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?

You've Been Drenched

Let's start by saying I quite like the new Drench ad. However it does appear that the script idea is quite familiar...

Tango Drench Script

We want to recreate the effect of being Tango'd Rehydrated.

We take a documentary voiceover guy doing deadpan.

We show people in an ordinary environment.

The family is hit with fruit water

No, I mean really hit with fruit water. In a big way.

But it's not as good a tango rehydration effect as Tango Drench

You know when you've been Tango'd That's Juicy Drench

http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/theWork/news/1066829/Drench-smart-hydration-people-CHI---Partners/

Jumping the Shark

It's official, T-Mobile's flashmob series has today jumped the shark.

In it's defence, I can see how they might have thought it was funny to pastiche the royal wedding (and done well it would have been); plus i like the idea behind Life's for Sharing.

However, the execution just is not funny. It fails to be entertaining, taking off a recentish net video, but with none of the self-awareness or light-heartedness that made the original so touching. It looks and feels like actors mugging, there is no sense that any of the expressions or actions are natural. Moves planned and set out wholesale.

It robs the video of likeability, and stops it being anywhere near as engaging as it could be.

Worst of all, I said before that T-Mobile had done a good job to avoid making the overused flashmob idea look old. Now it does.

Shark. Jumped.

Where next T-Mobile? We know you can do much better, I hope next time we get to see it.

The Internet vs Fluffy Jumpers

There is so much talk at the moment about 'the cloud', using online storage and utilising it for our benefit.

This got me thinking... The internet has become this all purpose location where all various aspects of your life are stored.

A place where your friends, activities, thoughts, actions and interests intertwine and tangle up on a daily basis.

It feels like the'internet' is such an old style name for a modern thing. Like looking at the millions of things your desktop can do, and still calling it a 'computer'. A name that even predates the warehouse sized leviathons of the 1940s.

'The internet' (or 'Teh Interwebz') implies linked networks and computers in a way that no longer happens.

I want to start a campaign to change the name to something more appropriate. A name that describes the intertwined nature of our online prescence.

The Beard

Or, more specifically.

Noel Edmunds' Beard

Think about it: "I'm browsing the Edmunds" "Surfing the NEB"... what's not to like?

A Joke To Celebrate 700 Posts...

Two planners walk into a bar chart ... :)

The Planning Commandments

As inspired by Charles' blog post yesterday. My thoughts on 10 planning commandments.

1. If thou does not question the morality of advertising now and again, you shouldn't be in planning

2. If there is no client that you would rather resign than work on, you shouldn't be in planning

3. If you feel happier about a small pay rise than producing world class work, you shouldn't be in planning

4. Always be nice

5. Always be honest

6. Treat people as people, not consumers

7. Never stop learning

8. No matter how good or clever it is, a strategy that only produces bad (or ineffective) work is bad strategy

9. Learn to both love and be wary of research, treat it with respect but never without scrutiny

10. Don't hold onto thoughts and ideas for yourself. Sharing promotes caring.

Crappy Customer Service Part XXVI

I hate ranting about bad customer service but I have experience so much of it recently that it needs doing.

I find it staggering how many online retailers forget that the whole point of online is doing things quickly; sites for whom 24 hours is an appropriate time for an email response.

Today's pain in the fucking backside is Direct2Drive.co.uk - A download gaming site owned by the media company IGN.

Anyone who uses Steam will know that outside of sales, buying download games costs a fortune compared to instore or boxed prices; but D2D had a couple of brilliant offers on Dirt 2 and Split/Second.

I ordered the games and went to pay for them, but mistakenly used a credit card that had been cancelled. They don't accept cdebit cards so my wife retried using her credit card. It came up that I needed to contact them, so (with no telephone number around) I emailed them.

...

The next day an email arrived saying they were looking into it... Several hours later an email said I should retry the purchase. So I went to do so, except that the offer had finished and the games were now 4 times the price, and they hadn't saved the basket at all.

I emailed back explaining this, and (16hours later) got an (admittedly very polite) email saying: "I regret the sale you are inquiring about has ended. We have many exciting sale prices for games on a regular basis, with many top titles to choose from, so please check back often!"

Yeah... Direct2drive.co.uk you can fuck right off, I'm going to Steam.

Lovely and refreshing

Lovely Mexican ad for Coca cola showing how the bad outweighs the good in the world.

You know us so well...

I do find it irritating when ads claim to know exactly what we want (I might be in advertising but I am still a customer and viewer), even more so when they do so despite the claim being blatantly untrue.

Sure, there are plenty of people who would like their air freshener to be shaped like a plastic version of a stone; but enough to make a key line out of the phrase "If you could design your air freshener..."

What did they do, carry out a quant survey of 300 housewives and say If you designed your air freshener, how would it look? To which 151 people said "Like a cheap plastic copy of a stone... even though my living room has no real stones."

By all means tell us it's the nicest looking air freshener around, that it fits neatly into your room, it doesn't look like an air freshener. All those things are valid. But really, to imply that a piece of grey plastic is what we would create is just damn annoying... unless you have some good evidence to back it up!

Thumbdercats are loose

Being on holiday I didn't see this ad until late last week, but it was worth the wait. As a loyal user of Cravendale I was quite sad to see the Cow, cyclist and pirate go; they gave the brand a lovely playfulness.

While the latest ad is a little more traditional in its' make up (reminding a bit of the old 'so good the cows want it back' ads), it absolutely works in giving the brand a leading yet silly tone of voice.

At first glance it felt like using cats was a concession that 'this thing will be online, so what do people watch online?' Yet the humour, detail and execution lets the campaign avoid any notions of being contrived.

Any cat fan knows that their cat would clearly like to take over the world. There is no exaggeration at all, but Bertrum Thumbcat is being used in a witty way that reminds me a little of the excellent Pinky and the Brain. Cats are fascinating creatures, and I hope the campaign continues to explore this (as they are doing online) and avoids falling into the trap of repeating itself.

You just cannot argue with advertising like this. (Especially now the cats are read up on military strategy)