Alex Kirk

Amid all the advertising talk about branded content these days, it's worth remembering that skateboard companies just call it 'content' and have been doing it like that forever.

Like all skateboarding companies, Tired Skateboards have their content game locked - but they do it with a twist, one that would give most advertisers a serious fit of the worries. Basically, they're honest.

Not 'honest' as compared to 'dishonest', but realistic and perceptive about who their target market is, and it's incredibly powerful - not to mention gut-wrenchingly funny.

You see, Tired Skateboards cater specifically for skaters of a certain age - as the blurb for the video below goes, 'some of us had it, then lost it. Most of us never had it, but still love it'. This is insight applied to communication at its sharpest.

As a comparison, go and watch literally any other form of advertising for athletic goods - super-human ability, impossible skill, incomprehensible stomachs - and they all rely entirely on the aspirational to draw you in. "Just Do It", "Impossible Is Nothing", all these slogans start from a fundamental point that reminds you that you are somehow not good enough. Even when they're just mucking around - Tiger Woods bouncing the ball on his club, or David Beckham and Jonny Wilkinsonswapping balls for penalty & conversion practice - they're still reminding you that they are amazing and you are not.

That's all well and good, and some of those adverts remain classics and for good reason. But in contrast, Tired's 'athletes' are mainly middle-aged guys who land about half of their tricks, and land most of those pretty badly.

Look and listen to the influence of rock music visualized over the past century.

In Quartz today, how tablets are doing an iTunes on the desktop market and how "PCs are becoming a niche market".

One of Lifehacker's loveliest 'Best Five' features ever, on notebooks.

Thanks, The Guardian! I was just in the mood to read the most narrow, daft, naive, and patronising view of social TV *ever*! 

My New Favourite Ad: Yoinks! *THIS* is how you do experiential. By crikey, this is awesome.

Just a quick note to self - things only happen because of external influences, not in isolation. Looking at this Voltron / Sharktopus / Sharknado mega-merger of Omnicom and Publicis, I'm wondering just what the external influence is that's causing it all.

It's not jealousy or anything as intrinsically daft as simply wanting to be bigger than WPP. At least, I hope not - if the world actually works like that we might as well all just pack up and go home. 

For me, this is the logical end-product of the last decade-plus of procurement-driven pitching, of clients demanding more for less and - agency and media-owner side - the entire industry caving to those demands in order to compete and survive.

There's a nice post on Digiday (who came up with that solid Sharknado gag about the whole thing) which talks about the lack of client / agency loyalty driving companies to 'diversify risk'. They're right - but that makes it sound way too clever or business-like. 

This is self-protection, pure and simple. God knows how you smash together two incredibly complex networks like that and expect it to work, but if they didn't they'd simply stay locked n the merry-go-round of clients switching networks based on price, with the money going somewhere else. External influence, meet inevitable outcome.

The bottom line is that CMOs get the agency networks they deserve. That two of the previous biggest three networks - each of which were true giants on their own - feel the need to react to the business environment by merging, instead of fighting like crazed dogs for their independence (as they would in a previous age) says more about the customer than the service provider.