Case Study Confessions

In light of the Cannes Lions controversy, I must make some sobering admissions about various case studies I’ve been involved with over the years.

1. We did not, in fact, capture the imagination of the nation. The nation’s imagination was captured by Married At First Sight. So was I tbh.
2. Most of the press coverage we got was trade press.
3. The limited edition that ‘completely sold out’ was very limited indeed. There were 5 of them.
4. The concerning statistic that forms the basis of the whole case study? The planner sourced that by sending a SurveyMonkey to his mixed netball team WhatsApp group.
5. We did not achieve more media impressions than the population of Earth.
6. When we say it went viral, we mean the Daily Mail’s bots ingested the press release and farted out an article. A farticle, if you will
7. We did not pay for the rights to use that track by Cinematic Orchestra or M83 or Explosions in the Sky or Jónsi/Sigur Rós.
8. When the editor created that giant cloud of positive social comments, it was like 11 comments step-and-repeated to look like a thousand.
9. We omitted negative comments such as ‘worsst ad campiagn ever!’ and ‘all involved should retire’. Again trade press featured heavily here.

I realise that these confessions might see me stripped of my pride of Lions. But I am at peace with that. They are mostly Bronzes.

Anyone else want to fess up?

AWARDS SEASON

A lot of people don’t realise that Bon Iver’s ‘AWARDS SEASON’ is about trying to win a Cannes Lion. It’s about that feeling we’ve all felt: your campaign has three shortlists in Direct, and your hopes are high as you go to bed at around 10pm Sydney time. 

You wake up at 3am and refresh the Cannes site 28 times. There are no results visible. You blame the crappy mobile UX. 

Your restlessness is clearly annoying your girlfriend at the time. Elisha is broadly supportive of your professional endeavours. There was, however, a clear moment you saw her eyes glaze over - it was shortly after you explained that, at an advertising award show, each category has a theoretically unlimited number of nominees. And winners. That furrowed her brow and it has yet to unfurrow. Whatevs. She’s never going to get it. As someone who works in pharma, her work life is just a slog of curing disease after disease and making people’s lives better. She’ll never Crip-walk through the Cat-5 champagne hurricane that you’re about to.

You drift back into a light sleep, waking at 5:27 with hopes of an ALL-CAPS text from your CCO. Nothing yet. Too busy celebrating at the Croissant or the Quassette or whatever it’s called? 

It being a Friday, your mind skips ahead to the prospect of a triumphant pub lunch. Chicken parmi? Nah, the scotch fillet. Ball out, playa - you’ve probably got a pay rise on the way. Speaking of on its way, you might even put in a call to your dealer, Ash - aka DoorAsh. His stuff isn’t great but it does a decent impression of blow and delivery is prompt.

Over coffee you discover that Campaign Brief has released the results in a damn spreadsheet - Excel, at a time like this?! It’s undignified. But you get in there and you command-F your campaign name. 

Through the chilly June dawn, the Microsoft pop-up need only whisper: no results.


Your fingers bound over your MacBook like bloodhounds - desperately sniffing out some kind of mistake.

But the whisper only turns into a howl: NO RESULTS DAWSO YOU WORTHLESS F**KING HACK.

You got NOTHING. Zip. Le zéro.

You had dreamed of Gold. You could already taste the wagyu. But you didn’t even bag a Bronze. Even after 3704 versions of that damn case study. That poor editor. He came in on a Sunday, when his baby was like 8 seconds old. He should have been burping Lupita, but he was re-timing the supers to be more ‘cinematic’. All of it for nought. 

Now you must front up to Elisha. To your Mum. To Lupita. To DoorAsh. And you have to explain that at that French award show - the one with the infinite winners - you are, somehow, a loser.

The Grand Prix went to an Argentinian shop, all of them infuriatingly gorgeous. Lilac Bazooka Buenos Aires looks more like a modelling agency than an ad one. They created a blockchain widget for blind, female dogs. Quietly, you curse those b*tches. The dogs too. It feels like they have taken something from you.


We’ve all felt this.

Of course, Justin Vernon expresses it a little more poetically:


Oh, but maybe things can change

What can wax can wane

Things can get replayed

And if it's all the same

Oh, just take my hand

And place it on your blame

And let it wash away

With you, I will remain


Good luck, b*tches.

Cabinet making

Whoa, a new set of Trump appointees has dropped:


Rip from Yellowstone (in character)

Vince McMahon

An old school styrofoam cup with a plastic straw

Ursula from The Little Mermaid (original)

The Hawk Tuah girl

A macaw from Tampa that has been taught to say ‘libtard’

Mel Gibson

The pre-recorded audience catcalling of Christina Applegate’s character on ‘Married With Children’

The crisis PR consultant Dana White engaged after he hit his wife on NYE

The female soldier from the Abu Ghraib pics

A sales rep named Randy who has joke pronouns in his email signature and his LinkedIn profile

A sunburnt woman putting Toby Keith on the jukebox at the Margaritaville resort in St Thomas, USVI

Roseanne

Jamie, the engineer from the Joe Rogan Experience

Bill O’Reilly

The Hamburglar

Amber Rose

An as yet untitled Taylor Sheridan project with Dennis Quaid attached

The guy from the Distracted Boyfriend meme

*** DATA BREACH ***

Dear clients and colleagues,

I regret to inform you that AMOK Creative has been the victim of a data breach. Hackers are demanding a ransom, and threatening to release years of sensitive information about how I conduct my freelance business. I refuse to enrich these criminals. I have decided instead to publicise these secrets myself. It’s not pretty, but it’s my way of taking back ownership:

1. On more than one occasion I have used the word ‘hyper-real’ despite having no idea what it means.

2. I have tried to sell an idea called ‘Dinner without drama’ on at least 3 different briefs. It’s a daytime soap parody, pretty funny IMO, but not IOO.

3. I have agreed with retouching feedback where someone says ‘Let’s knock back some of the greens in that red…’ but I don’t see any greens - I just see red

4. I have presented the platform line ‘Thing big.’ for at least 4 brands with very broad product offerings. I still thing it is good.

5. I have - with a straight face - suggested that a line in my script ‘could catch on and become part of the vernacular’

6. I have written an ad with Will Smith and Chris Rock as the talent.

7. I have written an ad that re-imagined Keith Urban as an R&B singer called Urban Keith.

8. When Urban Keith was knocked back I RE-PRESENTED him mere days later.

9. I have responded to the TikTok portion of the brief with a dance idea.

10. I know full well that everybody can see my screen on Teams.

11. I have pitched far too many experiential ideas in Martin Place Sydney, and Fed Square Melbourne.

12. I have almost no idea what to do or say at a grade.

13. I have presented split screen ideas. And doppelganger ideas. I know. I know.

14. I have done a meeting camera-off so that people won’t see I’m drinking wine on a Monday evening.

15. I have done a meeting camera-on with the wine in a mug

16. Pretty much every thing I write is - on some level - a rip-off of Bud Light ‘Real Men of Genius’.

17. I have cheerfully thanked people for feedback I am not thankful for

18. I have written an ad for an electric car where it drove through an epic electrical storm. Basically the most hack visual pun imaginable.

19. I have presented Crypto, NFT & AI ideas

20. I have billed a half day for writing a manifesto that took 8.5 minutes.

21. I have LAPPED UP the flattery in the opening paragraph of most director’s treatments.

22. I have deployed some of my best creativity when doing timesheets

23. When struggling for ideas, I have taken an alt name for an idea, and given it its own duplicate slide, to pad the overall slide count of the deck.

24. I have aided and abetted award case studies with whole sections of fiction in them.

25. I don’t even know how to properly indent the dialogue bits in a script.

So there you have it. I may have lost my dignity but I have held on to my BitCoin. Maybe they’ll think twice next time they try to hack a hack.

My learnings since starting an OnlyFans

At the back end of last year I decided to start an OnlyFans. AMOK had turned five years old - five years of being creatively promiscuous - and I thought I would celebrate by getting an OF page, and slanging some free ideas on there. A bit of a gag, sure - but not just a gag. As I discuss in my video about it, I have long had a suspicion that we undervalue the ‘first thoughts’ that come to us on a brief. Obviously 5 minutes of thinking will never be as good as 5 days - but I think the gulf isn’t as wide as most people would like to think it is.

Anyway, I thought the OF stunt was the perfect way to test it. I’d make the ideas free to begin with, to try and motivate people over the barrier of creating an OnlyFans account. It would also skirt any issues CCO’s might have with their finance department. I would fire out some quick turnaround ideas from my DMs. And we might find that there is market for them. And once we did, I might up the price from $0 to some nominal amount like $250. The ideas would of course be a bit hit and miss, but they’d be super cheap, and they wouldn’t soak up much of my time. I thought it could become an interesting solve for availability issues. When an agency contacts me about a job but I’m flat out on other projects, I wouldn’t have to just say no - I could at least point them to my OnlyFans for a ‘quick and dirty idea’.

That was the plan. It didn’t go at all to plan. Everyone got a kick out of the gag, almost no one hit me up for a quick and dirty idea. As is stand the total stats are:

  • 100 visits to my OF page

  • 0 subscribers

  • 0 DMs

  • 1 person who hit me up for a free idea over email but didn’t open an OF account - Simon Joyce at Emotive

  • 1 person who was prompted to send me a brief by the stunt…but insisted on paying me!

I thought the uptake for FREE ideas would be way higher. I guess people either thought I was joking, or they didn’t think that the quick turnaround ideas would be any good. But they are wrong about that. Just yesterday I presented some brand platforms to a big network agency. I had spent a couple of days on it, and I think I shared 15 or 16 of them. But where was all the love? The line that everyone loved was the one I scribbled down 5 minutes after taking the brief. It warrants further investigation. And folks my OnlyFans remains open for business - for anyone who is brave enough to slide into my DM’s.

George Vlahos and The Lace Arse

Years ago I lived in an apartment block in Waterloo. The building manager was a bloke named George Vlahos. Vlahos was of Greek heritage, and thick set. He wore wraparound sunnies, a soul patch, and a robust cologne. He wasn’t a great building manager, but we always had entertaining conversations.

One such time we were talking about the cost of car repairs - I think I was complaining about replacing the transmission on our Jeep. He said that the cost of parts is even greater for European cars. And then after saying that he said the following thing:

“Mate I always say, ‘If you wanna wear lace panties…you gotta have a lace arse.’ Ya know what I mean? If you wanna have something fancy, ya gotta be able to back it up. The original saying is ‘If you wanna wear lace panties, you gotta have a nice arse’ but I like to say ‘a lace arse’…”

Years later I’m still thinking about this remark, and have many questions. Why does he think his version is an improvement on the original? What does he mean when he says ‘a lace arse’? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean an arse made out of lace. I think he means an arse suited to lace - a lace-quality arse. But surely that’s just a nice arse? The original saying seems to work well. His tweak just adds some repetition and some confusion. But he likes the tweak enough to not only change the saying, but specifically call out to me what the tweak is. He wants me to know his ‘build’.

It was so baffling. But I can’t call the guy stupid. At the end of the day, I am still thinking about this conversation 10 years later. My wife and I still use the saying - his version! I’m not sure we would be doing that had he quoted the sensical version of the saying. (side note: it might be a stretch to call it a saying as I’ve never heard anyone else drop it in conversation - before or since)

I don’t really have a larger, intelligent point to make other than to say that this anecdote kinda supports a longheld belief I have that linguistic clunkiness and wrong-ness can play an important role in achieving cut through and memorability. It creates a cognitive dissonance that we can’t help but pay attention to, and linger on. Shit, I’ve lingered on this one for a decade.

Weasel word: Cadence

Cadence is a lovely word. Or at least it is when applied traditionally. It makes me think of like Irish poetry, or classical music, or some other thing I am too cretinous to appreciate. But if you hear it in an advertising context, you should probably run for cover. I’ve noticed people only whip out this beautiful word when trying to mask a truly hideous set of timings.

‘…unfortunately the cadence of approvals on this project requires us to go back to client later today…’

‘…we’ll need to work the weekend, to keep pace with the cadence of this pitch response…’

Don’t be dazzled by cadence’s charms. Tell them that it doesn’t align with the natural cadence of your week - 5 days on, 2 days off.

Get briefed last

When you go into production on a TVC, you brief 3 different directors. The first one you brief has a practical advantage - time. Often he or she will get briefed a couple of days before the third one. So they have some more time to craft their treatment. But I reckon the slot you want is the last one. Why? Because as a creative, I reckon my third briefing is the best one. And my first one can be a bit rubbish. There are things I haven’t thought through - the first briefing often happens the day after the script is approved by client. The act of talking about it with a director sharpens up my view about this or that. And it focuses my mind on what are the few key things that need to be nailed, for the spot to be a success. By the time I get to the third director, my brief is clear and concise. He or she might have less time, but I reckon they are in a great position to win the job.

Loretta Lynn, genius copywriter

Country music tends to maligned and kind of sneered at by popular culture, but I’ve always had a soft spot for it. One reason is just that some of the writing in country music is so brilliant. There is such clarity to it. Other genres’ lyrics are so often this kind of vague poetry. If you can even make out what the words are, the meaning is opaque - completely open to interpretation. Not in country. Country songs have a story to tell. Or a central idea. And every element of the song serves that idea - as clearly as possible.

There’s a song by Loretta Lynn, that I think is the perfect country song. It’s called ‘Miss being Mrs’, and she wrote it many years ago after her husband died, but it came out in 2005 when she did an album with Jack White. There are so many things I love about it, starting with the title. Three short words capture the story so poignantly. There’s also a slight wordplay/pun to it - country songs are great at using a little wordplay to make a song stick. So just the title has me intrigued and a little moved. But Loretta still has 3 minutes of song, and she doesn’t waste a second. Every single line goes after the heart strings. She creates this vivid portrait of grief. I don’t need to interpret it in the slightest. She just lays it out and it smashes me - even though I’ve never experienced that in my life. What a gift.

Ambiguity is overrated. Just hit play on the below video and have Loretta go for your jugular.

Scenes from the C-Suite

Often I’ll be following the news and see a public figure exhibiting behaviour I’ve encountered in my agency life. It used to happen a fair bit with Trump. I would often read about that way his staff would tippy toe around his volatile mood. If he was in a rage they would hold back bad news, and try to butter him up with good news or praise. Any time things were shared with him, it needed to be done in a way that accommodated his impatience/short attention span/illiteracy etc. And then any garbage idea he farted back at them would be furiously agreed with. Obviously no one I’ve worked with is on The Donald’s level, but boy I have seen versions of it. CEO’s or CCO’s who - if you caught them at a bad time - would just torch a week or more of creative work on a whim. Even worse, sometimes they would replace it with an idea of their own - that they have spent mere moments thinking on - and you now have to run with it. You just have to cop it of course. Being in the top job, that’s his prerogative. (I’ve only ever seen these traits in men lol).

Whilst it isn’t Trumpy, I also got that pang of familiarity when I saw this leaked text from NSW Premier Dominic Perrotet, to the CEO of Sydney Trains Matt Longland. I find it such a repulsive trait in a leader, when they just pile the pressure on someone beneath them to deliver a particular outcome…without any guidance on how they might get there. It amounts to ‘Just so you know, I’m going to be super pissed off (and blame you!) if this doesn’t come off’. I’ve seen CCO’s lay it on thick with GADs: ‘You have to get this idea sold - it’s a guaranteed award winner.’ I’ve also heard it from clients, who sometimes like to just re-iterate - sometimes mid-preso - that this product launch is CRUCIAL for the business. Or that the sales targets for it are HIGHLY ambitious. Okay. I am fully onboard with those outcomes. Let’s discuss how we can get there.

2021: Bring back the good ol' days of the pandemic

This past year was a bit of a bastard. And whilst I would love blame Omicron, or Omnicom, the real reason is a bit more mysterious. Firstly, why am I saying it was a dud year professionally? Because basically nothing I worked on got made. Having turned out plenty of ads in 2020, the second year of Covid was far less kind. And I don’t really have an explanation. It’s just how it goes sometimes. I certainly worked on some great briefs. With some great agencies - I spent most of the year with Clemenger Melbourne. It’s an agency I’ve long admired but never worked with before. And I was not disappointed - I met some incredibly talented people and some of the projects have been unreal. But even the great Clems is not immune to the high rate of attrition that is so common in our industry.

A few weeks ago I was at a 4th birthday party, talking to the lad’s mother, who is a teacher. She had asked how work was going and I said there was no shortage of it, but that nothing I had created this year…had actually been created. It took a little while for her to comprehend this.

“So, these brands get you to come up with all these ideas - and they pay you for them - but they don’t do anything with them?”

You’ve about captured it, Jules. There are times when it feels like the advertising industry is primarily a maker not of ads, but of inspiration for marketers and their bosses. Most days we are creating mere fodder - terabytes of slidecraft that just help the client decide what they really want.

Often what they want is to scrap the project for one reason or another. Other times they just opt for some fairly straight film, or something else traditional. Yes, 2021 has seen the continued floundering of activation as a channel. In an industry that has a lot of conceptual roadkill, no creature been splattered as frequently as the Non-Traditional Brand Act. Everyone asks for them. I would say that - comfortably - 50% of my time is spent coming up with them. And they NEVER get made. I have a few theories about why - but that might be another post for another day. Today, I wish to just bid 2021 adieu. I’m hoping that 2022 brings a bit more love from the ad gods.

A good time to give yourself an uppercut

If you ever find yourself in a client meeting, talking up some phrase you’ve coined, and suggesting ‘you can see it catching on, becoming part of the vernacular’ - do us a favour and punch yourself in the face.

No one’s group chat is going to split its sides as the resident larrikin says ‘Don’t get your Twinings in a twist’. Nor will ‘Grab life by the Bundabergs’ be the next YOLO.

It’s extremely rare, and impossible to predict, because it is a random byproduct of your ad just colliding with the chaos of culture.

Have I ever made such a claim about one of my lines? You bet I have haha. More than once. And each time, I absolutely deserved a smack in the chops.

Deadbeat Dad

One of the biggest things I’ve had to adjust to since going freelance is the wild variation in how much I can influence a campaign once it has been sold in. I’m always at the coalface when the idea is generated, but I’m rarely around come the day of the shoot.

The upside of this run-and-gun approach is that I get more work out. If you’ll forgive the crass metaphor, it can be a bit like the life of a sperm donor. I have lots of babies. But sometimes you see one of them out in the world and damn - the kid is ugly.

Other times it turns out great. Other times it turns out fine but is a bit unrecognisable - all that has survived from when I worked on it is the end line or something. The child unmistakably has my eyebrows, but nothing else. It can feel a bit odd to claim it as my work. And yeah, sometimes that munchkin is a minger. In those instances, it can feel as though this is the downside to freelance. Not being there for the kid! Not being around to shape it, and protect it.

In the end, I get a bit more philosophical, and more practical - am I sure I could have really changed the outcome had I remained involved? The answer I usually arrive at, if I’m honest, is no. Of course I would’ve made passionate arguments for this or that piece of music, or edit choice or whatever. And my CDs would’ve been in fierce agreement. In fact, they probably made most of those arguments in my absence. But the harsh reality is that the success rate of changing a client’s mind about such things is super low. Even as a full-timer, when I was a very doting father to ideas, there are these other Fathers and Mothers - with the Big Daddy being the client. Their opinion trumps all, as it should - they’re paying, and it’s their brand. And whilst you can usually win a couple of the one percenters, arguing the bigger bits - the kinds of decisions that can turn a brutish bub beautiful…well, I think that opportunities for persuasion are far more limited than most of us can bear to admit.

But maybe I’m just not persuasive enough.

I’m certainly a deadbeat dad.

Weasel word: Collaborative

Creatives are often asked to work in a ‘collaborative’ style - by both clients and account people - and we always say yes. Not only does it sound modern and innovative, if you say you don’t want to work collaboratively you just instantly sound like a jerk.

But a lot of the time ‘Let’s work collaboratively’ just means ‘I also want to be a creative on this one.’ Simple as that. The person saying it thinks they have ideas about what the concept should be, and they want you to go along with them/just jazz them up a bit. Sometimes their ideas are good, in which case you should. But sometimes their ideas are shit. If you say they are shit, be prepared to be accused of being un-collaborative.

NB: When a creative says they want to be collaborative, it has the inverse meaning. It usually means they don’t really give a shit about the job, and so they’re happy for you to give them the answer.