God Awful Things

Sorry to get all advertising and design busters in the ol’ blog lately, but whilst I go through my quantum physics desert of inspiration I just have to go back to the old reliable world of people selling shit.

It is a well known fact I can get lofty and pompous when discussing design and all that, and even more so if I am critiquing a cute girls work, how inspirational it is all all that, but I am no Peter Arnell.

Newsweek has an article on him, now you may not know who he is, but you have seen his latest work, and that would be the terrible new Pepsi Logo (which I nearly did a blog about months ago), and more famously, the disastrous Tropicana rebranding.

How bad is he?

Yet despite his achievements, some rivals dismiss Arnell as a pompous, pretentious, phony intellectual—a fraud, basically. That criticism seemed on target when, in the midst of the Tropicana controversy, someone leaked a 27-page memo Arnell wrote for PepsiCo crammed with so much pseudo-intellectual claptrap—references to the Mona Lisa, the Parthenon, the golden ratio, the relativity of space and time, magnetic fields, “perimeter oscillations” of the Pepsi logo, the “gravitational pull” of a can of Pepsi on a supermarket shelf, the rate of expansion of the universe—that some thought it might be a hoax. It wasn’t. In the small and catty world of advertising and design, Arnell’s stumble has been cause for celebration. The schadenfreude on Madison Avenue hangs so thick you can practically taste it.

Aaaaah, thats a healthy dose of bullshit served on a plate.. so it should come to no surprise that I took small glee (in a I-Have-Nothing-Else-To-Do way) to hear Tropicana is reverting back to their old packaging..

Oh how a few weeks changes things, in the following link you can here him say the following:

Now, the reason why that’s all important is because of course squeeze maintains a certain level of power when it comes to this notion emotionally about what squeeze means, like when I squeeze, or gimme a squeeze, or the notion of a hug, or the ideas behind the power of love and the idea of transferring that love or converting that attitude between mom and the kids.

Shame adage won’t let you embed the video, but it’s worth a smug smile to watch.