Newsnight

If you watch only one thing today, make it this. Superb stuff.

John Webster: The Human Adman

I agree with Steve Harrison's assertion that advertising people would be well served to be more educated about the work of successful people who have preceded them. He makes the argument that no budding director would set out without studying the work of the great directors, no writer would be devoid of knowledge of the great writers and their works. But every day, hundreds of advertising people go about their business knowing next to nothing about the greats of advertising.

I've heard the argument that your influences should come from outside of advertising - this is a favorite assertion of young creatives and so-called 'cool people'. I agree, you should have a wide sphere of influences - the whole of life, art, film, writing, design, technology, clouds, oranges. But that's no excuse to not study the work of people who have already done what you're doing, and done it better than you. Times have changed, but the essence of what makes things great is still the same.

Anyway, here to help in this regard is this film about John Webster. He needs no introduction from me other than to say that if you work in advertising and you don't know who he is, this can be your first step to enlightenment. The film was made by Nick Werber, Tom Baker, David Carr and Martins Millers, creative students at the School of Communication Arts in London in conjunction with Patrick Collister. It does contain a few people saying the odd daft thing to camera, but that's inevitable in any documentary about advertising – it is well, well worth a watch. So thanks to them for making and sharing it.


There's a site supporting the film, with full credits and background here.

Tactical naivety

Tactical naivety.

I'm not talking about footballing pundits describing the approach of African footballing nations to defending in the 70's and 80's.

No, the post refers to the depressing trend of a lot of advertising to focus on producing one-off executions rather than long running campaigns that help build a brand over time.

Now, it's clear that there's a prevalent culture of short-termism that puts pressure on everything needing to be done by yesterday but this runs counter to the way that most advertising actually works.

If companies genuinely want people to think or feel differently about their brands then they need to recognise that it takes time for this kind of step change to actually happen.

There is no magic wand that can be waved that will change the way a brand is perceived overnight.

It takes time. And it takes money. And it takes repetition of a consistent message within a consistent campaign to really cut-through and have impact.

Clients can be impatient as they're often in a hurry to make their mark as quickly as possible so they can continue to shin up the greasy career pole.

And agencies can be impatient too as winning awards, the allure of creating something shiny and new along with a "not invented here" syndrome that can exist in creative departments means that investing in a long running campaign is not top of their agenda.

All of which sadly creates a vicious circle that leads to more one-off, temporary, wheel-reinventing executions being created or campaigns being killed before they can reach their full potential.

There's no doubt that things like "crowdsourcing" and the rise of the "viral" and "online content" have exacerbated the problem as the ridiculous and unrealistic assertion that great ideas can come from anywhere has made advertising seem much more disposable and undermined the real value that great creativity can bring in the eyes of an easily influenced and increasingly inexperienced marketing community.

Some agencies and clients are pissing money away by actively encouraging pieces of work with no depth and substance that have a lifespan shorter than a mayfly.

And the "always in beta", "everything's changing", "let's throw lots of things against the wall to see what sticks" attitudes of the blinkered neophiles hardly stimulates the kind of breakthrough thinking that ends up with giving a brand a distinct and differentiated campaign that can live for years and years.

From a wider perspective, this short-term outlook and behaviour means that advertising agencies are in severe danger of being dragged down into a tactical ideas bunfight with other marketing service providers.

Rather than getting into X-Factor style idea auditions where fluffy, nebulous, PR generating soundbite stunty bollocks ideas are the order of the day ["let's build the world's tallest mountain out of cake", "let's sponsor the tomato/donkey/goat/ant throwing festival in Spain", "let's make a fake Turin shroud and pretend we've washed it"] advertising agencies need to reclaim the ideas high ground.

They can do this by concentrating on doing what they do best and doing what nobody else can do.

Producing brilliant, entertaining and rewarding long-running advertising campaigns that consistently captures the public's attention and imagination.

The bottom line is that's the thing that puts value on the bottom line.

As my old mate Sun Tzu said in the boozer last week;

Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.