BEST TVThrow tinsel, animation, uplifting Pixar style music, robins, snow, mince pies, fantastic voyages and a tear on the face of a golden child into a grinder and you've got yourself a Christmas ad. After the incomparable Adam & Eve set the standard a few years ago it seems everyone in London wants an epic slice of emotional toss. Whether it's
Mrs Claus spending half the production budget on aerial helicopter shots or a
clay Dad realising that he's the ultimate Christmas present, we seem to lose our minds and write spots that have the words 'audience cries here' in the scripts. I know it sounds very bah humbug of me, but I'm writing this in Sydney and my fucking air con's broken so I'm about as Christmassy as a novelty cluster bomb. There is, however, an island of hope in the sea of post Christmas dinner vomit and it's from the
Spanish Lottery of all people. In a faultlessly shot film, an old lady mistakenly thinks she's won the thing and her village rallies together to celebrate. It has more humanity and Christmas joy than any of the others and probably cost a tenth of the price. There's also the fact that the film celebrates someone NOT winning the lottery, so points to the agency for a very hard sell and a stunning piece of film. I loved the
alien spot for VW too as it's a lovely product demonstration (and I really like aliens) but my bulging parcel goes to El Gordo (whatever that means.)
BEST PRINTPrint's always a bit sparse these days, but hey, who wants to write a decent print ad when you can make an HTML5-based content-aggregating interactive activation eh? Let's start with
Audi. I've been working on this for a while now in the desperate hope that there's a bigger idea than just the line 'shock absorbers' misspelled to read 'shcok absrobers.' Apparently my Audi isn't fooled by inferior parts, much as it isn't fooled by the spelling of 'shock absorbers.' Neither was I to be honest, I just read 'shcok absrobers.' Let's move on to
McDonalds. Apparently three countries worked together to create an image of what appear to be sheep and wolves either leaping into, or escaping from a cup of coffee. I'm not entirely sure what it means. Maybe I'm old. Maybe I'm drunk*. Next, we have Facebook, taking their critics head on with a
print ad with the world's longest list of credits. I assume there's a TV attachment to this campaign but I've been asked to judge just the print so, essentially, I'm left with a headline that reads 'Sharing personal stuff with 500 'friends' ? No way.' Yup, that's a world-beater right there. Moving onto
Winston Churchill sucking a lolly because he's not him when he's hungry. Look, it's not terrible, but I can't help think that after what's come before you have to make a bit more of an effort. I mean, come on. Best brief in the agency, right there. Now fuck off and come back with six better ones. The
little green shoot sticking out of the 'bottle was obviously here' shape is sweet. I like the fact that you don't always have to show piles of crap to make a point about cleaning up, so points for making ad for rubbish that isn't. Lastly,
Nissan. Last week I scraped the side of my car along a brick wall literally just before I tried to trade it in so the Nissan ad instantly stood out (it's also uncannily similar to the mark I made.) We've all seen plenty of 'x on y material' art references before but the ad does the job and the visual is great.
BEST OUTDOOR Outdoor used to be a great poster in my day. Now it's a case study that conveniently explains the poster just in case you didn't get it when you walked past.
Peugeot is a case in point. The poster isn't particularly great but seems much better after you've listened to them explain the strategy. My (heavily scraped) Peugeot 308 started to slowly fall to pieces once the warranty had expired so I'm not entirely convinced about their dedication to craftsmanship, but hey. The
Volkswagen bowling film is another award-friendly 'gotcha' experiment that we've all had to judge by the thousand in dark rooms at award shows. This one uses high powered magnets to stop bowling balls in their tracks just before they hit the pins. Of course, the carefully selected agency talent soon realise that they've been had, whooping and applauding as a VW film is shown on the screens above them. A genuinely decent idea let down by the kind of 'agency staff member filming stunt on their mobile' production that we see all too often. That leads us to cannibalism. That's not a word normally associated with
organ donation, or indeed restaurants, but apparently removing meat from burgers is a great way of associating animal meat with, well, human meat. It's really, really fucking weird but hey, what do I know? The
University of Melbourne have a great idea of filling the city with interesting techy experiments, but
Saint Vincent De Paul is the best idea this week. Photographing the places homeless sleep and sticking them in a real estate agent's window is both simple and clever. Another bulging parcel delivered to 'In the company of Huskies.'
BEST INTERACTIVEIn Interactive
Coca Cola tell us that two out of three millennials block web advertising and don't have much time for brands. That's all presumably about to change with their idea to turn Coke bottles into selfie sticks, making sure that every shot they take from now on has a vast Coke logo taking up a third of the shot. Seeing as selfie sticks are about as millennial as a Michael Buble album, I presume this will lead to two out of three of their mates blocking their Instagram feeds.
Renault Clio cobbled together a car ad with a rather overdramatic conductor controlling a series of marketing-director friendly car shots. Apparently this was designed to send me to a website where I could make a composition based on the sound of Renault Clio engines. The site's sound didn't work for me, but I presume it'd sound something like Bondi on a Saturday night so maybe that was a good thing. The
Swedish 80ml project only had four posts on its Facebook page so I couldn't take it too seriously. It's hard to avoid the sheer brutality of Aleppo, and
using that shot of the dusty bleeding child just fucking kills me every time I see it, so any idea that can raise money for them I'm up for. That leaves
Netflix's 'stolen Narcos episode' that mysteriously 'leaked' the first episode of Season two onto social. After a few minutes, a seriously pissed off Pablo appears and calls you a 'fucking rat' for stealing the footage. It's appropriate, clever and absolutely in keeping with the tone of the show. I'm also very jealous of the words 'fucking rat' being used in a promo. So another bulging present for Alma, Miami and a lump of, you know, coal or something for everyone else. Happy Christmas to one and all!
*I am both.
This week's guest judge is Andy Flemming, group creative director, M&C Saatchi, Sydney. His mother wrote his bio.
My son left England in 1992, where he'd worked for absolutely no money at various big London companies who really should have paid him. Really. At the very least he could have got a trade. You know, something with his hands.
After we bankrolled his trip to Sydney, he worked at Chiat/Day/Mojo and wrote some lovely commercials including one with the funny band from that film.
Rather than coming home, he worked in Hong Kong and Singapore for a few years before moving to George Patterson Melbourne, then Sydney, then became creative director at either Saatchi and Saatchi, or M&C Saatchi. One of those.
He did that really nice spot with that funny man from The Office, a big football one and some others that I've forgotten. Oh, a lovely poem with that woman from the Sixth Sense film. The JR poster was nice. We always loved Dallas. The show. Not the place. That was where they shot Kennedy.
He won lots of awards. Can, DAD, OneShoe and others he can't be bothered to tell us about. He never calls. And we know he's on Skype. His name comes up.
They seem to like him where he works. That's important because of Brexit.
He judges stuff, lectures and wrote us a lovely email about the weather. The weather here is awful. Just awful. Anyway. Got to run. We're taking the dog out for a wee.
