D&AD Executive Council Election: the shockign trooth

D&AD has announced the newest candidates for its Executive Council, and there are some very good people on the list. You can download their manifestos here. (If you're not a member, I'm not sure if you can see the relevant page - sorry.)

Unfortunately, many of the candidates seem not to have checked their entries before presenting them to the world. They're full of things like:

And the inevitable

As well as howlers like these...

...and these:

Now, I know for a fact that you don't have to be able to spell to be a good - even a great - designer. I know some brilliant designers, with levels of talent to make you gnash your teeth in envy, who struggle to get through a sentence without tripping over an apostrophe. It doesn't matter a jot to their success as designers. And nor should it.

But I am surprised that anyone puts themselves forward for something as prestigious as this without bothering to proofread their manifesto (or better still, have it checked by someone else).

Things like 'm' for 'my' or 'positivley' are obviously just typos. They'd take a moment to spot and correct. Other errors, like 'effected' for 'affected', are maybe less obvious, but I'd imagine showing the text to a few people in the studio would at least raise the right question marks, and trigger a quick double-check in the dictionary.

Lots of the candidates have sensible things to say about D&AD, and I nodded along with several of them. I just wish more of them cared as much about the written word as they (rightly) do about the visuals.

Heavy sigh.

As names go, this is a stinker.

This is the new name for an American pool-cleaning product. Seriously. Can you believe it?

It's memorable, I'll give it that.

(Via Snark Hunting.)

EA Sports: on the ball

This is just the way it's going, isn't it? EA Sports see a YouTube video by some guy who thought he'd spotted a glitch in their Tiger Woods golf game, and they make an ad in response. With Tiger. And put it up on YouTube. And Neatorama picks it up, and it pops up on my RSS from Neatorama, and I pass it on to you.



Consumers driving advertising. (I'm tempted to say 'calling the shots', but that would be cheesy, wouldn't it?) Brands in a direct dialogue with their fans. Free media for what were once TV ads.

We're through the looking glass here, people.

What on earth will I do with all the time I save?

If life gets any more convenient, I won't have to move at all.

Commercial b(r)eak

Entirely unrelated to anything brandish or copywritery, I am hereby fulfilling a promise to my wife that I will promote her new (and first ever) blog on my site.

Wendy recently convinced me that our home was perfect apart from one small detail: an absence of chickens.

This has now been rectified, with the arrival of six former inmates of a battery farm. These slightly battered ladies rejoice in the names Annie, Clarabel, Squeaky Sue, Mrs Peterson, Truly Scrumptious and Gail. Some of these, you may be able to tell, are the inspirations of our four year-old son Tom. ('Gail' was mine. It just struck me as funny.)

Astonishingly, after just an afternoon and a night in their new home, the girls have rewarded us with these:


Not bad, considering we were advised to give them at least a few days to settle in before they'd lay anything.

Anyway, if you'd like to keep up with the goings-on down at Willowcroft Farm, Wendy's chickeny wisdom will be appearing here.

And now, back to our regular programme...

Steve McClaren's new tone of voice

Again, this is just irresistible, although only tangentially relevant. Steve McClaren, famous for making something of a hash of the England manager's job, has taken a new role with Dutch side FC Twente.

Interviewed on Dutch television, poor Steve guarantees himself a top spot on YouTube by adopting a bizarre sort of Gallic/Dutch accent, presumably in an attempt to make himself understood.



Among my favourite quotes:

"I think we are not just what you call "oonderdogs" but we are massive oonderdogs."

and this example of his strange new, "English is not being my first language, you know?" syntax:

"Yaaah... Very interesting. Already my phone has not stopped from English media."

I bet it hasn't.

How to make your emails even colder and more impersonal!

I just received an email from the new CEO of Network Solutions, through whom I own a couple of URLs*. Look:







Do you know, I have a feeling I wasn't the only one to get this email. Of course, I'd know that anyway, whatever it said. But you'd think a large company, especially one that deals exclusively in online services, could at least address me personally. And it would help if the first sentence wasn't a paragraph long, and deathly.

That phrase, 'delighted to make your acquaintance'. It's almost the opposite of the impersonal salutation. This time, the language is absurdly over personal. He's not making my acquaintance. (He's proved that by addressing me as 'Network Solutions(R) Customers'.) And what an old-fashioned sort of a phrase. I'm often a sucker for the old fashioned, but it just sounds stiff and awkward here.

Then, 'the opportunity to serve your online business needs'. It's like a radio ad I heard recently for a local builder: 'for all your building needs'. It's so vague, so lazy, so impersonal.

I'm sure W. Roy Dunbar (for that is the gentleman's name, believe it or not) is a very nice chap, and more than capable of serving my online business needs, such as they are. But this email just makes him and his company sound flat, formal, out of touch and out of date. Which is not good.

* By the way, the URLs, should you wish to buy any of them, are chattamo.com, chattamix.com and hooplo.com. One day, one of them will make my fortune. Probably.

The hippest scientists on Earth

I'm trying to find a way to tie this into copywriting, tone of voice and all that, but basically it's just enormous fun. I guess it's about using words, and about a very surprising tone of voice for CERN.



Anyway, on September 10, they're going to switch on the 27-kilometre Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which is a ludicrously exciting thing to do.

'What did you do at work today?'

'Oh, I recreated the conditions at pretty much the instant that the universe was created. What's for tea?'

Your own heart attack - or just Stephen Berkoff shouting at someone else?

Coming home from London the other day, I was faced with a poster inviting me to WATCH YOUR OWN HEART ATTACK. It's a pretty arresting headline.

I forgot what time the ad was going to be on telly, but I've now seen it online. And so can you:



The original poster was brilliant, in that it was completely un-ignorable. Even though I forgot when the ad would be on, it lodged in my head and I knew I'd be able to find the ad online, whatever it was. But how, I wondered, could they possibly have me watch my own heart attack?

They couldn't, of course. What they've done is film a commercial more or less from your point of view, as if it's you sitting in a chair and getting sucker-punched by Stephen Berkoff. But they haven't even felt able to stick to the viewer's single point of view. Instead, we get cut-aways of snakes coiling and wet rags being wrung out. There are even shots of the victim himself, sealing the fact that whoever's having this 'heart attack', it certainly isn't me.

(A separate worry is that Berkoff tells us to call an ambulance 'even if you're feeling unwell'. This would seem to herald open season on the 999 service, which as we know is already hamstrung by ludicrous calls. Berkoff's advice will probably startle ambulance workers like the brilliant blogger, Tom Reynolds, who has countless stories of wrong-headed 999 calls.)

The problem is, of course, that you can't possibly 'experience what it's like to have a heart attack first hand' from a commercial, as the British Heart Foundation promises you will. Mr Berkoff, or someone else, would have to come physically into your home and punch you in the chest, before gripping your arm and putting duct tape over your mouth.

From the start, this is a campaign with no hope of delivering on its central promise. Which is a great shame, because the message is obviously very important. We should all know more about heart attacks, and when to call the ambulance.

The whole thing feels like people getting very carried away: 'Imagine posters everywhere saying 'Watch your own heart attack'. Imagine the impact!' It's easy to get so excited by an idea that you cover your ears against the 'Yes, but...' side of your brain. But if an idea can't stand up against the 'Yes, but', then there's a problem. Because it won't take the audience long to come up with exactly the same objections.

For me, this campaign is an object lesson in not setting your target unachievably high. Because the inevitable let-down will always cloud whatever message you're hoping to get across. Better to do as Faulkner said of writing, and 'kill your darlings', than to sacrifice your message to your enthusiasm.

Only Stephen Fry...

...could spot that 'Apple Macintosh' is an anagram of 'laptop machines'. These are the little, nerdy, crossword-solver things we writers really get a kick out of. And it's as good a reason as any to post a belated recommendation of Fry's splendid blog.