An open letter to Danny Wallace after the creation of the film 'Yes Man', posted to Dannys site.

Danny, I have only ever walked out of two films....and am afraid that Yes man is one of them. How could you have allowed it to happen ? A terrible awful monstrosity of a film that betrayed every single part of your lovingly created book....I sat there with my mouth open with horror next to my girlfriend..both of us aghast about what had happened.....the old lady and the bl*wjob...dear god !!!!!!

So here's two of your fans letting you know that we felt pretty betrayed and hope that if you do let one of your most excellent adventures be used again that you either retain final signoff or have the 'once bitten twice shy' mentality to disown the whole thing. Personally I know at some point a remake will be made and this time it will do your book justice.With affection still....

Just

The iPint. Yes. That iPhone application that's been proudly sprayed across the creds of a certain ad agency as proof of their digital skills and fast paced ability to crack a simple idea that is spread by thousands.

Admit it - we've seen at least one plank in the pub using it - quaffing their imaginary lager to the delight of their equally hilarious chums.

And each time that H&G logged into the apps page - there it was - a constant reminder of what seemed to be a great, easy and of course free idea that users by their thousands downloaded much to the delight of Carling, the brand attached to the free Ap.

Except in a classic and frankly typical twist turns out the idea wasn't theirs. One of the team had seen it in America and decided to take the idea for their client.

Granted they offered to buy the licence from Hottrix (the actual creator), who politely declined as they were shifting plenty of units at $2.99 a pop.

So BMB thought, sod it, and stole the idea anyway. Allegedly of course.

Currently the latest state of play is that Hottrix are sueing for £7m for lost revenues and irrepparable damages.

Which brings me to this thought. If you blatently rip off someones elses idea and badge it as your own, then frankly, you deserve all you get.

Hot off the press H&G are excited about winning a Campaign Media Award for the Halifax and Sun partnership. The idea ?

We managed to convince News International to create a completely new newspaper for us. For a year. With our own journalist.

Well done us !

While one half of H&G is set in rant mode - and very good it was too - the other half of the dynamic duo has had a rather entertaining afternoon submerged in the land of records and 'bitchin beats'.

The tracks in question are for the up and coming Prodigy album 'Invaders Must Die'.

Look out festival land - some of these numbers are going to be huge live !

Hopefully look out for the anarchy that will hit the streets once the campaign goes live early next year.

Posters in flames ? You heard it here first.

How advertising works: part one...

Short answer: nobody knows. Slightly longer answer: if I knew, I wouldn't be here - I'd be enjoying my soon-to-be-submerged island in the Maldives.

What I hope H&G are here to do is to explain why certain things work and certain things don't.

And hopefully to have some fun at the same time.

Take, as a perfect example, the Cadbury's Gorilla. (Can you feel it, coming in the air tonight?).

Clearly, this was a critical success: winning all sorts of awards...and of course, increasing sales by a giant 9% year-on-year. Our favourite award was for our old agency which stood on stage and describe the TV strategy was about buying 'big spots'. Sorry, 'talkabout TV', whatever that hackney phrase might suggest !

Against a year where Cadbury's didn't advertise. Erm. Ah, well.... nope. No excuse. It didn't really work. Didn't. Work. At All. But industry people liked it.

So of course, it must reproduced with a further Magnum Opus. Which you are currently seeing as a bunch of airport trucks racing. To a theme tune of - currently - Bon Jovi.

Gentlemen: one cannot polish a turd. A sow's ear - or dog's puckering rectum - and this is just that.

Admit it: you don't know why anyone liked the Gorilla - and it didn't work then either - but you wish to recreate it, because the client wants "another one: just like that".

If you would like to know why it "worked" you know where we are.

JR

Dare we admit that time has flown rather fast of late. Turmoil has hit H&G towers of late, but with a location on the 10th floor this write is much improved !



And it's therefore with pleasure that we showcase our latest work for the Halifax and it's offshore banking services.



You see it's rather hard to target Expats because, well, they live everywhere. They're all rather different kinds of people. And they've all moved abroad for many reasons. Some for filthy lucre. Others to open that long dreamed about bar in the Costa Del Sol !



So instead of racing around in the internet chasing British Expats for their money, we created something for them instead that they wanted. An Expats newspaper. Fully staffed by journalists.



And written for us by The Sun.



Go to www.thesun.co.uk/expats



Enjoy !

A rather nifty tool was brought to our attention this fair morning by a fellow blogger. Head to 'wordie' and you can enter either a series of words or a url, then play around with fonts, colours and layout.

A masterpiece such as this can be created.

News has reached H&G of the latest viral work of contempt for Vauxhalls Insignia launch. We get the Men in Black take off but don't understand the following

Why doesn’t the car drive out of the alien spaceship hole ?
Why does it drop from the sky ?
Why are their women suddenly serenading us ?
And why is it targeted at holiday makers walking down the South Bank ?

£30,000 spent on talking to a group of people who probably don’t even have the Vauxhall brand, because it’s called Opal in Europe.

Just had the latest edit of some recent work we did on Streetcrime using a tip top Txtual Healing artist, Paul Notzold, out and about in Shephards Bush. We asked passers by to tell us what they thought about Streetcrime.

They answered in their droves

H&G have had a long long few weeks pitching on the beloved Channel 4 account. We await the news of the result with trepidation. However, something during the process has got us to thinking about a new, and of course, occasional series.

The Pitch Video.

The reason for this post - well, that would be the delight that we've found in watching one of our competitive agencies pitch group on Facebook. One which through their clearly poor digital expertise they forgot to make private. Yes dear reader. MEC has been supplying agency land with free mirth for the last few weeks with their 'amusing' Big Brother type videos proving that 'MECIS4Real'.

All I can say is.


Click here...to Enjoy.

Here at H&G we've been a little tardy of late. Work and a few other commitments to the cause have left us a little short of time, but there's nothing like poor work to pull us back into the game.

However there's nothing even more like poor work that costs clients a fortune to really get our mouths foaming.

Reader, we present for your scrutiny, the latest National Insurance Savings ad.

3 months ago : After several failed tissue meetings, 'Agency' runs out of ideas

2 months ago : Late one night the bottom drawer of 'Celebrity' gets broken open.

Today : A Caruso like montage of clever Celebs expouds the joys of NIS.

Now don't get us wrong. We know people. And people sometimes like those nice men off the telly. They trust them a little more than offficial looking folk in white costs professing clinical trials. But we should credit them with the ability to spot phony, poorly scripted, bowel-slackeningly bad copy.

It's nothing short of the worst ever 'perfect day' take-off ever audaciously presented and then bought by any single client.

Good luck credit crunch.

Campaign Magazine asked H&G to give their perspective on a key issue and the below article is an advance copy for our readers to peruse prior to the June publicatation date. We hope you enjoy.

PLANNING SANS FRONTIÈRES

The development of mankind can be measured by bursts of invention. Since the discovery of fire and Homo erectus learned the pleasure of his first barbeque, these fundamental occurrences have signalled great leaps in our ability to control and harness the world around us.

In similar, albeit less dramatic fashion, the microcosm of advertising can also be charted. Fixed boundaries that agencies work within, slowly moving outwards with each new media, creative or technology development.

The first major change came when TV audiences fragmented away from their annual date with Morecombe and Wise and planners slowly realised that 400 TVRs no longer constituted a targeted strategy. Equally when the Outdoor industry began to measure exposure based on eyeballs rather than traffic count, this new information allowed planners to avoid the barely visible sites secreted under dark railway arches in favour of more effective ones. The list goes on.

In short, planners adapted and improved their targeting. However, they did so on their own terms and, as change occurred infrequently, in their own time scale. The boundaries within which they had planned only moved in small increments, so their thinking only had to make small adaptations as well. Posters became lenticular but remained the same size. TV spots made gestures towards interactivity but were still, first and foremost, TV spots.

Yet with Digital things are moving at such a speed, and across so many different aspects, that many planners are struggling to keep abreast. Social Networks, personalisation, convergence, user generated content and peer to peer sharing are just a flavour of the new digital reality. A dazzling list of new unchartered areas with no rate card or easy menu from which to buy or well trodden format within which to illustrate your creative genius.

For planners, as creatures of habit, boundaries are comfortable and offer something safe to plan within. Campaigns can be referenced historically and results quantified by case studies. So ask a planner to move outside their comfort zone and more often than not things fall apart.

But where some find this uncomfortable I believe we should embrace this liberalisation of thinking. It reminds me of the Playstation launch tv script which said to play was to live ‘a life of exhilaration, of missed heartbeats, to command armies and conquered worlds’. In digital we can do this. We can literally create new worlds, we can mobilise a nation, we can build free services for our audiences and we can give them a platform and a voice.

Best of all. They get to decide. Great ideas are shared. Bad ideas ignored.

If you work in an agency, doesn’t that send a shiver of excitement down your spine? If you are a client don’t you want your team to be inspired by an explosion of opportunity rather than fearful of it?

Enough of the theory. The key areas for me are as follows. The first is with audience research. In traditional offline media thinking the world of audiences is built on research anchored, or more accurately, weighed down, by the UK base from which its research is driven. In addition some of it may be months or years old. Every single offline media strategy is therefore based on historic UK consumption.

Why should we settle for this ? How can we aim to influence audiences habits when all we’ve done is look backwards ? How can we justify creating future facing plans based entirely on what people used to do?

In Digital we don’t need to be constrained by these boundaries. Digital behaviours ebb and flow across the world and trends in Asia and the US filter through the ether to affect the UK.
Understand this flow of audience behaviour, of global trends becoming local, and we can glimpse insights that traditional media with their historic research can only hope to achieve.

If planners must open their eyes to this new era, then we are also obliged to help media owners and clients do the same. Our ideas are given credence and stature by the partnerships that we form, the sites or digital spaces that have a particular audience, or by an editorial perspective that we find appealing for our clients messages. So we must inspire if we are to create.

Of course, some agencies will be happy to continue in the status quo, cheerfully trading within the boundaries in the same old ways. But if you want to create something new you need to work closely with both sales and editorial and you have to pitch your idea to them as if they were clients not servants.

Finally, for clients we need to educate as well and inspire. They have a raft of agencies all vying for the lead voice. Yet no-one has a divine right or deserves a monopoly. Not the traditional creative agency. Not the media agency with the big poster budgets. And not the digital agency. Finally, the Comms agency which demands to be ringmaster in a hazy hypnotists blur of neutrality has no worse or better claim to lead the debate. Just because you have no financial bias toward using any specific media doesn’t offset the simple truth that you may not have had a decent idea to begin with. So why should you be first to speak?

Crucially, then, the boundaries of who should lead the debate must also be broken down. Today it’s about great ideas leading the debate rather than a pre-ordained hierarchy of knowledge. The agency that comes up with the idea the client loves leads things. It’s that simple.

I accept that with this comes potential for conflict but we must recognise that if we think we know the answer then we shouldn’t be afraid to stand up and say it. This the only way we can look each other in the eye and know we did our job. Great work driving great results for our clients.

That’s the opportunity we now have. An age of digital enlightenment where the critical mass of audience volume, the growing understanding of marketeers and the talent within the digital world have converged. Agencies that have the ability to harness these facets using a global perspective and a team of people with interests and expertise beyond traditional disciplines will flourish. These are the ones best paced to plan without boundaries.

The question is, are you up for the challenge?

Ah....the japes of April Fools Day. Humourous stories embedded in Tabloid tales that trick the gullible and silly.

Yet it falls to the BBC to create something that puts a smile on your face. Not quite Perfect Day, but still pretty sweet none the less.

'Beauty'. Not a word often coupled with 'Internet'. Occassionally however something seriously pretty arrives on our desk - and the new Adobe Creative Suite is testament to that.

Click on the link, slide the red bar all the way to the right and then turn up your speakers for a sumptous playing card related extravaganza.

A philosophical debate has long meandered around the question 'if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?'.

And with advertising awards season open for another year we at H&G pose this question. If you make a 90" cut of your tv ad, convince a minute satellite station to run it at 4am and then claim that this was a campaign. Can you in all concience claim this as great work ?

We have one job to do. To create great work which enlightens, amuses or informs the people we hope will buy our clients products. So stop creating things just for your own vanity and start making ads that do the job the client pays you to do.

Just occassionaly we at H&G are rendered so speechless by the poverty of creative thought in our industry that we just have to let the work speak for itself.

Click here to view the latest ad for the RSPCA is by some distance the most execrable idealess example of our art. Hats off. It makes the A.A. look like Van Gough.

In the words of our least favourite creative agency heads 'Where's the idea' ?

Now the man legend that is Charlie Brooker has long been applauded by H&G for his extra special turn of phrase.

Describing Mark Bannerman in the latest ITV dung heap of I'm A Celebrity he imagines the likely orgasm face of the ex-Eastender as 'at the point of climax he merely looks confused , gawping at the yop spurting from his fun-pole in cowed amazement'.

So to celebrate his best parts we give you 'The Top 10 Cocks in Advertising'.

Enjoy

Consumers.

A word that has long irritated H&G. Marketeers, advertisers, commentators and even (and especially) Radio 5 djs. They're all it.

'Consumers are in control '

'Consumers are empowered'

ENOUGH !

They are people. They are not mute animals waiting to be fed the next commercial message. They make choices about which brands to buy or not and just to be very clear, they are not eagerly waiting for your next tedious advertising spot.

It doesn't make you clever, it doesn't show you have your finger on the pulse of the nation. It says absolutely nothing about the intellect of the person who uses that word.

So join us in this plea. Stop calling them consumers.

Rare it is that viral campaigns catch the eye of H&G. But something cropped up in our inbox today that made us take note. Not only is the rendering sweet to behold but the question on our lips is...what's behind that revolving door ?

http://www.theotherview.co.uk/

Answers please on a postcard

The Hard Sell, the regular Guardian Guide piece, has long been the primo place for good old fashioned advertising creative bashing. But it's been rather off form lately. Cutting satire has become a tad forced and H&G are more than a little saddened by this.

So we have great hopes that they should have noticed tonights airing of the new AA work. The lasting legacy of Claire Salmon as their Marketing Director was to ditch the wondeful '4th Emergency Service' for...wait for it 'Just AAsk'. Right. Hmmm. Okay then.

She was promptly given the boot.

But this is even better. Having just about got them back on track with a group of simpering accolytes clad in cheap suits (the AAteam - how do they come up with such genius?), desperately trying to please their smug, silver haired leader the current agency seems to have panicked. Clearly their latest ad tracking has shown that consumers think that the AA is cold, smug, and as patronising as their creative work. So they've opted for the cuddly approach.

I don't really want to spoil it...Suffics to say, the bottom drawer from every single Coke brief in the 80's has just been cleaned out. Singing AA members prance around in their yellow clothing in a way that Halifax Howard himself would reject as faux-naif obseqiousness. Selected patrol men skip and leap around despensing joy to one and all via the medium of a Maria Carey cover version - and the closing caption on one twinkly eyed miscreant as he gurns inanely into the camera is so vomit inducing it's more International Rescue than anything else. Utterly, bowel- emptyingly awful.

A Cannes Lion clearly beckons.