I want to apologise for the lack of updates. On 4 January, I went into hospital for serious abdominal surgery. There is another operation on the horizon, so I am sucking morphine and watching more TV than anybody ever should. Regular posts will resume here in March.
Being on the couch with free time stretching out before me has cemented my self-destructive belief that you are only as good as your output. Once I can get around a little bit better, I’m looking forward to putting myself to the test: what can I personally achieve with these two months off work?
I like Gabriel Orozsco’s approach to art. I like the way he embraces his natural attraction to fun, the way he modifies the familiar. I like his photography. In this short webfilm, I especially like the lint installation.
Keep making stuff and I will see you when this nasty surgery bollocks is done with.
Of my younger brothers, Fraser was the second to arrive. His older brother Matthew and I would scrap like animals. So my parents were relieved to discover that Fraser was the most passive infant to ever roam the earth.
The only thing that would keep Matthew and I quiet and safe from harm was a Sega Master System II. California Games was one of our favourites.
We became experts at virtual Flying Disc, Halfpipe, Surfing, BMX, and the insanely difficult Footbag. All the while, Fraser would lie back in a little bouncy chair with eyes as wide as 8-bit pixels. Of course, the chair was designed in such a way that he couldn’t leave it even if he’d wanted to. He grew up in that little chair. His bouncy yellow prison. I’m quite certain that growing up captive to an inanimate object sharpened his faculty for the cutting retort.
My mother often laments the laissez-faire style of parenting that Fraser experienced while she was busy holding Matthew back from slitting my throat with kitchen implements. Then again, Fraser turned out smarter than any of us, so maybe California Games does have a powerful educational quality embedded deep in its code.
Fraser is at university now, but I like to imagine that his passive consumption of Sega Sports as a child will leave him predisposed and defenseless in the face of this California Games-esque message from MTV.
Just a casual reminder to teenagers that unprotected sex is totally bogus. Radical scriptwriting aside, it’s clear that nostalgia (even through something as subtle as an animation style) is a powerful tool in commanding the attention of an audience when there is a very specific age range. It’s also an awesome way to enhance viral potential. Awesome to the max.
Human Clock is such a sweet and simple idea. It’s also a wonderful way to take a photo tour of the world. And now that it’s 10 years old, I like to imagine you’ll never see the same clock twice. Pictured above is Seattle, Washington, USA.
While we’re on the subject, it’s worth mentioning Christian Marclay’s video installation The Clock (2010). Certainly one of the most ambitious archival editing projects ever undertaken, Marclay creates a functional 24-hour clock face compiled from old movie footage. For this work he was awarded a Gold Lion at the Venice Biennale, where he was also named amongst the ten most important artists of today. Here’s an excerpt from the installation.
When the Rena ran aground, the nation was outraged. The imagery was disturbingly familiar. Suddenly one of New Zealand’s quintessential summer holiday spots (especially if you’re sixteen, drunk, and keen to lose your virginity), looked a lot like the gone-but-not-forgotten Gulf of Mexico spill.
Greenpeace volunteers were amongst the first to respond with clean-up assistance. Of course, if you want to be honest about it, events like this one are vital to Greenpeace operations. Something close to home, that people can’t ignore, with powerful pictures to drive the problem home – it’s during times like these that Greenpeace is able to properly fundraise. This is the great New Zealand ‘Ambulance At The Bottom Of The Cliff’ Syndrome in action.
(Although may it be noted that accosting people on street corners with a clipboard or bucket is probably not the best way to raise funds either. (My high school girlfriend once taught me that the best way to get past the street collectors without the awkward tension is to tell them you’re already a member. Actual membership optional.))
Anyway, I am not here to judge Greenpeace as an organisation. I am here to judge the campaign Mojo was inspired to create. Lachlan McPherson is one of advertising’s good guys. If there’s a decent social cause that could use his help, he’ll be the first one on it. This is good news for ‘bad things’ as he’s also a smart guy and a great writer.
One effect of an oil spill is a lot of cute animals die. If YouTube has taught us anything, it’s that cute animals are the second most important thing on earth, after extended compilations of accidental personal injury.
So the team at Mojo took the deceased penguins, still coated in the oil that had killed them, and rolled them against street posters to make their point. They then convinced Radiohead to provide a classic track and made a beautiful piece of TV. It all comes together to form one of the most beautiful charity campaigns New Zealand has ever seen.
The disturbing thing is that while this campaign fully captured my heart and imagination, I am still left with this strange feeling of resent for the Greenpeace brand. I should love this brand, but so much of my experience of the brand stems from those awkward street-corner sign-up attempts. What do you do when your fundraising process is hurting your marketing efforts?
One day I had a rare epiphany at my desk: that the lessons I have learned in my time bringing brands to life might also help me to better understand what it is I want out of my own existence.
What resulted was a truckload of self-doubt, although in many ways this helped me to clarify a handful of my ambitions. The problem is, it turns out that most of the things I have been wanting are just really, really hard to come by.
So before you read this, I feel like I should warn you of exactly how completely miserable this mantra has kept me over the last 27 years. And also reinforce what an exciting, and at times productive, life it has made for.
Carrying an excruciatingly heavy set of personal expectations with you everywhere you go isn’t always practical. Nor, I imagine, is it particularly healthy or sensible. But I think it is probably good practice to examine your principles and try to reduce them to a clear purpose. A reason for being.
Why is it important to the world that you exist?
This is the first question you’d ask every brand you work with, given the chance. When a brand has a purpose, everyone with a responsibility to that brand has some tangible way to measure the things they say and do.
That sense of clarity is one of the reasons I have aspired to a brand purpose for myself. I can assure you it is born more out of curiosity than any kind of obsessive compulsive disorder. And anyway, the point of the exercise is not for me to modify my behaviour, because as chief executive of my existence, I am vetoing the fuck out of anyone who thinks they can tell me what I ought to say, or how I ought to behave. This is not about fooling myself into being a better person, either. It’s just about finding a flag to carry into battle.
As I worked through the architecture to reach my personal brand purpose, I began to see a few flaws in the exercise. How long would I need to stick to this purpose before I was entitled to a re-brand? Was it a problem that my current brand purpose was bound to differ from my brand purpose as a pre-23-year-old (the age at which I finally became an actual person)? What would this mean for me in the years beyond my inevitable mid-life crisis? If occasionally bending the rules around how my brand behaved (say at 4.00am on a Saturday morning) would I be undermining my fundamental principles – or just ‘keeping it fresh’?
Aside from shattering all of the very rigid ideas I had around the benefits of a brand’s architectural process, what I realised is that I had to seek a more flexible tool with which to measure my reason for being.
What I eventually arrived at was a question I could ask myself at any point during the during the week, amidst the annual moment of clarity I call ‘The Christmas Break’, or on my death bed, provided I still had cognitive function, which given the geriatric dementia that seems to run in my family I somewhat doubt.
Answers may scale from the slightest of tiny achievements – like writing a song with which to serenade a woman, right through to life’s great victories – like causing that woman to exit a baby from her sexy canal. The important thing is that I must be able to answer this question with something convincing – anything – or else it’s time for a new agency. So to speak.
Here is my personal brand purpose. A micro-architecture for being me. The heavy set of expectations I like to carry around, in spite of all they do to ensure my life is as difficult as is humanly possible.
Perhaps it will serve to inspire you also. Or perhaps you can dispute its relevance in the comments section and set me free.
I’m not going to tell you who to vote for. Okay, I am.
The system we choose can either empower the poor or relegate them to further poverty, where they will be overrepresented in all the usual negative statistics.
That same system can either empower the rich or gently remind them that they have the capital to fend for themselves.
Either way, intervention equates to socialism. So let’s not pass off bank bailouts as anything resembling free market capitalism. The free market is dead.
The state of the economy has always been cyclic. The best thing about economic failure is that it necessitates positive, natural change.
The wealthy will be fine, they don’t need your charity. Show some dignity and vote with your conscience this Saturday.
The most frightening thing about being in control of your life is the unavoidable onslaught of events that helps you to understand most everything is entirely out of your jurisdiction. I’m no fatalist, but isn’t life fatal sometimes?
The latest NZTA Don’t Drink & Drive commercial is copping a lot of flak. I think it’s all terribly unfair.
Agreed, the voice over sounds strangely like the Beached Az whale. The dialogue, a little Bro’town. The mood, uncomfortably sombre, like the seconds before a violent Once Were Warriors bar brawl. The art direction takes its cues from low budget New Zealand cinema, but weren’t we all celebrating those things when Taika Waititi released Boy last year?
A mixed bag of references, but one thing we can learn from them all is that we are completely fascinated with ourselves. In a country like New Zealand, where for so long so much of the cultural product we consumed was created overseas, or carefully designed to look and sound like it, the novelty of seeing ourselves on screen is even more pronounced.
Even before the screen, we were naturally compelled to this strange self-indulgent behaviour. This is the Makapansgat Pebble, considered the first ever manport (an impressive 2.9 million years ago). This pebble was discovered miles from the rock source of the pebble itself. Some pre-human beast saw the face in this anthropomorphic chunk of earth and decided it was remarkable enough to take along for the ride.
The same animal compulsion that led one thought-leading australopithecine to lug a pebble across South Africa has been a driving force in the development of tools that enable us to better see ourselves, both physically and symbolically. Maybe I’m getting over-excited here, but I’m going to suggest it’s also the force that perpetuates the human need to create and experience art, literature, theatre, cinema, and so on. Just like that pebble, when we turn on the television, we see ourselves. And that’s half of the reason humans keep doing it.
(The other half is they’re actually incredibly boring with nothing more valuable to contribute to the earth in the precious, dwindling time they have left on it. But that’s a whole other, much angrier blog post.)
New Zealand is a young nation, there’s very little that truly sets us apart from our near, dear Australian neighbours. But it’s clear our peace of minds requires us to qualify the difference. Long before Peter Jackson was making world-leading cinema, long before Flight of the Conchords, even before Neil Finn wrote Don’t Dream It’s Over, advertising was already busy trying to carve a distinctly New Zealand face in the metaphorical rock. Dare I say, our cultural identity, to an extent, was forged by the Speights Southern Man, by the Mainland Cheese Guys, by Toyota – a Japanese car manufacturer.
(Great. In the search for the Len Potts BNZ ads of old, I wound up discovering a local documentary that eloquently sums up my entire argument. Fuck you, YouTube.)
It’s fair to say that in recent years the old ‘You’re a Kiwi’ line has worn thin. It’s a widely accepted fact in creative circles that the last good Kiwivertising spot was this one for L&P:
So if we’re unable to fall back on those old worn cliches, where do we go when we need to tug on the national heartstrings? Remember, this isn’t cinema, where we have the luxury of an indulgent set-up. We’ve got 30 seconds, or maybe 15 seconds if our client is especially “media-focused”, to tell what poses to be a complicated story.
Well, that’s the good news. Because now that we’re a nation with some cultural product behind us (whether it be as innocuous as Beached Az, as damning as Once Were Warriors, as astute as Bro’town, or as enchanting as Boy), our cultural identity has been adjusted, or at least filled out, to be a little closer to the truth.
Now that advertising isn’t the only thing informing our national identity, there is an expanded palette of shared experiences, values and dialects for us as creatives to draw upon.
Which finally brings me around to my point. I’m worn out on brands that present Pakeha New Zealanders as ‘typical Kiwis’. It’s a dangerous territory to be in, the moment you take a face and apply to it the term ‘average’ or ‘normal’. I’m not even referring to the inherent racism (as if I care about that shit, I’m in advertising). I’m talking plain old business language here. Can John Saifiti see himself in John Smith? Probably not. It’s bad advertising.
There’s a not-even-that-subtle difference between casting a particular character for comic or dramatic purposes. There are, after all, some stories that only John Smith can tell.
Which is precisely the reason I love the new LTNZ ad. The problem: Too many Pacific Island kids are drinking and driving. We already know the cultural effect advertising, at its best, can have. We can use it to solve a social problem. What we need to do is hold the mirror up. Show them what a hero looks look to the target audience. Have the message come from someone they can relate to.
Remember, we’re not trying to tell people off. They haven’t done anything wrong yet. We’re just equipping them with the tools they need to make the right decision when the opportunity arises.
In the case of the NZTA Don’t Drink & Drive ad, we’re talking to Pacific Island kids. So why wouldn’t we show them Pacific Island kids?
After all, I’m sure I’m not the only person here who kind of enjoys this commercial:
Kind of interesting web film out of Brazil today entitled Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Night. Top 6 TV this week on BestAds.
I’m going to be a jerk and call them on the direct rip from my favourite existential flash game, Every Day The Same Dream. Music and all.
And where the computer game is immersive, interactive, stunningly mysterious, poignant and infused with a subtle sense of self-loathing, this new film (made to promote a contemporary arts festival) is just relentlessly over-styled, which is the worst thing about South American advertising. Without being personally invested in the characters (as we are when playing the game) the awful bleakness is all-consuming. I feel like I just drank a gallon of bleak.
Don’t get me wrong. I see what they’re attempting to do – we’re supposed to think of it less as a piece of direct communication and more as a piece of art. But it’s hard to not take it personally when the festival I am being encouraged to attend is offered in the pay-off as the solution to a monotonous existence.
My monotonous existence? Get out of here.
Conclusion: Fuck you, you just ruined the most ingenious flash game of all time.
I thought this iPhone App for New Zealand legends was a really neat idea. It’s been two decades since I was last exposed to traditional Maori stories at Kōhanga Reo. Back then, picture books were about as immersive as you could get. I loved the tale of Maui fishing up New Zealand’s North Island, and the one where he slows the sun to create day and night. That Maui was a pretty awesome dude.
But picture books are a bit retro now. By bringing them to a modern medium these old myths suddenly feel exciting and relevant again. If I was a young kid today, with an iPad in the family, I would be all over this shit. I would love to see this App developed further, and illustrated, even animated.
While we’re on the subject of massive production budgets, I love that Australia’s worst beer was able to buy Auckland for this amazing spot. Phenomenal CGI work.
A collection of nice words for people who like them and love them.
There sure are an awful lot of graphic design blogs out there. So many places for the visually inclined to stop by for inspiration.
And certainly there are copywriting resources on the web. They'll help you to deconstruct the art of an above-mediocre headline. They'll train you to optimise your thoughts into keywords for some search engine robot to carve a path through.
But wouldn't it be nice if there was a place writers of all vocations could retreat to for a little bit of a kick in the wit. Or to summon that ever important flush of critical self-doubt.
Sometimes all inspiration needs is a few nice words of encouragement.
One day I had an epiphany at my desk: the lessons I have learned in my time bringing brands to life might also help me to better understand what it is I want out of my existence.
Now that advertising isn’t the only thing informing New Zealand’s national identity, there is an expanded palette of shared experiences, values and dialects for us as creatives to draw upon.
When media is handled by a separate shop, it inevitably develops into an ‘us and them’ situation. The media partner decides to assume the role of arch nemesis.
Being a challenger brand is kind of like hitting on another guy’s girlfriend. You can be edgy and exciting and surprising and different, because you get all the freedom.
If advertising is anything you say or do, why are marketers so married to form? Why must the result of an advertising agency’s output always be so tangible?
