Our latest campaign for Honda got some coverage in the national press yesterday.

Claire Beale wrote in The Independent:

"Great ads…are hard to find. Bland mediocrity is the norm.
So when you manage a great one: feel proud, collect the awards, bank
the bonus, but don’t bet on your next ad being as good. Your adland
peers certainly won’t. They’ll be sharpening their blogging fingers
ready to knife your next piece of work for failing miserably to match
the ground-breaking standards of its predecessor.

Unfair, but
remember what Gore Vidal said: "Whenever a friend succeeds, a little
something in me dies." If he worked in adland, he’d probably have added
"so I’ll slag off every ad they do from here on, so they know they’re
past their best."

Spare a thought then for Wieden &
Kennedy, the agency responsible for one of the greatest ads of recent
years: the Honda "Cog" commercial. That’s the one with all the car
parts assembled in an amazing chain reaction that eventually starts a
Honda car.

Naturally, every Honda ad from W&K ever since has
sparked passionate debate about whether it’s as good as Cog and
generally the conclusion is "no". Which is fair enough.

Few ads
from any advertiser are as good as Cog. Just a shame that W&K’s
greatest triumph should put every successive Honda ad it does in the
firing line."

Well, I guess that’s just tough shit for us and we have to try harder. Claire goes on to say she thinks that ‘Problem Playground’ is a great ad, but that it suffers by comparison to ‘Cog, and that it’s also reminiscent of, but not as good as, the recent Skoda ‘Cake’ spot. She goes on to say that given the incestuous relationship between advertising and popular culture similarities between ads are perhaps inevitable but that "It all depends on how good the ad in
question is, and for my money the new Honda work is definitely good
enough." (Phew.)

Meanwhile, in The Guardian, Naresh Ramchandani wrote:

"Honda is the finest exponent of advertising in the car sector,
arguably in any sector, and needs to be. Without advertising, a Honda
is just a minicab. Seen in the light of a Honda advertisement a Honda
becomes a minicab covered in subtlety, ingenuity and philosophy and so
ceases to be a minicab.

"The new campaign for the Honda FCX
Clarity is possibly its cleverest ad yet. The telly ad features a bunch
of designers running around playing with Rubik’s cubes, cantilevering
sugar lumps into mugs of tea and assembling a giant jigsaw to form a
gleaming red hydrogen-powered Honda."

He continues: "Honda’s ingenuity not only benefits Honda, it also R&Ds for the whole car industry." And he suggests that other marketers in the automotive sector are attempting to follow Honda with watered-down versions of old Honda ads.

"Ten years ago, Coldplay aped Radiohead balladry but softened the edges,
so turning art school music into Asda-stocked muzak and making
gazillions. Ford are hoping for the same success but let’s see."

All very flattering, but also kind of frustrating. The music analogy above prompted me to think of the documentary I was watching the other night on BBC2 about Stiff Records – "If it ain’t Stiff". Stiff was a fiercely independent, creatively driven, chaotic little company that found a bunch of misfit maverick talents and somehow got them to deliver amazing work. (Hmmm… something familiar here?) Stiff artists like Elvis Costello, Ian Dury and Madness defied expectations and became proper pop stars.  But founder Dave Robinson, reminiscing about the glory days, said that once they’d hit the number one spot with Ian Dury’s ‘Hit me with your rhythm stick’ it was impossible to be satisfied with just hitting the top 20 any more. That success changed people’s expectations. His partner and co-founder left Stiff, saying that he didn’t want race-horses and lunch with Richard Branson, he just wanted ‘to tear it up’.

Meanwhile, a bit like us with Cog, for many critics, Ian Dury never again matched the genius of his ‘New Boots and Panties’ album. And, perhaps a fairer comparison, despite 30 years of trying, Wreckless Eric has certainly never matched his genius first single "Whole Wide World’.

So,what conclusions can we draw from all this? That if/once you do something amazing you should pack it in and quit trying to beat it? That you shouldn’t aim for success because people will slag you when you don’t make it?  That success inevitably leads to a loss of mojo?

Don’t ask me, I just work here.