Viral is a Verb

A man puffs into a rubber dinghy on the beach. A boy patters toward him and flings himself onto it. The man’s head explodes. Seven years ago, Head Rush – a simple 10-second clip, carefully honed to 790k to punch through Hotmail’s attachment filters – launched Ed Robinson’s company, The Viral Factory. It’s since been viewed 100 million times. “It feels incredibly crass now,” he’s prepared to admit, “but that’s how it was then.”

Of course, in the Web 2.0 world the huge advertising potential in peer-to-peer networks is clear to a growing number of brands – but agencies exploiting the system are still shaking off those past associations. Ed for one is clearly weary of justifying himself to people who still think ‘viral’ just means a bedroom-produced funny.

“Viral is a terrible buzzword,” he concedes. “It’s a mechanism; it’ll probably disappear from our company name within a year. It’s been misconstrued. A viral isn’t a short, rude 30-second TV spot you couldn’t get past the BACC – it’s a mysterious peer-to-peer network. Viral is something that happens when a piece of content wins its own audience in an exponential way, and we use the term as a verb. It’s ‘gone’ viral.”

Head Rush unquestionably went viral, and it persuaded Ed to reach beyond his job as a TV ads producer in favour of something edgier. “I didn’t want to make ads. I wanted to make films. As a punter I resent advertising – I want an honest exchange. Either give me hard facts, or engage me; give me something. I resent people just selling eyeball space.”

Ironically, the original proposal was not too far removed from that of a traditional broadcaster – selling space either side of great content. “I had this image of not having a relationship with clients. I’d just make stuff, put it out there in a locked environment and then advertisers would buy a placement; their name at the end of it. Effectively I’d be a programme maker, making small bits of communication.”

In principle, it made sense – clients would buy media space in return for the content winning viewers. It works on TV. But perhaps it was a paradigm shift too far – part of the appeal of online content, after all, is stripping off the ads. “They didn’t buy it,” Ed recalls. So, with reluctance, he began to explore winning an audience with an integral advertising message. In other words, ads that people want to watch. And share.

Evil Twin Ka came a couple of years later: a deliciously sinister decapitation episode in which a black Ford Ka tempts an unsuspecting feline into its open sunroof, and then slides it back in place with a sickening clunk. In another version, a pigeon is splatted flat in the road by a timely flick of its bonnet. “That was back in the day when email peer-to-peer – ‘have you seen this’ – was key,” adds Ed, acknowledging Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point as a useful reference on this kind of exponential growth.

“When people pull your content to them instead of having it pushed at them, you get a buzz,” he smiles. “But at the time it was an add-on thing. It’s only in the last two years that we’ve realised virals can be part of the bigger picture.”

And without the need to deal with media buyers, campaign budgets can be significantly lower. “The ad process can be quite stifling. You may have a million quid to make the ad, but they’ve got 10 million quid to buy the media for a couple of nights on Channel 4 – which is why everyone’s so anxious and sits around debating what colour a certain guy’s shirt should be. We have a much more fluid process – come up with an idea; make it for £50-100k; come back and hopefully they like it. We’re called a factory for a reason.”

Ed goes on to discuss their 2003 Trojan Games campaign for the UK launch of the condom brand, whose quirky notion of a sex Olympics persuaded 55 million visitors to spend an average of five minutes on the website, enjoying and recommending short videos of lycra-clad athletes engaging in acrobatic penetration. This equates to an army of excitable brand advocates roughly the size of the country’s population. Not bad, especially considering the clips contained no explicit sexual content whatsoever.

Sex, violence and slapstick humour – check, check, check. But within the viral space there remains infinite scope for creativity, depending entirely on who you’re targeting to disseminate your message, and why they’d be motivated to pass it on.

Web audiences are notoriously fickle with short attention spans, flitting from clip to clip on giant rambling sites like YouTube and MySpace, and are accordingly much more empowered than their passive TV counterparts. But with the growing interconnectivity between social networking sites, finding what you want (and dumping what you don’t) is only going to get easier. “Above all the advertising industry has to re-learn that they have to give something back,” is Ed’s take on it. “It’s an exchange.”

Perhaps their most innovative work to date was for Levi’s in 2006, ostensibly involving a gigantic jeans-wearing marionette being manoeuvred through the streets of Reykjavik by a trio of helicopters. Such a stunt would cost millions to stage for real, and it was considerably cheaper and savvier to mock the whole thing up in post-production, project it in cinematic glory onto a giant plasma screen – and film it on mobiles. The resulting clips, scattered over YouTube to give the illusion that random Icelandic passers-by had witnessed something wondrous, have garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

There’s an inherent talkability about a giant airborne puppet – even if people decide it’s a hoax, they’ve spread the clip, thought about it and engaged with other users about it on comment threads. That’s what a modern viral campaign needs to be about, and Ed is regularly frustrated by clients who want ‘something on YouTube’ – a request that, as he points out, is pretty meaningless. He turns 70 percent of potential work down, partly as a reality check for clients whose campaigns simply would never go viral.

“You can stick anything on YouTube – a picture of your product with you sticking your thumbs up in front of it. It doesn’t mean people will see it, and it doesn’t make it a viral. It only becomes a viral if you’ve specifically set out to generate an audience.”

Most important of all is to be straight with them once you have them. “They’ll turn against you if you try to ram a message down their throats, and that’s a massive turn-off to some clients,” he warns. “But if you do it right, you have free media, and an audience that voluntarily spreads your message.”

Ed took part in 4Talent’s Inspiration Session on Advertising in Birmingham, May 2007

© Nick Carson 2007. First published in Issue 7 of TEN4 magazine

All in the Detail

A handful of brands have dominated the upper echelons of creative, memorable advertising over the last decade. Advertising for which people sit through the dross in the hope of catching again, and seek out on YouTube months after the TV run ceased – Abbott Mead Vickers for Guinness, HHCL for Tango, Fallon for Sony Bravia. But perhaps one of the most enduring, varied and consistently innovative campaigns of the past few years has been Wieden+Kennedy’s treatment of Honda UK.

A creative behind several of the most memorable of these – not least Cog, better known as the mesmerising two-minute chain reaction made from parts of a Honda Accord – is copywriter Ben Walker. And while he tips a nod to the surreal pin-striped, blender-headed mannequin and attention-grabbing staff self-portraits that adorn the entrance to W+K, much of his inspiration comes from a razor-sharp attention to everyday detail.

The Accord was one of the first briefs on the new account, and the initial feeling was that there was space to talk about ‘warm engineering’ – a satisfying, affable, gentle type of technology to contrast the cold, teutonic efficiency marketed by Germanic counterparts Mercedes, Audi and BMW, or as Ben’s art director Matt Gooden put it at the time, “like the way all the bits in Mousetrap fit together.”

This in turn sparked a recollection of an experimental chain reaction film by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, and before they knew if they were dismantling a hatchback – then stringing the components back together like automotive dominos. ‘Isn’t it nice when things just work?’ was Ben’s beautifully simple tagline, and after more than 600 takes, it did – although they had to film it in two halves, simply because there wasn’t a warehouse long enough to cram it all in.

Incredible patience, precision and hours in the pursuit of that flawless take – it’s no surprise that Ben cites Michel Gondry and Stanley Kubrick as creative influences for their sharp attention to detail. But another of his ads, this time for the Honda Civic, drew inspiration from a less lofty source.

“There’s a Dorling Kindersley book in our office called The Way Things Work – which shows the actual way things work,” he grins. “They talk about something mundane like a stapler or a zip, and you think fuck me; that’s amazing. No-one ever points those things out to you.” A Civic, Ben reasons, is practical but not particularly cool – so they sprinkled this wonderment in the small unnoticed things in life onto a fast-cut editing technique inspired by Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream.

In the film the technique snapshots the pill-popping, tea-drinking, remote-clicking lifestyle of a desperately lonely menopausal woman on speed, and her deteriorating junkie son – unsurprisingly the ad brings a more wholesome Dorling Kindersley edge, integrating macro shots of certain life-enhancing features on a Civic with everyday items that make life easier, but tend to go forgotten. Again the tagline makes it all relevant, as a tagline should: ‘Why is it, the better something does its job, the more we take it for granted?’

Although fewer people are interested in the craft of advertising copy – and award-winning ads seem to be increasingly about effects and glamorous art direction – Ben insists that it’s still absolutely integral to brand communication. “It took me ages to write that line,” he grins.

And Grrr! – Honda’s rainbow-coloured award-magnet, which sees chugging diesel engines knocked out of the sky to the cheerful tune of ‘hate something, change something, make something better’ – is, he points out, built around a song. “There are optimistic visuals and the colour palette is good, but it’s all about the language. Copy makes it relevant to the brand. It’s still hugely important, but people don’t realise it.”

Ben took part in 4Talent’s Inspiration Session on Advertising in Birmingham, May 2007

© Nick Carson 2007. First published in Issue 7 of TEN4 magazine

A Remit to Provoke

“You shouldn’t be in it unless you love ads,” declares 4Creative’s Richard Burdett. “If you’re lucky, once in your life you’ll be part of something great. I’ve been lucky enough to see that twice.” Interestingly, his examples flank a period of disillusionment and frustration with a stagnating industry that’s only recently shaking itself into shape.

First is a seminal moment in the history of advertising. The colossal smiling, winking face, splashed across a rich human canvas in vivid red, white and blue, that helped turn British Airways around while he was at Saatchi’s in 1989. The very picture of optimism: diverse cultures connected across an ever-shrinking globe.

Seventeen years later, visages of an altogether grittier nature: coalition soldiers, contorted in panic and despair beneath ghostly clown makeup as hollow Iraqi gunfire echoes around them. A trail for Iraq: the Bloody Circus – More4’s season of programming on the controversial conflict – while at 4Creative.
 
Fortunately for a man who grew bored with mainstream advertising over a decade ago, the environment in which he now finds himself at the head of Channel 4’s in-house agency – a role for which he was headhunted at Cannes to cover maternity leave, and has commanded ever since – is an “incredibly benign” incubator for great work.

“I have as my client possibly the only advertiser in the country with the guts to provoke every single time, and a remit to provoke,” he declares, citing a recent campaign that sat the cast of Shameless around the Last Supper table as a concept the BBC would have “stabbed to death hideously” after a string of committee meetings. “We know they’ll buy challenging work, so we’re not mitigating ideas before we even present them. And we’ve produced some pretty visceral images – but never gratuitous.”

One of Richard’s personal favourites is a Shameless poster where Frank Gallagher has ripped the ‘4’ logo off the wall and carried it off, leaving screw holes in the plaster. “It tells you nothing about Shameless and everything about Shameless; nothing about Channel 4 and everything about Channel 4,” he enthuses. “What other company would agree to have a space where their logo should be, and have it tucked under the arm of a villain?”

Likewise, you won’t find a morbidly obese Jamie Oliver wobbling after a bus, or Gordon Ramsey smashing junk food into mush with a baseball bat, in their respective shows. “Not one of our ads tells you the story of the show, but every one of them captures the spirit of the show,” reflects Richard. “I think that applies to any brand; that’s what advertising’s going to become. British Airways is a precursor of those; the first ad that didn’t say ‘our seat is bigger than their seat’ or some quantifiable element. It just owned an absolute generic of flying. You get to the other end, you meet people.”

It’s benign, but not too comfortable – Channel 4 can choose whether their in-house agency is best for the job, and 4Creative must pitch for work alongside rivals such as DDB, who handled the launch of More4. “There’s no coercion to use us, and they’re not cutting costs – we have incredibly healthy budgets.”

“Getting David LaChappelle to do Lost, we spent all the money you’d expect a big agency to spend. But we’re tiny: 18 people, split thirds between account handlers, production people and creatives. Then there’s massive use of freelancers, which means 35 people sitting in the office at any one time.”

Besides greater creative freedom from clients, Richard feels that a more democratic creative process all round can help ensure genuinely groundbreaking work. “The ad industry has an incredible division of labour,” he reflects. “Only an account man can do this, only a planner can do this, only a TV producer can do that. And I didn’t realise how debilitating that was until I came to a place where creativity is the job of everybody.”

Having worked on the other side of the divide, both at media agency CIA and selling airtime as Head of Sales at Discovery, Richard has seen plenty of noisy battles for the strategic high ground – and the resulting appreciation of what all parties want and need has helped build a culture of joined-up thinking.

“Direct marketing, ad agency, media agency, communications planning – everyone wants to boss the strategy,” he laments. “It’s like herding cats. As an industry we should never have allowed media to slip out of ad agencies. When I was there, the agencies could talk to the guys booking the space for a clear idea of what could and couldn’t be done. Now knowledge is fractured and fragmented.”

And in an increasingly multiplatform environment, so is the audience. Richard flags up the fact that Bullseye used to draw an audience of 23 million as something of an absurdity in the modern era – anything pulling in that many eyeballs on terrestrial television nowadays would be nothing short of a phenomenon. But while they may be carved into a greater number of niches, the numbers are still there.

“The television advertising industry has been useless at defending television,” he argues. “You’d think that nobody watches TV anymore, and everyone spends their life on the Internet. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are still fantastically robust, big numbers. But the sad truth is that most clients don’t want fantastic work. They want safe, box-ticking exercises. If you find someone that does, stick to them like glue.”

Richard took part in 4Talent’s Inspiration Session on Advertising in Birmingham, May 2007

© Nick Carson 2007. First published in Issue 7 of TEN4 magazine

A Third Way?

Would you pass up a juicy brief from the swoosh, the golden arches or any other glossy global with cash to spend but a somewhat chequered back-story? Is there room for conscience in our glitzy, soundbite world?

In his time, Jonathan Barnbrook has turned down Coca-Cola, Nike and a seemingly innocuous leisure company who, after some digging, turned out to be owned by a landmine manufacturer linked with the Korean War. And while he stresses that ranting for its own sake can be counterproductive, if the opportunity arises he’ll make it abundantly clear why that client has been crossed off the list.

“You have to take responsibility for what your clients do,” he shrugs. Consumers and commissioners are waking up to the power of visual communication as a prime shaper of our culture, but the transition from determination to disillusionment is all-too common. His Soho-based studio regularly receives correspondence from design graduates unsure of how to balance watertight morals with a half-decent living.

“I’m sure I’d be a lot richer if I agreed to work for large corporates, but I’d be unhappy,” is Jonathan’s take on the issue. “It’s an outdated idea to put over the client’s message and not think about what you’re doing. Working for a trendy sports manufacturer isn’t necessarily the ultimate job. I don’t see it as kudos – to me, kudos would be working for a charity. Money is an issue; you have to keep going. But I’m not starving. I can turn down work and still survive.”
 
So has he burnt his bridges with the agencies that came bearing accounts that for many designers would carve a reputation and top their folio with a crown, albeit a thorny one? “They’ve never been in touch again,” he’s prepared to admit. “But to be honest, we don’t want to be desperate to get work from these sorts of people.”

Jonathan’s close ties with the global underground scene inform his often politically-motivated design and typography. When the Coca-Cola brief landed on his desk, he immediately picked up the phone to Kalle Lasn, founder of Vancouver-based counter-culture organisation Adbusters, to work through the ethical dilemma.
 
Kalle himself is optimistic. “People are more aware now; creative people are starting to feel their responsibility,” he insists. “They had to bow low before corporate clients and kiss their arses – now the feeling is that it’s us, not the corporations, who are the cool-makers and the cool-breakers.”

Jonathan first crossed paths with Adbusters and their culture-jamming magazine back in 2000, when they set out their individualist stall in a manifesto entitled First Things First. “Too much design energy is being spent to promote pointless consumerism,” it read, “and too little to help people understand an increasingly complex and fragile world.”

It created “quite a ruckus,” Kalle recalls, with many ‘old-school’ designers protesting that client satisfaction must always be top of the list of priorities. Their argument boiled down to the scale of success: two hundred employees polishing the corporate crown are better than twenty who subvert it. But the ruckus was there, and many young design and advertising students signed up.

One of Adbusters’ central concerns, he explains, is that the culture many of us swear by is “spoon-fed to us” – filtered down from the top echelons of the multinationals as they scrabble over each other in a “quest to put a glow around brands. To create cool.”

In a world that is gradually fabricated around us, fashion and social acceptability are handed down ready-made: “Culture no longer grows from the bottom-up. We should be able to decide for ourselves what we like.”

Almost from birth, we’re told what is fashionable to eat, drink and wear – and it’s only through the ever-expanding mouthpiece of the media that this is made possible. So in a world so firmly under the control of the ‘creators of cool’, is the brand-polishing bandwagon the only way to make a name in the design industry?

“It’s the job of every human being to be proud of what they’re doing, and do it wholeheartedly,” he declares. “But visual communicators have become part of the marketing arm of corporations. It’s not the job of designers to give clients everything they want, but to try to be ethical whilst making the world a better place. They should have the courage and ethical guts to say no.”

But clearly it oversimplifies the situation to polarise all potential clients into good and bad, light and dark, ethical and unethical. I challenge Jonathan to draw a line in the sand. “Ethical clients are concerned about the impact they have, and will have in the future,” is his considered response. But while certain issues – such as worker exploitation, war profiteering or wanton destruction of the environment – will automatically warrant a firm refusal, there are inevitably grey areas.

“With some companies it’s more about what they represent,” he goes on. “We’ll always research around a company before making a decision, find out who they might be owned by and so on.” So after 17 years in the industry, has he felt any sense of disillusionment himself since the heady days of student activism?

“If anything our work has become more extreme; more confident,” he reflects. “Graphic designers are finally standing up and saying no. Of course it’s difficult if you work for someone else; if it’s not your choice. But then you can always use your talent to do something useful in your own time.”

Jonathan’s ethos sits at odds with much of the London design community, which he identifies as “very commercial, intensely competitive and very much about the money.” But Barnbrook Design has always kept an international outlook.

“There’s a lot of underground stuff in London, but nothing compared to New York or Berlin,” he observes. So why continue to be based in the Capital? “Our work is very British in style, particularly our typography,” he asserts. “We have lots of connections with Tokyo, and our British aesthetic is very different to what they’re used to.”

In an industry where smooth, clean-cut visuals can put a glossy sheen on a rotten core, Jonathan has touched on a buzzword that Kalle believes is an early signpost of change from the ground up. “The last couple of generations have seen a slick, commercial, corporate aesthetic,” he observes. “The big project of the next generation is to develop a new aesthetic not driven by big branding, that has a sustainable future.”

“Design anarchy is hard to predict, but I sense a bold move away from modernism and slickness,” Kalle goes on. “A ratty, organic feel that moves away from straight lines to reflect stalks of plants, perhaps. There’s a public feeling about slickness within the design community, an acceptance of uncoated paper as a medium and so on.”

“Grids and straight lines mark the archetypal designer of the past, sat in front of a computer with a template, dividing the page into little bits, creating slickness so it pops off the page and highlights the product.” A distancing effect, perhaps, that separates the consumer from the client with thick, shiny plate glass? “It’s boring,” is Kalle’s less complicated way of putting it. “And no-one has the guts to break the paradigm.”

If design is the language that shapes and reflects our culture, he argues, forcing a regimented structure of images and typography into a tight grid will inevitably cause a backlash; an overspill; an organic sprouting elsewhere.

“Designers have not realised what power they have. With power comes responsibility, and just by realising that, the designers of the future are making a step forward. The designers of the past by-and-large sold out – they were the foot-soldiers of consumer culture. But the black-and-white choice between corporate design and small non-profit creative projects is a false route. There’s a third way emerging that’s much more tantalising and lucrative.”

© Nick Carson 2007. First published in Issue 6 of TEN4 magazine

Different and Relevant

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Swimming upstream may get you noticed, but it doesn’t get much more extreme than reversing evolution. Fresh from scooping just about every accolade going, Ian Heartfield and Matt Doman argue that it’s not enough to do the best ad on television. You should aim to do the best thing on television.

A successful advert, proposes Ian, must be both different and relevant. Clearly, to stand out from the endless formulaic dross splashed across screens, spreads and billboards – and to stop us switching off, flipping over or walking by – there has to be that spark to jolt us out of our blissful numbness.

But peacocking and shock-and-awe tactics alone won’t sell products, and eventually we’ll become ever more desensitised – hence the need for relevance. Simple when you put it in black and white, but doing it well is a different story. And with portfolio highlights already including The Economist and The Samaritans, it was a brief for a certain black and white brand that really pushed this creative pair up to the next level.

Understandably, they’re a bit tired of talking about it. “A creative brain needs to do new stuff,” as Matt puts it: “Once it’s done it’s done, and you’re onto the next thing.” So I’ll tip it a cursory mention and move on. But ignore it I can’t: settling into a glittering legacy that includes the spot widely acknowledged as the Greatest of All Time – Surfer – their work for Guinness picked up more awards than any of its predecessors. And despite being a UK campaign, it spread virally and got the international community pretty excited.

Matt and Ian are a rare example of a traditional Art Director and Copywriter team that have stayed together since college, the product of a matter-of-fact ‘ain’t broke don’t fix it’ philosophy. “If we weren’t doing anything good, we’d be mad and foolish to carry on with it,” reasons Matt. “If it runs out of energy, we’ll do something else. A lot of people work on their own now – there are no rules anymore.”

Straight after the highlight of their career, it’s fair to say it wasn’t broke. But when the praises for noitulovE had finished raining in, they decided to refresh things and left Abbott Mead Vickers for Fallon – the people behind the year’s other award-magnet, the stunning coloured balls idea for Sony Bravia directed by Nicolai Fuglsig.

Such is the nature of the industry; an ongoing cycle of talent to avoid stagnation. McCann Erickson, Ogilvy & Mather and Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy have all enjoyed their creative input – AMV the biggest by a stretch, with three times as many teams as Fallon. “The time was right for us to leave,” reflects Ian. “The industry average is three years. Clients do stuff on a yearly basis; by the third year you’re ready to move on.”

At its best, British advertising leads the world. You’d be hard pushed to find such subtle humour, surrealism and cinematic vision elsewhere. But then, we would say that – it’s aimed at us. “I’m going to prefer British advertising because it talks to me in a way that wouldn’t be relevant in America,” reasons Matt. “Likewise, their stuff is less relevant to me.”

Still, we must be doing something right. In an international judging panel’s pick of the best advertising last year, the top five were from London. “We started doing advertising before a lot of countries,” is his theory. “We have to be more advanced because we’re more ad-literate. People expect more.”

Boundaries can help: without a box it’s hard to think outside of it, and the BACC keeps them on their toes. “When there’s something in your way you have to get around it, which leads to more creative thinking,” Ian suggests. “Maybe it is easy to chuck a granny out of a car, but if you can’t do that you have to think of more sophisticated ways to make people laugh.”

Let’s not forget what the industry’s all about, though – as a creative it’s all too easy to applaud an ad that ticks the same boxes that an experimental short or cult comedy might. Top up their production budget with a spot of blatant product placement and, for a discerning British audience at least, both of those would sacrifice kudos. But no amount of sweeping camera shots, razor-sharp wit and glittering post-production will appease the client if their ad doesn’t also build the brand and shift the merchandise.

“We are glorified door-to-door salesmen, and our job is to flog stuff,” is Matt’s simple summation. “If an ad is good and well-liked, and sells a lot of things, then industry awards should follow that. Not the other way around. Someone’s not going to afford you a reasonably healthy budget and put faith in you if you’re not giving them results.”

“The only reason we can make the films we love is because some client somewhere is putting a lot of money down in order to sell a product. That’s the whole reason we exist,” agrees Ian. Of course, some ads serve another purpose – and one that stands out from his childhood planted a picture of a ‘natural-born smoker’ with tiny nostrils and shrunken fingers into his subconscious. “I was absolutely terrified and never smoked,” he reveals. “I’d like to think that stopped some thirteen-year-old lad from picking up a cigarette.”

Years later, as it happened, he was to work on an anti-smoking brief of his own. “It was in a child’s handwriting: ‘If you smoke, I smoke,’” describes Matt. “And hearing people recite that in the supermarket, and knowing that it may have made someone stop and think twice, is a really good thing.”

While many aspiring directors or scriptwriters slip into advertising to make a few bucks before moving on, both stress that this is the medium that inspires them – a sense of belief and belonging that could explain why these creative pioneers, both still in their early thirties, have already enjoyed so much success. Whilst studying Graphic Design and Advertising at Buckinghamshire College, one particular tutor advised all his students not to go into an industry where 250 applicants fight for each place. But as Matt puts it, that was like telling a kid not to stick his finger in a plug socket.

“We just really like doing ads,” he shrugs. “That’s the reason we give over most of our lives to things that interrupt good programmes on telly, or good articles in magazines. You’ve got a TV or cinema screen, a website, a magazine or a building – a means of communicating with what could be millions of people – and you’re given this opportunity to tell them something. You’re competing with the best of everything, and you’re trying to steer people away from the story. You’ve got to stop them making the tea.”

That’s exactly what Surfer did to Ian – little did he know he’d be tasked with carrying on its legacy a few years down the line. “I was walking from the lounge to the kitchen, and the soundtrack started,” he recalls. “I stopped and stared.” Music is enormously important: try listening to the delicate beauty of Heartbeats by José González without avalanches of colour filling your mind, or Sammy Davis Jr’s Rhythm of Life without the world devolving before your eyes.

Back to those two key principles. If you’re shuffling towards the kettle, both songs are vibrant, exciting and poles apart from what usually fills the ad break. Turn round and the stunning visuals hit you – for the former an extravagant and ambitious one-take gamble, for the latter an extraordinary amount of post-production by anyone’s standards. It’s fair to say you have the viewers’ attention, and all it takes are the now legendary taglines to bring relevance – ‘Colour. Like no other’ and ‘Good things come to those who wait.’

Part of the unique appeal of the medium is the challenge of doing all that in an extremely tight timeframe. “I’m a big fan of the climate of discipline,” says Ian. “Telling a story in thirty seconds is an artform in itself.” And depending on the brief, you could be talking to anyone from a disgruntled teen to a discerning trendsetter – and you need to know your audience. “Most of my inspiration comes from sitting outside a coffee shop and listening to people’s conversations,” he confesses: “Just being a nosy bastard, really.”

Whether or not an ad literally tells a story, it needs to have a kernel that remains effective when all else is stripped away – which more often than not becomes its tagline. It has to pitch convincingly in a sentence: post-production and technology can add sheen, but at its core a great advert needs a great idea.

“Have an idea, then make it ten, twenty, thirty times better before you make it happen,” is Ian’s advice. “Don’t just see a technique and try to shoe-horn it into a product. You can get seduced into things looking really good, but not using them for the right reason.”

Similarly with new technology: to be effective, a medium should channel an idea; a means to an end, not the end itself. “The danger is that colleges tell students that people aren’t interested in big Press or TV ads. They want virals; web stuff; stunts; ambient things – if that’s what they get as feedback, then everyone does that by default. We’ve had students showing us stuff where there isn’t really an idea to start with. You can’t miss the idea out because the other stuff is easy.”

In fact, for new entrants scratching at the door of the industry, live by the principles of a successful advert: be different, so long as you can make it relevant. “A team a year above us at college spotted that no-one wanted to do radio advertising,” recalls Ian by way of example. “It was seen as a poor relation; no-one in London was working in radio.”

“They had no intention of doing it long-term but they did loads and loads of scripts, and sure enough got a job in a top London agency as the radio team. They got hired, half the other students didn’t, and when they were there they could move into other areas. They’ve done very well.” Surprisingly few creative people, he observes, apply the same lateral thought process to their career as they do to their work.

One of a shrinking number of creative teams still split into Art Director and Copywriter, they’re taking their own advice and swimming upstream – and with most colleges advising students to call themselves ‘concept teams’ they urge anyone coming up from underneath to maintain a point of difference wherever possible. “Think about selling yourself,” is Ian’s advice. “Obviously you need the work to back it up, but you can’t do anything in advertising unless you’ve got a job.”

© Nick Carson 2006. First published in Issue 5 of TEN4 magazine

Adsubverts

The backlash starts here. Activist media organisation Adbusters says the Advertising Industry has to take responsibility for the corrupting influence of brand culture on society. Nick Carson examines the subversion of ‘cool’.

“If anyone here is in advertising or marketing, kill yourself…”

Trust Bill Hicks to hit the crucifix in the spot that’s too close for comfort. There’s no escaping the ’swoosh’ sign, those golden arches or interlocked Cs – Nike, McDonalds and Chanel. So hands up those responsible for this sorry state of affairs?

Oi you! Yes you, the Advertising Industry: don’t try and slip away. There’s no point trying to sterilise your guilty conscience. Your hands may be glossy but they’re certainly not clean. That dirty bottom dollar embedded itself right in your nails. But you can cope with that as it’s all about ‘the sell’. Money talks.

Moral judgements

But a career in Advertising doesn’t have to be this way. In this glitzy, soundbite world of big-brand business, the price of success doesn’t necessarily mean that morality has to be sacrificed. If the industry starts taking responsibility for its actions, then a third way can be found.

Optimistic? Well nothing was achieved without hope. Without it Kalle Lasn (founder and director) wouldn’t have conceived Vancouver-based operation Adbusters in 1989. At the vanguard of the self-dubbed ‘counter-force’ to the corporate world, he advocates wriggling free of the brand-building convention and getting back to our cultural roots.

“Mind-fuck. Yeah, that’s the word they use. It’s a mind-fuck.”

A Matrix-like epiphany, halfway through a conversation about the ethics of advertising: we have no control over our lives. Multinational businesses fronted by shiny, big-name brands shape our world. They have, Kalle argues, ‘more control than civil society’.

Not so cool

One of Adbusters’ central concerns, Kalle explains, is that the culture many of us swear by is “spoon-fed to us” – filtered down from the top echelons of the multinationals as they scrabble over each other in a “quest to put a glow around brands. To create cool.”

In a world that is gradually fabricated around us, fashion and social acceptability are handed down ready-made. As Kalle opines: “Culture no longer grows from the bottom-up. We should be able to decide for ourselves what we like.”

Almost from birth, we’re told what is fashionable to eat, drink and wear – and it’s only through the ever-expanding mouthpiece of the media that this is made possible. So in a world so firmly under the control of the ‘creators of cool’, is the brand-polishing bandwagon the only way to stay afloat in the advertising industry?

Hang on to your principles

Over the last century, Advertising has sprouted from something that offered simple factual information about a product and its price into a $350 billion “worldwide juggernaut” that sets the official agenda for the population. In the industry today, Kalle insists, companies that break away from that are the true creators of cool.

“There’s more and more talk about ethics in advertising,” he explains. “There’s a new breed of small businesses in North America run by people who do things their way, as a labour of love. I believe this is the future.”

Ethical guts

I put it to Kalle that if the ‘corporate glow’ marks the path to success, aren’t advertisers just doing their job? Surely to deny advertising its power to sell is to deny its very purpose?

“It’s the job of every human being to be proud of what they’re doing, and do it wholeheartedly,” he admits. “But visual communicators have become part of the marketing arm of corporations. It’s not the job of designers to give clients everything they want, but to try to be ethical while making the world a better place. They should have the courage and ethical guts to say no.”

Declaration of intent

For the torrent of students looking to enter the industry, it’s a choice between the well-trodden path to financial success and recognition – or something different.

When Adbusters set out their individualist principles in a design manifesto entitled First Things First in 2000, it stated: “Too much design energy is being spent to promote pointless consumerism, and too little to helping people understand an increasingly complex and fragile world.”

It created “quite a ruckus,” Kalle recalls, with many ‘old-school’ designers protesting that client satisfaction must always be top of the list of priorities.

Their argument boiled down to the scale of success: two hundred employees polishing the corporate crown are better than twenty who subvert it. But the ruckus was there, and many young design and advertising students signed up. The man behind it boils this down to ideology: “They want to join a profession that actually means something – it put the wind in the sails of many young people.”

Too ideological, or could small-scale be the face of the future?

Yes it could. Size, Kalle assures me, is not everything.

Culture jamming

In the business of bringing corporate cool down to earth, Adbusters’ global campaigns consist of subversive parodies of top businesses’advertising strategies. With an operating budget of $2 million against a $350 billion industry, the imbalance is clear, but Kalle insists: “If you’re smart about it, culture jamming does work. At the moment we’re just nibbling at the edges, but we’ve begun to flex our muscles and are learning how to use our power.”

Depicting ‘culture jamming’ on the Adbusters’ website as a movement that will define this zeitgeist like civil rights did in the Sixties, feminism in the Seventies and environmental activism in the Eighties, Adbusters believes this strategy will alter the way we live and think:

“It will change the way information flows, the way institutions wield power, the way TV stations are run, the way the food, fashion, automobile, sports, music and culture industries set their agendas. Above all, it will change the way meaning is produced in our society.”

Underdog success

One of their biggest successes is Buy Nothing Day, a global boycott that has reportedly had an impact on 60 countries worldwide. A ’support the underdog’ mentality could be at the root of the organisation’s successes against the Goliath-like world of fabricated coolness, but it must be in the minority: it cannot explain the widespread readiness to accept what we are told is cool. The power of advertising is enormous.

Cool activism

What marks Adbusters out from other anti-globalisation movements is that it turns the brand-building industry on its head – aiming its own rhetoric against it. The impact of graphic design is used for the opposite purpose: undermining reputations and stripping off the coolness that makes the big brands glow.

“Activism has become cool again,” Kalle informs me, reaching for that ubiquitous buzzword without a hint of irony. “And people have begun to question multinationals’ right to shape the world we live in.”

That fact that organisations such as Adbusters exist proves that things are already changing. Kalle predicts that in 5-10 years, the advertising industry will be dramatically different:

Mind pollution

“There’s a new breed of ‘mental environmentalists’ who argue that our minds are being polluted as well as the environment. The language they use is that ‘our souls have been sucked out’; ‘we’ve been mind-fucked’. These people are the pioneers of the future. They’ve shown that there is more to advertising than a catchy slogan and a memorable logo.”

© Nick Carson 2003. First published on Channel 4’s IDEASFACTORY