JEFF GOODBY’S ANDY’S DIARY: DAY 3

Thelegendary Jeff Goodby, co-chairman, Goodby Silverstein & Partners,San Francisco, provides the CB Blog with day 3 of exclusive diaryinstallments from Final Judging of The ANDY Awards in Mexico.
Campaign Brief,Campaign Brief Asia and Bestads are international media partners of theANDY Awards, which undoubtedly has the world’s hottest jury, chaired byMark Waites, creative partner of Mother.

There are remarkable things that probably won’t win big at

the ANDYS, and I’m not necessarily talking about your

entry.

High on that list would have to be a GPS-based, mobile

device tour of the graffiti of Lisbon.  With it, you are

enabled to walk the streets of certain neighborhoods and

read explications of significant taggings, with information

about the artists and how their artworks were created.

There is also an entry from a San Francisco artist who

creates “reverse graffiti” by sandblasting through

stencils placed against walls that carry years of grime.

He decorated the inside of the Broadway tunnel (which

runs underneath Russian Hill) using a forest motif that

was quite striking.

I’m sure such things would still be in the show if someone

had thought to have them  sponsored by, say, a laundry

detergent.  But they didn’t, and thus the efforts will

probably be lost down the drain of dead ANDYs work.

Enough.

We think we’re so smart.  We think we invented all this

stuff yesterday.  Consider this:

If there was a Crispin Porter in 1880, it was Glasgow

grocer Thomas J. Lipton.  To advertise the satisfying

nature of his food, he hired skinny men through the

streets, all walking toward his store and carrying signs

that read, “Going to Lipton’s.”  Simultaneously, he had

fat men walking away from the store, carrying signs that

said, “Coming back from Lipton’s.”

He also had convex and concave mirrors inside the store

that showed you skinny on the way in and fat on the way

out.  This is no shit.  1880.

Back to Mexico:

*THAT AGAIN?  The recent “Halo” success taught us

something that only occurred to me this afternoon:  Treat

digitized games as emotional content and put heavy music

on them.  It’s the trick de jour.  Xbox does that this

year and the result does something I think modern media

does at its best – it suggests the moving parts of a

familiar form.  In this case, it’s a movie trailer,

capturing the tragedy of soldiers in the face of war.  You

can’t help but be moved.

Oh, wait.  I forgot to mention, you should also put it in

slow motion.

The effect is stunning.  If Xbox doesn’t win this thing,

it deserves a lot of study.  I will encourage it among

everyone I work with.

*LOOK! A CASTLE!  LOOK! A CASTLE!  ETC.  There is a

campaign encouraging support for the study of Alzheimer’s

that shows a crew of guys tricking older people by deftly

changing their circumstances – swapping a parked car out

on a poor old blue-haired woman, for instance, and

watching what happens.

“They should have used real Alzheimer’s patients,” one of

the judges pointed out. “Yeah,” someone else said, “but

then they might not have noticed the car was any

different.  They wouldn’t have had a spot because the lady

might’ve just gotten in the car like it was no big deal and

driven away.”

*EMBARRASSING ROMANIANS VS. VAPORIZING VALUED

ACQUAINTANCES.  After many watchings, you realize that the

Burger King “Whopper Virgins” idea is very much inferior

to the thing that asks you to dump ten friends to get a

Whopper.  The former had a great build-up, but never

materialized.  The latter actually took advantage of a

truth about the Internet:  You desperately want to get rid

of some of those pesky Facebook friends, and you know

you’re looking for the first lame excuse to do so.

*QUICK, COVER YOUR EYES!  I don’t want to like that Nike

spot with Ladanian  Tomlinson and Troy Polamalu growing up

only to smash into each other, but dammit, I love it every

time.  The music is magnificent.

*HINT:  IT’S NOT JUST ME.  Is it just me, or is the

Microsoft campaign a little too obviously WAY too worried

about Apple?  Three judges have reflected similarly.  It

fails on account of this fear.

*COME ON, COULD THEY REALLY DO THAT?  If the youth of the

world had as much time as these entries claim they have to

participate in transparent wild goose chases, to vote

between inane flavors of Dew, and to turn out for

trumped-up parades about corn chip spicings, then we’re

fucked as a society in very deep ways.

On that note, I’d like to plug a second book.  I am not

My ex-agency president, Colin Probert, who was the

smartest guy in advertising for twenty-something years and

no one knew it, has advised me to read Winston Fletcher’s

Powers of Persuasion, a history of British advertising.

Naturally, it WAY overestimates the importance of its

topic vis-à-vis the American kind, but that’s just me.

Read it anyway.   It’s provocative.

And it tells the following interesting story:

After World War II, commercial radio was illegal in

Britain. (You Commonwealthians may know this story.)  In

the early sixties, however, a guy named Ronan O’Rahilly

revived Radio Luxembourg, a company that hadn’t broadcast

since the war.  He did this by beaming from a ship that

was positioned just into international waters off the

coast of Essex.  His programming appealed to a teen market

and had a great name:  Radio Caroline.

Poetically, he announced every day that the station was

being broadcast “from a pirate ship.”  And he paid no

royalties to the musicians whose work he played.

Sadly, he was put out of business by the British

government in 1966.  But he was way ahead of his time, I

say.

In fact, I’m taking a jet ski off the coast of San

Francisco to scope out locations next week.  Stay tuned.