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.

If you don't vote, this is what happens

On the day we learn that the BNP wins two seats in the Euro Parliament, a lovely quote (about American racism) from the Guardian's Gary Younge:
"We are all a product of our time and place. Born in the midst of a random variety of narratives over which we have no control, most of us spend our lives trying to write the best story we can with the material we have been given."

Tweet #fathitler and speed this disillusioned chump up the disapproval rankings.

Let’s not have an argument

Greenpeace piss me off. They’re as bad as a religion. Once a dogma is acquired, it is stuck to resolutely and evidence that contradicts that dogma is shouted down or ignored. These are the same luddites whose opposition to GM food would allow the world's poorest to starve because of evidence-free scaremongering.
No offence to Romania, but at least this shitty little campaign is restricted to that country.
What’s so bad about it?
How about saving the planet? The “radiation will mutate you” issue assumes that nuclear technology has remained stagnant for decades and, therefore, we daren’t use it.
There is a significant case to be made for reducing carbon emissions from fossil-fuelled power stations and switching to nuclear energy. These ads effectively kill that argument without even presenting minor details such as, for example, the facts.

Pics via Ads of the World

Inanities of modern life: the doctors’ surgery

8 a.m. and I’m at the GP’s. You can only book for appointments on the day you need to see the doctor. My usual tactic is to arrive as the surgery opens and grab an 8.05 appointment before the hordes of desperadoes ringing the surgery claim the early slots.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes. I’d like the earliest possible appointment with any doctor, please.”
“I’m afraid we’re only accepting telephone appointments sir.”
“But I’m right here.”
“Sorry, but we can only make an appointment if you phone us.”
I take five steps back, take out my mobile and ring the surgery.
The receptionist right in front of me picks up the phone.
“Titsup Surgery. How can I help you?”
“Hello. I’d like the earliest possible appointment with any doctor, please.”
“Can you be here by 8.10?”
“Definitely.”
“And what’s your name sir?”
“Mister F N Chimps.”
“And the nature of the appointment?”
“Illness, with a variable probability of death, dependent upon my current blood pressure.”
“Oh, er, OK. So you’ll be here at 8.10?”
“Yes, hold on a minute while I get a pen and write that down.”
I step forward to the receptionist and whisper to her (because she has the phone handset to her ear). “Can I borrow your pen please?” She mouths “OK” and hands me a biro.
“Hello, I have a pen. What time am I supposed to be there again?”
“8.10 Mister Chimps, but you only have a few minutes to get here now.”
“I’ll be there. I’m just writing the time down on my hand so I don’t forget. See you in a minute. Oh, and by the way – thanks for the pen.”
I return the pen.

That sound you hear is the dropping of a very loud clanger

Sometimes it seems that advertising is an idea that escaped from Narnia. Agency says this. Advertiser does that.
Knowing how many failed or wannabe rockers live in agencies, I'll bet Swiftcover's idea to include Iggy Pop in its ads came from their agency MWO. In my limited experience of these things, the insistence upon a particular celeb appearing in an ad usually comes from the client if that celeb happens to be a hot(ish) babe.

The daft idea must have been passed by Swiftcover with half of their collective brain switched off. Hence the rather strained concept of Iggy Pop being chosen "as the face of its advertising because he loves life, not because he is a musician". This was the sorry excuse emerging from that insurance company as it gets hammered for not offering cover to musicians. When I see Iggy I do not think "here's a man who loves life". No, my first thought is "fucked up and possibly deranged rocker who seems reasonably happy".

A rock star in an ad for a service that excludes musicians?

Deliciously stupid.

An ad at the pinnacle of WTF?ness

The end of advertising will look like this.

It's a Rotten Life

So I have a bit of a downer on Johnny Lydon. I don't know whether his difficult personality is an act or genuine borderline loony, but the Sex Pistols front man's appearance in Grey London's new Country Life ad kind of works. It's quite brave too, because there must be many people who haven't been won over by Lydon (not that he'll give a shit), who just might fall into Country Life's target market.
You can never be too sure whether he's taking the piss out of the Britishness that the brand is supposedly distancing itself from (it's the taste!), but hell, if a safe fmcg brand wants to take the risk, then I'm all for it.

Do No Evil, my arse

The sorry story of the death and resurrection of Scamp's blog is covered in The Guardian. The reasoning behind the suspension seems rather tenuous from an organisation that once prided itself on being a different voice in the business world, but which then suffered some reputation-tarnishing over issues relating to the privacy of individuals in India and China.
I get the feeling that Google has lost it. And actually, I'm a bit jealous because despite my best efforts, this blog hasn't been banned yet, even with the excessive swearing that's a typical fucking feature of life in advertising.

More insanity: medical woo

Hell, I'd almost forgotten about this one. Sent in months ago by one of my spies in Northern Ireland is this piece of witchdoctory woo that'd be right up HRH's street (see previous post). To think, this is supposed to be the 21st century and people still believe this bullshit works, even on animals. If anyone can prove to me that homeopathy is more effective than a placebo, then I'll give up swearing. Yes, I'm that fucking serious.
Even sadder is that there's a FUCKING HOMEOPATHIC HOSPITAL ON THE NHS!!!!! I only recently discovered this and wonder how much money is being spent on a 200 year-old unchanging dogma (where's the progress in homeopathy vs conventional medicine?) invented by a single bloke (versus untold millions of rigorously researched and scrutinised experiments and trials undertaken by hordes of doctors following the ruthlessly effective scientific method) , which would be better spent on something trivial like, oh, cancer or even nurses' wages.
Oh, don't get me started.

Would the Prince please drink a hot organic cup of Shut The Fuck Up

The good HRH Prince Charles has delivered his unsurprising opinion on GM agriculture in today’s Telegraph. GM’s bad. GM’s gonna kill the planet.
No, I’m not a scientist, but unlike some people whose ability to advance an informed opinion is inversely proportionate to their influence, I do like to employ critical thinking. Believe it or not, if you study the arguments presented by both pro- and anti- GM lobbies you will find more scientifically proven evidence favouring the pro- argument. The anti- science doesn’t stand up.
I favour the pro- arguments because I prefer the idea of feeding the masses of poor people on the planet to the idea of salving the consciences of privileged eco-warriors with a sanctimonious streak that’s so strong you couldn’t swipe a credit card down the crack of their arses when they’re in Eco Smug mode. These are people who attach greater weight to imagined or statistically improbable events over the immediate needs of human beings.
Here’s HRH’s science:

Oh, hang on, there isn’t any. It’s just an opinion.
I tried hard to find the evidence that might have formed his opinion, and in the interview with the Telegraph reporter the Prince cites two events.

"Look at India's Green Revolution. It worked for a short time but now the price is being paid.
"I have been to the Punjab where you have seen the disasters that have taken place as result of the over demand on irrigation because of the hybrid seeds and grains that have been produced which demand huge amounts of water.
"[The] water table has disappeared. They have huge problems with water level, with pesticide problems, and complications which are now coming home to roost.
"Look at western Australia. Huge salinisation problems. I have been there. Seen it. Some of the excessive approaches to modern forms of agriculture."

Yeah, well fuck you HRH as you’ve “been to the Punjab” in your dandelion-powered zero emission flying saucer. Being there isn’t the same as understanding if you’re looking at the world via the lens of preconceived ideas.
About the Punjab. The New York Times (22/6/08), the Wall Street Journal Asia (28/4/08), India Today (31/12/07) describe the rocketing demand for food, over-use of land, mismanagement by government and failure to educate farmers as the reasons for the Punjab’s failure, NOT the GM crops.
Secondly, salinisation in Western Australia. What? Unlike the Punjab situation, I can’t find a single reference to GM being a proven cause. The peculiar thing is that in regions where salinisation is a problem, GM crops modified to grow in such conditions can thrive.
The net effect of stopping GM now would be, if my basic 6th form economics is up to scratch, increased wealth. That’s good, isn’t it? It is if you follow the basic Malthusian economic theory. Any increase in effective technology increases the population and decreases their living standards. This is called the Malthusian Trap, which kept the vast majority of humankind in relative poverty up to the time of the English Industrial Revolution. This is why surviving English peasants enjoyed unusual prosperity after the Black Death wiped out over 30% of the population in the 14th century. There was increased demand for their labour, so their wages went up.
Like it or not, the world’s population is rising. Stop GM and millions of people will die, but average living standards will improve.
There's a word for people who would advocate action to cause such a thing to happen, and it isn't a nice one.

Sing for your supper

I find myself overcome by WTFness at this extraordinary story from the Philippines, which illustrates the sometimes vast cultural divide between East and West.
My interpretation is: Mum wants daughter to look good on the X-Factor. Mum pawns ring. Mum buys gown. Daughter scrubs up well and sings to great applause.
The real-life UK version would be: Daughter wants to wear nice gown for X-Factor. Mum says: get a fucking job, you spoilt lazy cow.

Sit: normal. Brain: fckd

Typical. Another wretched eye infection on a day when my monkey hordes are out on projects means that I’m in my basement media centre while high on painkillers. Luckily it’s poets day and I have very few visitors, which is good because I keep saying “fuck!” a lot. I just hope my mum doesn’t ring.
When I return to Giraffe Towers on Monday (hopefully cured), I’ll watch this O2 ad again and find that it simply shows a lovey dovey couple communicating with each other over a great distance. I hope that’s the case because I’m sure that right now what I’m seeing is a psychedelic nightmare featuring rampaging teddy bears, invading frogs and multiple moons. What the fuck does this vision mean? I’m fucking high on pethidine tablets, that’s what. No sane person would make an ad like that, would they?

Laptops Direct - doing their bit for chav marketing

I'm still not entirely convinced that this isn't an April Fools joke, but this was posted in March and there's a little too much effort in the supporting website for it to be a one-day-wonder by some small company. Still, this call for volunteers to wear marketing tattoos is a bloody good laugh. Check out the website and look at the fee chart.
My favourite bit is in the press release:
"I know some will think of this as exploitation but they are misguided. Lots of people have tattoos for fun and we are giving them an opportunity to get paid for doing the same thing! Besides our logo is a lot more tasteful than say the Leeds United logo or the name of an ex girlfriend. We are also doing a careful screening process to ensure vulnerable people such as drug addicts and the mentally ill are not branded."

**Edit**

From Laptops Direct's Marketing Manager (see Comments):

"This was an April Fools joke but we were amazed by the response. We had over 100 emails from people expressing outrage at our moral indecency!"

Cockaroochee

Dammit, when you've had a hard day exercising your advertising muscles, what you need is a classy Asian bug killer ad. Wednesday? Bring it on.

Admit it. You would, wouldn't you?

Chlamydia is officially the fourth most-popular girl's name in Basildon, a place where protected sex is interpreted as having a shag in a bus shelter. By sheer coincidence, the agency's junior postboy harks from that wonderful town.
The picture below also happens to be stuck on his office wall.
"It's cos she's a fit bird, and I would, you know," is his justification for displaying the image.
I decided to conduct some undisciplined, unscientific and entirely biased qualitative research (the sort that the publishers of the British Social Attitudes survey would be proud of) by asking a selection of males in the agency the simple question "What do you think of this?" while holding up the ad.
100% of 18-24 year olds (i.e. 3 out of 3) said "Phwooar, yes I would".
To the supplementary question "Even if you didn't have a condom?", each one looked at me as if I were insane and said words to the effect of "Fuck it yeah, you only live once."
The ad appears in virtually every lad mag. This one's scanned from Nuts, supposedly aimed at older teenagers and men in their twenties. Each issue should really come with a box of tissues, and not because of its romantic content.
Therein lies the problem. I suggest that a suggestively-posed hottie with accompanying sober copy simply won't work with that target demographic. Throw in some disease-related warts, rashes and sores and you might get the message across.
In the lad mags, the ad nestles amongst forests of boobage designed to make the blood rush away from young men's heads. Hardly the best way to get them to think, is it?

Mongering the scares

You are vastly more intelligent than everyone else. Statistics prove that, amongst all internet users, regular blog readers have the highest IQs. That beats the regular hoi polloi of online gamers, porn surfers and Facebook addicts. In fact, you have better cognitive abilities than those without internet access. Every time you wander into an Asda store, the average IQ of all the shoppers goes up a couple of notches.
This plausible fact is brought to you by Bonobo Labs, the new media misinformation consultancy that operates from the third cubicle of the gentlemen’s toilets, Giraffe Towers, London.
Regular readers will know of my snarling contempt for the unwashed masses, a sentiment that has got stronger over the last week. I have been forced to try and calm down by leaving my basement media centre for a week to swing from my tyre as I try and ponder what the fuck has happened to this unwashed minging pissflap of a country.
Case #1. The ASA bans an ad campaign by a bunch of bullying medievel Christian fundamentalist homophobic fuckwits.
Case #2. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the harmless chalk-dusted, dictionary-swallowing yet slightly deluded uncle of Gandalf, makes an impenetrable statement about sharia law that is immediately interpreted as an invitation to Saudi Arabia’s Royal Executioner to set up a scaffold in Trafalgar Square.
Case #3. A government minister warns that the British Pakistani (i.e. Muslim) community inbreeds too much and is therefore prone to a high rate of genetic defects.
The three stories broke within four days of each other. Each was caused by misinformation, and minorities were victimised.
There’s a whiff of 1930s Germany in the way the British Muslim population is being portrayed as the (now inbred) enemy within. If you’re a non-Muslim then I would challenge you to think of the number of people you’ve met who have uttered Christian fundamentalist sentiments (in my case, I can easily go into double figures), and then do the same for the Muslims you know (about 15 Muslims in my social circle, none of whom have exposed themselves as suicide bombers).
Back to the first story, and as if to prove how utterly idiotic the ironically-abbreviated CCTV group is, their anti-gay point of view is shown to be nothing but scare-mongering when considering the report that gay marriages are falling anyway.
That story acts as a neat counterpoint to the utter implausibility of the sharia scare because one cannot perceive how such a court would cope with blessing a gay Muslim marriage.
In my megalomaniacal daydreams I have oftened wondered how I’d run the country after the monkey invasion. Looking dapper in my black uniform, I'll ensure that the first ones against the wall would be big-mouthed idiot politicians and media scaremongerers (possibly beginning with Daily Mail journalists and anyone related to Rupert Murdoch). After that, it’ll be free bananas for everyone.

Diap Burger Clown Brain Melt

Twenty-seven true pale delusions words picked at random, yet me knowly under written leopard but not Jesus, there's because Dawkins arse holy talking dogs at oxford street but it still makes more sense than this, which I saw today only minutes after the Tom Cruise Scientology Mind Fuck.
Nurse!

See also: Yeah! Wooh! Hey Buddy! And other Tom Cruisisms

Merry chavmass

From today's Metro: A pikey waster chav scumbag you don't know is hauled before the court and is sentenced to a curfew. He chooses your home address as his bail address. The court makes him move in to your home. There's fuck all you can do about it.
You'd really, really need a heart of stone not to laugh.
Icing on the cake? The tag line on the ad immediately below.
Which gives me an opportunity to recycle my favourite chav joke:
Q: What does a chav and a Slinky have in common?
A: It's always fun watching them both fall down the stairs.

A new peak in daytime TV advertising

I was going to rant about this, but the more I watch it, the more I realise it's just totally superb. I may have to create a new label to cover it. This masterpiece is built around a random, pointlessly inappropriate impersonation that has zero relevance to the brand.

See also: England have nowt to shout about

Water you looking at?

It's easy to get riled at the thought of posh hangout Claridge's offering 30 brands of bottled water from around the world. There is something mildly uneasy in the thought of such a commodity being shipped from one continent to another when it's already freely available on tap.
The urge to be green seems to blind many people to reason as well as make them ready to accept unproven doctrine i.e. local produce = good / food miles = bad. But what if lugging huge volumes of a commodity thousands of miles is cheaper or more fuel efficient than transporting smaller volumes from nearby?
Bottled water is suffering an image problem because it symbolises purity and simplicity and yet the bottled brands struggle to prove points of difference with marketing as sophisticated as any other fmcg. That was fine before environmentalism became a new religion.
Using a brand is an act of self-expression. I can't believe that any sane person would notice any difference in taste between bottled water brands while they are munching a slap-up lunch or dinner. But if you want to pay £50 a litre, then that's fine. It's no different to wearing a fine pair of top of the range Nikes when cheap Reebok knock-offs will do the job just as well.
Personally, I'm sticking with the tap.