The British Superbowl

Last week, the whole office adjourned to the Walker to see the British TV advertising awards. It got me wondering, among other things, whether somewhere in Great Britain , there was a crowd of urbane hipsters gathering to see the American TV commercial awards. Probably not.

Which is not to say that we can’t make great ads here too. I don’t doubt that there may be such an awards screening for our own TV commercials. (The Superbowl functions in this way, I suppose, but the high entry fee–up this year to something like $4 million per minute– insures that these are merely expensive ads, not necessarily artful ones.) It’s been said many times that the best minds of the present generation are working in advertising, rather than writing novels or making films or painting masterpieces or any of the other things brilliant people are supposed to be doing with themselves. As I tried to think of a few good examples of the American art form, I didn’t have much trouble. In other words, great British TV commercials don’t necessarily asperse their American counterparts. Buck up, friend–we have some great ads here too, for what it’s worth.

No, the real attraction is in the exotic otherness, the subtle differences in what’s allowed and expected in TV abroad. The nifty thing is that Brits, having sent most of their Puritans to America hundreds of years ago, treat themselves to more nudity and swearing. That salaciousness adds up to more than just fart jokes and bare breasts, though–it cultivates a permissiveness throughout the whole medium, and that means TV will occasionally be challenging and even artful in ways you never see here. (The artful and the challenging tend to find a home here at HBO–where there are no commercials per se.)

Humor of course is almost as effective as sex as a selling device—and it’s much more difficult to do well. As you might expect, most of the best ads in this year’s awards are laugh-out-loud funny. But the relative freedom of the British medium also pushes the envelope in disturbing ways. British public service announcements, for example, tend to be shocking beyond description. In particular, there are a series of highly graphic car-accident PSAs this year, including a heartbreakingly realistic reenactment of a car colliding in slow-mo with a child crossing a street. This ad has already given me nightmares—and I’m a guy who’s fully versed in Unreal Tournament, Wes Craven, and all the other signifiers of red-blooded American violence-as-entertainment.

The main distinction in British and American advertising, from my point of view, is the same distinction that exists between good and bad advertising in any culture. Like anything else in media, we remember the good and forget the bad—the average being perhaps the most forgettable of all. Good advertising works the way a good book or movie or CD works—it stands out, you remember it, you talk about it with your friends. And if the advertisers are lucky, you associate it with whatever brand it is that they’re peddling.

One can only hope that the capacity audience at the Walker last week was filled with Twin Cities advertising professionals (there are as many here as practically anywhere, as a matter of fact) walked away with this endorsement: The finest ads in the British TV commercial awards are powerful and funny and sexy and mighty creative in themselves, as miniature movies. “Extending the brand” of their bankrolling advertisers is, though certainly not accidental, almost incidental.

Ad people undoubtedly fight this battle every day—convincing advertisers that good advertising needs to innovate, and in some cases that may not mean hiring a supermodel to scream a brand name and a price for 30 seconds. They should approach their clients with the rare attitude of the wisest writers—that good writing flatters all writers. Good ads are not nearly as pernicious as bad ones.

There’s an interesting flip of the script going on here. Movies, books, CDs are increasingly driven by bottom-line formulas. It’s the advertisers who are, in many cases, given more freedom to explore creatively and artistically. It’s no accident that some of our most artful and credible musicians, movie directors, actors, and writers are working in advertising. And even if they never come back over from the dark side, we can still take a moment to appreciate it when they use their powers for the attenuated good of a memorable commercial.