D&AD Awards / Creative Circle Awards

Today Molly (just about) finished our entry for the D&AD student awards. We're feeling pretty good about it, we've had some great feedback from mentors at the school, and we've tweaked just about as much as anything will take being tweaked.

Due to D&AD rules, I'm not a liberty to show you the idea until we know whether it's won or not. But it was interesting to note that the advice was either given, or had to be taken, in two ways. Firstly, in terms of what you would do if actually approaching the client, and secondly, how you would convince an awards judge to put you through.

Which raises the question of what extent I might end up doing that as a creative professional. I'm not the first person to ask it, but it's a timely one, as the Creative Circle Awards are descending into booze-soaked chaos at the Roundhouse as we speak.

I haven't had chance to check through all their winners, largely due to their website's flashy but frustrating (ok, just plain fucking stupid) interface, but the Gold of Golds for John Lewis (by Adam&Eve) is fully deserved. And you can bet that the creatives' focus was aimed fully at the needs of the client.

But then there's work like BMB's ad for Thomson's Holidays, which won a Gold. I've critiqued it before, and the disconnect between the well-spoken, precociously articulate boy and his well-dressed family, the luxurious locations, and the instagram-y filtering on one hand, and the type of low-cost mass-market holidays that Thomsons sell on the other, still persists.

It feels like an advert the agency made for themselves, not for their client and certainly not for the audience (unless the creatives genuinely thought families watching the X-Factor were going to be captivated by a bit of cod philosophy over a piano re-working of The Pixies, in which case, can I have their jobs please?).

I have no problem winning awards. I just hope never to win an award and be ashamed of it.

The best ad on TV so far this year...

...and I can't find any bloody video of it.

It's for Virgin Media - and it's not really an ad at all, but a guerilla takeover of another (willing) brand's ad. You see the start of another advert (Yeo Valley and Citroen have so far been involved), but it is constantly interrupted by a buffering symbol.

The ad then asks viewers why they put up with buffering online when we wouldn't on TV. It's a very simple idea, and plays cleverly on the mental frames we apply to different viewing experiences.

But most importantly, there were 3 of us in the living room when it came on, and as soon as the buffering symbol appeared and the music stalled, the advert had our undivided attention. And that's a huge achievement.

I believe credit goes to the media agency fifty6 for this one. Nice to see creative ideas not just coming from the agencies.

Otrivine: Art Direction by Harry Beck

Another one raised by a friend on social media, commenting "Hi Ad agencies. When putting together a campaign to go on the Tube, a variation on the tube map is a *fucking lame idea*".

He has a point. I wouldn't be so utterly opposed on principle to including tube map elements, it'd have to be done a whole lot better than this. It's pretty clear that no thinking went in to the message they wanted to get across, or the branding, just "let's use the tube map". And it doesn't work anyway, as a blocked nose is usually in the latter stages of a cold, after sore throat, sneezing, feeling ill, etc.

The strapline - "a fast way to unblock your nose" utterly betrays the lack of brand thought. How does that stop me buying Sterimar, Olbas Oil, Vicks, Sudafed, etc?

Saatchi and Saatchi Switzerland were apparently responsible for this mess. The sad thing is, I imagine them being quite proud of it.

Against The Grain - another look at THAT Guardian ad

Yesterday I wrote about BBH and my somewhat tepid reaction to their new Guardian ad. It was written in a hurry, and though I stand by my general opinion, I perhaps should have concentrated more on the faults of the advert and less on the part only relevant to the industry. Also, the criticism of them for using Ringan Ledwidge was on reflection unfair - and I hard to find fault with someone who names their production company Rattling Stick.

Anyway. What want to talk about today is conformity and peer pressure, because it seems that some of the theories explained in "Nudge" by Thaler and Sunstein might easily apply to the discussion of the advert yesterday at the School of Communication Arts. A couple of quotations...

"People become more likely to conform when they know that other people will see what they have to say".


"Because people do think that everyone has their eyes fixed on them, they conform to what they think people expect".


"If the confederate [someone infiltrating a group discussion in an experiment] spoke confidently and firmly, his judgement had a strong influence on the group's assessment".

All of this was relevant yesterday, when we were presented the advert in School at the morning Town Hall. By the time we saw it, there was a weight of opinion that it was good. And the initial overall reaction of the assembled students was "it's great".

Did every single student really like it? Or was it because we've been conditioned to automatically think of BBH's work as good, because of their previous excellent work, not to mention Sir John Hegarty's generous support for the School? I think it's certainly telling that when I rather short-sightedly praised their "Aviators" advert, it was just after being shown it while visiting the agency, one day before it was released publicly, by a very proud employee.

And did it make a difference that Marc, the Dean of the School, who showed us the work, is undeniably a confident, firm, and convincing speaker - and had already tweeted his approval of the ad the night before? And once some students had expressed approval, this combined pressure on anyone with a contrary opinion to keep it to themselves was enormous.

And what's equally interesting is that it was only after one person (who happened to be me, another confident speaker) spoke out against the ad, and a mentor from a well-known agency who I won't name expressed some agreement with my views, that the balance started to shift, and at least two other people were emboldened enough to voice mixed feelings about it.

This isn't about who was right or wrong. For me, it was simply a neat demonstration of how a group consensus can be created or changed not just by persuasion and evaluation, but by what was - even if not intentionally - a psychological power struggle between two individuals.

And if this makes morning Town Hall at the School of Communication Arts sound like a particularly tense scene from 12 Angry Men, then all the better, I say.

Why I'm not that fussed about BBH's Guardian ad

It's the talk of the town right now. There's no doubt that it's beautifully made with a lot of wit and great attention to detail. But it's left me feeling a little cold, for various reasons.

Firstly, there's always the sense that BBH ads will always be greeted with great fanfare, regardless of the quality. It's almost as though there's an expectation that they'll be great, because of their big successes, and we all gather round our TVs like it's Princess Diana's funeral all over again. I know this because I wrote favourably about their BA ad when it came out, but now I think of it as overblown and self-satisfied.

There's also the additional worry that some elements look rather reminiscent of BBH's campaign for Google Chrome, and Ringwan Ledwidge almost seems like a default choice of director now. It's just getting a little bit "BBH house style".

The second objection is that it doesn't just carry the simple emotional weight of The Guardian's iconic "different points of view" ad. We have an instant emotional response to the image of a skinhead running at you, and to the twist that he's actually helping you out - which you will never get out of a slightly contrived take on a fairytale. In fact I'm struggling to remember what the "twist" in the BBH ad actually was.

The BBH ad takes 4 times as long to get across a message less effectively. And if you look at the Guardian page introducing the advert, it's clear they were looking to promote the idea of "open journalism" - whereas this advert mostly shows the news being reported in the normal way, and other people commenting on it - just as top-down a system as it ever was.

The "different point of view" ad was made by DDB in 1986. I just don't think we'll be talking about the 3 Little Pigs ad in 2038. And that's because this ad targets your brain where the skinhead ad gets you in the heart and in the gut.

Mercedes "Escape The Map"

This campaign has been going for some time now, with apparently over 72,000 people playing the Google Streetview-based dystopian maze game Escape The Map, aiming Mercedes at a younger (but presumably still affluent!) audience.

What's heartening is to see that the TV Ads stick strongly to the plot and theme of the game - they're notably different in tone to your average TV ad, and all credit to the client for going ahead with it and to AMV BBDO for the creepy, unsettling execution.

Where I'm not certain if it works is on viewers with no previous knowledge of the game. The "I need to escape the map" could have been taken further as a standalone concept, in the sense of "I use the car to escape the dullness of driving in a familiar city". But perhaps the advert was only ever intended to jog the memories of those 72,000 odd players - so it's only a minor, and possibly invalid, criticism.

"Think Of Me As Evil: Opening the ethical debates in advertising"

This report was recommended to me by Frank Krikhaar, Corporate Responsibility Manager at Aegis PLC. It can be downloaded for free here. Now you've got it, here's what I made of it...

It starts on an unpromising note, with a list of recommendations from just about anyone except representatives from the advertising industry. However the actual report starts on a very reasonable note, suggesting "it is incumbent on the advertising industry to demonstrate that the cultural impacts of advertising are benign (p11)", which seems fair.

It goes on to make the point that most criticism of advertising has concentrated on specific products rather than the impact of advertising as a whole. They conclude that "modern advertising's impact from on British culture is likely to be detrimental to our wellbeing... the balance of evidence points clearly in this direction (p14)". And this is where we hit the underlying contradiction.

You can't simultaenously claim that not enough study has been made into the impact of advertising, then draw confident conclusions from these apparently insufficient reports. Note the weasel words in the last quotation - "is likely to", "balance of evidence points" - these caveats pervade the entire document. "It seems", "this may", "whilst the evidence is not conclusive", "can be theorised to". It's not solid stuff.

That said, the strongest part is probably section 2, which quotes convincing academic studies that advertising does not simply redistribute consumption between brands, but increases the market. But this raises the second objection, which is that of realism. Are we really going to tell people they can't have goods they can afford? Are any of us really in a position to preach anti-materialism? The report refers to J.K.Galbraith's argument that "human wants must be contrived in order to achieve on-going demand for things, once basic needs have been adequately met (p18)" - but you can bet he had lots of lovely furniture in his house.

Section 3, "Is advertising simply a mirror of cultural values", is where the report really leaps off the firm cliffs of reality into the seas of conjecture. On one double page spread (p30-31), the weasel words "likely", "may", "seems", and "probably" and "possible" appear at least 16 times. If you're not sure, don't bloody write it.

Even when they do refer to actual reports, the argument is riddled with holes. They quote a study that showed that students in America who watched a news program with adverts as part of their school curriculum were found to be significantly more likely to hold "extrinsic values" - the need to conform, be successful, be attractive to others, etc. But there's a major discrepancy here. Earlier in the report, the authors made much of the fact that we are exposed to between 500-1000 adverts a day. And yet they seem to claim that just 2 minutes of extra advertising is making that huge difference.

There are two explanations. One is that something in the methodology and questions is suspect - did they ask the children shortly after viewing adverts? Are there other lifestyle factors that haven't been taken into account? The second is more interesting, which is that the context in which advertising is presented is more important than the advertising itself. In this case, there was an implicit endorsement by the school and by the teachers that these adverts were acceptable, and indeed the news program was provided along with significant audio-visual equipment for the school. I'll return to this issue of context at the end.

Section 4, "Is advertising purely about the promotion of choice", they draw attention to the fact that much communication does not happen on a conscious level. This is true and reasonable. But of course they bring up that evil word "subliminal". It's an easy stick to point at the industry, to turn it into a scapegoat, with misrepresentations and one-off examples used to back up conjecture.

Yes, advertising appeals to intuition and emotion. But if advertising were removed from society, would we really be any less intuitive about brands? We would still judge them on their logos, their shop layouts and staff, their website, etc. Communication is not confined to the billboard or commercial break. And secondly, when the concept of "subliminal advertising" was at its height, mistrust of advertising was also at an all-time low, whipped up by Vance Packard's book The Hidden Persuaders (Andrew Cracknell, The Real Mad Men, p24).

I won't deal with the section on advertising to children, except to mention its main sources are David Cameron, the Bishop of Ripon and Leeds, and the Bailey Report (produced by the leader of a Christian Charity). So much for balance.

In conclusion, this is an important topic that deserves a better, more thoroughly researched report. What could have been a sober assessment of the known effects of marketing on society descends with alarming regularity into conjecture, hypothesis, illogical conclusions, imbalanced sources of evidence, and scaremongering language.

But that's not to say we should be complacent. The industry should be pro-active in reframing its relationship with the public. As I said before, context is all important. An advert break in Coronation Street may be acceptable where an advert break with an implicit endorsement from a teacher is not. Product placement is equally troubling, as it places advertising in a context where we are not consciously aware of being advertised to. And in fact, although there's the usual kneejerk bleating about targeted ads in Facebook, they fail to recognise that increased personalisation could be the key to reducing the pervasiveness of advertising.

And that's our task at the School of Communication Arts. Work out how a new unspoken contract can be drawn up with the public about when, where, and how our paths meet. Make our communications relevant rather than intrusive. Make adverts that don't waste people's time. Make adverts that only the people who need to see them will see. Make them entertaining rather than unwelcome. No-one would complain about advertising if it was all good.