Picasso at La Colombe D'Or
All of us have been involved in the creation of advertising as clients, in ad agencies and in our current lives. It is perhaps immodest, but nonetheless true, that we have been associated with a number of the most creatively awarded and commercially successful campaigns that have run in recent years. Whilst we think that great advertising is simple we also think people often fail to realise just how hard it is to create great advertising.
Advertising is an almost uniquely constrained creative process: there are few creative environments where what you have to communicate, to whom it is to be communicated and the tone of voice with which it is to be communicated are so defined. And it is often evaluated by people for whom creative evaluation is not their core strength.
All very difficult.
But on the other hand, despite the desire of creative teams, it is unfortunate that there is very little genuinely innovative advertising being presented to clients, let alone produced and finding it's way to the public. And one of the further difficulties is that often creativity is inspired by what has gone before, or what surrounds the creative mind, but the advertising industry seems reluctant to acknowledge this.
Bob Dylan says he is inspired by Woody Guthrie, Willie McTell and Jack Kerouac.
John Galliano seeks inspiration from stage and cinema, referring to how Brooke Shields looked in Pretty Baby, and the films of Bollywood.
Inigo Jones changed the face of London architecture inspired by the classical styles of the Italian Renaissance.
And Martin Scorsese refers to the influences and inspiration of Caravaggio and The Rolling Stones.
All of these will go down in history for their creativity and all of them acknowledge that their work has been inspired by what has gone before, or what surrounds them.
By contrast, two of us were heavily involved in the Stella Artois 'Reassuringly Expensive' TV campaign. We saw a long lecture from one of it's authors on it's creative originality. You may recall the early executions bore a remarkable similarity to 'Jean de Florette' and one of the the first featured an artist swapping his paintings for a glass of Stella Artois in the South of France. There is a hotel in Saint Paul de Vence, above the Riviera, called La Colombe D'Or. It is a beautiful place and notable because impoverished artists used to swap their art for meals. Some of the artists went on to do rather well and so the restaurants walls are now covered in the early works of Picasso, Matisse, Chagall, Miro and Leger, amongst others. The hotel is so well known in the upper echelons of the advertising world that it once had a UK ad agency cricket team. We are sure however that the author of the 'Reassuringly Expensive' TV campaign had never heard of Jean de Florette or La Colombe d'Or, and his work was every bit as original as he said it was.
One of the paintings swapped for a meal
We think there is nothing wrong with being inspired by what has gone before, or by what surrounds us, but it should be an inspiration for something new and different, rather than the source of something that goes on to be simply derivative.
In view of all of this we thought we would run an occasional series of entries featuring ads that seem derived, inspired, or genuinely original.
We'll start with this ad.
And here is the video for the OK Go track, 'Here It Goes Again'.
It looks a bit derived to us, but we'll forgive it, for it's undeniable relevance.
More will follow.