Hasta La Creative!

Read the full text of David Abraham’s speech, called ‘After The Gold Rush: Sustaining creative risk in UK television for the next generation’, given at the Edinburgh International Television Festival.

Aga, the British cooker brand indelibly linked with the upper-middle classes and their country homes, has released a campaign for its city oven.

Harrods, the luxury department store, has appointed TBWALondon as its creative agency.

Category: Up Your Game
Summary: Customer loyalty, like love, can be fickle and fleeting. Every brand craves it. But few really achieve it. It’s time to rethink the ways brands woo their best customers.

Improvise the Carnival of Delight.

From Adbusters #113: Blueprint for a New World, Part 2: Eco

Santiago, Chile, 2011

Hey Adbusters,

Jazz improvisation is a fine paradigm for a future society of carnival. The conclusion to Terry Eagleton’s short exploration, The Meaning of Life, tells us how:

“A jazz group which is improvising obviously differs from a symphony orchestra, since to a large extent each member is free to express herself as she likes. But she does so with a receptive sensitivity to the self-expressive performance of the other musicians. The complex harmony that they fashion comes not from playing from a collective score, but from the free musical expression of each member acting as the basis for the free expression of the others. As each player grows more musically eloquent, the others draw inspiration from this and are spurred to greater heights. There is no conflict here between freedom and the good of the whole, yet the image is the reverse of totalitarian. Though each performer contributes to the greater good of the whole, she does so not by some grim-lipped self sacrifice but simply by expressing herself. There is self-realization but only through the loss of self in the music as a whole. There is achievement but it is not a question of self-aggrandizing success.”

“Instead, the achievement — the music itself — acts as a medium of relationship among the performers. There is pleasure to be reaped from this artistry and, since there is a free fulfillment or realization of powers, there is also happiness in the sense of flourishing. Because the flourishing is reciprocal, we can even speak of, remotely and analogically, a kind of love. One could do worse, surely, than propose such a situation as the meaning of life — both in the sense that it is what makes life meaningful, and — more controversially — in the sense that when we act in this way, we realize our nature at its finest.”

“The goal would be to construct this kind of community on a wider scale, which is a problem of politics. It is, to be sure, a utopian aspiration, but it is none the worse for that. The point of such aspirations is to indicate a direction, however lamentably we are bound to fall short of the goal. What we need is a form of life that’s completely pointless, just as the jazz performance is pointless. Rather than serve some utilitarian purpose or earnest metaphysical end, it is a delight in itself. It needs no justification beyond its own existence.”

So yes, let’s continue to play what’s not there, to create our own carnival of delight.

All love,

Richard Hayward, Cornwall, UK

Ever wish advertisers would just admit when they’ve airbrushed their models? Online retailer ModCloth promised to do so when it became the first retailer to sign the “Heroes Pledge for Advertisers.”

The petition, drafted by The Brave Girls Alliance, sets boundaries on image retouching in ads.

ModCloth has pledged that it will “do [its] best not to change the shape, size, proportion, color and/or remove/enhance the physical features, of the people in [its] ads in postproduction.”

In cases where retouching is used, the pledge requires adding “a ‘Truth In Advertising’ label to these ads to ensure consumers, in particular children and teens, do not confuse an advertising ‘ideal’ with what’s real.”

“It’s easy for us to sign on to something celebrating real people,” ModCloth CMO Nancy Ramamurthi told Forbes. “When you see in the public this kind of change in attitude of embracing a company that does what’s right, companies will make the shift.”

ModCloth’s participation is a significant step for advocates of the Truth in Advertising Act of 2014, a bipartisan bill that asks the FTC to create guidelines on the use of image-altering techniques, such as Photoshop, on people in advertisements.

“It is a courageous movement that we were excited to get behind,” ModCloth said in a blog post. “We have agreed to label images of models who have been materially Photoshopped because that’s what we all deserve—to know the truth!”

By signing the pledge, ModCloth has promised to mark advertisements that include retouched models. They also will not run ads with retouched models in media catering to children under the age of 13.

With lingerie maker Aerie’s recent attention-grabbing campaign of unretouched models, brands seem to be catching on to this movement. Which one will be next?

Online
Tim Hortons

Advertising Agency:JWT, Toronto, Canada
Chief Creative Officer:Brent Choi
Creative Directors:Ryan Spelliscy, Paul Wales
Art Director:Dan Bache
Copywriter:Henry Park
Senior Producer:Elana Olavesen
Account team:Darrell Hurst, Renee Ray, Cameron Stark
Director:Neil Tardio
Production Company:Partners Film Company
Postproduction:Alter Ego
Editor:Geoff Ashenhurst, Married to Giants
Music:Tyson Kuteyi, Tattoo Sound & Music