Via Fon­tanel: Gon­zo. I've prob­a­bly been too long too close to the ad­ver­tis­ing in­dus­try to look at ads in a way a nor­mal mem­ber of the gen­er­al pub­lic would, and I can only imag­ine how things would be for some­one who's been too long too close to the porn in­dus­try, but I def­i­nite­ly agree with Gor­don when he says "Gon­zo’s rise is as­sured, not be­cause it’s good, but be­cause its ide­al con­sumer isn’t the con­sumer, it’s the brand man­ag­er". I don't even re­mem­ber if I rant­ed about it be­fore, but more and more ads are just the mood boards re­lat­ed to ads. Mood boards used to be only a tool that was in­ter­nal­ly used by an ad­ver­tis­ing agency to get the mem­bers of the cre­ative team to com­mu­ni­cate about and in the end agree about what kind of mood a brand had to com­mu­ni­cate. It could in­volve shoot­ing some rough graph­ic or video ma­te­r­i­al or throw­ing some­thing to­geth­er with stock pho­tos but when that was done that was just the be­gin­ning. In a brain­storm in a cou­ple of sec­onds some­one can come up with the im­age of sky­div­ing and the oth­er mem­bers of the team then in­stant­ly know what that stands for and how it de­fines what they are do­ing. But then the whole mood had to be trans­lat­ed to a con­cept and an im­ple­men­ta­tion, which prob­a­bly didn't in­clude sky­div­ing, but some­thing that has the same mood but makes more sense when you think about it longer than in a brain­storm ses­sion. But to­day it looks like the mood board is done in high res­o­lu­tion and then just used as the ad, with­out trans­lat­ing it to a con­cept and im­ple­ment­ing it. Also be­cause the web gives the free­dom to cre­ate your own for­mats you don't even have to do any trans­la­tion to make it fit in for ex­am­ple a 30 sec­ond TC. If your mood board is a 30 minute video, just dump it on­line, no need to trans­late it to some­thing that makes it a good 30 sec­ond TC. It's like Ge­orge W. Bush's speech­es in which he keeps just say­ing things like "I'm here to tell you that...", or "I'm here to re­as­sure you..."; and that is how he does that. It's stat­ing the brief­ing and not both­er­ing to try to trans­late the brief­ing into some­thing com­pelling. Peo­ple in­volved with brief­in­gs, or the brand man­agers judg­ing the mood boards, do know whether they like it or not, but prob­a­bly for­get that the gen­er­al pub­lic isn't in­ter­est­ed in some high lev­el step in the cre­ative pro­ces, and needs a trans­la­tion. While a book ex­plain­ing how to write good jokes can be very good, that doesn't mean it must be very fun­ny. And while a mood board can de­fine a brand, it doesn't com­mu­ni­cate the brand to the gen­er­al pub­lic, but just to the brand man­ag­er. Who is then peer-re­viewed by oth­er brand man­agers who don't get it and maybe even giv­en some awards by the in­dus­try who doesn't care if it's the award for best mood board or best ad. And this is only just the be­gin­ning...