Guinness Viral: Yet Another Reason Why I love The Interweb

Some dude made his own Guiness Ad. It's fucking great and Guinness hate it.


*

Of course Diageo are up in arms about it, even protesting to YouTube's owner Rupert M. to have the film pulled, stamped out, destroyed, eradicated, disregarded, wiped out, Exterminated blah blah blah it never happened.
Brand Republic gives the full story with humorous quoted reactions and press release clippings etcetera.

Did nobody learn from the Diet Coke and Mentos thing? Are any of the brands out there even tuned into what's going on? Surely this is a good thing after all no PR is bad PR. Of course they did, but my feeling is that they still feel that they have to be seen to try to stamp this sort of thing out, even if their digital strategist is wiping the pleasure stains from their pants and realising that somebody just did a years' worth of work for them.

This is the best damn Ad I've seen for Guinness in a long time; and it didn't come from a overpaid ad agency who's happy to spank a few million smackers on, "the most expensive ad of all time". This is real, humorous, appealing and engages me more than half an idea sexed up by exotic locations, ACE associated photographic direction and ego-massaged Ad-creatives sitting on deck chairs in some Argentinian backwater.

I'm getting myself into a larger argument here regarding democratisation of media, the pros and cons of often badly made UGC versus a well though out, paid for and professionally executed idea, but hey there's time for structured debate later: this was just supposed to be a rant aimed at championing the little man (and the naked chick being spit-roasted) over the Agency.

Well done Deschatz. Now grow some backbone and repost the video on your youTube channel.



*Obligatory message: Please comment if this video doesn't appear, it means it's been stamped out. I encourage you to copy it, and repost it in any way you can. selah.

In the Future

There will be no mass production of any considered worth. We shall all have meaningful, bespoke experiences, which engage us to a suitable level.


This is why I work in digital.

Banner ads can fuck off.

The Future of Digital AdverFilms

shepperton studios, originally uploaded by donshades.

Last week I spent a long day doing an interactive Ad shoot for one of our clients at Dare. In order to get the required assets, we had to hire a very tall studio. Infact the only place with a studio big enough was London's famous Shepperton Studios.

“Great!” I thought. This is is. We're here! A digital agency shooting an ad in the same studio they used to shoot Harry Potter's Cribbage game. We've made it. We've grown up....

Then I realised. We were shooting a fucking banner Ad.

Indeed things are beginning to change. Clients are starting to trust us more frequently with budgets which extend to more than your best mate with a DV camera shooting in an empty meeting room. But where's the story? Flo's point on the creative social blog is an interesting one and something that has bothered me from day I checked out of the film world and into the land of Digital.

"Why are we trying to do everything our own way?".

It seems that we spend too much of the time getting excited by interesting interactive technology, and not enough time worrying about story, meaning, narrative. I'm just as guilty of this as everyone, by the way.

I am a bit of a film geek however and for me that makes a good story paramount. TV script writers have been bothered about this since the days of the Bulova Watch Company (obviously they fuck it up a lot..); so why do we think needn't bother?

This is something that I feel very strongly about. There is some great work about of late; but all too often an interesting understated story is left high and dry - out gunned by the technology which is packaging it up. Digital agencies are full of copy writers, not script writers and this is evident from the output of their more narrative ideas. I keep banging on about the novelty factor of youTube slowly wearing off and suddenly we're left swimming in shit... well I think this is most definitely starting to happen. Things move with sound on the interweb - great. Now tell me a story, and tell it fucking well or I'm clicking onward. I was at a lecture the other day where the speaker mused over the next layer of the web being the Visual Web. If he's right (and I don't see anything to make me think he's wrong); then surely the champion players of this visual web will be those who know how to tell a story, how to write a good story to be told in spoken words, sound and moving pictures.

For me we've got a lot of growing up to do before we can move in and start our own digital production office at Shepperton.

Play-Doh Interface

Thanks Flo for the best link I've clicked on in a while. I love fuzzyness. I live in a universe where most things are fuzzy. My perception of things that are not at all fuzzy is often fuzzy and being an ex-rotoscoper, I was taught that when you zoom in enough to even the sharpest image, it is fuzzy.

Enough of this fuzzyness - here's the film.


Play-Doh as Interface from Brendan Dawes on Vimeo.

There's lots more crazy analogue and digital projects over here.

5 of the Best

Just putting myself back together for another week. Last week saw Dare scooping 5 Awards at Campaign Digital, including MD Mark Collier's special award for Best Digital Achiever.

For the full serious review, see Coops Blog, however the best of it for me was to win an award for Lynx Blow. It's run a long year of turning heads, scooping various awards here and there, an this prestigious award sort of marks the end of the awards year so I'm very much a happy bunny.

And she still looks hot!

Racy Work For Barclays from Dare

Well, I've been away for a week searching for the last remains of the lost city of Atlantis (more on that soon); and it seems that Dare have been in the news while I've been away, having Barclays Ad's removed from MSN for being too racy. This YouTube video shows the full, uncut version of the Ad, written by Yasmin Quemard and edited by Kooch Chung. Nice work guys.




The project consists of a set of three Ad's, all spoofing some famous movie scenes. Each one carries comedy on its own merit, with this one being my favorite:

This is What we Do all Day

At dare....



really. Just dance



via Kooch

Inneresting MP3

Here's a link to an interesting mp3. Basically it's Flo and Mike sitting in Flo's garden crapping on about the state of Digital advertising and turning over some very interesting ideas about the state of Digital, where it is and where we may be going over the next few months.

Digital Agency seeks Physical Effects

Shooting sand as some Physical effects elements with Alexis from Difference today. This is where I feel most at home... behind a camera monitor in a studio, turning ideas into captured images to help tell a story. The Digital Agency world is great, but far too clinical after a while for me; spending every day driving a computer... manipulating elements digitally.

Getting stuck in, getting physical, getting back to reality and capturing it on film; shooting and reshooting; setting and resetting shots. This is my passion - a reflection which often catches me after a day on-set shooting people/places/elements.

Map of the Digital Seas

...Not sure I agree whole heartedly with this, however it presents it in a much nicer cartographic way than the ugly venn diagrams that I see planners so often presenting in long-winded presentations which try to unpick the complicated relationships which keep the digital market tied together.

I'm not sure where it's from as it was sent to me in an email from my girlfriend; send me a link and I'll post the Via.

Like Minority Report but Real

Watching si-fi movies in the cinema while whacked out on a cocktail of various combinations of mind-bending drugs and liver damaging spirits could be an interesting experience. When I saw Minority Report at the cinema, I though I saw the future of digital video editing. Browsing Mike's Blog today I though see that somebody else was just as captured by the flick and decided to bring the idea to life in the real world.

Blowing Lynx Blow into the winds of the Interweb

Today my work is dull but noteworthy in the books of rampant self-promotion, Ad-land rhetoric and western corruption of the Interweb.

I am a digital Utopian.

I Believe that the Interweb should be Advertisement Free.

I Work for a Company which makes Ads for the Interweb.

I am a self contradiction.

Hence I am in two minds about my task for the day: to populate message boards and listings sites with Lynx Blow "Seeds". Am I am the graffiti artist with nothing but a stale tag-line to scrawl? No; I do believe that Lynx Blow is something new, exciting.... I should do as I was one of the main driving forces behind its creation. I gave it digital direction, nurtured it like a little plant and was there every step of the way until it blossomed through a season of well executed teamwork into a summer of winter wonderland. Therefore I should be proud to scrawl its tagline - http://www.lynxblow.com on every bare wall I see in this macabre digital landscape... and in some ways I am. So here it is:

"Wow - check out this funky site, interesting, sexy and innovative."



http://www.lynxblow.com - plug up your headphones to your computer and blow the girls bra off. A different way of interacting with a site; the mouse won't take you anywhere you need to blow.... like the wind... blow.... Is this a possible future model for Human Computer Interaction? I would like to think so.

Oh and here's a photo: