I always liked John Webster's work - although I never found the Cadbury Smash Martians to be all that endearing.
If you look at the date on the lower right hand side of the clipping in the picture you'll see it was January 1988. I tore it out of Campaign magazine when I was a copywriter, working at an advertisng agency called Rialto. My office had a panoramic view of the Auckland harbour. When I wasn't looking out of it I was tearing things out of Campaign.
The interesting thing about the viewpoint by Mr Webster (sadly now deceased)is that almost everything he said back then, 20 years ago, is just as true as it ever was.
"Whoever it was that created the human mind designed it to respond to a set of basic emotions: love, fear, pride, envy, humour-things like that. Anyway, in the list of of priorities it's fair to guess "scratch video" came pretty low"
"Faced with the onslaught of computer-graphics, paint-on-film animation, grain and pop-promo look-alikes, how did the human mind respond? It switched over, as a man, to EastEnders, consistently the most popular programme of the year and not a laser in sight."
Perhaps the web changes that, rebalances things - Web 2.0 at least. Can't remember when I last visited a Flash animated site.
I like the crusty old artifact - which fell out of a book by that other crusty old artifact David Ogilvy, Blood Brains and Beer, his autobiography.
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