This is me being woken up by drunks on our agency summer holiday. Much to my shame, I am genuinely afraid.
But that’s my lot for the year because Halloween is about as scary as a PG-rated ‘horror’ film starring a grown up Haley-Joel Osment.
Actually, that would be pretty scary. Not only does he see dead people, he’s been eating them.
But Halloween is shit. The same, crappy costumes wheel their way onto the shelves every year and it’s down to the creative types to improvise a Zombie Bin Laden, a ghoulish Gaddafi, or maybe even a skeletal Steve Jobs.
A George Osborne mask would shit me up more though. Reality is much scarier than the rent-a-ghosts of Halloween. I even found bits of The Greatest Movie Ever Sold scary - scary because it contains real life scenes from the world of advertising.
The latest film from Morgan Spurlock rakes the muck on marketing. You’ll remember he ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month, got fat and turned the colour of a Quarter Pounder. Now he’s approaching advertisers to fund his movie entirely through product placement. Become the beast to expose the beast.
I’m not one to scrutinise commercial ethics. I work in advertising, I’ve made my pact with the devil and I’ll sell guns to kids if I have to. So what could scary about a guy pitching a few ideas to make his picture?
Watch this clip
The handlebar mustache and the Bride of Frankenstein client are genuinely frightening but if you’ve worked in a creative department, it would have been how all the creative routes got blown out for a bog-standard competitor ad that would have spooked you.
You don’t need to see the film to know what ad he ends up making. You’ve seen it a million times. The graphs, stats, condescending tone of voice; it all blends into noise that we have no other choice but to ignore. Whatever you think of the concepts, if the client's laughter was genuine then isn't there a good chance other people will do the same? Instead, they ask for something no one will react to.
Feels like adverts have become a bit like the Halloween masks on the shelf in Tesco. We’ve seen them before and they don’t quite do the trick. What's everyone so afraid of?