Three Minute Happiness

James Cooper

I just won another 20 bucks from a colleague after Spain won the Euro 2008. It's my third in a row on the Spanish. I knew they were going to win straight from the off. If you could bet online over here in the states I would have cleaned up even more. Conventional wisdom had it that the Spanish can never win anything, they bottle it etc etc, that's why loads of people put money on Russia and especially Germany. To me that's just incredibly lazy thinking.

Bookies don't normally get things wrong. Why? Because they take emotion and conventional wisdom out of the equation. They look at the cold hard facts. So Spain were among the pre-tournament favourites - rightly so. Yet when it came to the final loads of people, especially English people, were betting on Germany. Why? Because that's how its always been. And there is a pithy little quote from Gary Lineker about Germany always winning that's just so funny, and 'oh, how true?, don't you just love Gary Lineker?' No. Bollocks.

Anyone capable of seeing things clearly should have been able to see that Spain have not lost a game in 20. This is a new generation who don't give a jot about previous failings. Also those failings are grossly overegged to sell more newspapers. England were very lucky to beat Spain in Euro 96 and how South Korea managed to pay off the referee in the 2000 World Cup and get away with it remains one of sports great mysteries. In fact Spain have been incredibly unlucky over the past 10 years or so. So forgetting all the media hype and sentamentality about Spain and our old foes the Germans it was a no-brainer.

It seems to me that it's the same in our business at the moment. It's easier to think and act as if everything is still the same. That the stereotypes will naturally prevail. In other words TV should lead, digital people don't really have ideas (not proper ideas!), clients are incapable of creativity, creative awards are everything, you get paid by the hour, blah blah blah - the Germans win - that's how it is. Like I said, Lazy Thinking. Slowly but surely pieces of work like Nike+, Uniqclock, Subservient Chicken, Lynx Feather etc and innovative practices like marketing that make money for clients and agencies or entrepreneurial deals will leave Gary Lineker and his traditional agency friends who can write clever little headlines behind once and for good. Like Jay Z giving Noel Gallagher the finger at Glastonbury, things changes, move on. Viva Espana!

 
(PS. Right at the start of this blog, a yeah and half ago, I wrote a post about how I had seen Gordon Brown speak at a conference many years ago and thought he was awful. I couldn't see how he was going to make a good PM as he had no charisma. That post had the most comments I had ever received - probably from all these, die hard Labour supporters who had a pop at me saying that I knew nothing about politics and I should stick to advertising etc etc.

You don't need to know anything about actual policies and the intricacies of real politics to know that someone personally is a dud. It's just a feeling that you get. The best people in our business are able to make snap decisions that usually play out to be correct - one idea is better than another etc etc. But again, just look at the facts. It's incredibly lazy thinking to merely assume that because Gordon was a good Chancellor and he was the new Labour PM that he would be any good. I'm sure loads of people wanted him to be good, to rally behind him but, for me, it was never going to happen.)