Creatives will often spend copious amounts of time during the work day with their feet up on their desk, trying to come to grips with the clients latest batch of refusals on the copy they just spent days slaving over. So naturally, they require a comfortable – yet fashion forward shoe, that can withstand this type of grueling routine. Not to mention, playing ping pong or foosball without the proper supportive footwear,  is cause to throw ones back out or twist an ankle.

So why do Ad people share such a connection and universal acceptance of one shoe?

Well maybe it has to do with the history of Chuck Ts.

Charles Taylor, aka Chuck, was a real person. He was one of the first basketball players to officially endorse a sports shoe. Converse then hired him in 1921 to run basketball clinics around the US, selling the sport of basketball, and the shoe it took to play it. In 1923, Chuck Taylor’s name was added to the All-Star ankle patch. Next, came World War II, and Converse was tapped to shift production for war times and outfit all soldiers going through basic training in the Chuck Taylor All-Star.

Could a history so rich in product endorsement and paradigm synergy optimization integral branding metrics Facebook be the answer? Of course not, that sentence was just a bunch of marketing buzzwords I heard a client use in our last meeting.

I’m not an investigative reporter, so I’ll just assume it has something to do with the fact that, how many clothing styles or items of dress have been around for close to a century, and can blatantly brag about being in style for the general population for at least 50 of those years? Chucks have been a symbol of “hip”, “cool”, “in the fashion know” for 50-plus years.

Or maybe it has something to do with Creative folks ability to identify with a pair of shoes that reflect their individual styles. Which, when you think about it, isn’t really all that individual.

But Chucks remain as versatile as ever. Not only worn by lowly Jr. Copywriters making barely enough to survive and forced to wear the only shoes he/she can afford – without committing fashion suicide. Chucks are also worn with ease by corner office Creative Directors and agency Presidents. Worn with a suit they make the statement that you’re successful and a person of influence, yet still connected to what’s cool and trendy. Clients love that. Although what it really says is, you’re someone who spends too much time and money trying to appear like you have neither.

A copy writer dies and Saint Peter offers him the choice between spending eternity in Heaven or in Hell, so he asks to see both. In Hell, Saint Peter leads him to a doorway marked “Especially For Copy Writers.” Inside he sees rows and rows of faceless hacks toiling over typewriters while huge red devils beat them mercilessly with whips, screaming “The meeting is in five minutes! The meeting is in five minutes!” Obviously put off, the copy writer asks to see Heaven. Saint Peter leads him to an identical door, and inside the same scenario is playing out, only there are angels holding the whips, screaming “The meeting is in five minutes!” The copy writer, confused, turns to Saint Peter saying “I thought you said this was Heaven!” Saint Peter replies: “It is. Up here the work actually gets produced.”

Of all the things on our ever-growing list of Stuff Ad People Like, spite is probably in the top ten. There is nothing more frustrating as a graphic designer or copy writer than to pull three consecutive all-nighters meeting an impossible deadline for an important client only to have your brilliant proposal flatly panned by that client in favour of some first-year intern’s cutesy, amateurish approach to the same project. You, the genius ad person, are left with this little piece of inspired creative and no client to run it, so what do you do? Where might you find a venue to display your talents to the advertising community and the world-at-large, just as much to spite your former client’s poor decision-making skills as to showcase your work?

Why, the internet of course.

We at SAPL recently came across the wonderful zeldman.com, self-proclaimed as “web design news and information since 1995”. In addition to Mister L. Jeffrey Zeldman’s extremely informative content on the main page, he has included for our personal enjoyment an archive of failed or otherwise defunct advertisements from the full spectrum of media, appropriately entitled Ads From The Crypt.

Each entry includes credits for art direction and writing, just in case you thought it was Photoshopped (and believe me, you will definitely have your suspicions with some of the featured ads), as well as who the client was, and the ad’s “cause of death” or, when appropriate, the client’s motivation for dropping the ad. (My favourite is the series of banner ads for the Beatles Anthology, “Killed by: Client. Motivation: Clients don’t need motivation.”)

One of the nice things about the advertising industry (or at least about the dedicated Ad People who work in its massive cogs) is that, on some level, we’re all on the same page. We might be in fierce competition for the next major corporate account, but at the end of the day, every one of us has had at least one outstanding piece of creative bold-faced shot down by the client, some outside focus group, or even our own Director. A lawyer friend once told me there’s nothing stronger than true love in the world – except for spite, and nobody knows that better than Ad People. So come share in the spite at Ads From The Crypt, and raise a glass to all those ads that never made it.

“Hey, there’s my house!”

“That’s my car in the driveway! Weird!”

How is that alarming? Well, it’s a short hop, skip and jump from the innocuous to the downright menacing.

“My husband said he’s working late at the office, but damned if that doesn’t look just like his Beemer parked outside the strip club.”

“I wonder if Jenny Smith, my high school crush, still lives at her parents’ place in Oklahoma. Well, what do you know? There she is!”

While this sort of thing isn’t unique to what only an Ad Person would like, as advertisers we have to congratulate Google on getting this project done. I mean, it’s absolutely VAST. Think about it: camera views of every street in the world? Imagine the marketing potential. But while you’re at it, imagine the sheer scale of the job. What did they do, hire a bunch of guys to drive around all day with giant cameras capturing everything there is to see ever?

According to College Humor, that’s exactly what they did. I know they’re making out like it’s a joke, but I have to wonder how far from the truth this really is.

Google Street View, we here at SAPL salute you. Keep on keeping on, you creepy bastards.

Take motivational posters, for example. You know the type I’m talking about: photograph of a mountain, or silhouette of a runner, or a saccharine picture of a kitten hanging onto a branch, with a caption featuring a prominent word or phrase like “Excellence” or “Overcoming Adversity”, typically with an explanatory statement in smaller text like “You can achieve anything if you work hard” or “There is no reward without struggle”.

Back in the late ’90s, these posters were the toast of the corporate community: you’d find at least one hanging in the offices of executives and the cubicles of overly-ambitious assistants the world over. But now, only ten years later, the overwhelming cultural trend towards irony and cynicism has relegated what was once an eager, fresh-faced expression of business inspiration to the realm of amusing curiosity at best and, at worst, the stuff of internet-meme-mockery.

Many websites have started allowing users to write their own captions for a variety of photos that range from the mildly ironic to the patently absurd to the graphically offensive, and then generating the caption-with-photo into the motivational poster template. Titled “demotivational posters”, this meme has taken off in a huge way with entire websites devoted to user-generated demotivation.

Here at SAPL, we recognize the need to sling a little mud our own way every now and again – and what better way to illustrate our ability to laugh at ourselves than by highlighting what happens to old ideas in a new era? Besides, some of those posters are pretty damn funny.

Check it out for yourself, and share a laugh at the expense of ad people everywhere.

Inspiration is the bread and butter of these heroes, and you never know when it will strike (if at all): at the office during your twenty-minute “washroom break” when you’re idly playing Bejeweled on your cell phone; halfway through your kid’s painful-to-watch Christmas pageant just as the eight year-old playing Wise Man #2 mispronounces “myrrh”; or at three in the morning when the bartender informs you for the third time that they’re closing and no, he doesn’t care that your “brainstorming session” was just getting productive.

But when that dim little light bulb hanging over your head periodically brightens with the promise of a clever new way to market edible oil products masquerading as ice cream, it really is the magic moment that makes the whole job worthwhile.

Of course, when you consider the sheer number of advertising heroes walking the earth in this day and age, it’s entirely probable that somewhere, some equally-dull light bulb brightened at the exact same time and for the exact same reason. In short, your splendidly original scheme isn’t nearly as original as you thought, a point that will doubtless be uncovered by either your Creative Director or – worse – your client, in short order. Talk about egg on your face.

Thankfully, we at SAPL have discovered a helpful little archive called Ad Mirror. This thunder-stealing site lists advertisements in categories (usually bookmarked by exactly the hook you thought you came up with) and gives you a detailed run down of ads that have used the same idea: in print, television, film, and everywhere else you could conceivably find advertising (so, literally, “everywhere else”).

So before you start patting yourself on the back and buying self-congratulatory drinks in celebration of your impeding raise and/or promotion thanks to your great “interactive bus shelter ad” idea, you’d better think again, Hero. Do your research, backtrack and fact check, and never, ever take it for granted, because as that Barenaked Coke Sniffer Steven Page used to say, “it’s all been done”!