Everybody wants to direct, not everybody is Stanley Kubrick

Just read this fascinating and brutally honest interview with a B-list Hollywood director. You can read it here.

Among other things he directed the classic TEEN WOLF starring Michael J. Fox. Yes, i am that old.

I found his interview a hell of a lot more illuminating than listening to yet another great director whine on about his or her process.

.A not very big idea for Smart car USA

OK, i do not come here to mock. Let me get that out of the way.

I come here to help.

Merkley Newman Partners in NYC (also Mercedes Benz’ agency) recently produced THIS idea. please click to view

Perhaps tellingly, the video is not freely available online, hence my need to link.

why would anyone do that in 2011? To “control” the message i guess. Very 2005 PR thinking. at least act like you’re proud of the work. it’s a good execution and a cool product, you’ll be fine!

The video is basically a series of random not very likeable people saying “BIG” over and over again.

And then the SMART car appears, presumably as the antidote to all this bigness and badness.

i can guarantee you that this ad will not sell Americans on the Smart car.

How do i know this? I’ll tell you how.

I drove a Mercedes Smart car in the midwest of America for two years. Way before it was cool and mainstream. I was a SMART pioneer.

And let me tell you, it wasn’t easy being a pioneer.

People looked at me like i was driving a motorized easy chair.

These were the three most popular questions i would get asked on a daily basis:

1. “Is that thing electric?” No ma’am, it’s not. It’s gas driven. This question got really old.

2. “Do you take that thing on the highway?”, said in a highly incredulous voice. My response that I did in fact take it on the highway was frequently met with awe and wonder. This was usually followed by asking would happen if i got hit by a truck or something horrible like that. You could tell safety was a big concern of the average American.

3. “What kind of mileage do you get on that thing?” Here I would flat out lie and usually claim some astronomical mpg just for fun. I honestly didn’t know. But i do know that it wasn’t nearly what you might think. I think the Mini Cooper got better mileage per gallon.

Americans love cars. And there was a lot of curiousity about my SMART car. And i was, usually, happy to be a brand ambassador.

But any advertising that doesn’t address the obvious, basic questions Americans have about the SMART car is simply missing the mark.

UPDATE: I think THIS GUY made some great points

UPDATE 2: An “un agency” undid this un big idea.

Chuck Porter talks some sense

Chuck Porter, of Crispin Porter Bogusky, has always struck me as a down to earth, somewhat avuncular character.

And as a somewhat fearless speaker of the truth. An all too rare commodity in our business.

He was recently interviewed in Forbes magazine. You can read it here.

An American ad guy finally speaks out on the death penalty.

There has been much discussion about the pending execution of Troy Davis here in the United States.

I’m not familiar with the case but enough important people have put their good names on the line for me to wish the judicial system would err on the side of caution here.

Here’s why.

Years ago, the late 80s to be precise, i got involved in a seemingly hopeless campaign to free four mass murderers from prison in the UK.

They had killed 5 people in a series of IRA pub bombings in the UK in the mid 1970s.

Only they hadn’t.

They were completely innocent.

But the enormous political pressure to get a conviction in the case had led to four innocents being railroaded and convicted.

At their sentencing, the presiding judge expressed regret that the UK had recently abolished the death penalty and that he couldn’t impose it on these four young individuals.

Cut to 16 years later.

I’m outside the Old Bailey courthouse as these now four middle-aged people are released from jail. completely absolved of the crimes they spent 16 years in jail for.

They later made a movie about this case. It was called IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER.

These four innocent people would surely have hanged if England had the death penalty in 1974.

If that doesn’t give you pause for thought, nothing will.

I should point out that the campaign to release the Guildford Four was largely led and managed by English civil servants and their English lawyer Gareth Pearce was very accurately portrayed by Emma Thompson in the film.

12 year olds feel nostalgia too!

You might not think they’re capable of it, but they are.

My 12 year old daugther and her pals are getting all misty-eyed over the prospect of THE LION KING 3D being released.

Believe it or not, Fiona, my 12 year old said something to the effect that “this movie was special to our generation”. Or something that sounded equally gooey.

I thought 12 was too young to get retrospective.

I was wrong!

This is my 600th blog post btw.

They’re doing to have to pry this keyboard from my cold dead fingers! Ya hear!

integration across the nation

i came across an article recent that fretted that advertising agencies were struggling with “integration”. Which is, IMHO, frequently mistakenly taken to mean that every idea can somehow effortlessly straddle multiple media and platforms.

Like if you just really racked your brain your idea will somehow become magically “integrated”.

Here’s the deal. Great ideas have energy and go places, bad ideas don’t have energy. they just sit there.

My test of a good idea is that anyone – the milkman, your spouse – can come up with great additions to your original idea.

Because great ideas are usually fundamentally and obviously good. Your biggest problem is deciding which great addition to produce.

A nice problem.

A great tactical use of the outdoor medium

You can’t beat a good…SURPRISE!!!

I’ve often by struck by how simply being surprising gets you noticed and remembered.

It might sound obvious. And it is obvious.

But simply being surprising can go a long way.

Because you make a deep impression.

And deep impressions stay with you.

I will never forget the first big surprise of my life.

Yet another of my Irish peasant farmer antecedents had died. Farming not too stressful obviously and it’s a physical activity. They all lived into 80s.

So i got dragged along to yet another funeral.

Funerals meant going to mass and being bored for me. I think i was like eight years old at this point.

When we got to the church, i noticed there was an Irish flag on my grand uncle’s casket.

I wondered why. he was a farmer. not a soldier.

After the mass we all went to beautiful cemetery in the shadow of a ruined medieval abbey by a river. It faced an old Norman keep. Just lovely.

And the catholic priest did his funeral rite at the grave. And he left.

But nobody else left. Which struck me as odd. I knew how this went at this point.

And then, out of nowhere, appeared six guys wearing masks and in military fatigues. They all pulled out assault rifles and fired shots over the grave.

I couldn’t fucking believe what i was seeing. This was like TV!

They then disappeared back into the crowd. And a young bearded man who i would later find out was Gerry Adams emerged and read a speech in Gaelic.

It was the IRA.

My grand uncle had been a hero in the original incarnation of the IRA in 1916.

It turned out he was a hero for his dispatching British army recruiters that would come to the area during WW1. England wisely thought twice about imposing conscription to Ireland, then a colonial possession. So they had to send recruitment officers to Ireland to get paddies to fight the Hun. After a while they stopped sending recruiters to his area.

My grand uncle was a bad ass!

I was so psyched. This was so exciting!

So the usual post funeral boring pub session was suddenly electrified.

I was very keen about this one.

What the hell was that all about???

What are you NOT going to do?

I was watching artist Chuck Close talk about creativity recently in an excellent show hosted by Charlie Rose.

Chuck was trying to explain how his generation of artists differentiated themselves from the previous generation. and he said something to the effect of “we just decided that there was a whole bunch of stuff that we just didn’t want to do and wouldn’t do”. And he went on to say how liberating that feeling was.

Not claiming to be an artist here! But i too have used this approach consciously over the years and it’s always good.

Once you decide that the past is boring, things can get interesting.

Throwing away the past works.

In each case it was the result of having a real attitude about what i was doing.

I was dead set on not repeating the past.

I had a lot of passion about this. In each of these cases.

And in each case it worked like a fucking charm.

In each case i had drawn a line in the sand. I WAS NOT doing what had been done before in the category i was working in.

now this decision did not affect what needed to be said. it just drastically altered the form the communication ultimately took.

exhibit A: I had worked on Bud Light for two years before doing this one. So i had gotten all the beginner beer advertising thinking out of my system. Now i was back working on beer after a two year break. And i’d had time to think about what i would if i worked on beer again.

So this time, what I WAS NOT going to do was yet another ad with a bunch of white guys in their 20s acting like children coz they ran out beer. Or some lame gag about how awesome beer is, like it was invented last week.

OK, this next situation was one where there was a HUGE electric fence. And that electric fence was this. Happy Americans happily consuming the happy food product being happily consumed throughout the happy commercial.

Now we completely understood WHY the ads looked and felt like they did. But they were terrible viewing.

Who wants to watch :30 of slavish love for a snack? Nobody, right.

But that doesn’t change the fact that :30 of slavish love for a snack might be the only thing worth doing for a loveable snack, does it?

So we just did the updated version of that messaging. something that actually stood a chance of getting noticed and it worked interactively with Twitter and social media…yadda, yadda, yadda.

A proper modern ad from Chipotle

Chipotle is a chain of restaurants that sells Mexican food here in the USA.

What distinguishes them from their competitors is the freshness of the ingredients and the fact that the tacos and burritos are assembled in front of you to your specs. The food is yummy, as we say in the industry.

Chipotle is also very picky about the ingredients it uses. Like Whole Foods Market, Chipotle realizes there is a growing market in this country for meat that it is farmed in a humane manner and not dosed with antibiotics 24/7.

So, in other words, Chipotle has a great story to tell.

And this video tells that story in a powerful and affecting manner.

What I love about it is that it’s a great use of online video.

Increasingly, I have come to the conclusion that advertising is simply storytelling. And if you don’t have a story to tell, don’t pretend you do. Give out a coupon or something.

Well done to all concerned here. Agency: CAA, directed by the well named Johnny Kelly. Great name that!