The Super Bowl Ads 2011

Is it just me or was this Super Bowl the biggest anticlimax in sports? I don't mean to cast aspersions, but what a boring game (and this one was actually good, I think). Is this game worth getting your head concussed for? I don't think so.
In any case, I was there for the ads. You can watch them all here. Except for a couple here and there and with the notable exception of the very best of them all, the VW Passat Darth Vader spot, the ads were dismal.
The Passat spot is an instant classic. What makes you laugh, beside the pitch-perfect deadpan, mock-heroic style is the subtext: Obviously this kid is going through a phase so long and monomaniacal that even the dog has lost interest. The parents bear this obsession with a welcome dash of sangfroid. The kid is not obnoxious or rude; in fact, he is rather awesome in his zeal, but by the time he tries to immobilize his sandwich, and worse, denies his father's embrace, he has crossed a line (in a meta storyline that could be derived from the Star Wars mythology!). I love the minimal reaction of the mother when he spurns the sandwich and of the father as he gets his revenge. I love how the kid emphatically spurns the father, and we never see the father's face, just his unrequited hug. When the force finally manifests itself and the kid jumps in fright,  where does he turn to first? The parents.  
How or why this has anything to do with the Passat is beyond me, except that if I ever buy a car, it's not going to be an Audi anymore (belabored and vulgar commercial), but one of these: smart, sophisticated, cool (and they don't break the bank).
Everybody remembers the brand it's for and better yet, they must have spent a pretty penny on the use of the music and the Darth Vader character, but otherwise, a fantastic story told simply with 3 actors, a dog and a car in one house. Way to go!
The Chrysler Detroit anthem ad with Eminem was very effective. Great music and some Diego Rivera murals thrown in for good measure. It made me want to go to Detroit, but not to buy a car from Detroit.
I also liked the VW beetle ad, although at this point I'm afraid I have developed incurable computer graphics fatigue. 
Meanwhile, I had trouble distinguishing between the dumb ass humor of Pepsi Max, Bud Light, and Snickers (Overkill. Just Richard Lewis would have been funny enough). What's with all that dumbass violence?
The "Reply All" commercial from Bridgestone really made me laugh.
I adore the E-trade babies but this year they felt forced, although I liked the tailor spot.
Coca-Cola was a huge disappointment. I absolutely loathe their "Siege" ad. Horrible, horrible, horrible computer animation, soulless, uglyass shit. This is Coca-Cola? The spot about the guards was also heavy and labored. A huge letdown from that fantastic commercial with the Thanksgiving air balloons a couple years back. 
The rest are not worth talking about. Many are a huge waste of money and resources with little storytelling. The Stella Artois spot is a good example. All they are saying is what all the other beers are saying: that men prefer beer to women.  They may couch this idea with as much "sophistication" as they can throw around, but it's a dumbass sentiment.
Give me mini Darth Vader any time.

Esto es Vida!

I don't know what it is about the Cote D' Azur that it is so delightful, even as it is chock full of  men wearing ugly square-pointy shoes and pastel colored pants. There is something about this outrageously expensive town (one beer and one glass of rose at the Hotel Majestic: 23 Euros), that is extremely soothing to the eye and the soul. The sun shines, the sky and the sea are super blue, and the seafood is amazing. This is, after all, Provence.
I have been coming to the advertising festival for 3 years now and was finally able to get a table at perpetually mobbed Coquillerie Brun, est. 1958, late last night. It did not disappoint. A non pretentious seafood place with amazing shellfish platters (freshest oysters ever), an unbelievable fish soup and a tarte tatin with caramel and fleur de sel ice cream that made us vow to eat there everyday, if we only could. The euro is a little bit cheaper than last year, totally engorging our sense of largesse. 
So you will forgive me if all I can talk about is food right now. That and the thing that never ceases to amaze me, which is that the French in this part of France are so much nicer (for the most part) than the ones in Paris.
I have to find out at what time is the Mexico game. I also didn't see mes amies the Leopard Ladies last night, so there are 2 mysteries to be solved.
See you later (I wanted to say A tout al'heures, but I don't know how to spell it)

Apichatpong!

The man with the most wonderful name in cinema, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, won the Palme D'Or at Cannes.
I like his movies. I'm looking forward to seeing this one.
Love of my life, Javier Bardem shared the prize for best actor (¡Felicidades, guapo!) for his work in Biutiful, an Alejandro G. Iñárritu film we are hoping is not as over the top melodramatic as is his custom. Best thing Iñárritu has done lately is an amazing Nike spot for the World Cup.
A Mexican movie, Año Bisiesto, won the Camera D'Or for best first feature. Nice!

Eat Lard!

I read in The New Yorker that:

In February, the city’s Department of Education amended Regulation A-812—“to improve the nutritional quality of food and beverages available for sale to students at school”—mandating that only twenty-seven snack items, all of them prepackaged and approved by the Office of School Food, could be sold during school hours. The target is childhood obesity, but the effect is that pupils hoping to fund the pep squad or the eighth-grade wilderness trip can now do so only by peddling Whole Grain Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts (No. 12 on the list) and Reduced Fat Cool Ranch Doritos (No. 7) and not, say, their mothers’ brownies or carrot muffins. Anything homemade is forbidden.

This is the height not only of idiocy, but of perverse unintended consequences. What I would like to know is how come unintended consequences always seem to benefit the evildoers? More sales for Frito-Lay, yay! As always on every new chapter of the ongoing saga "The Road To Hell is Paved With Good Intentions", the authorities, in their zeal to protect children from obesity, are contributing to their further ingestion of junk. I can assure you that anything homemade, be it fried in lard, covered with bacon, basted in butter, and smothered in cream (or all of the above, like a gratin dauphinois, oh, yum) is healthier than anything that comes in a bag sprinkled with fluorescent orange dust. But corporations always seem to have the last word. All parents can do is stage a cute little protest. If I were a parent, I would fucking sue the Dept. of Education over this.

In another example of pernicious brainwashing brought to you by your friendly neighborhood advertiser, NBC is going to institute behavior placement, in order for couch potatoes to subconsciously adopt supposedly good habits as they fester in front of the TV set. This is supposed to be for the common good, but it is actually the height of evil. (George Orwell, eat your heart out). 

Behavior placement gives marketers extra incentive to advertise at a time when digital video recorders equip viewers with an unprecedented ability to skip commercials, says Jason Kanefsky, a media buyer at Havas's MPG. "You're not forcing your way into a program in any shape or form," he says. "You're just nodding your head at a program."

Jason, I hope you have a spot reserved (right next to me) in the circle of hell allotted for marketers and advertisers. These people's confidence in our collective gullibility, stupidity and inertia knows no bounds. And for once, they may be right.

No Habla Español

There is a mini-brouhaha raging because of a slogan used by a Pepsi campaign for the Hispanic market that a lot of people, including me, feel uses incorrect Spanish. You can read about it here.
This incident allows me to vent about a routine problem in Hispanic advertising, which is that the Spanish that is sometimes used runs the gamut from the pathetic to the blatantly incorrect. This is my theory of why this happens:
This is not a Spanish speaking country (yet). The Spanish spoken in the US is an impoverished version of what is spoken in any other Spanish speaking country,  basically because Spanish is not the main language. It lacks a local literature, and it lacks outlets. We don't really have serious newspapers or magazines. People don't read in Spanish. We are not surrounded by the language. This makes our language poor. Add to this that we have different national groups with different accents and expressions unevenly scattered across the country, and we have a bit of a mess.
I have nothing against Spanglish, but nobody can tell me that Spanish in the US is a beautiful living organism. It's not.
Because of this unique circumstance, those of us who make a living communicating in Spanish need to be particularly meticulous with our language. This doesn't mean that we all have to sound like Cervantes, or that our Spanish should be stiff and archaic, but we need to know it and use it well. We are its custodians.
In the case of advertising, the problem gets compounded because people forget that Spanish and English have different grammatical structures. The products we shill have been dreamed up in English. The marketing lingo used to describe them barely resembles English to begin with, but clients and their legal departments expect the Spanish versions to be as close to the English as possible. This is why many agency creatives and executives pretend that Spanish should behave like English. For the most part, it doesn't. A classic example is that necessary articles (el, la, los, las) disappear from our sentences. English can do this, but Spanish needs articles. Stuff like this and worse happens all the time. It sounds dreadful.
The other problem, and this has happened to me countless times, is that clients trust some half illiterate Hispanic consumer more than they trust a professional copywriter or their agency. This is because of their reliance on research and focus groups. I will give you an example. We mentioned the word "college" in an ad. In Spanish it translates as universidad (university). However, in a focus group, some moron with a limited command of Spanish, whose only credentials were that he was a potential consumer, insisted that the word in Spanish for college was colegio. However, colegio in Spanish means grade school, and I can assure you we did not intend to recruit 7 year olds to the Army. It took way longer than should have been necessary to persuade our clients that the guy was talking out of his ass.
The standards of our industry are very low. When I moved here in 1992, pretty much anybody with a Hispanic sounding last name was considered the ultimate expert in the Hispanic market. You had people leading creative departments that were incapable of writing a sentence in Spanish. But nobody thought that the fact that they spoke three words of Spanish with their abuela on Sundays meant they could not write in Spanish or give grammatical opinions. Today, things have changed and most serious Hispanic agencies have very qualified people, most of whom are native speakers of Spanish, and actual writers who can write in Spanish. But bad habits and uncomprehending clients still wreak havoc.

People who defend the Pepsi phrase use the excuse that language is flexible. What are they, Noam Chomsky? I think the unspoken rule is that language is only flexible when it works; that is, when most people understand the meaning intended by an unusual turn of phrase. If most people are flummoxed and annoyed, and uncomprehending of a turn of phrase that seems unidiomatic, incorrect and weird, then language is not flexible. Also, language may be pliable, but we don't go around inventing meanings for words at our convenience, to please a marketing client. We don't say that now the word "tree" really means "cloud". Language seems to work as an unspoken collective contract in which we all agree with certain pre-assigned meanings. When new expressions are born, we all collectively, instinctively agree to accept them or not, use them or not, according to how much they resonate, and make sense to us. So don't tell me that in the Pepsi case they were being flexible with the language. They were sloppy, which is another story.
I'm fascinated with this case because it seems like an instance of groupthink, surprisingly coming from a good, reliable agency, which has consistently done dignified work. However, in advertising, and particularly in marketing, it is not unusual for common sense to leave the building. I can almost bet that they were trying to find a more original way of saying "I count" because that verb has been used copiously and frequently in connection to the Census, which is related to the campaign. What is a mystery is if anybody cautioned there was something wrong with the phrase or what processes of massive self-convincing took place in order for this to happen.

The Amigo Country...

...apparently has set up shop here in the US. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 30.7 million people in the US are of Mexican origin. 19.3 million of those were born here, and 11.2 million are foreign born, like me.
Mexicans represent 65.7% of all Hispanics in the US, estimated at 46.8 million, and 37% of all foreigners. Hispanics are now 15.4% of the total population of the United States. So más respeto, vatos.
These numbers are huge. They are radical. Mostly, because considering how many Mexicans we are, we certainly do not have the political influence or make the noise we should be making (compared to the four Cuban cats who have held US foreign policy hostage from Miami since forever, for example). We are way too silent. Too busy working to complain. But that's because most of us have little education and even less money.  With these numbers, we should be seriously influencing immigration and foreign policy, among other things, both here and south of the border. We can no longer be ignored by both governments. And wait for the Census results...
There are many important corollaries to these significant numbers:
1. Are these numbers to blame for the recent improvements in Mexican food in New York City? You bet. Is this why we can now buy churros at the subway? Indeed. Is this the reason for the recent ascendancy of chipotle flavored everything? You gringos are very lucky.
2. I work in Hispanic advertising. It has always frustrated me that someone always asks whether the Dominicans, the Puerto Ricans, the Cubans or the Ecuatorians understand expressions that come from Mexico. Frankly, who cares? If they don't understand them now, they will soon, just like the Korean deli owners and anybody who works at a restaurant now speaks Mexican inflected Spanish.
I have always said that Mexican Spanish should be the Spanish used in national Hispanic advertising by virtue of its majority. Period. Number one, it is pretty good Spanish. Number two, I don't care if you think this is arrogant. Me vale madres.

 These numbers are from 2007. I rest my case.

3. I suggest that we scrap 5 de mayo, which is a bullshit holiday and celebrate instead September 15, which is our Independence Day. 
We seem to have taken back the territory that Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana sold to the US in the 19th Century. Karma.
Speaking of which, I was informed through Facebook that there is a petition going on to declare a national holiday honoring César Chavez, the Mexican civil rights dude who  originally coined the phrase "sí se puede", yes we can. I say, why not?

From the Enchilada Files: The End of Metaphysics

The Paletón Corona (a chocolate covered marshmallow lollipop) used to be an inquisitive child's first introduction to the wonderful world of philosophy and metaphysics.
Here is why:

Used to be, until recently, that the label of the Paletón showed a kid holding in his hand a Paletón, which inside had a kid who held in his hand a Paletón, which in its label had a kid holding in his hand a Paletón, ad infinitum. But more amazingly, this lead your young little kepaleh to think that you yourself were holding in your hand your Paletón, which could very possibly mean that you were just another kid inside the Paletón of a kid bigger than you, who was held in their hand by an even bigger kid and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. This begat enormous questions about our place in the universe and the very nature of our identity. Now all we have is this:

You can see the tragedy. Gone is the kid inside the kid inside the kid. Gone are speculation, awe and wonder. I want to personally murder the marketing genius who thought that taking the label off the inside paletón would create "appetite appeal". But such is the power of destruction, the stupid tunnel vision, of marketing.

Super Bowl Ads

Most of them seemed to have been written by Sarah Palin, they were so dumb. Most of the ads were surprisingly lame, or had good premises and stupid endings. Many were quite hostile to women or suspiciously self-deprecating to men. I know it's the Super Bowl but guys, get over your hangups with women already. You are starting to sound like whiners.
I hated all the Bud Light ads except the one with the guys with the vocoder, the only funny one. The asteroid one is a total ripoff and not half as funny as an old Argentinian spot about an asteroid that's going to hit Earth and a guy decides to live it up big time (orgies included) and then the asteroid misses and he is in deep doodoo. That spot was brilliant; this one's retarded.
The one about that weird looking woman surreptitiously extolling the virtues of not having aborted her son was so weirdly creepy -- right to lifers trying to have a sense of humor -- that I had trouble wrapping my head around it. That woman was very distracting. She was like a spawn of Sarah Palin and one of the shrimps in District 9.

Here are my favorites:

• Kia: Big Game. Loved the toys getting down in Vegas, and it had a nice twist.
• Coke: Sleepwalker.  Does not beat the Thanksgiving balloon spot which is one of my all time favorites, but it was among the few entertaining ads this year, plus it uses Ravel's Bolero nicely.
The Simpsons ad was funny and had some nice details (like the Warhol portrait of Mr. Burns) but we are in no mood to be nice to Mr. Burns. The Burnses of the world are not being nice to us. And as far as I can tell they are not getting any poorer. Can't make the Simpsons cloying. So can it, Coke.
• E-Trade. Although not as funny as other years, the jaded talking babies always crack me up. Milkoholic!
• Dove for men: loved the execution.
• Dr. Pepper: Little Kiss. So tacky you gotta love it.
• HomeAway: I saw the full version of the Chevy Chase/Bev D'Angelo spot in Hulu. Very funny, stupendous acting, but way too long, even for the internet.
• Career Builder: Casual Fridays. Not as good as last year's but still good, absurd deadpan. I miss FedEx.
• Monster: The beaver fiddler was sweet and funny.
• VW: Punchdub. Great execution, fun and fresh, if a tad aggressive. And the Stevie Wonder double punchline: overkill.
• Snickers. I like poor Abe Vigoda.
• Motorola with Megan Fox. I hate her but I liked the ad. A fun way to demonstrate product velocity.
• I am truly torn about the Google ad. It seems to me it inadvertently points out everything that is inhuman and intrusive about Google and everything that is bad about our interaction with computers, namely, that we don't ever see a human face interacting back with us. It does demonstrate the actual personal usefulness and potential of Google simply and powerfully, but even as it tries to tell a human story, it seemed rather cold to me. 
In general, it was pretty underwhelming. But so happy that the Saints won.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph!

The news is that some groups consider this ad blasphemous. I think that is the least of its troubles. The blasphemy is the non-sequitur of the writing. Jesus was born because of the Census? He was born on a burro? And I thought it was because of the immaculate conception. But what do I know? Are all Christians familiar with the  Roman Census business? It was news to me, but then again, what do I know.
Still, it doesn't work as written:

This is how Jesus was born.
Joseph and Mary participated in the Census. Don't be afraid.   

Latino thinking in a nutshell: I participate in the Census, I get crucified like Jesus. Thanks, but no thanks.
Am I nuts or the entire Jesus situation just adds to the feeling of fear and persecution?
If this is the best that the National Association of Elected Latino Leaders can come up with, perhaps we need to elect us a new set of Latino leaders.
I am surprised the Census bureau approved of this. I worked for the Census recently. I can tell you there are hundreds of eyes scrutinizing every word related to the Census.
I can't fathom what happened.

A Pangram

I didn't know these things existed, but boy, are they useful.
A pangram is a sentence that includes all the letters and grammatical possibilities of a given alphabet. It is helpful to language students, but I think even more helpful to graphic and type designers, so they can see how letters look, feel and work. Thus, a Spanish pangram is:

La cigüeña gigante bebió ocho copas de whisky, más quince jarras llenas de fría cerveza rubia, y enseguida huyó en un taxi.
Which means:
The giant stork drank eight glasses of whiskey, plus fifteen full mugs of cold pale ale, and escaped in a taxi right away.

This one, however, is missing the accents on the ú and the é. Long, verbose and surreal, like most things having to do with us Latins.
Now check out a pangram in English. As usual, a marvel of synthesis and no nonsense:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

The reason I know this is because I was asked by a client to find out if there is one in Spanish. Thank God for the internet, is all I can say.
I was having cold sweats trying to come up with one myself.
This is a public service from moi to all art directors and graphic designers who are sometimes challenged and even annoyed at having to put words on their layouts.

My Head Is Spinning...

...after two days at an advertising production conference, the Boards Summit, where we heard that the sky is falling but the good news is that it may not fall completely on top of us. The reason for conferences such as this one is for industry people to connect. There are panels where industry leaders supposedly share something of value with the attendees. If they are any good, like graphic designer Stefan Stagmeister, you get inspired. Unfortunately, most of the time, you get self serving presentations of stuff that they have done that you have already seen on internet.
For the most part, I do wish that people would stop transparently shilling their own thing and start giving something worthwhile to the audience. One pays a lot of money to attend these events, and we might as well just hold an open bar for networking and dispense with the fiction of getting something of value other than schmoozing. Out of two full days of panels, I found a total of three to be interesting.
I wonder if it's just me, or my other creative colleagues are very good at hiding their cynicism, but after two days, my brain spins with the amount of BS advertising people are capable of spewing. Used car salesmen got nothing on us.
The one reassuring thing I learned, is that no matter how small the screen, and how intrusive or cool the constantly evolving technology, there will still be a need for writers (yay!). It turns out that more than ever there is still a need for "storytelling" and "narrative". Very reassuring, since these things have been around for thousands of years.
Interestingly enough then, that the new directors showcase showed nothing of the sort. Just mostly young guys doing crazy, non-narrative stuff with some panache but nothing to say. I'm the first person to embrace non-mainstream talent, but the selection this year was dismal. Some of the stuff was sheer stupid shock value, other was selfindulgent, most of it could not tell a "story". Talent is all well and good, particularly if it is exercised in the service of a brand and it still comes out looking like talent. That's what the director's showcase should be about. Either that, or real directorial prowess. There was only one (debatable) instance of that in the entire showcase and that was Cary Fukunaga's ad for Levi's. Now, I hate those pretentious spots (and so does everybody at the movies; people boo them off the screen), but directorially speaking, they are well done.
Now, "content" is in great demand. And what is "content"? Isn't it what we used to call movies, books, music, art: human expression unattached to selling a corporate brand? Now marketers want content, so this has become product as well. Content is really the expressive filler with which marketers expect to get your attention. The word is so Orwellian that it gives me the shivers, but I don't know anyone else that objects to it. Content has become product and product has become content and the lines are totally blurred. My colleagues seem to love this development. Me, I am scared out of my wits if I can't tell the difference between an ad and a non-ad, like a novel or a movie or a TV program or an article in a magazine. I don't mind great advertising, in fact, I love it and deeply admire it, as long as I know it's an ad and it is presented to me that way.
There is a lot of crap out there joining the content-social media-games-apps bandwagon, which is as utterly crappy as it was when it was a TV spot or a print ad (or even worse). The glut of messaging is frankly horrifying. And people are hunkering down and filtering out everything that does not apply to them. How many internet ads do I actually click on any given week? Probably one a month, if any.
The banners I get are totally off the mark. For a time, they assumed I was an Arab speaking lad willing to join the US Army. Lately, it's gotten a little better. Now they assume I have cellulite and wrinkles and am in sore need of Hydroderm. What do they know? How much "viral" content do I get through facebook or other internet media that I actually find amazing rather than stupid and puerile and a waste of time? Very little. I've learned a lot from what people share in facebook that represents their interests. Most of the time it's not ads. Agencies trying to viralize things that are obviously fabricated and artificially spread with useless effort deeply insult my intelligence. Luckily, there are incredibly smart, talented agencies doing awesome work in the new paradigm. The cream will always rise to the top.
Meanwhile, and at the risk of sounding quaint, there is the question of the Snuggie. I leave you to ponder that after all the bells and whistles of the new, this is the one thing that sold like pancakes, with an ugly ass ad on TV and a scary as hell internet page that behaves like an informercial on TV*.


*Which doesn't mean I am not fully embracing the experiential-viral-interactive-social media-mobile apps carnival. I'm just saying.

Hispanic Advertising Awards

Report from Miami:
The level of the winners of the AHAA Ad Age Hispanic Awards this year was consistently high and most of them displayed sophisticated, rigorous creative thinking. None of the ads seemed silly or half baked, which has been the case with some entries in previous years. Quite the contrary, the respect afforded to language and craftsmanship, to thorough creative thinking and quality executions is very encouraging. All of the winners seem to belong in the same range of quality. Moreover, most of the winners are based on actual Hispanic insight. They pass the test of "why is this Hispanic?" with flying colors. This is very good news. It shows that our niche market certainly has room for a high level of creative excellence that still delivers on our cultural nuance.
There were two Best of Shows (which as someone pointed out, is sort of oxymoronic). One was the campaign by Lápiz for Pepto Bismol, a wry take on the foods you love that hurt you (a Spanish pun on hurting both your stomach and your feelings). They are funny and insightful, but talking to Lawrence Klinger, Lápiz's Chief Creative Officer, I mentioned that cheesecake is not necessarily hard on the stomach. He concurred and told me that there will be more challenging foods in the next iterations of the campaign. This is a campaign that could easily play in any Spanish speaking country; even in any country where people love to eat heavy, demanding foods.

It's always good to see women on the stage, and I don't mean the models who give out the prizes and who still, in the dawn of the 21st Century, get whistles from our boys in the audience. I mean female creatives. The fact that an openly gay creative director also gets whistled at really gives one pause. Perhaps we can leave that sort of atavistic, puerile machismo behind? Some day?
Remember Little Lulu's friend Toby who would not let girls into his treehouse? This problem is rampant in advertising in general. And the Hispanic agencies are no exception. We need to see more mixed creative teams which are not "El Club de Toby", like the Lápiz winning team.

The other Best of Show winner was a single ad by Latinworks, for the Cine Las Américas film festival, a hilarious use of real footage of President Menem of Argentina giving a bizarre speech about Argentinian spaceships. The tagline: "if this is our reality, just imagine our movies". The campaign includes other surreal executions like Hugo Chávez talking about getting coca leaves from Evo Morales. It is smart and simple and brilliant.
My other favorites were Adrenalina's wonderful spots for Tecate, which are the strategy come to life but with great casting, excellent direction and a smart, infectious sense of humor. The Mexican parents of a young guy read him the riot act about his drinking bad light beer, instead of Tecate. I particularly liked how Adrenalina integrated radio into the campaign. They could have lifted the dialogue from the TV spots but they created a hilarious ad with a long funny disclaimer about who is not to drink Tecate. Very macho, but that's the beer drinking target. My feeling was that this campaign was flawlessly executed and right on strategy and was a strong contender for Best of Show, but my hunch is that it was too Mexican. Lately, a lot of the best creative seems directed to (and acted by people who look like) the people who come up with it, rather than the actual consumers. Thus, the Tecate campaign has merit for being right on target and still being creative and funny. After the controversial DDB Brazil WWF fake ad, it behooves agencies and award shows alike to take a hard look at creative pieces and make sure they are intended to work in the real world, not just to win awards.
My feeling however, is that there were no "truchos" among the winners this year. The work felt refreshingly honest.
Another great campaign was Grupo Gallegos' campaign for Latin Cable Comcast. It's a very clever spin on preferring to watch TV in language rather than with subtitles. It demonstrates the superiority of in language communications simply and hilariously and it found an ingenious way of translating the very visual concept into radio.
I also liked The Vidal Partnership NFL ad where a guy asks what's a yard and his friend responds with a poem to the game and then shows him with his hands the actual length. Again, it shows Hispanic insight in a clever, creative way.

I will say one thing that drives me crazy: when agencies win CREATIVE awards and instead of sending their creative teams to the show, they send some account executive who has no business being on that stage. It takes the creatives of such agencies blood, sweat and tears to come up with those spots, let alone sell them through the line, and convince the agency to spring the money to enter award shows. They deserve respect and recognition from their creative peers.

As the winners celebrated, I thought that Hispanic agencies (at least the ones who win awards) have come a long way. Yet after over 16 years of working in this market I find it amazing that we still have many hurdles to overcome when convincing clients to advertise to Hispanics. It's as if the agencies have grown creatively in leaps and bounds, yet many clients are still taking baby steps. No matter how much marketing research belies the Latino spending power, many clients are still wary of putting their marketing dollars into Hispanic efforts. These days, the appalling anti-immigration rhetoric is not helping our cause, which is all the more reason to fight harder for brand solidarity and visibility. But at least it's encouraging to know that there are agencies out there doing stellar work, in spite of all the hardships.

Down with Fake Ads

For those of you earthlings that don't know anything about the world of advertising unless you see it on Mad Men, I will divulge to you a little secret. Many of the commercials that win awards at "prestigious" advertising shows (where the judges basically parcel out the prizes to their own agencies), are actually fake. Sometimes they are produced with the complicity of the client, which buys them a time slot at four am in a local station in Wyoming, so they can compete for a Gold Lion at Cannes. This is the case, for instance, of the award winning campaign for Crest, which Procter & Gamble clients approved but would not be caught dead actually showing en masse to its consumers. Sometimes, however, somebody forgets to advise the client, like in the recently notorious case of DDB Brazil, which submitted an incredibly stupid and tasteless fake ad for their client, WWF (not the World Wrestling Federation; the World Wildlife Fund, the one with the Panda).
First, it was a print ad that caused concern and commotion. Then it turned out the agency had produced an even stupider and more offensive TV spot for submission at awards shows. Besides the sickening use of footage of the 9/11 terrorist attack on NY, the ad is offensive because it is beyond moronic. It puts the client in the worst possible light. It is the work of provincial, narrow-minded, ignorant, clueless, Third World idiots, and I say this with every intention to offend.
Now, the first award show to ban fake ads is the prestigious One Show. 
It was about time.
Fake ads are easy. Usually they are glib and facile and really pose no creative challenge. The real challenge is to win an award with a real ad that is seen by millions of people. Real creativity is coming up with ads that have passed through the daunting gauntlet of corporate approvals, real marketing strategies and real media buys (i.e, the nine circles of Hell x 827). Those are the ads that truly deserve awards.
The moment fake ads are banned from competition, this will become painfully apparent. There will be a dearth of creative excellence and, who knows, if everybody else follows the One Show's example, perhaps clients will finally shed their creative inhibitions (I'm being tactful here), take some risks and approve ads that truly deserve creative awards.

Marketing is Evil

And in case you were skeptical, here is my gift for you.
Some members of the food industry pay $100,000 to enroll their engineered products (which can't be called food proper) in a program that uses green labels signaling them as "Healthier Choices". This is instead of each food company doing the same thing on their own, which they had been doing up to now. The people running the program are mostly representatives of the food industry.  Thus, Froot Loops is considered a Healthier Choice. Under their ridiculous guidelines, something as natural and wholesome as Kool-Aid could make the cut since it has vitamin C.
Lunchables, that despicable packaged thing for kids, has made the cut. 
This is nothing but misleading advertising.  It has nothing to do with nutrition, much less with actual food.

Department of Newfangled Etiquette

In Brazil, where they have always been progressive about the human body (behold their beachwear) , if not about anything else, there is an ad campaign encouraging people to pee in the shower in order to conserve water.
I have always found peeing in the shower a little gross, but leave it to the British to come up with very sensible rules in case you are feeling virtuous and want to do your part for the environment as you bathe.

Bacon will Prevail

This article by Michael Pollan about the importance of homecooking and its demise in this country moved me to tears. (But then again, a good Parisian croissant or my mother's Orange Souffle could do the same). It's informative, fun, wise, right on the money and beautiful. Required reading.

International Incident sparked by Burger King

Thanks to Cynthia for alerting me to the incident that threatens war between the US and Mexico. It's not the drug cartels or even immigration. It's a Burger King ad about their new Texican burger. As the copy says, "the Whopper with a little spicy Mexican".
Quite literally, as it turns out. The ad is startling. It shows a tall, handsomish Cowboy and a tiny Mexican dressed as a lucha libre fighter (can we please declare a moratorium on lucha libre? It's really getting OLD). They become roommates and share a house. It's obvious that the creatives scoured their brains thinking of ways in which a tiny little Mexican would not be offensive, so there is a cute scene in which he opens a big jar of pickles for the cowboy, and another one where he is swimming in the pool while the gringo cleans the pool, for a change. I think it's great. I actually find the fact that they are living harmoniously in the same house very sweet and wonderful and symbolically very potent, given the climate of persecution against illegal immigrants nowadays.
The problem is the little tiny Mexican. It's a stereotype.
The creatives will counter that the cowboy is a stereotype too. And they are right, but the cowboy is tall and handsome and the Mexican is tiny and ridiculous. So not everybody will get the postmodern wink of the spot.
I don't find the spot offensive and, according to many comments in You Tube, many other Mexican Americans don't either. But the ad comes at a juncture of dramatic strain between Mexicans and Americans and one wonders whether the creatives and the Burger King executives are either blissfully unaware of this or they thought they could comment on it in their trademark ironic way. As a creative myself, I applaud them for taking the risk. I'm sure, or at least I hope, they predicted the possibility of a shitstorm. Maybe they hoped it'd be a shitstorm that sold tons of burgers.
In any case, it's controversial.
In Spain where they are utterly clueless when it comes to talking about foreigners, for instance, in a print ad of the same campaign the little tiny Mexican is wearing a cape with the Mexican flag (because otherwise Spanish people may not get the lucha libre reference), which prompted our ambassador to object to the campaign in a formal letter. Nothing better to do, I guess.
More offensive than the wearing of the Mexican flag (which the US creatives were smart enough to know was taboo), are the ingredients listed in the Spanish ad: Cajun sauce, cheddar cheese, and beef taco with beans. EEEWWWW!
This is not only offensive but repulsive and I think good grounds for a new Spanish-American-Mexican war.
Remember the Alamo!

Let's Boycott Red Bull

For the height of marketing stupidity, nothing can beat what I saw happen on a Friday afternoon in Mexico City.
As a prelude, I must tell you that the traffic in Mexico city is now officially a giant knot without exit, end or solution. If people thought it could not get any worse, it has and it is beyond human comprehension.
It is not helped by the absolutely stupid attitude of drivers, who contribute to it by throwing their cars at any free space without any regard for traffic laws or the right of way or even daredevil pedestrians.
So in comes some marketing/advertising genius who decides to unleash a flotilla of about 15 Minis decorated with the Red Bull colors, driven and peopled by a bunch of third rate female models (as is customary of all marketing promotions in Mexico), all the cars bearing a giant Red Bull can in the back, all honking their horns doing spins around the block, creating more traffic, more noise and more pollution, as if Mexico City didn't have enough already. I was hoping the police would stop them, but no such luck. Who gave, if any, permission for such a retarded stunt? I was sitting at an outdoor cafe when this happened and to judge from everybody else's grimaces this moronic campaign did not do much to endear us consumers to Red Bull. Quite the contrary. To which I say, I'm never drinking that shit again. And I urge you to do the same.