JEFF GOODBY’S ANDYS DIARY: DAY 3
Thelegendary Jeff Goodby, co-chairman, Goodby Silverstein & Partners,San Francisco, provides the CB Blog with day 3 of exclusive diaryinstallments from Final Judging of The ANDY Awards in Mexico.
Campaign Brief,Campaign Brief Asia and Bestads are international media partners of theANDY Awards, which undoubtedly has the world’s hottest jury, chaired byMark Waites, creative partner of Mother.
There are remarkable things that probably won’t win big at the ANDYS, and I’m not necessarily talking about your entry. High on that list would have to be a GPS-based, mobile device tour of the graffiti of Lisbon. With it, you are enabled to walk the streets of certain neighborhoods and read explications of significant taggings, with information about the artists and how their artworks were created. There is also an entry from a San Francisco artist who creates “reverse graffiti” by sandblasting through stencils placed against walls that carry years of grime. He decorated the inside of the Broadway tunnel (which runs underneath Russian Hill) using a forest motif that was quite striking. I’m sure such things would still be in the show if someone had thought to have them sponsored by, say, a laundry detergent. But they didn’t, and thus the efforts will probably be lost down the drain of dead ANDYs work. Enough.
We think we’re so smart. We think we invented all this stuff yesterday. Consider this:
If there was a Crispin Porter in 1880, it was Glasgow grocer Thomas J. Lipton. To advertise the satisfying
nature of his food, he hired skinny men through the streets, all walking toward his store and carrying signs
that read, “Going to Lipton’s.” Simultaneously, he had fat men walking away from the store, carrying signs that said, “Coming back from Lipton’s.” He also had convex and concave mirrors inside the store that showed you skinny on the way in and fat on the way out. This is no shit. 1880.
Back to Mexico:
• THAT AGAIN?
The recent “Halo” success taught us something that only occurred to me this afternoon: Treat digitized games as emotional content and put heavy music on them. It’s the trick de jour. Xbox does that this year and the result does something I think modern media does at its best – it suggests the moving parts of a familiar form. In this case, it’s a movie trailer, capturing the tragedy of soldiers in the face of war. You can’t help but be moved. Oh, wait. I forgot to mention, you should also put it in slow motion. The effect is stunning. If Xbox doesn’t win this thing, it deserves a lot of study. I will encourage it among everyone I work with.
• LOOK! A CASTLE! LOOK! A CASTLE! ETC.
There is a campaign encouraging support for the study of Alzheimer’s that shows a crew of guys tricking older people by deftly changing their circumstances – swapping a parked car out on a poor old blue-haired woman, for instance, and watching what happens. “They should have used real Alzheimer’s patients,” one of the judges pointed out. “Yeah,” someone else said, “but then they might not have noticed the car was any different. They wouldn’t have had a spot because the lady might’ve just gotten in the car like it was no big deal and driven away.”
• EMBARRASSING ROMANIANS VS. VAPORIZING VALUED ACQUAINTANCES.
After many watchings, you realize that the Burger King “Whopper Virgins” idea is very much inferior to the thing that asks you to dump ten friends to get a Whopper. The former had a great build-up, but never materialized. The latter actually took advantage of a truth about the Internet: You desperately want to get rid of some of those pesky Facebook friends, and you know you’re looking for the first lame excuse to do so.
• QUICK, COVER YOUR EYES!
I don’t want to like that Nike spot with Ladanian Tomlinson and Troy Polamalu growing up only to smash into each other, but dammit, I love it every time. The music is magnificent.
• HINT: IT’S NOT JUST ME.
Is it just me, or is the Microsoft campaign a little too obviously WAY too worried about Apple? Three judges have reflected similarly. It fails on account of this fear.
• COME ON, COULD THEY REALLY DO THAT?
If the youth of the world had as much time as these entries claim they have to participate in transparent wild goose chases, to vote between inane flavors of Dew, and to turn out for trumped-up parades about corn chip spicings, then we’re fucked as a society in very deep ways.
On that note, I’d like to plug a second book. I am not being paid. My ex-agency president, Colin Probert, who was the smartest guy in advertising for twenty-something years and no one knew it, has advised me to read Winston Fletcher’s Powers of Persuasion, a history of British advertising. Naturally, it WAY overestimates the importance of its topic vis-à-vis the American kind, but that’s just me. Read it anyway. It’s provocative. And it tells the following interesting story:
After World War II, commercial radio was illegal in Britain (you Commonwealthians may know this story). In the early sixties, however, a guy named Ronan O’Rahilly revived Radio Luxembourg, a company that hadn’t broadcast since the war. He did this by beaming from a ship that was positioned just into international waters off the coast of Essex. His programming appealed to a teen market and had a great name: Radio Caroline. Poetically, he announced every day that the station was being broadcast “from a pirate ship.” And he paid no royalties to the musicians whose work he played. Sadly, he was put out of business by the British government in 1966. But he was way ahead of his time, I say. In fact, I’m taking a jet ski off the coast of San Francisco to scope out locations next week. Stay tuned.