The Shortest Word.

That’s it for now. I am resigning this blog to make time for a couple of projects that are very important to me. One of them is the Thanksgiving conversation I recently began under the pseudonym I have traditionally reserved for my solo music, Quail State. The other is a novel entitled Volcanic Hazards of Auckland, which will be released early next year to accompany the upcoming Quail State album of the same name.

This coincides with my move to Melbourne, Australia – and my new job at Leo Burnett Melbourne.

Thanks to everyone who has subscribed to The Shortest Word over the years, and especially to those who were keen enough to comment. Even you, Spam Bots. Goodbye for now. I hope we can work together again some time in the future.

Jono.

The one thing artists need to learn from marketers.

Evan Roberston’s literary posters.

Here is one mighty fine collection of literary quotes cum Etsy wares by New York graphic designer Evan Roberton. See the rest at the aforementioned store.

Ain’t nothin’ like a catch phrase.

 

 

 

Which is what’s great about this piece of election advertising from Canada. Swearing may be cool with the kids. But simplicity is cool with everyone.

Money is… debt.

The trouble with a tease is that it leaves everyone feeling weird and dissatisfied.

They can try all they like to put a positive spin on the way this campaign played out, but the moment other institutions perfectly preempted the punchline BNZ was waiting to deliver, the campaign lost any sense of excitement or wonder.

The only company that will benefit from this campaign is whoever clipped the ticket on all the media.

The last five years have been difficult for everyday New Zealanders. All BNZ has proven with this effort is that they’re charging enough in fees to afford a multimillion dollar TV commercial. Between the dehumanising scale of production and the intentionally American setting, I wouldn’t be surprised if most New Zealanders find the message here to be quite intangible.

Who in New Zealand finds themselves in philosophical turmoil over having money?

It’s unfortunate for BNZ that their campaign drops at a time when Campbell Live has been generating a great deal of awareness around local child poverty. New Zealand is a financial treadmill. Even for those that work hard, this is a difficult country to get ahead

For most New Zealanders, money isn’t good or bad. There’s simply not enough money in circulation for it to even be a factor. Our wages are comparatively low. We have no natural resources. And New Zealanders are notoriously late-adopters, which makes this country a toxic place to start a business.

Simply put, having money is not a problem we’re familiar with.

What we are familiar with is having debt. And the banks are the ones loading us up with it.

The frustrating outtake for most customers will be – ‘why is a bank telling me what to do with my money?’

And for the savvier customers – ‘why is a bank that needed bailing out just a few years ago telling me what to do with my money?’

Meanwhile, the savviest customers will be armed with information like this:

The corportate gentrification of Britomart and the working man’s beer.

New Zealand is experiencing a rebirth. So far it has been concentrated here in Auckland, where the Britomart development seems to be spreading like the Early Roman Empire. It’s a distinctive style – a look and feel born of design agency, Shine. A look and feel that has been emulated by everybody since.

For the most part, it’s good. Auckland is looking better than ever. You’re never far from a half-decent cafe with a funky fit-out. The new retail spaces are quirky, but slick. Pop-up spaces are popping up, and interesting things are popping into them.

I remember the first time I visited Shaky Isles in Kingsland – the first of Shine’s interior projects. It felt great, special, like nowhere else in town. I remember wishing that more spaces in Auckland looked like that cafe. And now they do. All of them. Even the High Street fashion designers – Karen Walker, World, Kate Sylvester – have upped and moved, adopting the Britomart style in the process. The ubiquitous ‘slick and quirky’. The look and feel of New Auckland.

Premium design? I call it corporate gentrification.

And recently it’s reached the threshold where instead of making Auckland a nicer place to be, it’s making it feel conformist, devoid of spirit, actively shittier.

I feel the same way about New Zealand beer. As the craft community has risen from obscurity, mainstream brands have been attempting to take on the small guys by positioning their faux-craft beer in the premium space. The packaging? Slick and quirky premium design. All the while, the very same brands have been driving their generic lagers into the premium space to compete with Heinekin. The premium space is occupied. It’s full. There is no more room here for new entrants.

After a decade of breweries harping on about ‘premium mass-produced lager’ (as if that even exists), they’ve succeeded only in creating for themselves a competitive gridlock. A Mexican standoff. And no one is willing to back down.

My incredibly stylish cool-hunting brand genius pal Laura Ford and I have been discussing this conundrum, and what New Zealand beer brands ought to do about it. The solution is part comms, part design restoration job. It involves bringing heritage brands back to life – harking back to simpler days, when beer was cheap but hard-earned.

The working man’s beer. A lost cultural artifact in the over-gentrified Auckland City.

Here’s an American brand that is doing it well.

And as far as Auckland cafes go – I’ll stick to the usual, thanks. Mmm. Dank.

Whose job is it to name things anyway?

R.I.P. The Campaign Palace.

Responsible for some stellar work spanning four decades, including one of the most timeless commercials ever made:

Junkie Tuesday.

I liked this today, but I realise there aren’t many words on it. So as a supplementary text (to fill in the blanks, if you will) I’m going to offer up this salient artifact of junkie chic:

 

Places you might see me:

– Melbourne (15-18 July)
– New York (21-24 July)
– Vancouver (25-29 July)
– Portland (30 July – 11 August)
– San Francisco (12 August)

Want to hang? Contact me via the About page.

Things you couldn’t script better if you tried:

This cute as heck Earthquake PSA from Clemenger Wellington.

We don’t care who you are, we care what you say.

Lovely to see a wine brand with the confidence to put its messaging – it’s mission – ahead of its brand.

Wine branding seems to exist on a sliding scale, with refined exclusivity at one end and democratic irreverence at the other. I never quite understand why wines that aren’t high-end pretend to be. Nothing stinks of cheap wine like an under-resourced attempt at premium production values.

So I’m always curious to see how brands at the affordable end of the spectrum – the ones with names you don’t recognise – go about differentiating themselves. Supermarket quality wine is, after all, a rather generic product. Aside from the tried and true wine buying tactic that is searching for the expensive bottle with the largest discount, the only reason anyone might pick up your bottle is that they like your attitude.

I like your attitude.

The one where I get a bit feminist.

About five years back, I thought it would be awesome to start some kind of campaign to help the common man relocate his place in society. To find a modern definition for masculinity that on one hand didn’t merely equate to ‘how many babes you’ve boned’, but didn’t subscribe to the (at the time) prolific trend termed metrosexuality (the idea that a sexy man was a man who waxed his body and owned a blow dryer to use on the parts of his body that were not waxed but faux-hawked).

To boil it down, its inspiration shared some things with modern feminism: namely, that men should not be told to conform to an unnatural ideal, and certainly not by a corporate world intent on wriggling into the slightest crevice of human insecurity. But where it departed from feminism was that (again, at the time) men seemed to be increasingly disconnected from their traditional roles. No longer were we bread-winners, we were eyebrow-pluckers. We weren’t wood-choppers, we were interior-decorators.

For some men, a penchant for personal grooming might have been a lifelong ambition. But what infuriated me was the trend itself. Suddenly men who had previously pursued masculine tastes and hobbies were feeling the pressure to participate in this societal pegging.

Suddenly their heroes waxed their butt cracks, and the pressure was on to hit the salon. It had all the symptoms of a subject you could have a lot of fun with. Primarily because the men themselves were uncomfortable with it. They just sort of… went along with it. Simply by trying to embrace their sensitivity, and dare I say, femininity, they succeeded only in proving why men should never wear eye make-up: because unless you’re in an awesome band, or are a fashion brand in your own right, people will correctly assume you are an attention-seeker with a poor sense of judgement.

But I needn’t have worried.

Cue, of course, a man-sized wave of manvertising that matched my sentiment exactly. Job done. Crisis averted. Metaphorical penis reclaimed. Congratulations to the male-dominated world of media and advertising for bringing back the beard, the flannel shirt and the alcohol addiction. Short of championing the tobacco pipe, I’m pretty sure the spirit of masculinity has, by now, fully recovered from its brief foray into the feminine. And while one day I would like to write a book that examines masculinity through the ages, the state of emergency that once surrounded the subject has subsided.

A few things have happened this week.

1. I read this Nextness article on feminism by the talented Hila Shachar
2. I listened to a whole lot of Placebo
3. Someone sent me this:

Before anyone gets a rush of estrogen to the bicep, it’s a piece of shit.

I am mortified to think that the resurgence of masculinity I discussed above has found its natural apex in women-hating. It is not remotely funny. Yet it is imbued with the same tone, and that same critical, cynical objective eye, that made a lot of the early manvertising so witty and (worryingly) so popular.

It scares me that young men might endorse messages like this one as a result of a conversation that we in media and advertising are responsible for sustaining. We were just having a bit of fun, but today’s teenagers have come of age to the sonorous voice of the Old Spice Guy. And they were groomed by the onslaught of manvertising that followed.

With the benefit of hindsight, let’s take a look back at these three commercials from the 2010 Super Bowl. Stripped from the context of 2010, and considered alongside this discussion, these ads suddenly look like works of Satan himself.

Remember, these are mainstream commercials, for mainstream brands, in the most mainstream ad break there is.

As an industry, we often underestimate our power of influence. It’s okay to delve into the dark, it’s good to start conversations about ideas from all over the political and social spectrum – but it’s never useful to take the message to a place of hate. Unfortunately, it’s hardest to know where that line is when everyone else is taking stabs in a similar territory. I should know – I am the unchallenged king of gnawing on my own feet at dinner parties.

So what can we conclude about the poster above, which seems to take what manvertising created and push it unflinchingly off the cliff?

Obviously, it’s hateful. Potentially, it’s hurtful. But the fact that it even exists betrays its own message (i.e. If the Prince was so cool, why did he stay up all night making this stupid poster).

Besides all that, what it may have cemented for me is my personal outlook on feminism (i.e. If this type poster had been made by a woman it would have looked way better).

I appreciate the implicit irony in my obsession with the masculine throughout a post that aimed to tackle the thorny subject of feminism. But maybe that’s just another thing that women are much, much better at.

The new philanthropic brand (and why your brand is evil).

If you were keeping track of the general sentiment as it filtered down from the world’s most important advertising awards show, the 59th Annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, you might have taken three things away.

The first: the age-old conspiracy that the multinational parent companies had pressured the judges to vote up work from within their own networks and kill work from competitor networks. We hear it every year–and of course it’s true. Nobody ever promised that advertising would be fair. It only makes it difficult when the annual awards haul is used as a measure of an agency’s creative muscle. Which is invariably–always.

The second rumour was that the quality of work this year, according to the judges, was down on previous years. I’m instinctively inclined to dismiss this as Middle-Aged White Man Syndrome. If you’re wondering what that is, I just made it up. But it’s the same force that compels middle-aged white men to declare Led Zeppelin the apex of rock music. Nothing can move you the way the songs of your youth do, and the same is probably true for other forms of creativity. Ergo, the longer you work in advertising the harder you are to satisfy, but the more likely you are to be a judge at Cannes.

The final thing you’ll have noticed is that many of the top prizes were awarded for work that solved the brief by implementing a new technology. Examples of this run all the way from the design category, where a solar energy company’s annual report was printed in ink you could only read in direct sunlight (wonderfully immersive, but what a way to punish your accountant), to the grand prix winning idea from Droga5 New York, who avoided the harrowing task of begging people to come in for a blood test in order to join the marrow donors register. They did so by teaming up with a bandage company to create a product that could be used as a regular old sticking plaster, which could later be mailed away as a needle-free blood sample.

All cool stuff.

The simple outtake for agencies watching Cannes unfold with envy might have been this:
Next year, hire a technologist to feed your creative department with technologies and use them to solve a real business problem for one of your clients.

But the Cannes jury comprised of some of the most intelligent women and men in business today. They’re not the kind of people who are easily swayed by novelty factor. Surely there was more to this trend than ‘technology wins’.

So here are my thoughts as they relate to any agency that wants to compete at Cannes 2013:

It has less to do with technology than it does with philanthropy. Technology featured so heavily at Cannes this year simply because technology is the easiest way to promote goodwill. It’s the most logical, functional and affordable way to create and distribute something–anything–for free.

Take, for example, the winner in the radio category. Rather than place 30 second radio ads throughout the camping season, a camping magazine sponsored the entire station’s programming for two weeks, while pumping in an ultra-high frequency down the speakers that was undetectable to humans. You couldn’t hear a thing. But as long as you were listening to the station, this frequency would keep the mosquitoes away from your camp site.

It’s very smart thinking, and certainly the technology is key, but we’ve seen this ‘secret frequency’ technique employed in advertising before. Nearly half a decade ago, the New Zealand SPCA won accolades for a Christmas album that could only be heard by dogs.

What makes this technology award-winning in 2012 is the motivation that underpins the act: a generosity of spirit; the idea that this company has set out to delight its audience; the joy generated by the simple act of giving something away for free.

It doesn’t have to be a product. Entertainment is also something you can give away for free. A fabulous example is the work BBH London produced for The Guardian, which expands on the old children’s tale of The Three Little Pigs and tells it in a way that integrates seamlessly with the product. In the post-apocalyptic world of journalism, this commercial finally demonstrates how a balanced and trustworthy news source can be the hub that facilitates important discourse. But the commercial never expressly makes that claim. In fact, that’s kind of the point.

What The Guardian could easily have done was to sidestep the expensive and time-consuming process of producing this piece of entertainment, and simply run some posters that insisted: “The only place to get the full story is The Guardian”. When you say it like that, it seems hard to believe that any client would fail to see the fundamental problem with cutting out the remarkable bit. But in my 6 years of industry experience, I can confidently say that the majority of clients would feel much more comfortable riding the bypass to the bit where they talk about themselves.

So what would a swing towards philanthropy mean for your average agency? Probably, the way the agency bills (and pays its bills) depends on clients demanding advertising in its most traditional form. But maybe it’s time agencies embraced generosity as a business model internally as well. Perhaps it’s never been more important for an agency to have a pro bono charity client on its books. After all, there is no easier place to demonstrate goodwill than in the charity category. And if not a charity, then at the very least a brand that is fundamentally grounded in doing good. Should a modern agency aim to only attract clients that are, fundamentally, doing good?

But what if you don’t work in an agency? What if you don’t care what happens at Cannes 2013? And fair enough–the whole thing is just a creative circle jerk.

If you’re a client reading this, what does advertising’s philanthropic shift mean for you?

Well, unfortunately, it means that you’re now evil.

I’m sorry to break it to you like this, but the kind of advertising you’ve been doing for the last decade now looks awfully self-centred.

Look at you–buying enormous billboards on which to announce the latest addition to your line of overpriced motor vehicles (you are so self-indulgent). I can’t believe you used all that TV time to explain your product instead of providing something useful, or entertaining your audience (so self-important). Worst of all, I can’t even read the newspaper or listen to the radio without being interupted by YOU, TALKING ABOUT YOURSELF.

That’s right, you’re evil, and you serve no purpose.

As the top tier of brands have set about providing exceptional products and services born of generosity, those brands that have focused simply on producing smart, quality entertainment are now just the norm. The kind of work that was once the measure of a great agency has become a sign of mediocrity.

If that’s true – what for the brands that don’t even go that far? The ones that simply put their product on display, next to the price point, and perhaps a headline suggesting that true happiness can only be obtained via this magnificent purchase? The bad news… is that the world has simply moved on.

It’s strange to think that once upon a time it was a new idea in advertising to seek emotional triggers to start the path to purchase. Suddenly to sell pimple cream, you first had to tell some poor, greasy 14-year-old boy that he was ugly and would definitely die with his virginity intact. All of this self-loathing before he had even had the opportunity to develop a pre-frontal cortex–as if his perpetual virginity wasn’t already the only thing on his mind.

For decades, this was how advertising was done. The agency would work to find a new emotional button and the creatives would push it. Some agencies call this ‘making a connection with the customer’. I’ve heard it described as a ‘real human insight’. But those terms are misused, and what is described above is nothing short of abuse.

But then the old way got broken.

Let’s face it. It’s been a hard few years for capitalism. Now, the idea that one must accept personal debt as a side-effect in the acquisition of happiness sits more uneasily than ever before. The best thing that has come out of the global economic crisis may just be that ordinary people feel less inclined to project their anxieties inward.

We were promised a lifestyle. Work hard, play hard. Learn to delay your rewards and you will win. The market has shown its flaws, and finally our generation can blame The System for the way it has inherently aimed to make us feel–incomplete, inadequate, disempowered, shy of our individuality. When we consider the way advertising has sought to take advantage of these insecurities for the last 50 years, it is exciting to finally be able to speak of brands as potential philanthropists.

So if you ask me, when the 2012 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity judges decided that the quality of the work was down on previous years, they could not have been more wrong.

Here’s the lesson I’ll be infusing through all my work over the next 12 months:
“Just be nice.”

The art of coincidence.

THE MARMALADE Identity from schoenheitsfarm production on Vimeo.

A look into the world of high-speed HD production, and the challenges this team overcomes through clever thinking and really, really, ridiculously expensive, totally badass technology.

Mess with the complacently rational.

Twisted designer Kelli Anderson kills at TED Phoenix.

We need to talk about respect.

It’s shitty luck when the soundtrack you’ve had your heart set on doesn’t work out. Maybe the track is too expensive for the client’s budget. Maybe the band isn’t so keen to be forever associated with that cute ad for cornflakes.

At this point you have two options.

Option 1: You can get on the phone to a publishing company, trawl every music blog you can think of, and be open to the genuinely promising likelihood that you’ll eventually find one other song recorded during the great expanse of human existance that also suits the commercial you have in mind. Perhaps you could begin your search by hunting for bands who have been inspired by the artist you were hoping to engage. Or you could look to the artist’s contemporaries – which bands or genres do they usually affiliate themselves with? Once you have identified this other song, you may then begin the process of legitimately acquiring it for your purposes.

Option 2: You can call up a production house and have them whip you up a soundalike.

If you were thinking that Option 2 sounds considerably easier, you’d be right. You’d also be a parasitic scourge on the world of art, who deserves to die cold, hungry and alone in a meeting room.

Volkswagen Polo – Dad

Beach House – Take Care

Include specific details.

Be the funny bully.

If the earnest route seems at odds with your brand, you might as well take your irreverence to the next level.

Try calling out the over-earnest brands. That way you can be like the funny bully at school – the one everybody finds hilarious until about 15 years later, when the crippling performance anxiety grabs you around the throat mid-presentation, and you begin to wonder if all that emotional prodding in your weaker years may actually have taken some toll on your self-esteem.

It doesn’t matter. That guy got through school without being challenged on his behaviour. And he’s probably going to be CEO of that company in about 5 years time. I guess that means he got away with it. You can too.

Puma is the smart, earnest kid:

Old Spice is the funny bully:

One last procedure.

Next week I head in for one last operation on these guts of mine. Let’s keep in touch and I’ll see you soon.

In the meantime, we can celebrate with some butt jokes.