I'm an occasional freelance copywriter, but mostly a student at the School of Communication Arts in London. Previously an Account Manager at a small design agency, where I started writing copy and thinking up headlines and slogans. In fact, I've been writing all my life, but it never occurred to me I could make a living from it this way. So now I'm giving it a go.
Well, not really much of a launch. Certainly, considering what a massive acquisition the client was, and the way they pinched it from under the nose of DDB, it was released with relatively little fanfare - certainly compared to the Guardian launch.
Perhaps it's because it's an advert made for purpose rather than to win awards and plaudits. And in fact it's so similar to the Mark Warren adverts produced by the previous agency, you'd barely be aware that the whole change had been made. It's another famous face and another product demo.
Apparently the DDB advert had the TiVo boxes flying off the shelves, so why change a winning formula? But you have to wonder what it does for BBH's reputation - and the extent to which the client is calling the shots in this relationship.
Currently sweeping the awards ceremonies with THAT John Lewis ad, Adam and Eve must be on a bit of a roll - and this weekend they brought the first UK Google+ TV ad to our screens.
It launched in primetime, during Britain's Got Talent. A lot is resting on it. But I think it's a massive misjudgement. Have a look if you haven't seen already, then I'll do my best to explain.
First of all, the criticism has already been made that it's ridiculous that the social network's user interface will look exactly the same when the subject is an elderly man as it does when his child is born. But the bigger problem is that it is pitched both too high and too low.
Too high, because Benedict Cumberbatch reading Shakespeare, is, let's face it, going to go over the heads of a large proportion of the ITV audience. It's like the kid from the Thomson's Holidays multiplied by a hundred. Not to mention how chattering-class it all is; it was like watching the life of Nigel Slater's straight twin brother.
And too low, because anyone who does know As You Like It will be aware that the speech does not end with old age, it ends with senility and death - "sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything". But the advert cops out (it edits out a lot of the rest of the speech, too).
If it had gone on to the bitter end, it might have had more emotional resonance, because as it currently stands, it leaves me completely cold. And again, its problem is in falling between two stools.
Take BBH's work for Google Chrome. It hits us on an emotional level because we know that Jamal Edwards and Dan Savage are real people, embarking on journeys which we know are authentic, and have affected real lives. Whereas "Tom" is clearly a character, a tool created for a purpose.
But a fictional character can be equally affecting, as Adam and Eve have shown - like the child from The Long Wait, or more pertinently, the life portrayed in "Always A Woman". So what's the difference?
We never learn their names. It's as simple as that. Unlike Tom, with his football refereeing and his mountain climbing and his rock band, we're not really given any detail about their "lives". Because those ads are not about a little boy waiting for Christmas, or about a woman's life from birth to old age. They're about us.
Whereas this Google+ advert is about some guy called Tom.
Funny, how things turn out. In 2007, a lady called Laney Griner took a photo of her baby son playing on a beach. It was one of those amusing photos that 10 years ago would certainly have remained in her drawer - or at least on her computer.
But the internet has moved on, and like many others, she found that once you put something out there, it doesn't really belong to you anymore. And somehow her snap had become a recurring internet meme known as "Success Kid", like this:
I suppose one might find this annoying, although Ms Griner appears to be relaxed about the attention - as her son is now 4, it's not like he's going to get recognised.
But she also got her just reward in the end, as Virgin Media have now paid to use her image on their latest outdoor campaign.
I'm not actually sure if this was done before or after the great DDB-BBH handover, but whichever, it shows the value of being immersed in culture of any sort. Anyone who's in on the joke will love it and remember it, and if you're not, it's an amusing photo all by itself.
Getting a child to play an adult role can be a bit of a fallback technique in TV adverts. At its best, it can be done with charm and wit, as Vauxhall did not so long ago, in one of my favourite ever adverts:
Lately, there's been a little rash of them. Here's Tesco with a Mother's Day themed ad by the Red Brick Road, including a boy doing a disconcertingly good impression of Mrs Overall's voice:
JWT pitch in with this slot promoting Harvester restaurants:
And lastly, this BBH slot for Waitrose. It's not quite the same theme as the others, but close enough:
All of them pretty decent ads, though I think the Harvester one stands out. The Heston one seems just a little rushed, like it's the 6th in a series of 10. The Tesco one seems to be going for "kids acting adult and posh", but the overall impression the boys give is, well, pretty much one of inevitable homosexuality. Nothing wrong with that, but a bit distracting. The Harvester ad, in the meantime, feels like just a little more effort has gone into it, and keeps the tone fresh and down to earth.
Yesterday, I blogged about an advert for Dulux that I erroneously credited to Glue Isobar - turns out they're actually just handling the digital, and the TV ad was produced by BBH.
Which is nice as it redresses the balance after I was so critical of their Guardian ad, and gives me the opportunity to say that I think BBH are a great agency who have produced and are still producing absolutely inspirational work. They just drop the ball occasionally.
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.
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.
I feel a little sorry for DDB losing the Virgin Media account. According to those in the know, their adverts with Marc Warren - basically product demos with a little flair and quality - had TiVo boxes flying off the shelves. But new Marketing Managers mean new agencies, and so the work went over sharpish to BBH. I'm sure they'll produce more imaginative work. But will it sell more boxes?
I was going to blog on this advert at some point anyway, but it's particularly timely, so I'm pushing it forward.
Tonight I attended a seminar on creative education chaired by Sir John Hegarty. He was talking about the democratic nature of creativity - that anyone can have a good idea - and used this new BBH ad for Barnardo's as his example. Apparently, although they had the best production team working on it, the initial idea came for a junior creative team (jobless students just one year ago) in the BBH playpen - Melanie Lynch and Rory Hall.
That's going to take some beating on their showreel. Read more here.
Note: this question arose from a discussion on Twitter following BBH Labs' "Tale Torrent" event, a collection of stories about the Internet which (I had noted) had involved a great deal of nostalgia. Thanks to Rishi Dastidar of Archibald Ingall Stretton for the challenge, which I will take on in a loose, disjointed way before I collapse in exhaustion.
What was the deadliest conflict in the history of the world? You'll probably think one of the World Wars, and in fact the Second World War, by any estimate, killed more people than any other in history.
But there's another way to slice the numbers, by factoring in historical levels of world population. Even at its highest estimation, the Second World War resulted in the deaths of 3.1% of the population. But although the An Lushan rebellion of 8th Century China was responsible for fewer deaths, it still took out a staggering 14-15.3% of the people then living on the planet. 5 centuries later, the Mongol conquests wiped out somewhere between 7 and 17%.
We are, as Steven Pinker tells us, living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. You'll also see figures from this video showing how rates of violent death in current hunter gatherer tribes far exceed those of western society - giving us an insight into death rates before records began.
So what does this tell us?
Clearly fetishisation of the past is prevalent, or else this information would not be surprising. Instead we are bombarded with messages of moral decline, educational decline, rising criminality, and economic armageddon. We're going to hell in a handcart, as we are regularly told by well-paid tabloid columnists, and we should go back to the way things were.
But is it inherent in the future? I'm going to alter that a little and say that it is certainly an inherent result of progress. We largely aspire to live comfortable lives, and breaks in our routines cause disharmony and chaos. Note the reaction every time Facebook makes a minor change to its layout. Because we fail to fully understand the new developments - and it will only ever be an elite few in this position - we worry that they threaten our habits and our way of life, whether it's where you click to get your messages, or whether your children will ever make real friends.
My old (in both senses of the word) boss used email every day, because he understood it and could relate it to the past - i.e. the simple act of writing a letter. But, however much I tried, he could never get his head around Twitter, which to him was irrelevant people saying irrelevant things all the time. What he couldn't grasp was that the past was just the same - if you could listen in to every telephone call made in the 80s, you would doubtless hear an awful lot of inconsequential nonsense. The difference is that technology now allows us to do just that, and we have to learn to apply our own filters.
But even that is actually the wrong way to approach it.
What we need to do is relate progress not to the past, but to people - to human needs and instincts. And these remain virtually unchanged over the centuries. The need to communicate. The need for artistic achievement. The desire to share creativity. Because if there was one thread that emerged from the "Internet stories" at Tale Torrent, it was that they almost all concerned relationships between people. From James witnessing his Mother finding long-distance love, to the imagination of Rachel's daughter, to J. Nicholas Geist seeing a friend come out of his shell thanks to World Of Warcraft, human relationships were at the heart of the matter throughout.
So my answer to the question is "probably, but it's up to us to change that". It's up to communicators and early adopters to take out the technology, and instead discover the human need it fulfils.
Right, I'll leave it at that. It's late and I have to present work on STDs in the morning. If I get chance, I might look at the psychological urges behind nostalgia, and what actually goes on when our brains are confronted with progress and novelty.
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.
An appropriate post, I think, as we popped into BBH London last week as part of our agency visits. Bit of a pilgrimage for me, as John Hegarty's book was one of the things that convinced me I was taking the right path. Anyway, here is their new "aviators" ad for British Airways.
There you go. It's obviously stirring, tells a story, beautifully shot and written - it's the kind of ad that BBH do best. But I think the most interesting thing is Easyjet's response.
It's easy (hah!) to see this as a shot across the bows, and it is certainly a little cheeky. But I suspect that it won't bother BA one bit. Anyone who is looking to save probably already knows that Ryanair and Easyjet will be cheaper. If anything it reinforces the message that for heritage and quality, you go to British Airways. Both brands stay in their respective places, and although Easyjet may get publicity out of it, I don't think it's at the expense of the older airline to any great degree.
You could compare it to the Dixons ads targeting John Lewis, but BA's advantage is in having only one position to defend, which Easyjet don't even try to attach. John Lewis made the mistake of saying "never knowingly undersold" on 3 things - quality, price, and service - meaning they have to fight wars on 3 fronts.
