Hasta La Creative!

“Is this great enough? Because if it’s not, sooner or later we’ll turn into one of those small regional agencies that does ads for oil changes.” -Matt Anderson Linda Baker of Oregon Business spoke to Matt Anderson of Struck, following his recent promotion from creative director to CEO of the Salt Lake City-based agency. Here […]

The post Matt Anderson Is A Writer At The Helm appeared first on AdPulp.

Advertised brand: 10 Downing Street Pub, Chennai Traffic Police
Advert title(s): Had a Drink? Think!

Advertising Agency: Dentsu India Group

Executive Creative Director: Ashwin Parthiban, Shiv Parameswaran
Creative Director: Rathish P Subramaniam, Sachit Sadanandan
Art Director: Rathish P Subramaniam, Shiv Parameswaran
Copywriter: Sachit Sadanandan, Ashwin Parthiban

Additional credits:
Production House – Silent Picture Company
Director – Mark Manuel
Executive Producer – Balaji Selvaraj
Camera – Anbu Dennis, Vignesh Vasu, Jagadeesh Ravichandran
Assistant Director – Al Hoon
Music – Timothy Madhukar
Sound Engineer – Sean Bout
Post Production – RGB
Offline – Manohar
Online – Mohan
Computer Graphics – Velu

Short rationale (optional):
‘Don’t drink and drive’. Its a message that is so ubiquitous in big cities, it has actually become a blind spot. What this jaded ‘public’ message needed was a personal touch. An emotional connect that would not only make people notice this message, but act on it.
Had a Drink? Think!

The post 10 Downing Street Pub by Dentsu Bangalore appeared first on desicreative.

Elmore Leonard’s recent passing prompted Bruce McCall to write a reflective piece for The New Yorker.

McCall worked on Chevy in Detroit at the same time Leonard was banging out Westerns on his typewriter and working as a copywriter. McCall notes how common it is for real writers to find “safe harbor” in the ad business.

A fat book could be assembled, just listing all the later-to-be-famous writers who stopped briefly in the cubicles of ad agencies: Dorothy L. Sayers and Salman Rushdie and F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Patterson and Joseph Heller, for starters. Advertising is a morally squalid racket that demands one make a Faustian bargain by manipulating truth for money. But I’ll say this much for the murky intersection of morality and commerce and guess-who-wins that is the ad biz: it has perennially provided a safe haven and a decent income for writers while they were working out their higher destinies.

“Manipulating truth for money” is some pretty tough language. Or is it tough love? After all, it’s common wisdom that advertising is all about the bullshit. The agency dreams up some bullshit to present to the client, who has a whole list of bullshit reasons about why people ought to care and buy the bullshit they’re selling. After several high-priced bullshit sessions, the client then buys the agency’s bullshit about the client’s own bullshit, at which point the agency goes off to spends millions of the client’s dollars justifying all this crazy bullshit.

Here’s what I think. Common sense trumps common wisdom. And in this case, common sense dictates that advertising is no longer about the bullshit. It’s not that marketers woke up one morning and realized the error of their ways and opted for higher ground. No, it’s more like the Internet was unleashed on society and its industry-crushing reach has had its way with marketing communications, just like it did with the news and music industries.

Today, thanks to radical transparency and the popularity of people-powered, mobile and always-on media networks, your brand is who and what you do everyday, for real. You are not who your ad campaigns say you are and this is great news, provided you know how to operate in this new media environment.

When I consider my own higher destinies as a writer, I allow dreams of a best seller or a successful screenplay. But for me, it makes perfect sense to infuse advertising with poetry and art. Also with meaning, soul and passion. Advertising is a storytelling platform, like films and theater are storytelling platforms. The job is to convey memorable information in a moving way, and it’s far from easy to do.

McCall notes that advertising’s real writers rarely have much success in advertising. Clearly, for many, advertising is a payday and nothing more. In the beginning, I wondered if it would be like that for me. It wasn’t and isn’t and I am grateful for this.

The post Are Copywriters Just Authors In Hiding? appeared first on AdPulp.

Do you recognize a so-called native ad when you see one? It’s not as easy it sounds. Back in the day we used to plaster an ADVERTORIAL sign on top of any editorial that was supplied by a marketer. But marketers today want their ads, excuse me, their content, to blend in and fit seamlessly with the rest of the media product.

Buzzfeed, “the leading social news organization,” is advancing the native advertising ball as aggressively as possible. Which has some traditionalist’s panties in a wad. Last night in New York, as part of a Social Media Week panel, a debate on editorial ethics erupted between journalist/blogger Andrew Sullivan and BuzzFeed’s Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith.

Today, Sullivan reflects:

I am accusing those (media) institutions of pushing as far up to the line between advertorial and editorial as can be even remotely ethically justified. I am accusing them of now hiring writers for two different purposes: writing journalism and writing ad copy. Before things got this desperate/opportunistic, the idea of a magazine hiring writers to craft their clients’ ads rather than, you know, do journalism, would have been unimaginable. A magazine was not an ad agency. But the Buzzfeed/Atlantic model is to be both a journalism site and an ad agency. You can see the reason for the excitement. We can now write purely for corporate clients and that will pay for us to do the rest. And so a CEO at Chevron gets a by-line at the magazine that once gave us Twain and Thoreau.

Again, the need for greater media literacy states its case. Mother Jones writer Kevin Drum argues, “that people who don’t inhale news simply don’t notice bylines. They’re practically invisible.” Too true. Yet, I wonder if the distinction between media company-generated content and marketer-generated content is truly significant outside of the media/marcom bubble. Journalists sometimes forget that they too work for media companies, with strong business agendas, like making payroll. The concept that journalists write purely unadulterated and unbiased copy, while copywriters write crap is so tired at this point. Copy is copy, and it is meant to sell — an idea or a product. May the best writer win.

Adweek’s Charlie Warzel is taking the judicious approach. He believes “for native advertising to succeed, its practitioners need to be mindful that it’s not yet universally accepted, and traditionalists need to unmoor themselves from the idea that native is a corrosive practice that undermines great journalism and see that it could even be its savior.”

The post Can Journalism As A Civic Good And Native Advertising Live Side-by-Side? appeared first on AdPulp.

Le photographe John Clang nous propose des clichés coupés, puis collés et remontés du plus bel effet. En mélangeant les silhouettes et les éléments de l’environnement, il cherche à transmettre ce sentiment de flot et de mouvement de la ville. Plus dans la suite.

Previously on Fubiz

• Restructure Series
• Behind Photographs
• Explosion Series

Copyright Fubiz™ – Suivez nous sur Twitter et Facebook

Last week I posted various movie taglines that I enjoyed from the last two decades. One thing I realized about these taglines is that they aren’t very compelling if you don’t have any prior knowledge of the movie. Particularly the puns. Pun-intended taglines come off as awkward and persuade you to raise an eyebrow (kind of like this guy ~_^ ). Overall, there were actually very few from last week’s list that would lure me into watching that movie based on its tagline alone.

Anyhoo, here are the corresponding movies to last week’s taglines:

“Five good reasons to stay single.” (1994) -Four Wedding and a Funeral

“Vampires. No Interviews.” (1996) -From Dusk Till Dawn

“Before you die, you see…” (2002) -The Ring

“Earth. It was fun while it lasted.” (1998) -Armageddon

“On May 6th… See Paris Die!” (2005) -House of Wax

“Love is in the hair.” (1998) -There’s Something About Mary

“See Our Family, Feel Better About Yours.” (2007) -The Simpsons Movie

“Even a hit man deserves a second shot.” (1997) -Grosse Pointe Blank

“From the brother of the director of Ghost.” (1994) –Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult

“The Lucky Ones Died First.” (2006) -The Hills Have Eyes

“When it comes to love, sometimes she just can’t think straight.” (2001) -Kissing Jessica Stein

“A life misunderestimated.” (2008) -W.

“Be All That Someone Else Can Be.” (1999) -Being John Malkovich

“He loves her. She loves him not.” (2005) -Just Friends

“He Was Dead… But He Got Better.” (2008) -Crank 2: High Voltage

Don’t beat yourself up for missing them as I chose some pretty tough ones. Now that you’re all warmed up, here comes a second batch of movie taglines. The twist? These are the really bad ones.

“He stole the money…and he’s not giving it back.” (2003)

“Rocky shows he’s a champ…and wins!” (1979)

“Size does matter” (1998)

“You will believe a cow can fly” (1996)

“The wait is ogre” (2008)

“Twelve is the new Eleven” (2004)

“Everything that has a beginning has an end” (2003)

“The saga is complete.” (2005)

“It could happen to you!” (1997)

“Cowabunga, it’s the new turtle movie.” (1991)

Good luck with these! That second and last one you may never guess. Be sure to look for my next post (or IMDb) for the answers.

Tommy Liu, the man, the legend (to be) wields his pen of creativity against the injustice of mediocriety plaguing the world as the Creative Officer at Supercool Creative & Marketing Director at SpotZero where he also manages the blog. Click here to view some of his battles (he doesn’t always win).

Congrats to Bryan Judkins, ACD/Copywriter of Young & Laramore.

[via 10ad]

Do you notice anything strange in this bit from the Arts section of today’s New York Times?

A few (striking) writers have returned to gigs they had hoped to forget: waiting tables, bartending, copywriting, tutoring. Some who began as performers have returned to the grind of auditioning for commercials.

That’s right, copywriting is just one of the shitty jobs held by real writers who later go on to work in TV.

Are “real” journalist’s capable of writing moving ad copy? I say, yes. And Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times is my proof.

Let’s watch her role with this lurid product description…

Our redeemer is Scrivener, the independently produced word-processing program of the aspiring novelist Keith Blount, a Londoner who taught himself code and graphic design and marketing, just to create a software that jibes with the way writers think. As its name makes plain, Scrivener takes our side; it roots for the writer and not for the final product — the stubborn Word. The happy, broad-minded, process-friendly Scrivener software encourages note-taking and outlining and restructuring and promises all the exhilaration of a productive desk: “a ring-binder, a scrapbook, a corkboard, an outliner and text editor all rolled into one.”

Ring, scrap and cork sound like fun, a Montessori playroom. But read on — and download the free trial — and being a Scrivener-empowered scrivener comes to seem like life’s greatest role. Scriveners, unlike Word-slaves, have florid psychologies, esoteric requirements and arcane desires. They’re artists. They’re historians. With needs. Scrivener is “aimed at writers of all kinds — novelists, journalists, academics, screenwriters, playwrights — who need to refer to various research documents and have access to different organizational tools whilst aiming to create a finished piece of text.”

Of course, journalists don’t typically write ad copy without a smirk on their learned faces. Lest we think Heffernan is truly out to sell, she brings us back to earth with this send off.

Let’s just say it: It’s biblical. And come on, ye writers, do you want to be a little Word drip writing 603 words in Palatino with regulation margins? Or do you want to be a Creator?

Still funny and dead on, but willfully over the top, as well. Not that that’s bad (from a journalist’s perspective).