Badvertorial.

I buy a few magazines regularly. WIthout fail,  no matter what subject they specialise in, they're pretty decently art directed.

Wired, Men's Health, Monocle, Good, Fast Company. All, without exception, good-looking titles. Nice type, great photography, consistent looks yet enough flexibility within their design guidelines to provide variety.

So, one question: why the hell are all the ads in these mags so damn ugly?

You'd think someone, somewhere, in some advertising agency would have cottoned onto the fact that if someone buys a magazine, there must be something about that magazine that they like.

And that there's a chance that one of the things they like about the magazine they buy is the way information is presented.

But no.

If a magazine has interesting, modern typography, the ads will look like they were done ten years ago.

If the magazine features lots of information in an article, the ads will be light on facts, with just a few words that could hope to convince nobody.

If the magazine is stylish and slick, the ads will be messy and almost totally un-art directed.

If the agencies involved were smart, they'd look at the environment their ads were going to run in, assume that the readers had some interest in the way content is laid out, and go some way towards looking as if they understood that fact.

And ff the clients were smart, they'd simply go directly to the magazines in question and ask them to do something that demonstrated the same understanding of their audience that they show in the editorial.

Agencies are always complaining that they don't get enough respect. If they continue to show an almost wilful naivety in the way they go about trying to convince consumers on behalf of their clients, they should be getting even less respect than they do already.

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Dramatis personae.

Last night's Man Utd-Chelsea game had it all. What a great story. And such a cast of characters.

John Terry provided the tragedy. Ronaldo the hero who nearly fell from grace. Giggs the veteran who comes back for one last mission and carries the day. Anelka the villain whose previous misdeeds came back to haunt him.

The script couldn't have been better written. Just when you thought the bad guys were going to win, just at the end when you thought there was no hope, Terry let the good guys back in. And a perfect Hollywood ending.

It was almost possible to forget this was a Champions League game at all. Beating Chelsea was enough of a thrill and cause for celebration in itself. It was only a few minutes after the victory that it sank in that it was so much more than that; Man Utd were actually champions of Europe too.

A brilliant night.

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Swift theft.

I think I could make a living searching the web, magazines, bookstores, podcasts for cool things, adapting them a little bit (or not at all) and presenting them as ideas for my clients.

There is so much great stuff out there, and so little of it exposed on a grand scale, that it would be easy to repackage things, give them a slight connection to clients' businesses, and present them as original ideas.

Alternatively, it would be no shame to admit that the ideas weren't mine; in my experience, the act of knowing about cool stuff is at least as impressive to people as the act of coming up with it - if not more so.

In fact, I'm quickly talking myself into setting up a division dedicated entirely to harvesting cool new stuff and using it for clients.

The three key words of the philosophy would be:

1. Speed. If you're going to copy stuff, you need to copy it quickly. You need to be the first to copy it, and you need to copy it before it becomes known on a mass scale, so you can be seen to own it as far as your own audience is concerned.

2. Taste. You need to know where to look, and you need to know what is really a good idea and what isn't. In my experience, taste is easy. When you didn't have the idea in the first place, you're in a better position to judge whether it's good or not.

3. Packaging. Changing something slightly, or finding a place 'within' the idea for your business, is the killer app. You need to take something and rebrand it so you can own it, and make it look as if it came from your own business, not co-opted from somewhere else with a dubious link.

Yes. Harvest. Good word.

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