Creatives not cunts?

I have to disagree with my angry friend below.

I don't think that all creatives are necessarily cunts. I think some of them are ok, but I think that circumstances force them to act like cunts.

Most people become creatives for personal reasons, not connected to their aptitude for the job.

Basically, they'd like to get laid a lot more. More than most people, male or female. Not because they're all raging horn-dogs, although some of them undoubtedly are (or like to think they, even though many of them are too tired after a day spent writing ads for catfood to do any actual fucking), but because having a lot of sex is the easiest way of telling yourself that you're well liked by the people around you.

One way of drawing attention to yourself, so you can do more fucking, is being creative in public.

Look at Prince. Very creative. Does a lot of fucking. But which came first? Would he have spent so much of his life, pumping away, like a priapic performing dwarf in the retinue of a decadent emperor, if he'd not written Raspberry Beret? Did he write Raspberry Beret for that reason? Or Little Red Corvette? Both songs about being picked up by dominant women whilst doing two-bit low-paid jobs?

But back to creatives.

Basically, they want the acclaim (and the hot cock or poon) that comes from being creative in public, but they don't have the stamina that will see them through to the creation of a really excellent album or novel or film. Or even a low-charting novelty grime record.

And the reason that they don't have the stamina to do that, is that they are all massive egotists. Hence the infantile need for physical love. The problem with being a huge egotist, is that it makes it very hard to do anything that you're not immediately good at. And doing something like learning to be a concert pianist or a playwright or a novelist means not being good at it for a really long time.

If you write a really good ad, it takes seconds. Ok, ages of sitting about, reading blogs, but then one moment of insight and bam - the whole production mechanism kicks in and the huge golden hand drops out of the ceiling to pat you on the head.

All the baubles and production company lunches and business class flights are just part of this mechanism.

Well, you might say, advertising creatives have a tough time because people mess with their ads.

Poor diddums. But we, I mean they, do not have to go more than a couple of weeks alone with their project, with just their self-belief to drive them on, ever really. And that is the bit of making real art that drives real artists howling fucking mad.

The wonderful thing about capitalism is that there is a niche for exactly this type of personality, in a creative department of an ad agency.

So in my opinion, they're not cunts. They're merely terrified, priapic, egotistical pseudo artists.

But then, what's another word for a priapic, egotistical pseudo artist?

Creatives are cunts?

Aren't you?


All of you.


You're lazy, rude, sexist, surly, dismissive of those who don't come up to your own questionable standards, hypocritical thieves.


Go on. Admit it. If you weren't you you'd think you were a cunt.


Stealing other people's ideas, pretending you're more of an artist than a corporate whore just because you wear baggy, overpriced jeans and get your hair cut for £65. You are nothing but a puppet for a bunch of braying pricksleeves at the top of the chain who laugh their overpaid arses off at the fact that you'll stay late doing an ad just because it's got half a sniff of a Creative Circle Bronze.


And how you cling to those shiny baubles like they're a true validation of your existence on planet earth, when, ironically, they're the exact opposite. 'They spinnin'! Lookit, they spinnin!'






You are a sad bastard wage slave willing to work evening and weekends to make a fat fucker in charge of a holding company a little bit richer

And going to little art shows in Shoreditch doesn't make you better than an account bloke.

It makes you worse.

At least they know they're cunts.

Classy bit of banner advertising on CampaignLive

I wonder if they're going to start running those 'Make Love Longer' ads just to raise the tone.

What's wrong with your face?

This has to be the most idiotic advertising strategy in history.

Yeah, get plastic surgery. Why not? 32% of you are already considering it.

Well I've considered breaking into your house in the night with a pair of pliers and roll of cellophane, but that doesn't make it a great idea.

But yeah, why not?

Well, for one, you might end up looking like the male lead from a mid-budget Europorno like this fellow.

You'd also be undertaking an invasive medical procedure, all in the name of vanity.

And whatever the benefits, it's not like you could pretend that you hadn't had plastic surgery. So having plastic surgery constitutes a public announcement that you're an unhappy person whose only deep belief is in appearances. Unless you planned to dump all your friends and get new ones, to go with your new face. Maybe they'd like you for who you really are.

Could you trust a bloke who came in after Christmas with a new face? I ask you?

The Harley Medical Group can fuck off. Not just because they're plastic surgeons, but because they have a history of making insulting advertising. Remember this campaign:

 

Oh look, it got stickered by feminists because it was spreading hate.

This is how you advertise surgery:

Fallon - agency of gibberish

Hey look, Fallon have won French Connection without a pitch. How did they do this?

Maybe they wanted to buck the trend. Clients are mainly leaving Fallon at the moment, big clients like Sony and Asda. And you've gotta wonder whether Kraft are going to want to spend quite as much money on whimsy as the Quakers of York (who are reportedly out of their minds on Miaow Miaow the majority of the time).

In the past French Connection sold bland clothes to violent men who use hair gel and women who get drunk and vomit on their own shoes using Trevor Beattie's show-stopping typo: FCUK. This was so successful that it became ubiquitous on the beer guts and cantilevered breasts of the above group and they basically hate themselves and so they started to hate the brand.

Some of the Fallon FCUK stuff seems basically ok. Can't argue with this for instance:

 That definitely is the woman in that picture yes. And ok, it's rather boring, but it's a bit like the Fred and Farid Wrangler stuff, or the new Levis America stuff in trying to make a strong statement. In fact, fashion brands have always done this, only using photography, rather than headlines or strap lines. So, for instance, Paul Smith's styling has always been 'classic with a twist', but no one ever wrote, 'CLASSIC WITH A TWIST' on one of his ads. The Wrangler ads without the end line sort of say 'WE ARE ANIMALS' or 'WE ARE MAKING A STUDENT FILM'. So with out the headline this ad is just a picture of some bird in a mac. But I digress...

 

Ok, right so now you're saying something about the qualities of masculinity you're going for. Beard, rabbit ears, t-shirt, the man doesn't give a shit right? Ok. Sort of. But then I'm passing French Connection in Covent Garden the other day and I see this:

Now what they're clearly trying to do is develop a new, thrusting tone of voice for FCUK. What they've actually done is to write gibberish. This is interesting because for me Fallon have always had a strange relationship with language and meaning. When you think about it, the defining characteristic of most of their advertising is that it literally doesn't make any sense.

 

And that has a place in advertising, because when people are constantly sent meaningful messages sending them some meaningless ones looks sort of whimsical and interesting and exuberant. In fact the only thing Fallon seem to guarantee their clients is that nothing they do will make any sense. Or maybe it will sort of make sense. Or maybe the agitating thing is the extent to which is doesn't make sense.

Anyway, why pay an ad agency to write your headlines when you could just go through the subject lines in your SPAM file and pick out whatever gibberish you find there and give 2 million quid to charity and then PR the whole the thing for kudos? Ask you I do.

(Yorkshire)

At Amsterdam Schiphol. Yorkshire has hills but in my experience is a bit rubbish.