I’ve never used this blog to criticise or slander other people’s creativity. The fat content in Pret sandwiches, yes, but never the ideas that people put out there. Anyone brave enough to follow your creative star, I salute you. That sentiment is really what this blog’s about.

But then I saw the chip ad. And I think perhaps Microsoft is confident and comfortable in its own skin enough to take a tad of criticism.

I don’t know where to start, but let’s start with this ginormous widescreen illuminated poster in Edgware Road. Lord knows how wide it is or what size? 192 sheet? Good old 96 sheet was the biggest I ever dressed!

And let’s rewind still further to the strat-errrr-geee.

The campaign is to launch  Windows 7, the Microserfs latest attempt at being nowhere near as good as Mac when it comes to operating systems. It comes after the 3 year debacle that was Windows Vista, the clunky, complex and deeply faulted system that so many Windows users simply ignored, sticking to their quaint old XP.

(Yes I use a Windows VAIO as well as my home and office Macs, so I have a foot in the Gates camp and the right to an opinion.)

So what is the strategy that the £200k ++ planners have come up with? Simply that YOU created Windows 7. ‘I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea.’

I mean hello, how obvious is this? Everyone knows that software is developed using customer feedback. Isn’t that what Beta testing is? Aren’t we living (thank you T Blair) in a country shaped by focus groups?

The campaign is almost staggeringly patronising. I haven’t memorised the TV scripts, but one has a slightly Sloaney girl in the back of a taxi, having a Eureka Big A-ha moment realising that ‘I wanted Windows simpler, so they made it that way’, or words to that effect.

For once I’m lost for words – it’s a real insult to their customers’ intelligence.

Most of the print executions are pretty harmless, featuring models out of that stock of Central Casting ‘real people’ types that somehow don’t have the ring of authenticity at all.

At least they don’t have the funky girl of mixed ethnic background with the explosive mane of frizzy hair who seems to appear in every ad from M&S through to Dove. I’ve actually never see anyone look like that in normal life, but I guess in adland that’s an accepted take on ethnicity. Why can’t we see Christine Ohuruogo-alikes in our ads or even lads cut along the lines of Didier Drogba. (Man, he’s on fire.)

But I digress. I thought the campaign was just patronising and bland until I saw the fellow staring out onto the Edgware Road munching deep fried potatoes.

Call me old fashioned, but I quite like people with manners, particularly when it comes to eating. I know there was a period at the end of the nineties where agencies – led by the flavour of that day, HHCL – tried to get as many revolting images of gluttony in their ads as possible. Even across the year I remember the Pot Noodles being slobbered by various dysfunctionals. I confess it was quite funny at the time, and carried the shock of the new or rather new-on-TV. But do we need to go back there? Can’t Beautiful be the new Ugly?

And they’ve also fallen into the trap of casting the agency. Doesn’t he look like a planner in a Soho agency? Or maybe Noho? He looks very Saatchi and Scratchy. Long sleeve T, calculated stubble, and that look of concentrated arsiness that only an adman can give. (And I should know.) He’s slumped in the local, forcing a chip into his gob.

Now really Mike Rosoft, do we really want to look at this guy on a 70 foot long poster? Does he make you feel happy, inspired, challenged, educated? Nope. Personally I’d just like to set my retriever on him or send him into Brogans on Fulham Road on Match Day with an Arsenal shirt on, but there you go.

It’s just a really horrible image. Not artful, not funny, not stimulating. But he does look like the people who created the ad. Probably.

When I was in Big Agencies, back in the day, I had a general rule of thumb that the ads I was proud of would be the one I could one day stick on the wall in my study in the retirement home, and feel that I’d at least had a go. It didn’t have to be a beautiful ad – Nike was rude, Canon was weird, BA was cheeky, Emirates was thoughtful. But it had to be an ad, an image, a communication that would fit the looks-good-in-your-dotage test.

I mean how could you really be proud of this ad?

The model’s Mr Surly. The photography’s like it was done on a Nokia n73. As client or creative director, I wouldn’t accept an ad like that in a million years. The words aren’t special. The strategy’s generic, at best. But enough.

Rant over.

Anyway I’m off to lie on the sofa, turn on the web cam, and eat some McCains, yeah!   

Taking a five minute break from writing to seek inspiration on the Internet, I found this colourful background to the name I share with the company. (source: Internet Surname Database)

"Percival: This interesting name, with variant spellings Perceval, Percifull, Purcifer and Passifull, derives from the male given name Perceval, first recorded as the name of the hero of an epic poem by the 12th Century French poet Chretien de Troyes, describing the quest for the holy grail or chalice. The name is fancifully taken from the French elements "percer", to pierce or breach, plus "val", a valley, hence "pierce the valley", a nickname presumably given to a keen poacher or soldier remembered for his breach of a fortification. The exact origin of the name is uncertain; however, the most likely source is the Celtic "Peredur" from the Old Welsh meaning "warrior of the cauldron". This name was borne by a Welsh legendary hero of the Middle Ages and the cognate Old Welsh "Pair-cyfall" means "warrior of the Chalice". Occasionally, the name may be of French locational origin from Perc(h)eval in Calvados, Normandy, as in Richard de Percevill (Staffordshire, 1203). The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of William Percevall, which was dated 1229, in the "Calendar of the Close Rolls", Shropshire, during the reign of King Henry III known as "The Frenchman", 1216 - 1272." 

I've always been a FroggyPhile, so my Gallic sympathies suddenly stack up!

Well we were busy the last quarter of 2008 so it was time all our new work made a debut on this site.

Click here to see our new portfolio, with enhanced navigation thrown in for good measure too.

The last couple of months we’ve been shuttling down to the Pembrokeshire National Park, an enchanted corner of Wales.

Here I’ve been working at a place called Bluestone, a completely new take on what a holiday resort can be.

In a simply breathtaking valley, and centred around a traditional Welsh village, it’s a total retreat, a place to calm down, chill out and generally forget who the hell you are.

For once, I’ve been the middle man, a consultant working with a creative agency (redrivercreative.com) and a technical agency (fusionworkshop.com) to create a brand spanking new website, http://www.bluestonewales.com

Bluestone seems to be inhabited by the nicest people in the world ever. (I always remember the tennis commentator Dan Maskell saying of a Seventies tennis ace, Tom Gorman:  “Tom Gorman. One of the nicest men….in the world.” Quite what the empirical or contextual basis for this sweeping statement was, I’ll never know, but it caused a giggle or three at the time.)

Last night was quiz night in the Tafarn Pub in the village, and I can now tell you that Q and Z are the highest scoring Scrabble letters. Great camaraderie, superb service, and uber quaffable local ale.

Bluestone deserves to – and will  – succeed. It’s endlessly endearing, ‘green’ to the core (the Blue Lagoon water park is powered entirely by biomass fuel grown on site) and situated in a matchless location. The Coastal Path with endless hiking and whale watching opportunities is nearby, they’ll soon be Britain’s first new racecourse in decades just twenty minutes away…..I could go on and on, it’s just a totally different, fresh experience.

A place to lose yourself and find yourself.

(Spoiler warning: this blog entry contains cheese.)

I skied twenty consecutive seasons, and then suddenly the passion went dead.

Maybe it was some bad luck with poor snow conditions, ill-fitting ski boots (my last girlfriend called me Shrek Feet, enough said), the ridiculous cost of a ski holiday (yes white powder is an expensive Class A drug), or a host of other reasons. But I missed 3 consecutive seasons on the bounce. I fell out of love with hurtling down mountains. 

Until….approaching Christmas, with nothing other than London based r’n’r planned for New Year, a friend and I suddenly imagineered a week in the Alps. And did it.

The only place with a spare bed left in the whole Tarentaise Valley was La Plagne, so that’s where we headed.

The early signs didn’t augur well. The road we had to negotiate up to the resort had more hairpins than Elsie Tanner, and the village was a selection of boxy sixties buildings, among which were the first tower blocks I’ve ever seen in the mountains. Chocolate Box charm was thin on the ground.

Thankfully, the snow situation was quite the opposite. The whole place was carpeted in the white stuff.

Our hotel, the Araucaria, was new and meant well with vaguely Art Deco inspired décor and ski lockers that worked on your electronic room key (why don’t all ski hotels have these?) It was fabulously located at the bottom of the slalom slope so you could have a late afternoon aperitif on your bedroom balcony and catch all the races. Basically a nice place, apart from the hyperactive Maitre’D who in the charm stakes made Basil Fawlty look like Basil Brush.

I’ve always found skiing a totally creative experience and source of almost divine inspiration, a time when the mountains rule and you think expansive thoughts. (Laurence, cut the spiritual crap, Ed.)

But the first couple of days, I just couldn’t get it right. My boots were adjusted all wrong, I bruised the top of my foot so each turn was agony, and my short short curvy carving skis felt all wrong to a man who’d skied his formative years on 203cm planks with nary a curve between them.

The sun was great, the snow was new, but I wondered if I’d ever get back ‘that feeling’.

And then: like it always does with anything truly addictive, the magic cut in. We skied across the Paradiski region to Les Arcs, and suddenly we were on kind red runs snaking through the trees, with hardly a soul on them, and then my knees began to flex, and that sensation of feeling the skis through the balls of your feet and effortlessly unweighting from one to the other began to cut in (yes I know that’s Old School technique, but hey ho!).

My friend and I weave in and out of each other’s tracks, and I see a smile even bigger than my own. And briefly, oh so briefly, I feel like I’m flying and master of all I survey.

And it may sound cheesy, corny, call it what you will – and it maybe it’s the Vin Chaud talking - but I see next year and all the creative projects, for me and for work, and we can make them fly too. Sometimes creativity comes easily, sometimes you have to carve it out.

Not to the tune of Hot Chocolate’s ‘It started with a kiss’, but 2008 literally started for me at the world’s most famous hotel. (I noted it here).

And after a great start, in the words of Frank Sinatra, it was a very good year.

But what of the warily anticipated 2009? Step in the cock-eyed optimist.

The credit crunch, correction, recession – call it what you will – is a problem, sure. But it’s also an opportunity. Creativity will be at a premium than ever. When it’s harder than ever to make a sale, you need big ideas on your side.

So to close the year, here’s wishing all our clients and friends a resilient, resourceful, rebounding 2009.