It's a Funny Old Agency Life

The latest post from the Ad Contrarian about success and reacting to post-success dips got me thinking about much like football management working with bad clients can be.

Take Roman Abramovich. He has hired and fired 5 managers in about 7 years trying to achieve his aim of winning the Champions League. Yet I have no doubt whatsoever that had he kept manager number 2 (Jose Mourinho) he would have won it at least once by now.

Does that sound familiar? An agency doing good work and heading in the right direction, only to be fired or chucked into a re-pitch for no good reason? A new marketing director taking over and wanting to stamp their authority? Either way the work gets changed, the ideas diverted, the strategy altered and instead of building up a long term result they get stuck with short term spikes and no loyalty.

Mind you. At least there is a reason for those sackings. You could be like poor Chris Hughton, doing an excellent job in difficult circumstances and let go on a whim by the shambling management team that you just dug out of a Championship sized hole. As thanks for the good work you get treated like an inconvenience and kicked out halfway through a campaign where you were doing well.

Of course it would be bad if like poor Everton fans, you had to put up with all your best players being sold, and then no money being spent on new ones. Imagine having your budget cut in half and then being expected to get the same results. How bad must it be to be trying your best to make communications work, but there is never enough budget to actually achieve anything. I wonder who will be the one to get fired?

Still, it could be worse. Abramovich is reported to constantly meddle in the team affairs, undermining the manager and making decisions for him. Wouldn't it be terrible if bad clients did that to ag...oh. Next time you get given a gigantic chunk of bad copy or a list of features, or are given some bad art direction you can't refuse, that's what we call a Torres.

Thank goodness very few clients are like this though. When you think about who you could be working for, it makes you better appreciate those you already are.

Disclaimer: I am West Ham fan who lives near Old Trafford.

P.S.: I also have sympathy for the poor client that hired what they thought was a good agency and ended up with Steve McLaren (Sorry Rob C)

Bad or Rad?

Some ads stick with you even though they may not be great. This for example, an early 90's ad for milk featuring a bastardisation of a great Squeeze track.

Is this a good ad? Is it a product of the time?
Either way it's been lodged in my head for 18 years.



Is this a borderline racist display of outdated black stereotypes, or is it a cool piece of animation that makes a random beverage seem a million times more attractive than a dull Robinson's fruit drink?

I for one never saw any offense in it, it seemed very very cool; and if it did use stereotypes, it did so in what seemed a mostly complimentary way.

Hit the Button

Some ads make great use of celebrity endorsements, some are a little cliche'd, some are just celebrities with logo's on. It takes a very special kind of celebrity ad to make you want to rip your own face off.

The new Head and Shoulders ad featuring Jenson Button is worse than that.

Funny thing is, I like Button. As an avid follower of Formula 1 (at least until Murdoch gets his mitts on it), I have a huge respect for his skills and abilities, as well as his loyalty in sticking with the Honda team even though it was slower than a royal wedding procession (topical!) hitching a lift on a tortoise (internet topical!).

However this ad is just awful. A strange idea that doesn't seem to ever gel into anything coherent. From the half arsed ryhming that gives up midway through the ad, to the cheese factor that stinks out any of the moment that might be considered comedy.

There is plenty of creative potential to the thought of other things being on his mind, but it comes across as a safe, riskless, joyless, passionless piece of work that not only embarrasses Jenson but embarrasses the brand. Maybe it works better in other languages (I believe it's not a UK ad), maybe their sense of humour fits this better...

This is a perfect example of where agencies and clients need to watch the ad like a real person. Stop thinking in your roles and imagine this came on while you were watching TV, would you go and buy it?

Grey of Sunshine

Ah the terrible wonders of Just for Men advertising. Creeping out of the sludge of hard sell manipulative dirty old man land is this new gem.

Yet another interesting NPD idea killed by advertising so terrible that even Gillette wouldn't touch it. (Though they both come from the 'state the obvious and then make it more obvious then scream it til you pass out' school of hard sell that I hoped had died out 10 years ago.)

The only thing that this ad says to me about growing old is that baldness isn't as bad as you think when hair topped over 50's have to put up with this shite.

Sigh School Musical

Aka - Just because you acknowledge being terrible doesn't make it good Part 2



Pot in the name of all that HHCL ever made is this piece of shit? Taking the piss out of High School Musical isn't hard; it's just waiting to be dragged down the streets by its ears and given a good kicking. Which frankly is just what I'd like to do to the Pot Noodle guys.

How on earth do you sign off a one minute long parody without a single decent gag? Well, I'll be fair, I bet a couple of those lines sounded good on paper... but they just do not work AT ALL here.

Pot Noodle is a licence to make exciting ads, but what we have right now feels like an agency struggling too hard to match the past instead of looking forward. We know they can do better (indeed they have recently).

I think frankly it's largely down to casting, those guys just do not seem funny; like you could give them the best scripts in the world and it would still be bad.

The old Pot Noodle ads worked because yes, they were cheap and tacky, and yes they were stupid and silly, but they were witty, and had a dark edge that kept everything in check.

This is Disaster Movie to Airplane. I hate it. More than I hate High School Musical, and that is one hell of a lot.

Wafer Thin

Aka - Just because you acknowledge being terrible doesn't make it good Part 1



Don't you just hate it when a product you love is sullied by bad advertising?
I do.
But I hate it more when a product I love makes an ad that is not only bad, but tries half heartedly to acknowledge its own badness.

Cue Tunnocks Caramel Wafers, with what looks like agency staff imitating cheesy bite shots. It just doesn't feel right. It's low budget, and that's fair enough; you can't magic money from thin air... but it doesn't take the imitation anywhere funny, so you end up with a typical bad chocolate ad, without the product!

So Easy a Man Can Do It

I'm not sure why I hate this ad.

It could be the complete patronising tone.
It could be that the implied sarcasm doesn't give the ad the ironic excuse it is clearly looking for.
It could be the shite (beyond so bad its good, and into so bad its a stain on our industry) acting, that also fails to give the ad the ironic excuse it is clearly looking for.
It could be that its implied relationship is so outdated and insulting to both men and women. God forbid an agency try to do this the other way round.

Or it could just be that I don't get it.

Creating purposefully shit ads to get attention is all very well a few times. But when 20% of our industry's output is trying to be Barry Scott it just falls flat.

I see what they were aiming for but even if they'd have achieved it, it would have been pointless.
The product looks useful, why not find a better way to show that...

What in the World??

After discussing the brilliance of M+C Saatchis latter BA ads (see bottom video) on Facebook, I was reminded of how any brand can have good ads if the agency and company tries hard enough. How any agency can make good ads.

It saddens me then, that these awful PC World ads are still appearing. Ads that not only are horrible and cringeworthy to watch, but fail to get across a positive message about the brand other than "good value" (which they aren't, usually).

I wonder, what could be done with the brand if the agency or company (or both) were to realize there is so much more they could say and do. (Hell, even a better ad with the same strategy would be alright..) We know from the BA ads that M+C can do better; so why is it they aren't?

And from there,,,

Having mentioned TV's worst ads in my last post, I'd like to post about an ad I saw on there that I somehow missed on TV in my post-wedding haze of busyness; and also one I saw last night.



Everybody knows a bloke like Mickey. No. No I don't. Oddly enough, contrived characters of stereotypical vain anality hardly exist in the real world. I thought it would be hard for Head and Shoulders ads to get any worse. But good grief this is poor.

Secondly, a new Ocean Finance ad (you know where this is heading... thats right, financial metaphors!) which shows financial services as lanes in a swimming pool. It looks low budget, its badly shot, its badly written, badly voiced over, as patronising as David Cameron claiming to understand a gun crime teenager in Hackney, and FAR too long. I mean fuck, it just drones on and on and on and on and on and on and on... and then it cuts to an Ocean. HAHAH! I see what they did there, genius.

No. Just yet another bloody awful financial ad on UK tv.

Holy Marketing, Its Brandman!

Any of you in the UK or US may be unfortunate enough to have had to witness the dire atrocity of sales that is the "Brand Power" (ta da da da dah DAH, Braaaannnd Powwwweeerrr!) ads.

Seemingly set in the mid 90s when calling something a brand made the public believe it was a powerful sign of quality, and with planning from the mid 1950s to boot.

With all the subtlety of a nuclear bomb hitting the statur of liberty with a gigantic sign in the sky saying "Look at this!"; and the tone of a patronising army major explaining the theory of relativity to a brain dead, hard of hearing checkout assistant at 3am in the morning.

Surely the brands involved in this horrific travesty of airtime must realize that these ads are harming their public perceptions; and if they aren't then viewing public, im utterly ashamed of you.

Shoe... Go On SHOE. Stupid ad...

Latest company to cross over into awful ad territory: Brantano.

The latest ad for Brantano shoes feature a female professor Brantano (supposedly on a par with Freud...) who discovers the part of the brain that makes women go mad for shoes.

Now, the ad appears to be aiming itself at women, yet taking the piss out of them in a remarkably unsubtle and charmless way. Its a little amusing, but it borders on the patronising in the way it depicts all women as helpless over shoes.


I cant find a video to show those of you who havent seen it, I will keep looking...

Badadmadness

Thinking back to Russell Davies comments at the FMS about how "The business model for shit is going away." I was wondering, why is it that bad ads still get made?

Do they work? Or is there just a total ignorance of a: how bad they are b: whether they work c: whether something better could work more?

I mean, if the Coke Zero ads worked, why on earth wouldnt other rubbish ads... but why?! Are people fond of being patronised and talked down to? Do they enjoy being treated as if they have the intellectual capacity of a mouldy peanut, or are people far stupider (arf) than we give them credit for?

Why do Loreal and Gillette still do the same terrible ads they have been doing for 30 years? Surely if they didnt work they would have been stopped?

We need better, but will better work?