Not the chronic

Dear devoted blog-disciples, apologies for this most recent week long intermission; I'm sure you've all been hovering your cursors eagerly over refresh for my latest post? Never fear..here it is. The reason for this gaping hole of critical nourishment has been my reengaged preoccupation with actually making some damn ads or at least trying. Which, coincidentally brings me onto the reason and subject for this particular post.

So the competition brief I've been working on..although I'm sure I'm maybe not supposed to talk about it if i'm working on it.. is one for Hewlett Packard. Has anyone seen the new ad with Dr Dre? If not cast your eyes over this spacey shocker.

Now there's some fairly legitimate criticism I could raise here, most of which I'm sure you can see for yourself so I won't bother mentioning. However, I'm frustrated for another reason...and it's with HP. The HP brief (half-heartedly recycled for two years no doubt...please God don't let them see this) was put forward by a major advertising and marketing body, who for my sake what remains nameless. In a nutshell it's aim was to place HP tech in the forefront of creative minds as high-performance and cool. With specific consideration of competing with Apple; a tall order.

Apple's Macbooks are everywhere..the most visibly present example that comes to mind is DJ's. Nowadays every single DJ I can think of uses a Macbook.. so, and I hate to say this as a budding adman, it's nigh on impossible to compete on this level as it is. This ad fails to sufficiently push what sounds like a really good feature and majorly wastes an opportunity to borrow some organic credibility from Dre; the mask, a spaceship..does Dre produce dance, is that what he's renowned for? Are you serious?!

With regards to actually finding a solution to the problem of pushing HP into the forefront of creative minds I'm still thinking, and imagine I will be doing so for sometime. But I guarantee I'll come up with something, anything better than this. Whatever HP pull out of the bag it's going to have to be far far more savvy.