Freddie Flintoff for Morrisons

Right, back to an ad a day, this time a celebrity supermarket slot from DLKW Lowe

Well, as far as these things go, it's beautifully done. The message - Morrisons do a range of ready meals from different cuisines - is put across simply and effectively.

But Flintoff is the perfect find for so many reasons. Men want to be his mate, women want to be his mistress. He's charming and handsome, and has a populist appeal that a Michael Atherton or a David Gower could never possess.

But more to the point, he just nails it. There must have been some high-fives after the first screen test. He's down to earth, but he pitches in and learns the foreign phrases to each of the chefs. He's blokey, but not wooden. The sign-off "champion" works because it reflects both his image and the brand's image.

Richard Hammond, take note.

SCA 2.0 half term assignment pt.4

Well bloody hell, here it is, Sunday night, then once more unto the breach, dear friends.

I did have a listen to 3 albums that I normally wouldn't, although to be fair I wasn't always concentrating on them that much.

1. "Missundaztood" by Pink

Taken from Mrs Cutcopywrite's CD collection, I did already know a couple of tracks, like "Get the party starte" and "Just Like A Pill", but the rest was a mystery. Strangely, even the tracks I knew had a really dated, anaemic production, neither pop nor rock, that was all drums and vocals and nothing in between. We're used to big bass and ravey synths all over our music these days, and despite a spirited perfomance from the woman, I can't imagine, for example, ever using it in an advert. One of those things that sounds better in your memory.

2. "Happy Hardcore Top 100 Best Ever" by Various Artists

This was, er, fast. It brought back happy memories of Technohead's "I want to be a hippy", in which Top Of The Pops would censor the word "marijuana" but not the phrase "I want to get high". There were odd moments where I'd recognise a sample, or where a nifty rave riff would appear for a bit, but mostly it just highlighted how much dance music has moved on, and with genres like dubstep and artists like Major Lazer around, going faster and faster (happy hardcore runs at 160-180bpm) just seems silly.

It's fair to say that of the three, this is the CD that caused Mrs Cutcopywrite the most aggravation.

3. "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill", by Lauryn Hill

I enjoyed this. It's not my thing entirely, but sales and critical acclaim were so high that you can't help but take notice. I could have done without the strange educational spoken word parts, but otherwise, it was a great album lyrically and musically.

Right, now for a good night's sleep. Possibly.

SCA 2.0 half term assignment pt.3

Right, as promised, I started reading "Quest - Journey to the Centre of your Soul".

Then I stopped. Sorry, but I just couldn't take it any more. It's the usual New Age logic gap. Yes, there is probably great personal benefit from spending a day in silence, or camping out in nature on your own, or sitting in an empty room without distractions for a period of time. But you can see that benefit without linking it to Native American rituals, or attaching some kind of cosmic significance.

Time alone = time to think = time to reflect = a chance to make decisions and come to answers. It's as simple as that. But it gets surrounded by this self-important, meaningless "spiritual" bollocks.

Take room purifying, for instance. I will just about accept that the aroma created by burning sage may have some relaxing or calming properties. But I won't accept that it will "cleanse the energy", because energy is a complicated scientific concept and not something you can spray with Dettol, and neither will I accept that it is necessary to use a feather to waft the smoke around. Why not anything else? What difference does it make? If I wafted it around with a copy of Mein Kampf, and then invited her into the room to examine "the energy", would she be able to tell?

Furthermore, why do they always pick the acceptable parts of tribal rituals? She talks about how young adolescents from Native American tribes go on a Quest to reach adulthood, and prescribes it for her own children. But then, the coming of age rituals of boys in the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea would involve inserting sharpened sticks into their nostrils until blood gushed out, and encouraging them to fellate as many bachelors in the tribe as possible, and swallow as much semen as possible, over a period of 5 days. Perhaps Ms Linn would like to include this "Quest" in her next book?

Anyway, I feel a bit guilty for not getting through it all, so I'm going to listen to an album of Happy Hardcore to make a start on part 4.

SCA 2.0 half term assignment pt.2

Today, I developed a terrible, terrible cold. I also watched a film that I would never normally watch, a chick flick / romcom called Baby Mama, starrring Tina Fey.

It was actually quite enjoyable. I'd write a fuller review but I feel like crap. Luckily, the book I've chosen for part 3 of the assignment should help me out. It's called "Quest: Journey to the centre of your soul", by Denise and Meadow Linn. Sample sentence: "One of the fastest ways to tap into your Spirit Power is to drum". Can't wait!

A response to George Monbiot's balls

The writer used his Guardian column yesterday evening to pen an attack on the advertising industry as "a poison that demeans even love".

There's so much wrong with this is article it's difficult to know where to begin. It's certainly true that advertisers must face up to ethical responsibilities around targeting children and invading privacy. But at every stage, he takes the argument a step too far.

"Some adverts appear to promote intrinsic values, associating their products with family life and strong communities. But they also create the impression that these values can be purchased, which demeans and undermines them."

Do they? When was the last time anyone watched a family bouncing around happily on a DFS sofa and think "oh hey, if I buy DFS, maybe my family will be happy like theirs"?

The truth, of course, is far less sinister. DFS know that families are a major demographic target for their goods, so they put a family in the advert to indicate this. Just like left-wing parents take their kids on marches, even when they're too young understand the banners they're holding, in the full knowledge that they'll make an effective photo opportunity.

"As a report by the progressive thinktank Compass explains, the messages used by advertisers are designed to trigger emotional rather than rational responses"


Yes, and George Monbiot and other left-wing columnists never use emotive language to encourage us to see their side of the argument.


"Advertising claims to enhance our choice, but it offers us little choice about whether we see and hear it, and ever less choice about whether we respond to it."


Oh, balls. If this was true, we'd never stop spending money. I don't see an advert for EasyJet and leap for the laptop to make a booking. But if, for example, I fancied a holiday in Europe, then maybe I'd start thinking about where I could find hotels and flights and ideas for places to go, and remember the EasyJet ad.

I could equally well, of course, go to a flight comparison site, like thousands do every day, and decide for myself who I want to go with.

Which brings me to a wider point - that every advance in the sophistication of advertising is matched by the sophistication of consumers. The industry is getting cleverer because it has to. People are more aware of advertising and how it works than ever before. Consumer advice programmes, news, blogs, and social media make us more aware of product faults and unethical practices than ever before.

And finally, there's a massive sense of entitlement about all this. It's like those libertarians on the right who complain about taxes being too high then complain that the council services are poor and the NHS didn't treat them fast enough. Just how many websites do we use every day, of our own free choice, that charge us absolutely nothing to use their services? How many hours of TV (outside of the BBC) do we watch?

Then ask how many people do these websites and TV channels employ? How much equipment do they need to purchase and maintain in order for you to enjoy and use their product? And you think that this should all come for free?

Advertising, just like free-market capitalism, needs to come with ethics and it needs a safety net. But it is the sister of democracy, and unless you ditch that, you can't ditch advertising either.

I know which combination I'd choose.

SCA 2.0 half term assignment pt.1

Over half term this week, we have to do the following:

- watch a film we would never normally watch
- read 2 magazines we would never normally read
- read a book we would never normally read
- listen to 3 albums from a genre we would never normally listen to.

As of today, it's one down, three to go, having read my two magazines. Magazine number one: BBC Top Of The Pops.

From this, I learned that:
- Horoscopes in teen mags are basically behavioural engineering. A typical one runs "your parents are tired, so why not help them out with chores?" or "there's a new girl at school who's feeling left out, why not make friends with her?"
- The word "cringe" is now a noun as well as a verb, as in "I had a complete cringe in front of this boy I like"
- It is acceptable in such mags to describe the pre-pubescent mini-Bieber, Ronan Parke, with the word "yum"
- Teenage girls like One Direction. This cannot be overstated. They're on just about every page of it, including the page telling you what's in the magazine next issue.
- Slashfic* is the underlying psychological driver behind teen fandom. In this case it's a kind of platonic slash-lite, but it's notable how many of the questions asked of the various boys involve friendship, hugs, togetherness, and brotherhood. Typical enquiry to One Direction: "How much do you love each other out of 100 per cent?"**
- The free bottles of nail polish and stick on jewellery are harder to apply than they look; it's probably something to do with a group of friends at a sleepover. Here's my attempt, with The Wanted looking disapprovingly on:

* This is slashfic, if you weren't aware.
** As opposed to "out of 75 per cent", one assumes.

Magazine number two: Love It!

This really was a horrendous, downmarket, prurient, depressing piece of filth. On the one hand they have horror stories about cosmetic eye surgery, on the other they offer, with no apparent irony, breast reduction as a competition prize. We have a single Mum whose way of finding personal redemption from her disfiguring burn scar is to work nights in a strip club, private dances included. Apparently men jizzing in their pants as she rubbed her vagina against their trousers made her "feel good about [her]self". There's some half-arsed analysis of celebrity couples' body language, deciding from a single photo that Fearne Cotton's boyfriend has doubts about his relationship. The embarrassing photos sent in by readers are simply not funny or remarkable in any way, and the captions added by the subs added nothing witty or charming.

I could go on, but I won't. I know there's downmarket, but this is just hideous.

Tune in tomorrow when I'll be watching Tina Fey's 2008 film "Baby Mama". Apparently it's a comedy.

Half Term at SCA (and earphone scamps)

Or "no rest for the wicked", as it should be subtitled. We've still got a lot to do, and I've got a bit extra as I'm doing some freelance work producing web copy for one of our mentors. But there should still be time for a little rest, with a bit of luck.

In the latter part of the first half term we finally started producing ads. The first brief was a bit of an odd one, and a difficult one for me - we had to produce a government campaign to get people to turn down or take off their earphones, with posters on the tube and on buses. Difficult for me because I depend on them while travelling for my sanity, and because I know that they're well insulated and the sound doesn't leak to the outside world.

Anyway, working with the splendid Katie Harland, we came to the conclusion that lecturing people about health risks or antisocial behaviour would largely be ignored. Therefore we needed to engage and amuse, and get the message across to people with a little subtlety. We did this by suggesting weird and wonderful conversation snippets that you might overhear if you took your headphones out.

First example, which also gives an idea of the typography:

Next example as a scamp, with added pay-off line and the tagline ("Unplug Your Lugs") buried in the web address.

Final example, with some extra words to make it clearer that it's referring to what you might hear in the carriage. I think another team, who had basically the same idea as us, had a better solution, which was to give each quote a date, time, and tube line where it was supposedly (or actually) heard. I think ours was a little clumsy by comparison, though naturally I preferred our quotes...

I had a lovely idea for a hard-hitting poster based on the insight another team had about tinnitus sufferers being likely to commit suicide. It would feature earphones in the shape of a noose, and the words "Tinnitus leads many sufferers to suicide. So it's not just the other passengers you're driving mad. Turn it down". Unfortunately, the suicide thing is a complete myth, but it would have been nice.

Twinings - gets you back to you

One of a plethora of adverts to be released during an episode of X Factor (it's a fun game spotting the ones where the entire budget has clearly been spent on the timeslot and not the ad), this is the new effort for Twinings by the good folk at AMV BDDO. Stephen Fry is nowhere to be seen.

I find the song on the dreary side, but as Adele is currently Queen Of The Entire World, I suspect I am out of step with the times and it's a sensible choice. It certainly fits the mood. But it's a solid piece of positioning - aimed squarely at women who sometimes feel a bit run down and miserable, which is clearly all of them. I wonder if the woman embracing herself led some men to become momentarily excited about the thought of some  twin-on-twin action, but it's the only morsel to chew on.

The strapline - we've been talking about these a lot lately - of "gets you back to you" is weaker. It could be any tea or hot chocolate or anything comforting really - I hope they don't try to use it to define the entire brand.

Schemas

Things are getting busy at the School of Communication Arts 2.0 - in fact I've only got round to doing this blog after a busy day at school and an evening spent writing and recording a voiceover on the history of telecommunications advertising (a very potted one, mind you).

The morning session from Chris Hill was fascinating throughout, but one part stuck out, which chimed in with the book we're currently reading: Made To Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath. They've been talking about "schemas" - which are (and let's head over to Wikipedia now) "structures that organize our knowledge and assumptions about something and are used for interpreting and processing information".

In other words, when I say "X Factor", you might think "a singing competition on the television that loads of people watch and while entertaining is not perhaps the purest example of musical and artistic expression". You probably think a lot more. Just 2 words instantly bring up a whole range of facts, ideas, names, images, songs and more in your mind - and that makes them an incredibly powerful tool for expressing a complex idea in an easily digestible and easily remembered way.

So today, we had the old AA slogan, "to our members we're the 4th emergency service". And that's all you need - with that you know that you phone them to get help, they come to you, probably in a van, as fast as they can, and they'll fix whatever it is that's wrong. All that is expressed in 2 words - "emergency service".

Words, eh? Bloody hell.

Thoroughly decent Goodfellas ad (for balance)

This blog can't be all doom and gloom, so here's a good ad. It draws you in, it strongly pushes authenticity as a brand value, and there's a great pay-off. A big platonic Italian kiss to the uncredited Mother London copywriter who wrote the script.

However, now we supposedly have to listen to what Steve Henry and Dave Trott are saying, that you really have to start making your ads special, or else who remembers them? I don't think things are quite this black and white - because in this case, what they want to do is make you choose them at the freezer aisle above the other frozen pizzas.

You might not remember this ad when asked "tell me about some ads you saw yesterday", but to me that's a bit of an artificial challenge. Surely the test is to put some brands in front of someone then ask if they remember seeing any adverts for it, what they thought. And if this one springs to mind as they're hovering around that freezer aisle, it's only going to be a positive.

What The Shitting Fuck? #3 - Renault Koleos ad

And hot on the heels of the Range Rover Evoque comes yet another worthless car ad. Only one word needed to sum up why this is a complete abortion of creativity and imagination.

Meerkats???


Publicis Conseil, Paris, consider yourself spanked.

What The Shitting Fuck? #2 - Range Rover Evoque ad

OK, this is maybe a little unfair as it's not actively awful, but just last Friday we had Steve Henry come and talk to us, and he asked us what our families would say if we asked them "what advertising have you enjoyed recently?". Maybe they'd mention meerkats, or Cadbury's gorilla, or the Yeo Valley farmers - but they wouldn't mention very many ads at all.

In advertising we can exist in a bubble where we assume that everyone is as interested in the slot as you are, and thus the technically proficient becomes the enemy of the interesting. And this ad is a prime example. It's just so stylishly, imaginatively, grandiosely... empty. There's nothing there, just pretty images, none of which are going to make anyone break off their conversation and watch it.

I don't want to know who made this. I hope I don't ever make an ad like it.

Bitchin' Pitches

Today at SCA2 we had an all-day session on presentation techniques and public speaking. I've always regarded myself as fairly confident and a good speaker, but with a less-than-engaging voice - it's distressing how often I answer the phone in a perfect state of health to someone who immediately says "oh my, that's a shocking cold you've got".

In fact, it turned out to be the other way round. My voice was praised (apparently I use my "resonators", which although I've sung in the odd choir I've certainly never been trained to do), but I was picked up on for moving around, not gesturing enough, not making eye contact enough, saying "erm", looking at the floor, etc.

So I now have to just remember to GESTURE, to speak LOUDER, to speak SLOWER, to EMPHASISE each word, and remember to PAUSE.

Apologies for capitals, but I think they're semi-appropriate there. Anyway, I made a whole lot of progress today, and with the help of a Don Draper clip and a viewing orgy of Obama speeches under my belt this evening, I think I'm just about ready to pitch our agency name to Steve Henry tomorrow.

Pot Noodle Wag

A great new effort from Mother. The tagline - "why try harder?" - perfectly expresses the Pot's position - a piece of piss. After all, it's about the same effort as making a cup of tea. The whole advert screams - "it's junk, it's trash, it has no class, but it's fast and we don't care". It's gaudy and funny, and must have been a joy to make.

Changing Rooms

So we (me and Mrs CutCopyWrite) decorated our living room last weekend - or rather, we finished decorating it over a long period of curtain making (by his Mum), painting (by him), and arguing (both of us).

In fact, as I was reading about Eric Berne's theories of Transactional Analysis, it was a bit embarrassing how often we fitted into his roles (controlling parent, natural child, adaptive child, nurturing parent, and so on), and even more shaming how often I fitted into the natural child role.

Still, it works - this is what we ended up with. Note G-Plan dining chairs, feature walls, and original radiators.

Yoghurt WAR!!!

So, the first X-Factor live show, and the first big brand face-off sees a Dairy Derby in play. In the red corner (yes, we've moved from football to boxing) is BBH's new Yeo Valley spot:

It was probably never possible to improve on "big up your chest, represent the west", but it's a good try and very slickly done. Some nice touches too: the key change, the cheesy looks, serenading the cow, the fact that it's actually quite catchy, and so on. It isn't quite genius but it'll certainly go viral (#yeovalley was very quickly trending on Twitter during the show), and releasing it on iTunes will keep the publicity going and raise a little extra cash along the way. Also, early indications are that the farming foursome are fluttering the hearts of girl and gay alike.

In the blue corner, Muller yoghurts from TBWA, with a play for the nostalgia angle.

Props to the licensing and special effects departments on this one, they must have pulled a few late nights. It's certainly impressive, but you have to ask what part of it will stop people talking about Two Shoes' lipstick malfunction and actually sit still and watch it. It's certainly talked about less - "wunderful stuff" has only 117 results, and "Muller Yoghurt" only 887, compared to 22,500 for "yeovalley" (on a google search for results in the last 2 days), despite the agency's best efforts to start a rival trending topic.

A TKO, I think. Or 2-1. Something like that, anyway.

I want us to talk because I like the sound of your voice

Sod it, no ads today, I just wanted to find some writing that's just perfect, and The West Wing is always a good place to start.

The scene really doesn't need much context - it's all about the universal theme of fear - that is, fear of being in love and giving yourself to somebody completely, the feeling that you're surrendering yourself in some way.

Ultimately, it all boils down to that one simple line - "I just want to talk". It's that distillation of everything, that truth, that insight, that every copywriter is searching for.

SCA 2.0 work: G-Wiz brief

One of the purposes of this blog is to post work that I've been doing for my course at the School of Communication Arts - not just to show anyone interested, but actually to have a record of work completed for evaluation purposes. It's all a far cry from the exam papers and bound dissertations I'm used to, but what the hell, let's go with it.

To help us understand the process of writing a Creative Brief, we were... asked to write one, by Patrick Collister of Creative Matters. This is what my team produced.

Click here to download the document.

Peace Talks... but who's buying?

International Alert has created a short film, produced by HMDG, to mark International Peace Day. The message is pretty simple - words can stop bullets.

The production is pretty good but it feels like something is lacking. It just feels like the CGI isn't quite dramatic enough. Also, the story isn't right either: why does the peaceful man seem just as angry as the warmonger?

A missed opportunity.

Wartime Whores

Great pair of posters from World War II here, mostly aimed at American soldiers finding themselves in Britain amongst a lot of lonely ladies. The first one is the perfect short line of copy, with a kind of symmetry that puts "say" in the middle, then "know" and "no" rhyming either side, then "who" and "to" rhyming either side of that. It's got a great rhythm to it, too.

This one seems more old fashioned, like one of those old allegorical cartoons, or even a Hogarth drawing - whereas the previous one, disregarding the slight misogynistic overtones, could have been made now.

Original post at Retronaut with more images.

Christians do Good Copy

This weekend I went to see my nephew get christened and become his godfather. During the service, being an atheist, I was actually paying a lot of attention to the words of the prayers and hymns, and noticed that some of them are absolute masterclasses in rhetoric, using the same devices as politicians and orators have used for centuries.

I typed out one of the prayers and annotated it - click here to view the document in google docs (you don't need an account).

Alternatively, you can just watch this video of my nephew developing his neck muscle stamina.