People moaning about Christmas decorations in the shops in October can shut right up. I’m going to be fed up with the whole thing before Argos even puts Slade on rotation.
I’m working on two of them at the moment and thinking that it might be time to do a ‘7 Deadly Sins Of Digital Christmas’. There’s plenty of them around.
The only thing that’s going to get me through is the Beat Street Christmas Rap. You can’t beat the bit where Doug E Fresh pops out from between Santa’s legs. Awesome. (The Xmas bit doesn’t start until 1m30).
I never thought I’d be ranting about chocolate eggs. It makes me feel unclean and slightly deranged. I’m hopefully going to manage to fend off the voice in my left ear going: “you’re just like one of those people you hate, the ones who (supposedly) campaigned for the reinstating of the Wispa” for just long enough to finish this post…
Small child. Me. Kinder Eggs. Sweet AND fun. Exciting. And those ads…
Minilogue video by Kristopher Storm (Music by Minilogue).
Carphone Warehouse ad by Kristopher Storm (Music by Minilogue).
I’m really confused. Everything in my brain is shutting down and I’ve got no idea what to say about it. My groove has been well and truly freaked.
I saw the Carphone Warehouse ad on telly and thought this is quite a nice advertisement. Then something twitched in my brain and I thought “Fuck me, that really reminds me of that Minilogue video”, then I heard the music at the end and though “Fuck me, it even sounds like bloody Minilogue”.
Then I went and looked both of them up and realised that they’ve been done by the same guy: Kristofer Strom.
Here’s why my brain almost imploded:
I’m glad that it’s not a ripoff or ‘homage’
I like the fact they’ve gone to the source to get it made – I like the idea of people being ‘discovered’ on YouTube then being given decent budgets to make more of their ‘art’
I think it works well as a ad, I think it’s nice
It’s taking something that’s been seen by 3m people globally (on YouTube) and whacking it all over the ad breaks on UK TV where it will be seen my millions more (don’t know if I feel good or bad about that – probably just neutral)
BUT CREATIVELY IT FEELS LIKE THE LAZIEST THING IN THE ENTIRE WORLD EVER, doesn’t it?
Or does point 5 even matter? If it’s a good ad that tells the right story and engages the target market (and the creator is getting duly rewarded) why should I be such a stuck-up creative fuckwad about it?
I don’t know how anyone else feels about it, but it’s certainly raised a debate in my head that’s not dying down…
Is this the future? Does it even matter? Do I really care?
I wasn’t going to blog about the House of Cards video and it’s brilliant integration with Google and the geekosphere. I wasn’t going to blog it because everyone else has. It is bloody brilliant though. Yet another example of how Radiohead really understand the importance of context.
So I wasn’t going to post it, then I realised it’s a golden opportunity for me to share a presentation I did at the Online Marketing and Media Show last month. I got invited by NMA to talk on a Creative Directors Showcase thingy. Me, Flo from Dare, Sam from Lean Mean Fighting Machine and Dom from Glue all got to chat about things we’ve seen recently that we like. The other guys all did a great job and showed us lots of cool online / mobile advertising things.
Instead of doing it on something that I liked, I chose to do 5 minutes on Radiohead ;-)
Basically it’s all about how I don’t like Radiohead, but how, through being interesting and innovative, they’ve made me like the ‘idea’ of Radiohead. Imagine if normal brands could do that. Make you care about products you don’t even like that much. I reckon there’s stuff we can learn from the ‘head.
I tried to format it for online video as best as I could (I added some extra words so it can be followed without me speaking, and I put some music in it to stop it feeling too silent) – but I’m not good enough at that kind of thing to make all the timings quite right, so please forgive any bits that feel too slow or too fast.
I hope no-one minds that I used their footage in there. I specifically use the examples of:
I’ve just noticed that Radiohead are a bit shit at search engine optimisiation though. With page titles like this:
RA DIOHEA_D / HOU SE OF_C ARDS – Google Code
How is anyone supposed to find them. Like anyone will look for all those spaces and underscores ;-)
Admission: I really posted this because I had an odd experience in the pub on Tuesday night, a bloke approached me and asked if I’d done a presentation on Radiohead. He’d seem me do it. Live. I felt almost famous. For a second.
It’s a different thing doing a different job. But I can see how one would perhaps make you think of the other. For sure.
Now I’ve no idea if Tim’s comment is a thinly veiled jibe or just a simple statement. I don’t know Tim. Or his intentions, so it’s really hard to tell.
He could be saying:
YOU ARE THIEVING FUCKTARDS WHO HAVE NICKED THE IDEA OF USING A GUY WHO MOVES FUNNY AROUND AN URBAN ENVIRONMENT FOR ADVERTISING PURPOSES
Or he could just be saying that he really quite likes this video and there’s just something about it that reminds him of the above Spike Jonez directed ad from the year 2000. But there’s something about the use of the word ‘version’ that makes me think there’s a hint of jibeyness about it. Or I could be suffering from blog-comment paranoia…
Ah well.
But it does relate to something that happened to me earlier on today. I met up with some lovely creative chaps who I’ve known for a while. They wanted to chat about an idea for a project. It just so happened that we’d already done exactly the same thing 4 years ago on the internet. Like totally exactly the same. So we laughed about it and moved on to chatting about some other ideas instead.
But if they’d talked to someone else about it there would be an identical thing being conceived and made at this exact moment in time. And at some point in a month or two people would be saying: “Oh my god, they ripped off that thing from 4 years ago”. And I’d never have known any different, apart from the fact that I really like these guys and I know that they wouldn’t intentionally have done that. But in another time-space scenario I’d have probably been dead cynical about it. For sure.
The Tea Buddy shenanigans a few months ago is yet-another example of a similarish thing being spotted and jumped on.
It’s tough. And it’s only going to get worse as we get more connected and more people see more stuff that they can make more connections between.
I guess the only answer is to try to have seen everything in the world ever. Or perhaps the creative industries should try to set up a global panel of idea guardians who can check all concepts at an early stage and make sure they don’t remind them of something else?
But for what it’s worth, as far as I know, no-one involved in the making of the David Elsewhere stuff has ever seen that Spike Jonez ad (at least not that they’re admitting).
EDIT: I just remembered another thing! My brain must be working OK-ish tonight. This point made by James Cooper ex-of-Dare now of Anomaly NY on Scampblog.
2. Be original. Same rules apply to when all you lot who moan about whether Bravia or Guinness or John Lewis was original or not. Poke’s nice unlimited site looks a little like a Motorola site, our nice Bravia site looks a little like a Pioneer site. The point is it’s not such a leap to imagine that creative brains come up with the same things. An amount of copying goes on, but these things right themselves in the end. No one is going to make a serious career out of being unoriginal – apart from The Chemical Brothers. There are trends in digital in the same way there are in TV. If you really want to stick out then you have to do something different and we all know how hard that is these days.
Sorry if this is old hat, it’s been seen by quite a few people on YouTube. But it’s one of those things that even if you’ve seen it before, you’ll be happier after seeing it again…
I was lucky enough to go to Portfolio Night 6 last night. Set up by the enterprising young dudes behind http://ihaveanidea.org/ it’s billed as a chance for young creatives to meet creative directors (for a fee of £10). I felt like it was a chance for me to meet young talented people (for a fee of nothing with a couple of beers thrown in for free).
Without giving away any personal details about people that I saw I was amazed at the disparity in skills that I saw. Some of it was obviously about talent. But there were a bunch of people who’d obviously been given a really rubbish schooling in what ‘advertising’ is all about. A shocking image with a quirky line and a logo (bottom left invariably bottom right invariably [thanks Ben for pointing out my stupid error]) can’t be the basic unit of advertising any more, can it?
I met a few youngsters that really stood out: if I thought I could hide Jai and Wal from the world and keep them as my little secret I’d be tempted. But they’re already out there, blogging with the best of them and doing placements at great places. So they’ll be fine whatever happens.
There’s another couple that I really really liked, but I’m keeping them secret for now whilst ‘discussions’ take place…
I hope my comments were useful to the people I spoke to. I’m not sure they were mostly. But I hope at least I was polite and respectful (unlike some of my contemporaries who I heard being a little bit mean if I have to be honest…).
Here’s the talk I did at Iris’ excellent Under the Influence day. It’s basically about digital experiences and magic and how the two are interconnected.
Hope it’s OK – from my perspective I think it wanders a bit at the end (I sort of ran out of preparation time). As usual I can’t bear to watch it in order to tell if it’s rubbish or not. I need to get over my fear of seeing and hearing myself, it makes it impossible to do anything on YouTube or the like.
I wish I’d got to see more of the day’s other talks but I was busy writing my presentation and doing other work. But now thanks to the magical internet and the generosity of Iris I can see them all online. Hooray.
