Just don’t do it

It is often said, and if it isn’t it should be, that you can tell as much about a client company by the design work it rejects as that it accepts. The same could be true of advertising campaigns.

The first Unpublished – Best Rejected Advertising took a look at some examples of ditched advertising, providing an entertaining read. A second volume of the book is now to be released, giving a further insight into the rejection process.

Or it could do, had many disgruntled clients not refused permission to use their names or images in the book. A number of the rejected campaigns included are reproduced with false, generic logos attached to disguise the identity of the rejector. No real clues as to the reason for anonymity are given for many of these entries. There appeared to be far less of them in the first volume.

The message is further confused by an unclear layout, with insufficient headings, and a translation from German which is, at times, laboured.

Despite these failings, the book includes some interesting and creative campaigns. But they suffer, when seen through UK eyes, from cultural differences between ourselves and our European counterparts.

McCann Erickson’s executive creative director in Brussels, Jamie Ambler, points out in an interview in the book: “…English clients tend to be expecting very well thought out, intelligent advertising, Italians tend to, I am generalizing now, want something more superficial and maybe sexy, if you like, Germans want to see something hard working with lots of product in it.” It does appear true that campaigns which may have seemed brave in Germany seem like fairly basic stuff here.

The book also makes the mistake of using arguably the best, by a fairly large margin, rejected ad on its cover. The rest of the book fails to quite live up to the subversion of Nike’s logo in a Tampax campaign, which was rejected not because of the client, but because Nike objected.

Unpublished – Best Rejected Advertising is published by Berlin Press, priced £35