Serendipity Book

Fallon’s fair deal for consumers

Nope, I'm not referring to that pants Britannia Building Society ad (it wasn't Fallon btw), but the wonderfully simple rationale that Juan Cabral of Bravia Balls and Cadbury Gorilla fame gives for his work in Esquire:

"I think of the people when they're on their sofas watching the telly. I want to do it in a way that's fair - I'm selling you this, but in exchange I'll give you this minute of colour and hypnotising music."

Via Hidden Persuader

A Few Good Admen

Dubbed version of a A Few Good Men ...

Peter Greenaway: "Cinema is brain dead"

The Independent reports on a wonderfully splenetic outburst by Peter Greenway at a Korean film festival yesterday.

Ever the iconoclast, Greenaway ripped into his fellow filmmakers for merely "illustrating novels" rather than innovating in cinema and ignoring the developments in technology that have transformed other media over the last quarter of a century.

"If you shoot a dinosaur in the brain on Monday, it's tail is still waggling on Friday. Cinema is brain dead.  Cinema [died in]1983, when the remote-control zapper was introduced to the living room."

He challenged film-makers to look at new, interactive forms and to reinvent cinema for the electronic age:

"Every medium has to be redeveloped, otherwise we would still be looking at cave paintings... New electronic film-making means the potential for expanding the notions of cinema has become very rich indeed. Now cinema has to be interactive, multi-media art."

"We're obliged to look at new media... it's exciting and stimulating, and I believe we will have an interactive cinema which will make Star Wars look like a 16th-century lantern lecture. Thirty-five years of silent cinema is gone, no one looks at it anymore. This will happen to the rest of cinema. Cinema is dead."

Then, to gasps from the students in the audience, Greenaway then went in for the kill:

"Bill Viola is worth 10 Martin Scorseses. Scorsese is old-fashioned and is making the same films that DW Griffiths was making early last century."

"Most cinema is bedtime stories for adults. We're still illustrating Jane Austen novels – what a waste of time."

That's fighting talk. Hurrah for the iconoclasts!

Sidebar - note how Variety abbreviates audiences to "auds" in their write up of this story.

Ten New Cocks (and She-Cocks) in Advertising

Charlie Brooker is back with more irritating people from ads. The last compendium of cocks is here.

Fifth Gear's Tom Ford gets his hands on the new Fiat 500

Ad agencies face decoupling

Supply Management (yes, that's right, I'm a regular subscriber!) reports that the decoupling of the advertising supply chain is now starting from the bottom up with client purchasing departments now sourcing and specifying which production companies to use.

"According to the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers, only 40 per cent of its members have "decoupled" pre-press and print production services. Decoupling is the breaking up of the marketing supply chain. Suppliers further down the chain, such as printers, are usually controlled by agencies, but are now being selected and managed by the client."

As you might expect this is particularly prevalent in digital communications where some of the integrated agencies are seen to under-perform:

"Emma Nussey, consultant at Future Purchasing, speaking at a debate last month, said a strong supply market and increased use of digital technology is turning suppliers, traditionally reliant on agencies for work, into their competitors. She added decoupling services often began if purchasers "didn't feel they were getting the benefits".

Other industry commentators point to the inevitability of this move:

Jeanie Bergin, creator of marketing consultancy Thinking W.I.D.E, said decoupling is "no longer a question of if, but how". Karina Wilshire, managing director at agency Fallon, told agencies to consider how to manage it or "it might happen to you, rather than with you".

Can the one-stop-shop model survive under this onslaught? Will agencies really lose the ability to work with their preferred directors and production teams?

Only one online business model left and that's advertising says Microsoft's Ballmer

Under the headline 'Microsoft’s chief executive has seen the future - and the future is advertising' The Times today quotes Steve Ballmer as saying:

“My general rule of thumb today is that anything the consumer doesn’t have to pay for, they won’t. There is no way to play in broad consumer services unless you’re going to use advertising.”