My putting in the third consecutive CT post on the Bernanke appointment is exacerbated by the fact that it’s only a quick link, but redeemed by the quality of the link. As always, Max Sawicky has his priorities in order:
Best of all is the passing over of the obnoxious Martin Feldstein, who will have to content himself with endless attacks on Social Security from his bunghole at Harvard University
It’s true. Feldstein’s work on Social Security has been, by and large, disgracefully bad (in particular, his claim that SS reduced private saving was based on an error in a computer program; Brad DeLong rather coyly says that these days Feldstein “prefers to stress other points” but he has never really retreated from this claim) and I hope Max continues reminding the world of this fact forever.
Oh yeh, Guinness. This from Private Eye’s “Ad Nauseam” column. I still haven’t seen the thing myself but it’s an interesting alternative view:
Guinness is one of adlands’ most hallowed brands. It featured in the very first commercial break, and since then its reputation as a pioneering advertiser has grown and grown, thanks to an accrual of work involving toucans, Rutger Hauer, fish on bicycles and dancing Eskimos.
Each new Guinness advert, therefore, is unusual – people actually want to see it. But this in turn lumbers every new spot with the responsibility of living up to the legacy. Since 1999’s Surfer, a self-consciously arty epic that was voted the best ad of all time, Guinness’s agency AMV has been trying to repeat the trick with ever more self-consciously arty epics. As a result, the last offering, Anthony Minghella’s nauseatingly over-produced fable Mustang, is best remembered as a cautionary tale of what happens when adland disappears up its own epic backside.
So what of the new, £1m ad? It’s called “noitulove”, or “evolution” backwards and that’s exactly what we get: 60 seconds of CGI wizardry as three men in a pub are catapulted back in time to their evolutionary origins as bog-hoppers wallowing in primordial goo. “Good Things Come To Those Who Wait” runs the strap, the implication being that the entire human achievement has led us to three blokes in a pub.
For an ad about evolution it’s ironic that the strapline is a retrograde step, another throwback to the heady days of the Surfer spot. Visually, “noitulove” moves so judderingly fast it takes several viewings to decipher, and even when you do, the impression is of another magnificent achievement for the post-production magicians papering over a void where there should be a new idea. In short, fans of quality advertising will just have to wait a little bit longer for another good thing to come.
{ 4 comments }
Ray 10.25.05 at 6:03 am
You know you’re the second person on CT to refer to Private Eye’s opinion of the Guinness ad…
https://crookedtimber.org/2005/10/23/guinness-evolution-ad/#comment-114151
Tim Worstall 10.25.05 at 11:12 am
But will it be banned in Kansas?
CalDem 10.25.05 at 1:18 pm
A good friend TA’ed for Feldsteins huge econ seminar at Harvard. The first year she TA’ed he talked about tradeable pollution permit markets and how once they were put in operation people would see that the cost of environmental regulation was really high. She talked to him afterwards and showed him that, in fact, a market was in effect for Sulfur Dioxide and prices had been well BELOW what economists had predicted, showing that the costs of environmental regulation is lower than economists had thought. He said he would correct it the next year.
The next year, he gets up to do his environmental lecture and repeats the same erroneous claim that permit markets would show the high cost of environmental regulation.
The guy just can’t see beyond his ideological blinkers.
Brad DeLong 10.25.05 at 4:28 pm
“Coy.” Moi?
Had we but world enough, and time…
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