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.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Singapore Curl.

What on earth is up with the Singapore Airlines print ads? The Singapore Girl, archaic as the concept was, was always a paragon of charm and loveliness.

Now, in the new ads for First and Business Class, the air stewardesses look like they've taken their styling cues from Marge Simpson. Horribly dated beehive do's and hair that looks as if it's been subject to at least an entire can of hairspray. This stuff would have already looked old 40 years ago.

Advertising is supposed to be known for overpromising. But this is one of many examples where the advertising is actually worse than the product. The client would be better off not advertising at all. Since when did advertising get so uncool, or has it always been this way without my noticing?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Lo-res.

As usual, advertisers - with a few notable exceptions like Nike - are getting it wrong.

Everywhere clients are asking for higher production values, sleeker looks, 'bigger' feels. Something 'grand' to match the scale of the brand. And, agencies being what they are, are giving it to them.

When in reality, what real people are being turned on by is the exact opposite.

Out of all of the things that take off, all of the things that go global, all of the things that get emailed between friends and spread like wildfire across the globe, most are small. Low production values - home shot videos, shaky unedited footage of bulldogs on trailers pulled by bicycles, cats trying to catch fish from ponds...

Popular culture has gone from everyone looking forward to the occasional extravaganza - a blockbuster film, a major sports event - to a constant stream of low-budget, lo-res, interesting things in everyday places.

We're getting used to advertising being one step behind, so it's no surprise that there a very few examples of the ndustry co-opting the movement. (One of few examples is the brilliant Nike Ronaldinho 'Crossbar' spot, which has been forwarded literally millions of times on youtube.) But real culture has already cottoned onto it. Last year's Cloverfield is one example of a director doing something big by deliberately keeping it small: the whole film was shot like a shaky youtube video. And the handheld feel wasn't just a technique, it was the basis for the entire idea of the film; a military expedition force finding an abandoned video camera after a great catastrophe. Needless to say, the movie was one of the biggest cultural events of the year.

The situation is clear on both big and small scales. I uploaded an TVC to youtube about two months ago. The cost of the ad was about US$300,000. More recently, last week I uploaded a video of my dog eating a pizza, shot on a $500 video camera and edited on a $1500 computer. In one week, the dog video has received 125 times more viewings than the ad has garnered in two months.

It doesn't matter how 'big' clients want to make their communications. People aren't always looking for big things. Low production quality is equated with realness, honesty, likeability and charm. I'm not saying it's right for every client, but it's something we should push every now and then.

Blogged with the Flock Browser