Hasta La Creative!

While we’re not sure what making a bed has to do with a hospital’s ability to successfully perform a hip replacement or being ranked tops among all hospital responding to a heart attack, we do like this new commercial from Boston-based Winsper for Exeter Hospital.

LONDON – The Prime Minister’s director of political strategy, Spencer Livermore, is to join the SSF Group as a senior strategist working across Saatchi & Saatchi and Fallon.

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LONDON – WPP is launching an outdoor trading tool handing local advertisers access to poster sites that would otherwise be considered too niche for national brands.

LONDON – Programming distributor Channel 4 International has promoted senior sales executive Patrick Roberts to the role of vice-president of international sales.

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, here’s a look back at one of the great Guinness commercials of all time: 1999’s “Surfer” from AMV BBDO in London. In crafting the spot, art director Walter Campbell and copywriter Tom Carty were inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and, especially, by Walter Crane’s 1893 painting Neptune’s Horses, which shows ghostly white horses galloping atop a crashing surf. In a phone interview years ago, Campbell told me, “We thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could bring that [painting] to life.’ ” The spot was directed by Jonathan Glazer, the hot-shot music-video director who would go on to direct Sexy Beast the following year. The ad, which British viewers voted the best TV commercial of all time in a 2000 poll, is renowned for its violent Hawaiian surf footage. As Campbell put it, “Instead of making the kind of surf film where people say, ‘Hey, I’d like to do that,’ we wanted to say, ‘Maybe you should think twice about coming out here.’ ” Campbell and Carty’s other triumph for Guinness was 1998’s “Swimblack” spot. See that one here.

—Posted by Tim Nudd

This week’s Advertising Age is nearly entirely devoted to issues surrounding digital marketing and web advertising. I highly recommend it. There’s a lot of good stuff to read, and the Ad Age staff did a great job covering as much of it as they could. It’s both a high-level look at the state of digital as well as a dive into specific topics.

Here’s a bit of one article, written by Matthew Creamer:

What you’re about to read is not an argument for making over web marketing as a factory for destination websites or for making every brand a content player. This, however, is a call to give some thought to a question that’s not asked enough about the Internet: Should it even be viewed as an ad medium? After all, in some quarters of the broader marketing world, the habit of looking at advertising as the most important tool in the marketers’ toolbox is undergoing intense interrogation. Consider the growth of the word-of-mouth marketing business, premised on the notion that people not corporations who help other people make consumer decisions. Or look at the growing importance put on public relations and customer-relationship management both in marketing circles and even in the c-suite.

The same conversation should be going on around the Internet. Trends like those listed suggest the possibility of a post-advertising age, a not-too-distant future where consumers will no longer be treated as subjects to be brainwashed with endless repetitions of whatever messaging some focus group liked. That world isn’t about hidden persuasion, but about transparency and dialogue and at its center is that supreme force of consumer empowerment, the Internet. But when you look at how the media and marketing business packages the Internet — as just more space to be bought and sold — you have to worry that the history of mass media is just trying to repeat itself. Rarely a fortnight goes by without some new bullish forecast for ad growth that works to stoke digital exuberance within media owners that often drowns out critical thinking about the medium itself.

Yeah, that critical thinking stuff sometimes gets lost when there are mountains of money changing hands.

OK, guys. Admit it. You know you’ve done something similar before.

LONDON – The advertising watchdog has refused to uphold 54 complaints about gay rights group Stonewall’s billboard campaign tackling homophobic bullying, which has been accused of being ‘un-Christian’.