Awards Of Merit

Earlier this week we awarded the Turd d'Or to the "Breathtaking" Pepsi design document.

In the course of evaluating all the entries for the 2009 Bully Awards there were a number of nominees worthy of merit.  I would like to review a few of them and add some commentary.

"It's About Understanding Conversations" 

This was our runner-up. One of the wonderful things about this entry was how the message and the messenger meshed so nicely.

As one commenter said, "That dude ... has my vote. What a d-bag. He deserved a smack down..."

About the actual content of the video, another commentor said, "It's... completely unbearable to watch. After 30 seconds you feel a sharp decline in 'will to live'..."

Here at TAC global headquarters, we hope this video serves as a cautionary example to those inclined to blather on about "conversations" and "brands." 

"Synergy-Related Headcount-Adjustment" 

This did not receive as much popular support as I thought it deserved. Personally, I found it to be just about the most perfect example of corporate pr bullshit I've ever encountered.

To call firing thousands of people a "synergy-related headcount-adjustment" is the work of an evil genius. As one commenter said, it was "...full of the most vile form of bullshit around."

The fact that it was attributed to two guys named Simon Beresford-Wylie and Bosco Novak made it even more delicious. Dickens could not have named them better.

"We Started On A Journey..." 

This was another entry that I thought would receive more support.

As I said upon first viewing the piece, when some designer starts his pitch as if he was scaling the fucking Himalayas instead of playing with crayons, you know there's some massive bullshit heading your way.

One other thing I particularly liked was this sentence, "..there was a strong drive to bring a big messaging on to the carton where the single biggest billboarding was..."

This is a wonderful example of a big breakthrough in bullshit in the past few years. Marketing geeks have taken the gerundive form and applied it to nouns instead of verbs. So while a gerund used to be a nice little trick to turn a verb into a noun, bullshit artists are now using it to turn a noun into another noun. Why a noun needs to be turned into another noun nobody knows except the knuckleheads who think it sounds fancy. Rarely do you see it twice in one sentence. I was impressed. 

Full Disclosure...
....I have to admit something here. I never watched the full "Windows 7 Launch Party" or the full "Saturn Novel Adventure." I'm not as tough as I pretend to be.