And please tell me that not a single dime was wasted “researching” this. And please tell me that no better ideas (such as NOT running this) were discarded in favor of telling me that it is now possible to purchase Miller Lite in a wide-mouth aluminum container (100% recyclable variety).

This is the very opposite of good beer advertising. It has zero appetite appeal. It has zero charm. It has zero humanity. Zero fun.

Good beer advertising understands that consumers’ beer choice is not a rational decision. Beer is fun. It really is that simple. And to pretend otherwise is to go in precisely the wrong direction.

The rational thing to do is NOT to drink beer. So beer advertising has to serve as the license to have fun. So, logically, the ads should serve as the slightly devilish friend winking and elbowing you in the ribs. Cajoling you into going to the pub till you say “F**k it! Why not?”. The best current example of this approach is the Dos Equis ad campaign: The Most Interesting Man in The World. I have found myself drinking Dos Equis (instead of Modelo Especiale) PURELY as a result of liking the ads.

I understand why Miller put that wretchedly awful billboard up though. Being fun and exciting is hard. It takes skill and finesse. But most of all it takes caring about the other person. In this case the passerby. And caring about what people actually think of you (your product, your brand, your beer, your billboard) complicates your life.

It’s much easier to pretend that people in the real world really give a shite about your “wide mouth” (sounds icky, doesn’t it) 100% recyclable aluminum can. And that putting up ugly ads that look sound and feel like a slide from a powerpoint presentation will actually bring people closer to your brand.

What a waste. If only they’d just used common sense.

UPDATE: UK ad legend dave trott just provided me with the UK equivalent of the above ad. it looks nicer, as you might exppect. I’m sure this tested through the roof too. Yawn. It’s beer people. it’s not that complicated. unless you haven’t the slightest idea what you’re doing in the first place.

Legendary New York agency Cliff Freeman and partners just shuttered its doors. And anyone in creative advertising of a certain age shed a quiet tear.

Cliff ruled American advertising like a giant in the 1990s. The 90s wasn’t our best decade. It was full of shite, to put it bluntly. What set Cliff apart was his unrelenting love of overtly selling stuff while all around him pondered Gen X’s teenage brooding.

Cliff was of course, the man who penned “Where’s the Beef?” for Wendy’s hamburgers, which went through the culture like a dose of salts. He then went on to pioneer, and specialize in, a new form of retail advertising: really, really, really funny ads that stuck in your head. He realized that if you’re going to be funny, be really funny. that’s the only thing worth going for.

Starting out in NYC in the early 90s, working for Cliff Freeman was a shortcut to fame and awards glory. It was Shangri La. And a lot of his employees went on to become industry titans. Because they had had such an affirming experience. Being rewarded for just being themselves. you can’t beat that. i knew the guys that did this at CFP. bastards!

I met Cliff once at an ad awards do in New York. It was the History Channel’s top ten ads of all time thing. we both had catchphrase based ads in the top ten. we chatted about the recent superbowl. we’d both had ads in it. cliff was much more psyched about being in the superbowl than i was. i found that strange.
Having catchphrase fame in common i asked him for advice. He said he didn’t want to be “that guy who did that one famous thing”. that stuck with me. neither did i.

Cliff clearly had the most fun anyone ever had in advertising. I’m sure that will be a consolation to him.

Just one example of many, many great CFP ads.

My 8 year old son Liam is an original. For Halloween this year he wanted to be a sheep. Couldn’t be talked out of it. We hoped he’d change his mind and want to be Darth Vader, but no. A sheep or nothing. So my wife painstakingly constructed the costume using a lot of cotton balls and glue.

Recently he entered a poetry competition. He decided he wanted to write a haiku on the the theme “Beauty is…” where the entrants had to creatively define their idea of beauty in some way. Could be art, photo, dance whatever.

Liam decided that beauty was birds. Specifically sparrows. I was relieved to see his final piece wasn’t too sparrow-centric.

When he showed us his final work it was apparent that he hadn’t exactly stuck to the rigid haiku structure. He loved it so much he kept that haiku structure going some more!

Because Liam doesn’t know that the haiku structure is rigid. To him it’s more of a rough guide. Because he hasn’t been told otherwise.

And guess what, Liam’s new improved haiku works too.

Over the summer i was shooting in boiling New York and found myself in urgent need of a clean T-shirt, so i wandered into a nearby Levis store. The store itself was a shrine to what i subsequently found out is their new ad campaign by the frequently great Wieden and Kennedy. I mean it was EVERYWHERE. Beautifully shot posters and banners. They were even selling t-shirts (lots of them) festooned with slogans from the new campaign. i have since found out that they even commissioned a new typeface that was hand-carved from wood. I love that. Can i have the uppercase “V” and the “W”? I can? great. thanks guys!

Whoever bought this campaign clearly loves it and is going all in on it. And good for them. I think it’s working. This enigmatic TV spot is currently all over the airwaves here. That’s an actual recording of poet Walt Whitman’s voice on an early wax cylinder recording from the 19th century. talk about texture.

I just read today that Levis’ earnings last year were down precipitously. Let’s hope that this campaign helps reverse that trend. Because regardless of what you might think of the ads (and i personally like them) it’s nice to see a marketer really lean into an idea and run with it. Good luck to all concerned. Go Levis!

I just read famously reclusive ad legend Charles Saatchi’s new book: My name is Charles Saatchi and I am an artoholic. It’s basically the interview he never gave. He talks mostly about his legendary modern art collection. And a little bit about his advertising career.

Saatchi and Saatchi had an enormous impact on the ad industry and the UK culture. They famously helped elect Margaret Thatcher in 1979 with their LABOUR ISN’T WORKING poster, which captured the zeitgeist of the time. Britain was in bad shape and Maggie was the cure.

Charles was the creative guy, his bespectacled brother Maurice (now Lord Saatchi) was the business guy. Their mantra was “nothing is impossible” and they lived really lived up to it. They had boundless ambition and chutzpah, buying and selling agencies all over the world like they were second hand cars.

Charles is now mostly retired from the ad game. But in his day he was really good. He had a disarmingly direct but artful style.

I read something he said once that had a huge impact on me. It went something like this: in order to create something great you have to have an attitude about it. In other words you have to have thought about it from every angle and be 100% confident that you are right. Not just have vague feelings and lightly held opinions.

Having an attitude about something gives you and your work energy. And the energetic tends to displace the passive. So even if you’re wrong you may well prevail over those who aren’t quite as intense and focused as you are. Because chances are you’ll win all the arguments.

(if you don’t know who UK ad legend Steve Henry is, leave now! You are clearly not worthy.)

Recently Steve wrote this for his blog over at campaign magazine. Wise words.

MULTIPLE IDEAS

The best advice I can give you about pitching is this – brush your tongue as well as your teeth. Because 75% of the microbes which cause bad breath are on the tongue.

And 75% of pitches are about personal chemistry, not about ideas.

I remember when we used to get the intermediaries in to HHCL to talk about pitching. One of them told a very funny story about how a senior female client had said that she fancied “everyone in the room” of the agency which (surprise, surprise) went on to win the pitch.

It was a very funny story for lots of people – but not unfortunately for us, because we’d lost that particular pitch.

Again, I wonder if I’d spent more time in Savile Row and less time in Milletts, how different history might have been.

But as I said last week, if you want sexual chemistry, why not go to a speed-dating event ?

(Although in the case of some people I know, the dating would have to take place at the speed of light for them to pick up any positive responses.)

Pitches should be about ideas.

But don’t just take my word for it. Alex Bogusky is saying the same thing when he says agencies should be factories, rather than thinking they’re in the service industry.

And then, you have to look at one very important question.

Do you present one idea in the pitch, or several ?

Years ago, I remember writing a column where I criticised Saatchis for winning the Toyota pitch by using spectacular pitch theatre.

Basically, they’d somehow managed to get a Toyota into their Reception area, (by removing the glass from their windows, as I understood it) to create an impressive first impression.

I wrote rather huffily that surely strategic thinking was more important than knowing the phone number of a good glazier.

But the fact is that Simon Dicketts had come up with one of the best lines ever created for a pitch – “The car in front is a Toyota” – so it wasn’t empty theatre.

So, that’s one way of going about it – find a great idea and get 100% behind it.

And, if you’re pitching for Anusol, stick a giant arsehole in Reception.

(You’ve probably got one quite near there already.)

But look at the other option.

Because you could show a whole bunch of ideas – as long as all of them are provocative.

And then you could say – let’s make a few of these, and see what happens.

This is where it gets exciting. And this is what I think agencies should be advocating now.

Because creativity has changed fundamentally.

In bad, traditional agencies, 99% of the planning happens before the work breaks.

You get one script that takes 6 months to get through research, and it’s then put out there for a year or more, gathering dust and boring the pants off people.

In good agencies, at least 50% of the planning happens after the work breaks. Because half the skill of it is in developing and evolving it.

It has to be reactive, adaptive.

And that means being less precious about it all.

A very bright planner called Jon Leach who worked at HHCL was once working on a positioning statement for the agency – and he came up with the phrase “Strong opinions, lightly held”.

At the time I thought – that’s b*llocks, we’re about strong opinions, strongly held. But a minute later I thought – no, he’s right.

Rather proving him right, as it happened.

Because the agency loved to explore radical positions for clients, but we’d very rarely die on a sword for anything.

And I think we’d stumbled onto something very valuable about running work.

By being less precious about it, you can maybe create more value.

Present several ideas. Make several ideas. As I pointed out much later to the Whiskas client, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

And all I care about is that the client does do something radical – rather than the invisible garbage which makes up 95% of our industry’s output.

When we first developed this multiple-idea approach all those years ago, we had to use research to help us pick the best idea out of several.

But that’s far from ideal – because research is tricky.

In fact, research is like sex.

Good research is very good, but bad research is the worst thing in the world.

It’s also like sex in that it involves one-way mirrors, cheap wine, M&S sausage rolls and some bored-looking women wondering if this is really the best use of their evening.

But these days you can push out several ideas and see which one gets talked about most on the internet – thus involving consumers directly and saving yourself the expense of using conventional research.

Because the one thing we know about conventional research is that it doesn’t work.

All new business launches use conventional research, but about 80% of them fail.

(That’s worse odds than avoiding halitosis.)

I have seen plenty of evidence that this is true in my own life. It is true. Reasonable people just give up after a certain point. thank god!

Although, like Groucho Marx said: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try,try again. Then quit. No point in making an idiot of yourself.

I had a very good example of how persistence can pay off from personal experience. In the late ’80s i went to an Irish music festival in london. i was just yet another young irish immigrant in the big smoke. The pogues, elvis costello etc were playing. it was a lot of fun. it was also very heavily policed and watched. choppers overhead etc. at the time the IRA were still exploding bombs in London. so understandably the cops paid extra attention to this event.

Between acts this middle-aged mother came out onto the stage. and in a quivering voice announced that her son had been imprisoned for 16 years for IRA pub bombings of which he and his three co-defendants were completely innocent of. It was incredibly moving. This poor woman had been doing this for years. Trying in vain to get her son, Gerry Conlon, out of prison. Her husband had died in prison a few years before. Their story was made into a movie called IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER, starring Daniel Day Lewis.

They were known as The Guilford Four. They were young Irish immigrants who had been tortured and made sign confessions admitting they had planted these bombs. Dodgy scientific evidence was the “proof” that they were the bombers. Like pretty much every nation that has to deal with terrorism, the UK had suspended normal justice procedures to deal with this threat. Under the Prevention of Terrorism Act 1972, terrorism suspects could be held, without access to a lawyer for seven days. Well guess what happened. The cops, under severe pressure to get convictions for what were outrageous crimes, did whatever they had to do to get those convictions.

Anyway, seeing this poor woman made me determined to help in some way. So i started attending meetings of the organization to get these guys out of jail. I expected i would be part of a huge crowd. I wasn’t. It was a tiny group of mostly family members and was led by sympathetic English civil servants. i felt bad for them. there was clearly not a lot of hope of ever getting The Guilford four out of jail. They had been in jail for sixteen years at this point.

At their sentencing, the judge (who in the course of the trial had to have the concept of the T-shirt explained to him), said that his only regret was that the death penalty had been recently abolished for they would surely have merited it. instead they got 25 consecutive life sentences. Gerry Conlon was 18 years old.

The IRA itself had issued formal statements that they, not the people in jail, had committed the bombings. but to no avail. Both the BBC and ITV had done stellar investigative journalistic pieces that cast grave doubt on the convictions. all to no avail. it looked bleak. really bleak. they had exhausted their legal appeals and the story was old news.

Yet they never gave up. They kept chiselling away. Luckily they had an absolutely brilliant English lawyer in Gareth Pierce. She just kept hammering away for years. And then finally she found a key piece of evidence that had “gone missing”. Just like in the movie that was made about the case. it really happened like that. It was that dramatic.

And, just like in the movie, Gerry Conlon insisted on coming out the front door of the Old Bailey Courthouse. The other three had opted to be driven out the back door as the police advised. I remember because i was there. I had gotten the tip off from the family that maybe this was really it. And it was. We were surrounded by i would say, with no exaggeration, at least 2,000 english cops. After the dismissal of his conviction, Gerry strode out the front door to us (and the news media) and gave his famous protestation of his and the Birmingham 6’s innocence. Again, just like in the movie. It was incredibly moving. And it was the result of PURE persistence and faith. Nothing else. There was no way in hell these guys were EVER getting out.

It instantly became a huge news story in the UK and abroad. It was wild just to be even tangentially involved.

Funny follow up story that nobody knows. Three days after being released, a still-celebrating Gerry Conlon was in a car stopped by English cops on the motorway. There were drugs found in the car. The cop recognized Gerry and radioed HQ for further instructions. HQ said “Let them go!”.

at the urging of twitter’s own @johnpatricwoods i netflixed ANVIL! a documentary about a Canadian metal band. it was simply amazing. inspiring, funny, sad, immersive. It has everything. Anvil almost shook the hand of fame and fortune in the early 80s. i recall seeing them once in support of AC/DC (or was it Motorhead?). They were a really good and influential band but they just never got the breaks. Yet they plodded on. Never giving up hope.

And then one day they got a call from a longtime fan, Sacha Gervasi, an English Anvil fan who is now a successful hollywood screenwriter (and rumored to be the basis for Toby Young’s successful nemesis in the hilarious “how to lose friends and alienate people”). Sacha tracked them down and chronicled a year in their lives. He got lucky. Thirty years on the Jewish-Canadian rockers were weary but still unreasonably hopeful of success. It’s touching to see their faith in themselves and their music. And the film itself is really deftly handled. Which in doc terms means they got a great editor! Coz that’s where documentaries come together. In fact i am tempted to do a doc myself now. Look out world. I have a hi-def camera.

I highly recommend watching ANVIL! I haven’t been this psyched in a while.

i came across this in the newspaper this morning. it’s a neat little idea to promote the upcoming release of a kids’ movie. Alvin and the Chipmunks 2: the squeakquel!

my son and his friends LOOOOOVED the first incarnation of this, which was a big hit. It featured the legendary David Cross getting paid and doing a great turn as a record company bad guy out to exploit the falsetto singing chipmunks. innocent fun for innocent kids.

the movie comes out around christmas. and someone had the smart idea of doing a print ad that featured a chipmunk stencil pattern that kids (ie: their dads) can carve onto halloween pumpkins.

A nice idea that makes sense and is involving and adds to peoples’ lives. yes advertising can be more than empty hype. But only if you try!

Last Sunday night U2 played the Rose Bowl in California to a crowd of 80,000 fans. The gig was broadcast live in HiDef on YouTube. As you would expect from U2, the production values were impeccable – great camera work and staging. Watching it full screen on my new iMac with Bose speakers it felt like something new. Obviously I’ve seen U2 on screens before but this was special. It elevated the YouTube experience and the brand. U2 will probably sell a lot of records because of this broadcast, which was watched by over 7 million people. But arguably YouTube is the one that will benefit most from this. It was a great showcase for a technology that though hugely popular, is dogged by a somewhat inaccurate rep of just having low-brow, amateurish content. I can now readily imagine the Superbowl being broadcast live on YouTube. Why not?

Increasingly YouTube is forging relationships with movie studios and other producers of high end content.

Orson Welles famously said that the tragedy of film makers is that they are the artists that cannot afford their own tools. And it’s true. Despite technological advances, it still takes a small village to shoot film/video correctly. But equally importantly, it still takes talent and drive and vision to create great content. Look at U2.