THOSE CLEVER CLEVER PRINT ADS...

Manya times have I seen print work that I have to focus on for a good minute or so before I get what the sh*t it's on about...Yes to the point where I actually smile sometimes hiding my incomprehension...'Nice...niiiiice, clever bastards!!'




I think we have all exprienced something of the sort when an eager art director strolls up to you and throws the layout or art directors club annual on to your desk with an eager smile leaving you feeling pretty stupid for a couple of days...

Yes these are the ads that have populated much of the print awards spectrum, the spectrum that dominates the collective consiouness of any creative team with a hint of ambition...

I don't doubt that there was a time when people might have wanted to allocate sometime with an ad, trying to figure it out...

Linda Stone went on about continuous partial attention, it is was it sounds like. Think of the type of attention you devoted to a madium 15 years ago and compare that to the same medium today...you might struggle to narrow down your present day media selection due to it's chaotic nature...You've got Lost on, poking away on facebook while you check our emails and reply to someone on msn,not to mention texting away on ur phone etc...
15 years ago if you're playing Shinobi on your Amiga, then you're playing Shinobi on your Amiga...and if your mother yells out 'pick up the phone' from the next room, you're pissed off...

We once sat at a table with 1 maincourse and we loved it, now we have a collection of mezza, sushi, steak and an array of desert to pick from...the way we eat has changed...there is no longer an appetizer, main and desert...nope now we are binging on sushi, cheesecake, fries, steak and kibi bi laban while sipping on Jose, Raki and 'Ocha'

In simpler terms, content supply has flooded content demand...and our attention is being gang-banged.

So amidst the plethora of attention craving content, where does a magazine fit in, where does an ad in that magazine fit in...subtle advertising requires someone to actively sit scan an image in an ad that looks normal and search for that pun.

The only people I can imagine doing that today are the minority of 1) People on the crapper who keep forgetting to change crapper reading material and have read every word in Maxim and 2) People who spend 3 hours a day pissing on each others work on adsoftheworld

Oh and the judges

ps. The picture is of a friend of mine and ex colleague who struggled so much he became a consultant who spends his life on a plane.