Great Music Search Tool

Follow this link to a fantastic music tool that works both free and on a subscription basis that makes hunting for the right mood of music a doddle. Instructions? Just use the onscreen remote. Some of the suggestions are gas but it really does work. You can even purchase the track from within the website if you so wish.

http://www.musicovery.com/

Box Clever

From the day I scratched & sniffed my first impregnated reader as a child, the use of scent has fascinated me. The smell of chocolate from a book, the branding of hotels via specific notes, the selling of homes through virtually cooked bread and perked coffee … Proust had his Madeline, I have my scents.

Satsuma evokes Christmas Morning like nothing else; Fabreeze has evolved into vomit for me. Even a poor sewage system reminds me of holidays in hot countries.

So, what do I make of this genuine, real, 100% factual product? By God, I wish we handled the advertising!

According to David McWilliams, Ireland is production central for Viagra, Silicone Breast Implants and Botox. With any luck, some Irish chemical company will pick up on Vulva Original Vaginal Scent. The North-west, for instance, could do with an employment lift: maybe somewhere like ... Muff, County Donegal ..? Badum tish!

We suck at creative advertising. Yes, you do too.

There are many throries as to why advertising creativity is dying on its ass in Ireland these days. Perhaps it’s an over-emphasis on strategy; meeting every nook and cranny of the anally-retentive brief is stiffling subliminal levels of meaning that connect creative with consumer. Maybe, the foreign, acountant-driven super agencies are blandifying advertising so that they can easily compare one juristiction with another. It could be that during the eighties and early nineties, belt-tightening meant that a generation of loonies missed the opportuinty to come into advertising and that, since then, the straight-laced now control the HR wings of agencies. Can it be that a university degree is prized more highly than a portfolio? Or, its it the fact that, with the internet, we no longer have the excuse to slope off “refrence hunting” and spend the day getting schlitz-faced down the pub? Clients with more marketing experience/qualifications than agency executives may also be playing a part – gone are the days of the idiot son of the Managing Director being shoved into marketing where he couldn’t do any harm.
At best, we are a patchy lot. We measure our successes in award ceremonies run by lovvies who award a few exceptional pieces and retain the rest of the spoils for their clique. These ceremonies are really only an indication of how far ones nose has penetrated the rear of the organisers and have very little to do with genuine creativity. Last year, ICAD seems to have chosen it’s shortlist by reviewing the names on the entry forms rather than the work. I imagine the same will happen this year. That’s why there will be a mcflurry of radio awards going in certain directions and a few agencies will qm-pee themselves, believing that handing themselves awards makes up in some way for their part in murdering creativity.
Personally, I believe all of the above to be true. But the main fault lies squarely at my own door. Every ad I fork out with fifteen seconds of thought that gives the AE an easy sell and the client a no-brainer buy, helps kill creativity. Every ad that I’ve allowed be hacked to death by the ‘consumer is an idiot’ brigade, helps kill creativity. Every stupid defence I’ve made of of ego-inflated shoddy work, helps kill creativity. Perhaps the true purpose of Award Cermonies is to reward those who can be at ease with the dross they produce. For whom, the award is, in itself, the end goal. To whom ‘Creative’ is a job title like ‘Managing Director’ or ‘Spray Tanner’.
No amount of imported flash directors, no amount of awards, no expense account, no business trips abroad, no foreign shoots, no lickspittle praise from ones own posse can make up for a simple, clever idea designed to appeal to a target market and executed beautifully. Look around this year’s ICAD exhibition. You won’t find many ads that fit that bill there. If there was an advertising archive, that’s where you’d find them huddled together, old and alone.
Creative advertising is dead and gone, it’s with Sally O’Brien in the grave (with apology to Yeats).

Mock The Ad

One of the great radio campaigns over the last year or two is that for Dublin Pubs, voiced by Irish comic, Dara O'Briain. You'd wonder who was primarily responsible for the copy, the writer (I think Cawley Nea handle this) or O'Briain?

Anyway, the latest ad has curiously disappeared off the air, to be replaced by older copy. In the ad, themed loosely on the Rugby World Cup, O'Briain remarks something to the effect that you can watch Ireland on a Dublin pub's TV "not suck at a World Sports Event".

Oh dear.

Influence schminfluence

Ok, an oldie but a goodie: Just in case you didn't know just what is is you're doing for a living, Darren Brown explains all in a nutjob. I mean nutshell ...

Harp Supplemental: when is an ad just a research debrief?

Ah, sure there's no point ...
fish barrel etc.
Here's the one with the camel ...



At least they had the good grace to shoot it all on a beach in Ireland. What? You mean they couldn't even do that right! Ok, where was it: Portugal? South Africa?

The Pen is head & shoulders above the sword!

"Everyone knows a guy like Mickey"? What would have made this very mediocre commercial for the aptly named ‘Head’ & Shoulders far better is an ever so slight flick of the pen. It should read: “everyone knows guys like Mickey”. Carries the same meaning plus targets the pink pound. Opportunity lost? Or simply a double entrendre spotted by the AE or Client?

Dark Side of the Rainbow

This, at first, may seem to have nothing to do with advertising but … To those of you who haven’t heard of it, there is supposed to be a deep synchronicity between Pink Floyd’s (I can’t bring myself to use the word ‘seminal’ as it sounds like the punch line to a George Michael Urinal joke) Dark Side of the Moon and The Wizard of Oz. I won’t go into the details – you can find the science on: - Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_side_of_the_rainbow and the clips on youtube:



Suffice it to say, you watch Wiz whilst listening to DSOM and it seems to just work. That’s where we get back to advertising: sometimes, things just work. We’ve all seen a piece of crappy library music placed against a radio or tv ad that suddenly raises both the ad and the music to a new level. Or a prop or throw-a-way line in a commercial that becomes the hook everyone remembers. True, as often as synchronicity can work in our favour, it can work against – but it does work. Remember the monkeys on the typewriter thing? That they could write the complete works of Shakespeare? Yes, they could if given enough time but they would be producing the complete Words rather than Works. The true genius lies is recognising the synchronicities as we work and letting them live. Fighting for them, in fact, in the face of executive and client annihilation. ‘Why on earth are you using a monkey to sell right price tiles?’ Don’t know, it just works. ‘It Just Works’, once the core rationale for advertising is rapidly losing coin in this nut & bolts, wire and plastic packing, time and motion modern marketing melee. It’s up to us Creatives to hold on to the integrity of synchronicity, blind inspiration and happy accident. Don’t obey your thirst, obey your gut. It’s what got you into advertising in the first place. Now, fly my pretties …

Some other folk in our creative department have been pulling their hair out with a particularly obdurate client. I thought I'd send them this to cheer them up.

Noi is the winter of our in-content and the way it might look at you!

Screw the company you keep or actions you take. Similarly screw your word, your intentions and your deeds. Verily I sayeth unto thee: by your Brands shalt ye be known. Yes, the car you drive, the beer you drink, the clothes you wear, the brand of aftershave/perfume you wear are more telling than any other single thing about you (ok, we’re excluding over-production of sweat and voluminous body hair).

We have become a first impressions society – and those impressions count for 99% of how you’re perceived 100% of the time. Desmond Morris prattled on about it in the Eighties but now it is a reality.

Completely aside: wouldn’t it be great to remake 1984 and at the end, as Winston Smith is being led into Room 101 by Cyril Cusack to be reprogrammed/killed, Davina McCaul pops up to interview him and show him his best bits? ‘And here you are with the supposedly virginal Julia – what the Nation wants to know: did you shag her?’

Back to the point/pint: So wtf would anybody order a Harp?

Yes, Harp shares that special place in Irish Advertising. You know the one: ‘Northern’. It slots in there with Buttercrane centres and pit bull neutering, weather forecasts with a republican-challenged map of Ulster and the ever-effervescent Julian what’shisname. But please! I’m an insular knob, devoid of personality, taste or ambition – “I’ll have a Harp, please!”

High camp went out when the cops started going undercover at music festivals.

Next they’ll have a bunch of guys in pee yellow wetsuits swimming around in the stuff in time to some thumpy-thump piece of music.
Whatever about letting the client write the ads, letting the consumer ..?!