What The Shitting Fuck #6 - Kia Euro 2012 sponsorship

Who the fuck are these people?
Why have they been invited to play at a national football match?

If by some weird chance they are a famous enough band to play at a major event, why are they travelling in a small, cheap car?

Why are they bringing along the instruments with them in a car, rather having them safely transported with the rest of the equipment in professional flight cases?

Why, if they're playing a massive gig at a football stadium, do they need to practice the song on the way there, and get it wrong to boot? Why aren't they better prepared?

When they're singing in the car, whose is the second female voice harmonising with the girl in front? If it's one of the men singing falsetto, why are none of them moving their lips?

Why are they playing a cover instead of one of their own songs?

What has playing a song about being secretly gay or bisexual got to do with small cars or major football events?

Why do they need to drive the car onto the pitch?

I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for it all.

A Sunday Afternoon (more photos)

Just like yesterday, I was on a quest to ward off boredom, so set off out again. First up, some place near Borough was having an open gardens day so I met up with some friends, taking in a statue of King Alfred and a nice spiky flower:

There was also a book stall. I assume this isn't the book on which Mike Leigh's film was based.

And then to the London Transport Museum. Almost too much to blog about - possibly the most lingering memory will be a weirdly unsettling incident where a little girl asked me to help her find her Mother. Which sounds fairly normal, but she was literally dragging me by the hand to get me to take her to another bit of the museum. In the end I found a member of staff to take care of it, but it was very very odd.

Anyway, the highlights included a nice reminder that some things never change, some old school copywriting, and one of the best bits of art direction / illustration I've seen in a while:

And lastly, the chap at the desk said they didn't have any free maps of the place - I either had to buy one or take one of those they give kids as a challenge to keep them occupied.

Well, I've never been one to turn down a challenge.

A Saturday Afternoon.

Mrs Cutcopywrite is away at a festival this weekend so I decided not to mope around the flat for 2 days, and headed off to the Imperial War Museum.

Before I got there, I was wandering past a dance school, and noticed there was a free art exhibition on. So I looked at it, my attempts to understand it soundtracked by muffled thumping from the rehearsal rooms above.

I liked this one, entitled "Film Poster" (click to see full size and read it):

When I got into the IWM, there was a young toddler screaming. Later on, I was looking at a display on the Blitz and it was still screaming. At first it was annoying, but then it occurred to me that it was perhaps displaying the most appropriate response to the horrors and stories on display. More appropriate, certainly, than the 3 young men wandering through the Holocaust Exhibit, chatting about their favourite comedy programmes.

Having suffered the Holocaust, as it were, I decided to give the Crime Against Humanity film a miss, though I was intrigued by the warning at the entrance:

I'd like to think the disturbances are caused by distress, but I suspect that most are protests from those with a pathological blindness to the atrocities committed by their state of origin. Of course, it's the same mental myopia that means we have Holocaust Exhibitions in the first place.

And if that seems a sobering thought to end on, then fear not - I'm just about to watch some football, make a rich carbonara, and start on my second Corona.

Being touched by a writer

This post is a response to Ran Stallard's blog post earlier this year, entitled "why do you like it?".

I was delighted to see that someone else had picked up on one of my favourite quotations, from Alan Bennett's The History Boys.

“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

Even out of context, it's immensely powerful. But Ran posed a further question, which is why we like a particular piece of advertising. And although it may seem insufferably pretentious to compare an advert to an Alan Bennett play, it's actually for a not wholly unconnected reason.

A good advert should feel like an undiluted message from the writer to the reader (or viewer). It shouldn't appear to be filtered and approved and altered and tweaked, it should feel like they wrote that headline on a piece of paper and passed it to you across a table. It should feel human.

I don't believe a great ad can be written by a copywriter whose first thought was "is this on brand?", or who was sticking to a brief or watching their tone of voice. I think most were written after the second whiskey, at 3am on a sleepless night, or perhaps in a contemplative moment on the toilet.

Inspiration doesn't always strike. Sometimes an advert has to be forced out through a convoluted haze of logic, lists, and Roget's. But you're never going to reach out and touch someone with work like that.

Thieving Bastards, nicking Tyre Slogans

Have a look at this advert for Goodyear. Not sure who produced it, but it's a fairly typical example of economics (will need to work in several different languages) trumping creativity. Then ask yourself if there's anything familiar about the slogan.

That's right. "100% better prepared for the unexpected". Nothing at all like Tony Kaye's classic 1993 ad for Dunlop, with it's "Tested for the Unexpected" line. I mean, it's not like they're both ads for a similar product or anything.

Of course, when it comes down to it, it's not the plagiarism that offends - it's that they take the same idea and offer up such a weak travesty of an ad.

Make them sit up and listen

I wasn't paying attention to the adverts just now; I was sitting at my laptop idly looking through Twitter. And for whatever reason - Twitter, the ironing, an unexpected sexual favour - we have to face the fact that this is how a lot of us watch (or don't watch) television advertising.

But then an advert came on that got my attention from sound alone. Not with words, but pure sound - and in this case, the simple aural effect of taking repeating a short clip and making it go faster and faster.

I sincerely hope this is intentional on the part of the agency (Brother and Sisters) - because it really works.