JEFF GOODBY’S ANDY’S 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.
6 Comments
mate these posts are fantastic. nice one.
such a good read.
Nice, well written and classic. I’ve actually saved these posts to my iPod.
*There are too many interactive entries that involve wild goose chases to find obscure things on the basis of dubious hints. One cannot imagine cityloads of people having this much time. ”
That’s f’n gold. So spot on. When are all the digital monkeys going to wake up and realise no-one gives a shit about their inane treasure hunts.
Goodby rocks!
Yep, agreed. Not one bit about cigar hangovers or eggs benedict anywhere.
That bit with stencial/reverse graffitti was done by GoGorilla in NYC years ago…