10/18/2005 - 12:38 a.m. | advertising bitchery - ignore

For the most recent project in 452, we have to work on a project with a partner. Mine is the permanently scruffy sort of chubby frat guy. Course, he was out of town all weekend, but we were going to make ads and then meet up on Sunday night to compare and revise them. He is supposed to call at 7. I kill a couple hours at the Undergrad Library. Nothing. Well, nothing but a smokin' hottie across the table, inspiring all sorts of scrawled rants from yours truly. But no Scraggly. So he e-mails eventually. I assume he's lying, but I don't really care. Tell him we can meet before class, but he doesn't show up. Don't really care. We get to class. I show him my two campaigns, he shows his. He admits he threw them together in about ten minutes before class. Don't really care. We grab one of his, two of mine, post them.

The thing that DOES bother me is that somehow his fucking shit campaign got all the votes out of our three. All of them. Clean sweep. Now, admittedly, his are very simple whereas mine are wordy and roundabout and sort of bizarre. But come on! Not one stinking vote? See, for this assignment, we were supposed to pick a cable network that a lot of people don't watch and try to earn them a new audience. We picked CourtTV. Mine, esoteric they may be, but they're funny and kind of cute and weird and they at least try something new. His are like a picture of a fingerprint with the headline, "It can tell a thousand stories in the courtroom blah blah blah" AAAGGHH! That's the same old boring shit they're already probably using, but everyone votes for it because they don't get mine or its easier or something. And I know, I know, you have to understand advertising for it to be effective, and if these clods don't get it, America probably won't, but I just want to tell them all they're wrong wrong wrong.

And a lot of times, I do. Like, we were looking at a different group's campaigns, for TLC, and the one everyone voted for was the same old shit. We have stuff about weddings, babies, redecorating. Yes, the ads they did for that was clever, but they weren't reaching for anything new. The one I voted for, the one I starred as one of the best campaigns in the class, wasn't done yet, no, but it was darker and it was trying to do something new. So before anyone could raise their hand and start tweaking the one everyone picked (Our class loves to nitpick: "Maybe change the font so it shows more contrast?" Yes, that's sure to fix your boring ass hit) I just start yelling about how everyone is dumb pretty much, which starts a discussion, and then ten minutes later everyone is focusing on the campaign I voted on. "I want to change my vote," etc. And maybe it is bad that I have to explain things for people to get my shit. Maybe it should be self-explanatory. Then again, maybe it is, and we are burdened by the fact that we are trying to advertise to some imagined "audience" - an audience we tend to think is very stupid - and that they are a lot more clever than we take them for.

I'm not trying to be a snob. Maybe my ads were too weird and wordy. That's just how I am by nature. Some of the things I think are funny are just too random for lots of people. But I would much rather have an interesting wordy ad that can be simplified than a simple ad that doesn't say anything new at all. I got that feeling again today that this is a battle I'm going to be fighting over and over again. Maybe I'm just too arrogant, and I need to accept what I consider to be a lower standard, I don't know. But it hasn't been beaten out of me yet, and I'll carry right on making the strangest ads in class.

Also, Peter showed us a series of award-winning ads made by students in book-building schools and graduate programs and shit. I came in expecting to be very intimidated. I was not. I mean, some of the ads were good, but for all the work that supposedly went into them, they didn't seem any different from anything we had made, from anything we could make. Most ads still had that feeling like they could be improved - wording changed, visuals altered, design tweaked. Heh - maybe I am just a prick, and I'm going to keep shitting out all this artfaggoty shit, thinking it's God's gift to the marketplace while everyone else holds back their scorn. Maybe I'll end up in some tiny fucking agency hell, making those lousy tuneless jingles they play on local radio stations all the time, never getting to do the weird shit I want. But lord, if things start to click, if I make it to a good agency, if I can make fancy pants things that people get, win some awards, work crazy shifts in line with my nightowl tendencies rather than against them, well, won't I feel fucking justified?

Lord, I have goals... and no chance of achieving them.