Archive for May, 2009
Diet another day
While wading through the Sunday papers this morning I came across this shot in the Sunday Times from a 1964 bond girl photo session for Thunderball:
The thing that immediately struck me is while all three women are undeniably beautiful, they are also (gasp!) normal sized.
Compared to this shot of Halle Berry as Jinx in 2002’s Die Another Day, you can see just how far the perception of what body shape and size is considered sexy has shifted in the last 40 years.
I know I have a real bee in my bonnet at the moment about female beauty and body image (see my previous rants here and here), but it’s shocking to realise just how far the beauty bar has been raised.
In a bikini, I’m a similar shape as the blonde (Molly Peters, who played a nurse called Patricia Fearing) in the top picture, but I don’t think the 007 producers will be on the phone any time soon…
we didn’t budget for this…
Via Lenise comes this great look at the current state of the vendor/client relationship.
I have so been there…
Thanks to facebook, you now get papped at parties
Late last Friday night I wasted a good half hour of my life I could have better spent sleeping having a major Clothes Crisis.
The crisis was in response to my sister’s Hen Do the following day, but it wasn’t the event itself that meant half my wardrobe was flung across my bedroom – it was the thought of the avalanche of photos on facebook that would inevitably follow.
It used to be that you could rock up to a party having a bad hair/ clothes/ skin day and the only evidence would be a blurry 4×6 photo kept in its Snappy Snaps envelope, never to see that light of day again.
But what with mobile cameraphones complete with flash and zoom, digital cameras, flickr and facebook, no social event goes unrecorded for posterity. That particularly unflattering camera angle, slightly too revealing top or ill advised snog can be easily viewed by friends, relatives, colleagues, prospective employers and blind dates.
I’m starting to feel empathy towards the celebrities who can’t step out of their front door without getting papped. At least I know that I only have to watch out for the tell tale flash at social events, not when putting the bins out too.
Perhaps soon every wedding invitation will carry a polite note asking guests to leave their cameras at home – not because some magazine has bought the photo rights, but that the poor bride wants to control the quality and quantity of pictures recording her big day for eternity.
In this example of Bad Facebook Picture Syndrome, it would have probably helped if any of us had actually been looking at the person taking the picture…
I’m giving it to you straight
In my humble opinion, this newish ad from Magners for their pear cider is just one tiny element away from being great
The proposition makes a lot of sense, the creative concept works, the script is tight, but the casting is just wrong. Every time the actor raises his hands to demonstrate his exasperation with the world I want to slap him, not empathise…
Time waits for no agency (or planner)
We were clearing out a cupboard at work last month and found some photos from when the business was just getting started over 20 years ago. A few faces from the photos are still with the agency today and they told me about the days when desks were for writing not typing on, when efficient secretaries kept everything running smoothly, the whole place reeked of fags and 3 hour boozy lunches were not exactly unusual…
Looking back at the pics (apart from noticing how tidy everything looks), it struck me that it was another great reminder of how nothing stands still, however much you want it to.
If you’d told the account handlers in the photo that the focus of their business would have shifted away from all things advertising towards digital and below the line, that the headcount would have exploded (while the space-per-desk exponentially reduced) and that we’d have enough computer power in the building to launch a space shuttle – about 200 times over, they might have been sceptical.
But for me the most interesting thing is that the agency model and the communications industry itself is still changing. Companies and industries can’t stand still, if they don’t keep moving forward they will inevitably start slipping back. Technology (particularly the online side of things) is moving so fast that its virtually impossible to predict what an ‘agency’ will look like in ten years time, or even five.
Planning as a discipline has also changed massively in the ten years I’ve been involved, mainly due to the volume and quality of information we now have online at our fingertips. It has also got better known, hopefully more understood and thanks to the web, better connected. The big question is, with all of this change and refocusing, what will the future role of Planning look like?
Bring on the Summer
So 2009 is apparently going to be the Year of the Staycation, with people staying at home to avoid travel and accommodation costs but still behaving in holiday mode and enjoying what the local area has to offer.
This year is also being heralded as the return of the Great British Summer Holiday, with caravan sites and holiday parks reporting massive booking uplifts.
With an optimistic long range weather forecast added into the mix, it seems that everything is in place to encourage us to enjoy old fashioned holidays and days out here in the UK rather than wallet busting jaunts abroad.
It’s not only the domestic tourism and leisure industry that is bigging up Summer; Bulmers have got in on the act with their squeezing the best out of Summer ads (first aired in 08 I think):
Bold 2in1 do seem to be stretching the idea a bit though by suggesting that all you need for a fun and sun filled family day out at the seaside is a pile of fluffy and softly fragranced towels…
Bring on the Summer ..To blog or not to blog
I’m coming round to thinking that what people don’t blog about is just as interesting as what they do.
The Mommy Bloggers who make a living recounting blow-by-blow accounts of their family life (childbirth horror stories being particularly popular) seem to be in the minority of higher profile blogs in that they share a lot about their Major Life Events.
The authors of most topic-specific blogs tend to be happy to share their life in a twittery day-to-day kind of way, but when it comes to bigger stuff like relationships or illness, it seems that lots of topics are off bounds.
I’m just as guilty as the next blogger of choosing to keep some elements of my private life private, but with so many sources of online information, it can be difficult to keep anything under wraps for long (these days a LinkedIn status update ‘now available for freelance projects’ can be a giveaway of a redundancy for example).
But perhaps this smokescreen can be a good thing – Lauren blogged recently about how announcing a loved one’s death within the digital social realm doesn’t have any etiquette yet. As she pointed out, what happens to your online life should you die? Should you nominate someone to put a ‘no longer with us’ bounce back on your email or delete your facebook account?
as easy as 1-23
Also via AdAge I’m loving the new Apple getamac online ad, detailing the one-through-twenty-three easy steps to set up a PC. I particularly like number 23 which is ‘cross fingers’…
50 cars or one coach – driving the point home
Via AdAge I found Swedish airport coach brand Flygbussarna’s brilliant anti-car campaign by Acne Creative. They installed a coach made up of 50 cars by the motorway leading to the biggest airport in Sweden to make a point about CO2 emissions.
Raising the beauty bar – again
There was another piece about celebrity middle aged bikini bodies in last weekend’s paper, citing the latest entrants to the Fabulous For her Age club like Cindy Crawford and Courtney Cox Arquette, who have managed to maintain their bodies at perfect 20-something standards well into their 40s.
google image results for ‘Nicolette Sheridan beach’ – she’s 45…
This is perhaps a natural evolution of the Helen Mirren in a bikini fuss from last July, where she was widely applauded for looking Fabulous For Her Age, but at least she looked brilliant for her age, rather than brilliant when compared to women two or three decades her junior.
It seems that in the last few years (or even months) the beauty bar has been raised significantly. And women are responding to this with more than a little help from the medical profession. At dinner the other night, both of the thirty something women I was dining with had just had their braces removed. I can think of another three women I know who are currently sporting train tracks, a couple of recent boob jobs, one botox and a lady who went off and quietly got a facelift so good I thought she’d just been on a very restful holiday.
I can’t help wondering who we are spending all this time and money improving our appearance for. Is it for self confidence? Or is it because the perceived pressure is now there for us to become ageless beauties?
If the external pressure to conform to this model of perfection continues, the world is going to become a very boring place full of ageless practically perfect faces and bodies. And I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be less than perfect but uniquely me.
