Pee Yar Correspondentalist: Judas Winstanley
The news broke with a grenade-like BANG! this morning that Goodfellas Pizza has struck a £70million sponsorship deal with British soldiers fighting in Afghanistan.
Goodfellas marketing executive Katie Gash told The Drum: "Our war heroes are an obvious sponsorship choice for us, aligning the Goodfellas brand with real life good fellas who are hungry for success and enjoy getting stuck into tasty foreign things."
The deal will intially see members of the 51st Batallion wearing the Goodfellas branding on their helmets and vests, with Goodfellas Pizza to become an official supplier to the armed forces. A new range of pizzas and toppings have been created to support the campaign:
Friendly Fire - Mild chilli, green pepper and onion
Camoflage - Mushroom, yellow pepper, spicey chicken, black olives
Tora Bora - Extra deep and hollow crust
Tali-Banquet - Spicy meatballs, pepperoni, ham, chicken, red peppers
A spokesman for the MOD said that the decision to go ahead with the sponsorship deal was not taken lightly. "A good many people may see this sort of thing as tasteless. But Goodfellas Pizza are well tasty. Just like our boys on the front." Revenue from the deal will be pumped back into the MOD to buy much needed bullets and sun cream.
An industry insider told The Drum that Goodfellas are already in talks with the British Legion with a view to sponsoring next year's remembrance service.
Thursday, 12 November 2009
Wednesday, 11 November 2009
Short Story Competition
Do you like words and stories and occasional pictures? Then why in the hell don't you enter the first ever Content Flavoured Trousers short story comeptition?
How To Enter
Simply look at the picture below and write a story about it! Use as much of your imagination as you can, and as many or as little words as you are capable of. I'd suggest using at least 1 character, although 3 or 4 or even 5 wouldn't be out of place.
Ready then?
Nice one.
Post your entries in the comments section. Winner gets a pot of jam and a grappling hook.
How To Enter
Simply look at the picture below and write a story about it! Use as much of your imagination as you can, and as many or as little words as you are capable of. I'd suggest using at least 1 character, although 3 or 4 or even 5 wouldn't be out of place.
Ready then?
Nice one.
Post your entries in the comments section. Winner gets a pot of jam and a grappling hook.
Tuesday, 10 November 2009
Creative Directors of your Nightmares # (lost count)
NAME: Scary Negro Puppet
GOOD POINTS: Is literally hands on.
BAD POINTS: A bit old fashioned. Will kill you in your dreams.
Another Brick in the Wall
Yip hip hip hoo-rah-ay! It's 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell over. Anyone still confused as to why they built it in the first place, should watch this.
See if you can spot an excited Adolf Hitler at the end... or is it a young David Bowie?
See if you can spot an excited Adolf Hitler at the end... or is it a young David Bowie?
Comedy & Advertising
Adverts are funny aren't they. LOL, ROFLOL, mummy-my-legs-are-wet funny. Take a look. This one's nearly as funny as Del Boy falling through the bar every Xmas for last 30 years.
This year, Herr Dave Trott said that we all need more comedy in advertising, especially "at the moment" ie. skint and fucking miserable and at war (although he was about to judge the Chip Shop Awards at the time so perhaps he wasn't being quite as sincere as he could've been. Or maybe it was a joke in itself? Ha!) Anyway, his main point was that we all need to bloody well lighten up a bit. After all, the business of advertising, which is - let's face it - the business of finding interesting metaphors for products, isn't exactly life and death. And yet, walk into some agencies and you can almost hear Doom turning over in his bed... Shhh! People tapping away nervously in corners, piles of papers being marched over to desks to be whispered about. (If it's a small agency it tends to feel a little bit like Das Boot). Sure, we all have our Star Wars toys and posters up around the studio, but they're nothing more than sentimental reminders; like teddy bears on a child's grave...
No. The atmosphere in many agencies is barely conducive to creativity let alone a laugh and a joke. But humour remains one of the most powerful weapons in the ad man's (brass and mahogany) gun cabinet - a weapon that remains firmly under lock and key because humour might be a bit "inappropriate" or send "the wrong message" at the minute, because we all love being fucking miserable and uptight, right? Wrong! People like being happy, and like feeling they've gained something. Which is what humour does so much more effectively than (for example) an assurace of the quality and history of Kelloggs corn flakes, or any other stolid and pretentious recession-proof campaign.
Eric Idle once said that comedy is just "telling the truth", which is correct (if a little reductionist). To put it another way, humour and comedy are based entirely on honesty, and it's this that audiences respond to, whether it's the sarcasm of Blackadder, or the absurd pathos of Cadbury Gorilla (arguably the greatest ad of the last 10 years). In fact, if I wanted to be a total wanker about it, I could go so far as to say there's something Charlie Chaplin-esque about Cadbury Gorilla... but then I'd have to suck Kirsty Wark's lady-cock to get on Late Review and talk that sort of bollocks.
We're constantly told that humour is a difficult thing to get right in advertising, SO difficult in fact, as to not even be worth attempting. Ironically though, the process of writing an ad isn't that far removed from writing comedy. Headlines, tag-lines, holding lines, punchlines: all obey the same principles, structures and mechanics. But the lack of humour in advertising isn't due to the lack of talent. It's due to a lack of material - the increasingly shit, weird, cynical or pointless things clients want us to sell...
Oh, look. Another DFS Xmas ad with All I Want For Xmas on it... Must be time for Del Boy to drop through the bar again.
This year, Herr Dave Trott said that we all need more comedy in advertising, especially "at the moment" ie. skint and fucking miserable and at war (although he was about to judge the Chip Shop Awards at the time so perhaps he wasn't being quite as sincere as he could've been. Or maybe it was a joke in itself? Ha!) Anyway, his main point was that we all need to bloody well lighten up a bit. After all, the business of advertising, which is - let's face it - the business of finding interesting metaphors for products, isn't exactly life and death. And yet, walk into some agencies and you can almost hear Doom turning over in his bed... Shhh! People tapping away nervously in corners, piles of papers being marched over to desks to be whispered about. (If it's a small agency it tends to feel a little bit like Das Boot). Sure, we all have our Star Wars toys and posters up around the studio, but they're nothing more than sentimental reminders; like teddy bears on a child's grave...
No. The atmosphere in many agencies is barely conducive to creativity let alone a laugh and a joke. But humour remains one of the most powerful weapons in the ad man's (brass and mahogany) gun cabinet - a weapon that remains firmly under lock and key because humour might be a bit "inappropriate" or send "the wrong message" at the minute, because we all love being fucking miserable and uptight, right? Wrong! People like being happy, and like feeling they've gained something. Which is what humour does so much more effectively than (for example) an assurace of the quality and history of Kelloggs corn flakes, or any other stolid and pretentious recession-proof campaign.
Eric Idle once said that comedy is just "telling the truth", which is correct (if a little reductionist). To put it another way, humour and comedy are based entirely on honesty, and it's this that audiences respond to, whether it's the sarcasm of Blackadder, or the absurd pathos of Cadbury Gorilla (arguably the greatest ad of the last 10 years). In fact, if I wanted to be a total wanker about it, I could go so far as to say there's something Charlie Chaplin-esque about Cadbury Gorilla... but then I'd have to suck Kirsty Wark's lady-cock to get on Late Review and talk that sort of bollocks.
We're constantly told that humour is a difficult thing to get right in advertising, SO difficult in fact, as to not even be worth attempting. Ironically though, the process of writing an ad isn't that far removed from writing comedy. Headlines, tag-lines, holding lines, punchlines: all obey the same principles, structures and mechanics. But the lack of humour in advertising isn't due to the lack of talent. It's due to a lack of material - the increasingly shit, weird, cynical or pointless things clients want us to sell...
Oh, look. Another DFS Xmas ad with All I Want For Xmas on it... Must be time for Del Boy to drop through the bar again.
Monday, 9 November 2009
Unfamiliar Territory
Barman. Any chance of a drink? I've seen a lot of shit writing lately and I just need to calm my nerves.
-Was it something I read on holiday? No, everything I read on holiday was great, thanks. I read Frost by Thomas Bernhard, which was hilariously miserable and very, very German; I read Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton which was exceptionally good and the kind of tight, perfectly poised novel no-one can be arsed to write anymore; and I read Nick Cave's Death of Bunny Munro which was ace, and also a clear example of something you can genuinely describe as "mordant", which is a good word to use any time of the day.
No, the shit writing came before I went away. I was forced to deal with the single worst thing a copywriter can ever face: someone who thinks they can write. (Better make it a large one, yeah...)
As George Orwell once said in his essay Politics and the English Language, when it comes to writing the "enemy of clarity is insincerity". Which is to say, if you have no fucking idea, interest or understanding of what you're writing about, "one turns... instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms" - or as I like to put it: cliches and dogshit.
See, the difference between great copy and 150 words of crude, hollow, formless, nervous, prattle is roughly 1 day's research. Minimum. And NO! Mr. & Mrs. Planner, that doesn't mean researching and understanding your audience. It's not method acting, for fucksake. An audience is always gonna be an irreducible vortex of atomic randomness, yeah - and you can't apply quantum theory to the world of general relativity, dickhead, so lets just stick to what we know and can prove and undertand, ie. the facts. Let's not start second guessing and theorising (the client hasn't got the time/money for all that). No, we just need to get our heads round a few universal basics and take it from there. Once we've got those figured, digested, reduced, boiled down and mapped out, we can travel wherever we like within that world - the familiar territory of the audience.
It's this skill that every creative needs and that every shit writer lacks - the ability to make sense of and find a clear, confident and convincing way through unfamiliar territory. If you don't know the lay of the land before you set off, you'll be up Shit Creek after about 10words. The shit writer I had to deal with got so lost and changed direction that many times, the writing wasn't even fluent anymore and only just literate in some places. A right mess (shudder). I guess he's still trapped there now, going round and round in circles trying to find his fucking audience, bless him.
A toast then: to shit copywriters everywhere!
-Was it something I read on holiday? No, everything I read on holiday was great, thanks. I read Frost by Thomas Bernhard, which was hilariously miserable and very, very German; I read Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton which was exceptionally good and the kind of tight, perfectly poised novel no-one can be arsed to write anymore; and I read Nick Cave's Death of Bunny Munro which was ace, and also a clear example of something you can genuinely describe as "mordant", which is a good word to use any time of the day.
No, the shit writing came before I went away. I was forced to deal with the single worst thing a copywriter can ever face: someone who thinks they can write. (Better make it a large one, yeah...)
As George Orwell once said in his essay Politics and the English Language, when it comes to writing the "enemy of clarity is insincerity". Which is to say, if you have no fucking idea, interest or understanding of what you're writing about, "one turns... instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms" - or as I like to put it: cliches and dogshit.
See, the difference between great copy and 150 words of crude, hollow, formless, nervous, prattle is roughly 1 day's research. Minimum. And NO! Mr. & Mrs. Planner, that doesn't mean researching and understanding your audience. It's not method acting, for fucksake. An audience is always gonna be an irreducible vortex of atomic randomness, yeah - and you can't apply quantum theory to the world of general relativity, dickhead, so lets just stick to what we know and can prove and undertand, ie. the facts. Let's not start second guessing and theorising (the client hasn't got the time/money for all that). No, we just need to get our heads round a few universal basics and take it from there. Once we've got those figured, digested, reduced, boiled down and mapped out, we can travel wherever we like within that world - the familiar territory of the audience.
It's this skill that every creative needs and that every shit writer lacks - the ability to make sense of and find a clear, confident and convincing way through unfamiliar territory. If you don't know the lay of the land before you set off, you'll be up Shit Creek after about 10words. The shit writer I had to deal with got so lost and changed direction that many times, the writing wasn't even fluent anymore and only just literate in some places. A right mess (shudder). I guess he's still trapped there now, going round and round in circles trying to find his fucking audience, bless him.
A toast then: to shit copywriters everywhere!
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