Tug and I had a great time talking with the one-and-only Luke Sullivan last night. He’s more proof that the most talented people in this business are also the most down-to-earth. We talked for about an hour. That’s enough for two podcasts. I’ll get to work on cutting those right away. Of course, we all know what happens this Sunday. AC was founded on breaking down the Super Bowl spots and we plan to do that again. So, expect to hear the Luke podcasts later on next week. In the meantime, Luke said we could leak a few snippets of the new content from the third edition of "Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This." Enjoy:
Try something naughty. I do not mean do a pee-pee joke. (Oh lordy, please, please . . . no pee-pee jokes. No fart jokes. No scatology. Please, just stop it.)
What I am suggesting here is that you do something naughty. Maybe naughty isn’t the right word. How about controversial? My thesaurus also suggests: devilish, sneaky, disobedient, mischievous, willful, wayward, bad, or recalcitrant. Do something you’re not supposed to do. Break a rule of some kind. Come up with an idea that makes you say, “We can’t do that, can we?†That’s a sign it’s a strong idea. The other question to ask is: “Will somebody talk about this idea if we do it?†Sticking messages into dog poop at the park qualifies, I think, on both counts. It’s a controversial sort of idea somebody might talk about.
Beaming an anti government message onto the side of city hall is naughty.
Airing a free video on a hotel’s adult channel is naughty. Running a small-space ad with a headline “Fur Coat Storage Services†is naughty. Well, it is when you know the rich ladies who called the number got a recorded message from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals about the cruelty of the fur business and how they should “donate†their fur for proper burial. In Warren Berger’s book Hoopla, CP+B’s Alex Bogusky observes, “If you’re about to spend advertising dollars on a campaign and you can’t imagine that anybody is going to write about it or talk about it, you might want to rethink it. It means you probably missed injecting a truth or social tension into it.†A truth. A social tension. Now we’re getting to the nut of it. Think of truth, or social tension, or naughtiness as the bad guy in a movie. Ever notice how the bad guy is usually a movie’s most interesting character? Kids wanna be Darth Vader, not Luke. On Halloween, I’ve never seen anybody wearing a Jamie Lee Curtis mask; it’s always Michael Myers. Bad is good. The bad guy disrupts. He changes things, makes them interesting. Bad means gettin’ some “Bom Chicka Wah Wah†from the Axe Effect or doing things in Vegas that have to stay there. Bad is why the Subservient Chicken is wearing a garter belt. Do something devilish, disobedient, sneaky, mischievous, willful, wayward, bad, or recalcitrant. At every turn of the way, question authority.
