This party's over

That’s it
Because it’s easier to open the valve on Twitter
Because I’ve been so damned busy
Because the anonymity thing is feeling just a tad jaded
The blog started by accident. I was playing around with different blog platforms, experimenting for the sake of the agency planning department, which wanted its own blog (still going strong on Typepad). I have no idea why I picked FishNChimps as a name. Maybe I had a takeaway the previous evening. I thought it would be fun to demo the blog with a few articles about the harmless subject of chimps in advertising. And then my spleen took over.
A big problem is finding something to say. It was easy enough most of the time. My job means that I regularly come across some interesting stuff, almost by accident. But then the middle ground of satirising stuff got stretched to, on one side regurgitating amusing links, and on the other pontificating on things that annoy (what the great George Parker would call piss ‘n vinegar).
I must say, it did damn well for a long time, even becoming for a very brief period the UK’s #1 advertising blog. This was partly thanks to some timely links from those huge, Star Wars Episode 6 Death Star-sized blog beasts AdRants, Copyranter and AdScam.
So, I’m killing this blog and starting afresh with a rebooted Blogger version of my shitty Wordpress blog. Wordpress is supposedly a good platform if you’re an html freak but not even I, with a passing competence in it, could tolerate its stupid restrictions. Blogger’s a bit simplistic, but very easy to customise. I do, after all, have other things to do with my time.
My brief for the newish blog is, very loosely, advertising (my industry) + science/scepticism (my interest) + researchy stuff (my job). There may occasionally be monkeys.
Let’s see how it goes.

There's real gold, and there's chav gold

Somebody's getting rich in this recession, and they probably look like this guy, smiling happily as a certain class of person flogs off the family gold. I say "a certain type", because if the following extraordinary ad is anything to go by, the target market is the plasma poor. This is the British tribe that thinks having a wad of cash and talking posh makes you posh, but as any fule kno, they are betrayed by the gold-standard of lower class chavdom: having a telly that's bigger than their front room.
Just watch this ad and weep, cos you'll be needing to cash in your gold to pay for the new screen that you've just smashed in exasperation. Christ, are these actors on acid?

God's coppyrytar took a day off

via

Because The Sun would

via

D'you get milk with that?

Apparently not a spoof.
She could look a little happier, one would have thought.

via uTalkMarketing

In case of fire

Twittered via Swordfish

Death by juxtaposition

This really is awful - surely the worst example of automated web advertising to date. The story is already in most of the newspaper websites - a young woman fatally shot by Iranian police. I'm not going to link to LiveLeak because they should be ashamed of hosting the video in this way.

Tauntaun trick was a taunt

Remember how Wispa fans got Cadbury to relaunch the nostalgic chocolate bar? It seems like this behaviour now has an added dimension as some consumers demanded a product that doesn't actually exist.
A Star Wars-themed blanket was knocked up as a one-off for a joke, promoted as a spoof, and created enough credulous demand to make the jokers consider selling it for real. Total capitalist nerdgasm.

The man who put semen into basement

Humongous fuck-up by WH Smith who put Fritzl book on Father's Day promo.

You are hope, you are imagination

Yeah, and I know I'm a genius too, so why do I need these space cadets to tell me I'm special? It's a tweely sinister ad from that business masquerading as a religion, but with severe mafia tendencies: Scientology.

Strong stomach

For all those who have survived eating the shit they call food at Pizza Hut.

FACT! Fish!

"Today there are over 10,000 species of fish, which is far more diversity that all other land vertebrates. This diversity pattern can be explain by the notion that fish, being aquatic, survived the Great Flood, while many land vertebrates went extinct during this catastrophic event."

For more examples of stupidification, check out Fuckwitapedia

See also:
FACT! Surgeon!
FACT! Flood!
FACT! Evolution=Nazis!
FACT! Pianist!!
FACT! Throat!
FACT! Hedgehog!
FACT! Femininity!
FACT! Toronto!
FACT! Religious War!
FACT! Rocks!
FACT! Chuck Norris!
FACT! Fornication!
FACT! Pens!
FACT! Kangaroos!
FACT! The 19th Century!
FACT! Dinosaurs!