I'm gonna eat 'till I'm sick, drink too much, waste loads of money and make a general nuisance of myself, all for baby Jesus. Yes, it really makes sense having a December birthday celebration for someone who was actually born in September.
I'll be back sometime in the New Year.
And have a Merry Christmas. I'm having none of this Happy Holidays bollocks.
Let the big bananas of the advertising world dream up their own awards for the greatest, most effective, best art-directed and best tiddlyompompom watsit ad thingies. This is my own ill-considered list of 2006’s ad achievements, in no particular order.
1. The Crispy Tummy-Wipe Award
For the most gratuitous use of sex in advertising. Made for no other reason than to prop up the sales figures of paper tissue manufacturers.
These exercise vids had a certain charm about them, and at least the girls built up a decent sweat. So an honourable mention goes to Stuff4Dudes. But the prize must go to Independence Cigars whose first viral featured a naked woman playing with her boobs, and whose latest has progressed to a naked lesbian romp. There’s something about cigars which encourages advertisers to treat them as a phallic object, more so than cigarettes (which are a bit effeminate, after all).
2. The Limp Dick Award
We should have expected better from Virgin, whose reputation for making reasonably good virals is let down by this mank. I had intended to rail against Lutwyche, whose original 2003 viral was dark, sinister and brilliant. The sequel was so crap that it's url has been withdrawn, so I can't feature it here. Don't worry, you're not missing anything. St. Luke's is evidently trying to deal with the trauma.
3. Happy Slappy Award
I reckon that there's an ad trend that sees the camera moving away from the upper part of the body to the much more accommodating lower regions. Bums are funnier than tits, and you can smack them too. Hence Old Khaki’s fish spank, and this odd chap being accosted for Doc Martens. The prize must go to the utterly pointless slap happy girls from Bennetts insurance in a post that generated the largest number of hits for this blog. You perverts.
4. Le Grand Fromage Award
For big brands trying something risky. A special mention to Marmite, for a quite disgusting viral which generated the second-highest number of posts in CMM News. But Marmite has been making hay with its love it or hate it campaign for a long time, and the progression to baby vomit was still in keeping with the slightly irreverent style of its recent TV work.
What was surprising was the sight of the previously viral-shy Procter & Gamble stick its neck out with this piece of work for Charmin which, although relatively safe, was bold for being the first toilet paper ad that properly refers to poo. Toilet paper may be nice for drying naughty puppies, but that's not what the stuff is made for.
In 2007 I’d like to see a toilet paper brand use the tagline “great for wiping the shit from your arse”
Yes, it has a certain ring to it.
5. Provincial Potty Mouth Award
Internationally accepted swear words are sometimes OK, but they lack a certain something. Hollywood has a lot to answer for. The word Fuck, for instance, has been McDonald-ised, and is almost safe. Yeah, Fuck is now the Big Mac of the world of the potty mouth. You wouldn’t bat an eyelid if grandma uttered it.
I therefore hope that the lighter Wanker (Greenpeace) and Tosser (Tories) retain their British flavour. Both words popped up in virals this year, but didn’t hit the same high as Bollocks (VW) did a few years back.
The mean-spirited Greenpeace viral wins it by default because a win for the Tories would undermine my credibility.
6. Swimming in the Gutter Award
Whereas Charmin tackled the poo issue whilst keeping its hands clean, a distinctly yucky viral for a very small retailer was responsible for the biggest gross-out of 2006. I suppose extreme toilet humour is fine when targeting spotty adolescents, but it runs the risk of alienating older consumers who might have been interested in the product.
Dog poo is slightly less revolting.
7. Best Surprise Appearance of a Knob
The Oatso Simple plasticine uncle of Windy Miller provided the newspapers with hours of fun in their hunt for the man-made willy. This Computer sign is a bit random (but amused me enough to post it), but neither comes close to the cheeky priapic charm of the mutt whose todger became an embarrassment for Ikea.
8. The Snurge Award
Snurge was the term we used at school for the teacher who used to hang around the bike sheds sniffing the girls' bicycle seats. The gold-painted saddle is earned by this Scampi snack in memory of those dodgy teenage years.
9. The Glass Cock (GC) Zombie Award
For an ad-related story that is continuously resurrected. I have nicked the GC concept from b3ta.
My vanity will not allow me to contemplate the possibility that I wasn’t the first blogger to add Bentley to this sequence of car ads. Either way, it keeps popping up again and again in a variety of blogs. Other bloggers: stop!
10. Best appearance by a chimp in an ad
Never mind Careerbuilder and the Trunk Monkey, the star turn of the year was the cheeky fella in the Sure ad with a finger up his bottom (46 seconds in).
Give that monkey a banana, but don’t shake his hand.
Having just finished a fine yet tiring piece of newbiz prospecting work, I was grateful to find an immensely satisfying and de-stressing little viral game from Churchill Insurance, they of the Vic Reeves-voiced bulldog.
Become Santa and lob snowballs at annoying little elves in Elf Attack.
Because I have been tagged twice (by Doug and OneWomanRunning), and I am vain, I proffer ten FishNChimps factoids.
1. I am allergic to avocado and lobster.
2. Although I have never seen him, I believe that Professor Richard Dawkins exists.
3. My children believe that I am a retired Jedi Knight and that I control Big Terry, the friendly robot who defends London from flying saucers.
4. As a teenager I was diagnosed as being moderately dyscalculaic.
5. I lost control when skiing and knocked a line of fellow students off a (low) cliff.
6. A hamster put me in hospital.
7. A school trip to a museum ended abruptly when I foiled one of the interactive exhibits, and broke it. The party was thrown out and the school was banned from visiting ever again.
8. Steve Ovett told me to fuck off.
9. I am descended from a pirate who eventually rose to command a fleet in the Greek War of Independence.
10. A television fell on my head
(One of the above is a lie)
I’m tagging the following bloggers, although I’m aware that some of you may be uncomfortable with the pyramid/chainletter vibe going on here. One reason I went along with this is that I see blogging as a community thing and sometimes it's good to spread some love around.
As I am a self-deified atheist, I will happily take on any bad mojo that you feel might come your way if you don’t want to join in.
Jetpacks – apart from having the best title for an ad blog, I’d like to see if this quirky commentator is as rednecked as his geographic location might suggest.
Scamp – will the most prolific creative currently blogging in the UK stoop so low as to play this game?
Bill Green – because the Make The Logo Bigger guru occasionally voyages into off-topic weirdness, which is good.
The MonkeyWatch blogger because I need to know more about the person spying on my monkey troops, and for writing gems like "The habits of various animals disposing of their dung is considered."
And finally greencan – because of the fine argument we had during one of copyranter’s posts, and for having a blog post that begins with the words “All I could think about was wrapping my lips around his cock”.
Tags: Online; Viral
Checkout the Scandinavian Advertising Awards 2007 and be reassured that the Northern European casual attitude towards sex in advertising remains unchanged. It's a tidy site with representatives from above and below the line.
The above link is for the awards shortlist, but you can see all the nominees here.
As if to prove that Jesus wasn’t born in Australia because the angels couldn’t find a virgin or three wise men, a group of numpties calling themselves the Federal Court have effectively outlawed the internet.
To quote BoingBoing:
Bloggers, MySpacers, and anyone else who links to copyrighted material without permission is fair game for legal action, a court in Australia has ruled. Not "hosts," not "uploads," not "downloads," but "links to."
The emphasis is currently on music but it’s the thin end of the wedge when a nation of Australia’s calibre takes aim at one major medium.
It’s a short leap to the banning of links to movie clips, TV clips and ads which would mean that I and virtually every other blogger would be up for prosecution. Time to check out your country’s extradition treaties, fellow bloggers.
But fuck ‘em. Here’s an Aussie underwear ad (again).
I spent most of my school holidays in my grandparents’ house in a small industrial town in the North West of England. The town wasn’t pretty, but most of my happiest childhood memories are of that place. The simple reason is that everyone there was friendly. It was easy to strike up conversation with strangers because it was common to greet people with a question (usually something to do with the weather).
It’s not quite as nice now, but it is still a lot easier to get on with people there than it is in the South East. Our towns are so crowded that we try to ignore the people around us and never get involved with them. mp3 players make it even easier for us to shut out the world around us.
And yet, curiously, we see consumer technology that encourages to interact with strangers. There’s social networking and playing online games. What ever became of Freever, whose gadget (maybe it was an add-on for mobile phones) would alert you to another nearby Freever user whose profile complimented your own? And the Zune gives you access to another user’s playlist if they are nearby. It’s technology taking the effort out of approaching others.
It’s odd how we are supposed to be social creatures and yet we don’t speak to people, especially those strangers who we see every day. I was struck by this whimsical article from the BBC about a photographer who decided to break down the invisible barriers that separated her from these intimate strangers. After the initial effort, the exercise wasn’t as painful as you’d expect.
Maybe we are a little too precious about our barriers. Life’s so fast we don’t have time or the inclination to physically interact with others. We filter our emails, background noise, advertising and other people.
I guess that’s what we call progress.
Look at the body language.
The distance between the pair suggests that they kind of know each other, or at very least have only recently met.
Her head is tilted, she is leaning slightly forwards, her left hand flat on the cushion. Her legs are pointing towards him. She is looking into his eyes, challenging him to look at her boobage.
His knee casually points towards her, his stance open. A furtive glance at her rack isn't going to satisfy him.
He's in charge - this is his pad (note the minimalist alpha male decor) and he has drunk a little less wine than his prey.They support their heads in a way that could easily suggest boredom, but there is no uncomfortable moment. Not now. Not here. The small talk is over.
If there was any doubt that this pair are about to launch themselves at each other, then check out this image from the advertiser's homepage:
OK, so what the fuck does this have to do with selling wine?
Note the copy.
“Oo-er, he looks a very frisky young man. In my day... I once knew a Spanish waiter who looked like him - used to shove a bread roll down his trousers but WHAT is SHE wearing? A skirt like that in this weather and she'll catch a cold. Did you know you can get all sorts of diseases by wearing a skirt like that if you sit too near a lake? Especially if you're French. Those glasses are far too big. I will complain. Is she wearing a bra?"
This is the cheerful chappy who helped me spend my last 50p last night at the Tesco on Bishopsgate. He is the resident whipmaster for the self-service checkout that now greets shoppers at the newly hi-tech store.
I only wanted to buy a newspaper so, being something of an old fart, chose to queue at the tobacco counter because there happened to be a human being behind it.
Unfortunately she was dealing with one of those city oiks (probably one of those £2m Xmas bonus recipients) who was trying to buy a box of matches with his American Express card. It would have been quicker to buy a house.
In the olden days, I would have waved my paper at the human(s), plonked the correct change on the counter, and scarpered. Bear in mind I was eager to move quickly to catch the last Vomit Comet train from Liverpool Street Station, so speed was of the essence.
Waving my 50p extravagantly at the tobacconist earned me a tap on the shoulder from the whipmaster, who directed me to the till. Too impatient to work out how to use the wretched device (this was straight after the agency Xmas party), I uttered a phrase in Greek in order to pretend I was not of this nation and couldn't read English. The whipmaster efficiently passed my Evening Standard through the brains of the machine and, three minutes later, I was on my way.
Is this progress? Tesco is the UK's biggest retailer. For every £7 spent in the high street, Tesco takes £1, such is its power. It has been blamed for the demise of the small independent retailers that used to be present on every high street and, not content with that, is now targeting the very people who work for it by replacing them with these machines.
If there were a rival, human-operated supermarket alongside this Tesco, I would have gone there instead.
H&M are beginning to scare me. Its Christmas press advertising gets more bizarre as the clothing chain shifts from psycho babies to flesh-eating dead-eyed zombie women in grey jumpers.
Remember the scene from Lord of the Rings where Frodo falls into the dead marshes and is accosted by watery phantoms?
One of them escaped.
See also:
Don’t mess with these babies
Mummy, the Christmas bunny isn't moving
I'm sorry, but seeing these fellas glaring at me as I open the eggbox on a dreary Monday morning would simply freak me out. It would give the kiddies nightmares too ("Eeeuuur - look at his yellow brains!").
The faces are stuck-on, courtesy of in-pack advertising by razor maker Wilkinson.
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