EYEBALLS FOR SALE

Advertising is changing. Audiences are fragmenting, and TV-on-demand is letting viewers brush off the chaff. TEN4 chats to three figures at the cutting-edge of quality work, who agree that recent developments in technology aren't killing advertising - they're killing bad advertising.

A REMIT TO PROVOKE

"You shouldn't be in it unless you love ads," declares 4Creative's Richard Burdett. "If you're lucky, once in your life you'll be part of something great. I've been lucky enough to see that twice." Interestingly, his examples flank a period of disillusionment and frustration with a stagnating industry that's only recently begun to shake itself into shape.

First is a seminal moment in the history of advertising. The colossal smiling, winking face, splashed across a rich human canvas in vivid red, white and blue, that helped turn British Airways around while he was at Saatchi's in 1989. The very picture of optimism: diverse cultures connected across an ever-shrinking globe.

Seventeen years later, visages of an altogether grittier nature: coalition soldiers, contorted in panic and despair beneath ghostly clown makeup as hollow Iraqi gunfire echoes around them. A trail for Iraq: the Bloody Circus - More4's season of programming on the controversial conflict - while at 4Creative.

Fortunately for a man who grew bored with mainstream advertising over a decade ago, the environment in which he now finds himself at the head of Channel 4's in-house agency - a role for which he was headhunted at Cannes to cover maternity leave, and has commanded ever since - is an "incredibly benign" incubator for great work.

"I have as my client possibly the only advertiser in the country with the guts to provoke every single time, and a remit to provoke," he declares, citing a recent campaign that sat the cast of Shameless around the Last Supper table as a concept the BBC would have "stabbed to death hideously" after a string of committee meetings. "We know they'll buy challenging work, so we're not mitigating ideas before we even present them. And we've produced some pretty visceral images - but never gratuitous."

One of Richard's personal favourites is a Shameless poster where Frank Gallagher has ripped the '4' logo off the wall and carried it off, leaving screw holes in the plaster. "It tells you nothing about Shameless and everything about Shameless; nothing about Channel 4 and everything about Channel 4," he enthuses. "What other company would agree to have a space where their logo should be, and have it tucked under the arm of a villain?"

Likewise, you won't find a morbidly obese Jamie Oliver wobbling after a bus, or Gordon Ramsey smashing junk food into mush with a baseball bat, in their respective shows. "Not one of our ads tells you the story of the show, but every one of them captures the spirit of the show," reflects Richard. "I think that applies to any brand; that's what advertising's going to become. British Airways is a precursor of those; the first ad that didn't say 'our seat is bigger than their seat' or some quantifiable element. It just owned an absolute generic of flying. You get to the other end, you meet people."

It's benign, but not too comfortable - Channel 4 can choose whether their in-house agency is best for the job, and 4Creative must pitch for work alongside rivals such as DDB, who handled the launch of More4. "There's no coercion to use us, and they're not cutting costs - we have incredibly healthy budgets."

"Getting David LaChappelle to do Lost, we spent all the money you'd expect a big agency to spend. But we're tiny: 18 people, split thirds between account handlers, production people and creatives. Then there's massive use of freelancers, which means there can be 35 people sitting in the office at any one time."

Besides greater creative freedom from clients, Richard feels that a more democratic creative process all round can help ensure genuinely groundbreaking work. "The ad industry has an incredible division of labour," he reflects. "Only an account man can do this, only a planner can do this, only a TV producer can do that. And I didn't realise how debilitating that was until I came to a place where creativity is the job of everybody."

Having worked on the other side of the divide, both at media agency CIA and selling airtime as Head of Sales at Discovery, Richard has seen plenty of noisy battles for the strategic high ground - and the resulting appreciation of what all parties want and need has helped build a culture of joined-up thinking.

"Direct marketing, ad agency, media agency, communications planning - everyone wants to boss the strategy," he laments. "It's like herding cats. As an industry we should never have allowed media to slip out of ad agencies. When I was there, the agencies could talk to the guys booking the space for a clear idea of what could and couldn't be done. Now knowledge is fractured and fragmented."

And in an increasingly multiplatform environment, so is the audience. Richard flags up the fact that Bullseye used to draw an audience of 23 million as something of an absurdity in the modern era - anything pulling in that many eyeballs on terrestrial television nowadays would be nothing short of a phenomenon. But while they may be carved into a greater number of niches, the numbers are still there.

"The television advertising industry has been useless at defending television," he argues. "You'd think that nobody watches TV anymore, and everyone spends their life on the Internet. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are still fantastically robust, big numbers. But the sad truth is that most clients don't want fantastic work. They want safe, box-ticking exercises. If you find someone that does, stick to them like glue."

VIRAL IS A VERB

A man puffs into a rubber dinghy on the beach. A boy patters toward him and flings himself onto it. The man's head explodes. Seven years ago, Head Rush - a simple 10-second clip, carefully honed to 790k to punch through Hotmail's attachment filters - launched Ed Robinson's company, The Viral Factory. It's since been viewed 100 million times. "It feels incredibly crass now," he's prepared to admit, "but that's how it was then."

Of course, in the Web 2.0 world the huge advertising potential in peer-to-peer networks is clear to a growing number of brands - but agencies exploiting the system are still shaking off those past associations. Ed for one is clearly weary of justifying himself to people who still think 'viral' just means a bedroom-produced funny.

"Viral is a terrible buzzword," he concedes. "It's just a mechanism; it'll probably disappear from our company name within a year. It's been misconstrued. A viral isn't a short, rude 30-second TV spot you couldn't get past the BACC - it's a mysterious peer-to-peer network. Viral is something that happens when a piece of content wins its own audience in an exponential way, and we use the term as a verb. It's 'gone' viral."

Head Rush unquestionably went viral, and it persuaded Ed to reach beyond his job as a TV ads producer in favour of something edgier. "I didn't want to make ads. I wanted to make films. As a punter I resent advertising - I want an honest exchange. Either give me hard facts, or engage me; give me something. I resent people just selling eyeball space."

Ironically, the original proposal was not too far removed from that of a traditional broadcaster - selling space either side of great content. "I had this image of not having a relationship with clients. I'd just make stuff, put it out there in a locked environment and then advertisers would buy a placement; their name at the end of it. Effectively I'd be a programme maker, making small bits of communication."

In principle, it made sense - clients would buy media space in return for the content winning viewers. It works on TV. But perhaps it was a paradigm shift too far - part of the appeal of online content, after all, is that you can strip off the ads. "They didn't buy it," Ed recalls. So, with reluctance, he began to explore winning an audience with an integral advertising message. In other words, ads that people want to watch. And share.

Evil Twin Ka came a couple of years later: a deliciously sinister decapitation episode in which a black Ford Ka tempts an unsuspecting feline into its open sunroof, and then slides it back in place with a sickening clunk. In another version, a pigeon is splatted flat in the road by a timely flick of its bonnet. "That was back in the day when email peer-to-peer - 'have you seen this' - was key," adds Ed, acknowledging Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point as a useful reference on this kind of exponential growth.

"When people pull your content to them instead of having it pushed at them, you get a buzz," he smiles. "But at the time it was an add-on thing. It's only in the last two years that we've realised virals can be part of the bigger picture."

And without the need to deal with media buyers, campaign budgets can be significantly lower. "The ad process can be quite stifling. You may have a million quid to make the ad, but they've got 10 million quid to buy the media for a couple of nights on Channel 4 - which is why everyone's so anxious and sits around debating what colour a certain guy's shirt should be. We have a much more fluid process - come up with an idea; make it for £50-100k; come back and hopefully they like it. We're called a factory for a reason."

Ed goes on to discuss their 2003 Trojan Games campaign for the UK launch of the condom brand, whose quirky notion of a sex Olympics persuaded 55 million visitors to spend an average of five minutes on the website, enjoying and recommending short videos of lycra-clad athletes engaging in acrobatic penetration. This equates to an army of excitable brand advocates roughly the size of the country's population. Not bad, especially considering the clips contained no explicit sexual content whatsoever.

Sex, violence and slapstick humour - check, check, check. But within the viral space there remains infinite scope for creativity, depending entirely on who you're targeting to disseminate your message, and why they'd be motivated to pass it on.

Web audiences are notoriously fickle with short attention spans, flitting from clip to clip on giant rambling sites like YouTube and MySpace, and are accordingly much more empowered than their passive TV counterparts. But with the growing interconnectivity between social networking sites, finding what you want (and dumping what you don't) is only going to get easier. "Above all the advertising industry has to re-learn that they have to give something back," is Ed's take on it. "It's an exchange."

Perhaps their most innovative work to date was for Levi's in 2006, ostensibly involving a gigantic jeans-wearing marionette being manoeuvred through the streets of Reykjavik by a trio of helicopters. Such a stunt would cost millions to stage for real, and it was considerably cheaper and savvier to mock the whole thing up in post-production, project it in cinematic glory onto a giant plasma screen - and film it on mobiles. The resulting clips, scattered over YouTube to give the illusion that random Icelandic passers-by had witnessed something wondrous, have garnered hundreds of thousands of views.

There's an inherent talkability about a giant airborne puppet - even if people decide it's a hoax, they've spread the clip, thought about it and engaged with other users about it on comment threads. That's what a modern viral campaign needs to be about, and Ed is regularly frustrated by clients who want 'something on YouTube' - a request that, as he points out, is pretty meaningless. He turns 70 percent of potential work down, partly as a reality check for clients whose campaigns simply would never go viral.

"You can stick anything on YouTube - a picture of your product with you sticking your thumbs up in front of it. It doesn't mean people will see it, and it doesn't make it a viral. It only becomes a viral if you've specifically set out to generate an audience.”

ALL IN THE DETAIL

A handful of brands have dominated the upper echelons of creative, memorable advertising over the last decade. Advertising for which people sit through the dross in the hope of catching again, and seek out on YouTube months after the TV run ceased - Abbott Mead Vickers for Guinness, HHCL for Tango, Fallon for Sony Bravia. But perhaps one of the most enduring, varied and consistently innovative campaigns of the past few years has been Wieden+Kennedy's treatment of Honda UK.

A creative behind several of the most memorable of these - not least Cog, better known as the mesmerising two-minute chain reaction made from parts of a Honda Accord - is copywriter Ben Walker. And while he tips a nod to the surreal pin-striped, blender-headed mannequin and attention-grabbing staff self-portraits that adorn the entrance to W+K, much of his inspiration comes from a razor-sharp attention to everyday detail.

The Accord was one of the first briefs on the new account, and the initial feeling was that there was space to talk about 'warm engineering' - a satisfying, affable, gentle type of technology to contrast the cold, teutonic efficiency marketed by Germanic counterparts Mercedes, Audi and BMW, or as Ben's art director Matt Gooden put it at the time, "like the way all the bits in Mousetrap fit together."

This in turn sparked a recollection of an experimental chain reaction film by Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, and before they knew if they were dismantling a hatchback - and then stringing the components back together like automotive dominos. 'Isn't it nice when things just work?' was Ben's beautifully simple tagline, and after more than 600 takes, it did - although they did have to film it in two halves, simply because there wasn't a warehouse long enough to cram it all in.

Incredible patience, precision and hours in the pursuit of that flawless take - it's no surprise that Ben cites Michel Gondry and Stanley Kubrick as creative influences for their sharp attention to detail. But another of his ads, this time for the Honda Civic, drew inspiration from a less lofty source.

"There's a Dorling Kindersley book in our office called The Way Things Work - which shows the actual way things work," he grins. "They talk about something mundane like a stapler or a zip, and you think fuck me; that's amazing. But no-one ever points those things out to you." A Civic, Ben reasons, is practical but not particularly cool - so they sprinkled this wonderment in the small unnoticed things in life onto a fast-cut editing technique inspired by Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream.

In the film the technique snapshots the pill-popping, tea-drinking, remote-clicking lifestyle of a desperately lonely menopausal woman on speed, and her deteriorating junkie son - unsurprisingly the ad brings a more wholesome Dorling Kindersley edge, integrating macro shots of certain life-enhancing features on a Civic with everyday items that make life easier, but tend to go forgotten. Again the tagline makes it all relevant, as a tagline should: 'Why is it, the better something does its job, the more we take it for granted?'

Although fewer people are interested in the craft of advertising copy - and award-winning ads seem to be increasingly about effects and glamorous art direction - Ben insists that it's still key to communication. "It took me ages to write that line," he grins.

And Grrr! - Honda's rainbow-coloured award-magnet, which sees chugging diesel engines knocked out of the sky to the cheerful tune of 'hate something, change something, make something better' - is, he points out, built around a song. "There are optimistic visuals and the colour palette is good, but it's all about the language. Copy makes it relevant to the brand. It's still hugely important, but people don't realise it."

LINKS

www.channel4.com/4creative
www.theviralfactory.com
www.wk.com

Text: Nick Carson