Will Rolls

Damned if you fly, damned if you don't

We have been relentlessly told that our insatiable appetite for personal mobility is costing the planet. We have become acutely aware of our carbon footprint and tread as lightly as we can. In social situations, we feel a pang of self-consciousness when talking about our long-distance holiday trips - such reckless pollution doesn't go down well any more.

And so one can be excused for feeling a little confounded when one reads here that it is a bad thing that US travellers have in the last 12 months avoided 41 million flights that they would otherwise have taken. Seems that it's bad for the economy, now.

There's no pleasing people, is there?

Someone ate all the acid

Most advertising is bland, boring safe stuff. Occasionally, a daring company will do something a bit spectacular, which these days amounts to giving people entertainment that doesn't necessarily push the product (Honda and now Cadburys have got this right).
But once in a while, someone comes along and makes something so fundamentally weird, that you have to replay the ad just to check that you had not been hallucinating.
So without further ado, please sit back and enjoy this bonkers commercial for a KIA car:

Alarmingly, there's an even more disturbing version of this out there, viewable at this link here - it appears to be the same ad, but they actually decided to edit the bit where the tennis star inserts his limbs into a host of mini-people. You will see the difference and be truly disturbed.
Just goes to show - once you have released the viral genie from its bottle, it is so difficult to put it back in...

One lump or two? Part 2

I was left shocked and dismayed by the outcome of The Apprentice last night. I felt almost as winded as a Chelsea fan who had just seen John Terry's penalty skid the wrong side of the upright. I knew that Alan Sugar lacked elegance, but that he could also be so lacking in commercial judgement was quite beyond me.

If you missed the programme, he compared two ads made by his teams for tissues, assisted also by Ogilvy, which presumably in their wisdom they plucked as a right-minded ad agency. I was dumbfounded when he opted for a nasty, misleading, amateurishly-scripted ad that basically suggested an antibacterial tissue could cure a poorly child. When I first saw the ad, I chuckled to myself, looking forward to the deserved bollocking that its creators would receive. The British public would see through this as quickly as they would an ad for a ketchup that cures cancer.

But no... he not only picked the stinker of an ad (aided and abetted by the cutting edge advertising minds of Ogilvy), but also fired the wrong man - Raef Bjayou. Never before had it been so clear that the mighty Sugar has a very slight problem with those of a more privileged class.

Still, this from the man who despises the ad industry, and managed to better undermine it in one programme than in years of moaning about how few Amstrads it has shifted him...

Trousers

Who was it who decided that all jeans should be blue?

I'm a pug

Entering two YouTube vids in quick succession on my blog smacks of laziness, however this one is a milestone. It is the first time our daughter Ruby and I have sat together and both enjoyed a movie together. We both laughed, and she ended up doing a good mimic of the high hooting noise.
Enjoy.

Let's take it to bits!

I'd like to just unleash a couple of vat-fuls of scorn on advertising agencies that respond to a brief for a car advert with what is quickly becoming the most tired of advertising clich�s: "Hey! Let's take it to pieces!"

I can barely bring myself to continue hammering my disdain into the keyboard, so let's just get on and show the guilty parties:

The one that started it all - people should have recognised that there would only ever be one:

Then one that tries to be a bit more wispy:

Now let's have one with a bit of a twist "the car parts are a bit second rate, but let's bang them about and make some noise!":

Just like the spice girls, there needs to be a sporty one:

The latest one that frankly deprives me of the will to live. This ad agency should file for creative bankruptcy:

To the Manor Quorn

I have to say that I am shocked and stunned by this. I don't have anything against pasties, and I don't really object to the consumption of Quorn (even though I must confess I do not know what it is). Hell, I don't even have a problem when people mess around with traditional recipes.

What I despise are missed opportunities, and whoever introduced this product is guilty of having failed to name it a "Quornish Pasty". I mean, the name "Quorn" lends itself to so many great adaptations*, yet either this name was missed, or some litigation-shy marketing department decided against it. What's the good in an unusual name if you can't expand on it now and again?

*Another favourite is the term Quornography, which refers to lightweight erotic material characterised by an absence of meat.

An ad that blew me away

This is fantastic. Not sure what I'm meant to do in response, but it is fantastic all the same:

Reader, I wept...

I stopped, transfixed in front of the window of Books Etc when I saw this.
As a major product push to their new 'Feed your mind' campaign, they are pushing Jordan's autobiography. In it, you get to read about her tits, her kids and her husband. You also get a deep insight into her breasts, norks, baps, funbags and hooters. That includes her tits.

Falser gunk

I was out with a friend this evening, and we were slap bang in the centre of London and running out of time, imagination, and looking for affordable, convenient places to eat. We walked past the front of a Garfunkels, and I realised I had walked past these restaurants thousands of times without even contemplating going in there. It's a form of food racism, similar to what I feel for Angus Steak Houses - I don't even come close to entertaining the thought of eating there - such an abstract concept, you might as well suggest grabbing a quick meal at Phones 4U.
Anyway, assisted by a couple of pints and reassured by the branding, I snapped out of my reverie, and suggested that we go in 'just to see what it's like'.

I'll save energy on this entry, and just cut to the chase - Garfunkels is avoided by every Londoner because it is a truly horrible place to eat. In fact, you don't even have to consume food to realise that it is nasty.

I have experienced National Rail ticket inspectors more engaging than the staff, and the proudly-priced food arrives staggeringly fast (destroying the illusion that 'someone' 'made' it) and has all of the taste of a sheet of A4 paper. You receive the bill as you take your last mouthful, and you are practically ushered onto the street, along with the rubbish bags that they are carting through the place. To call Garfunkels a restaurant is to call Robert Mugabe a politician.

All I can do to gain closure and put the episode behind me is to give you an anagram of the name of the place: Falser Gunk