"Surprise and delight."

Surprise and delight. I've lost count of the amount of times I've heard this phrase in relation to bits of marketing. Either as a requisite in a creative brief, or in some 'inventive' description of a piece of work for an awards entry (I'll be honest - I've been responsible for the latter).

Now, I'm all for creative work that gets that reaction, or at least aims to. My issue with the phrase is that it's been devalued by over use. Did the last high-volume DM piece I worked on really elicit such a reaction?!

The other day, I was surprised - and delighted - to see this:



It's a giant, fake, green plug socket stuck to a wall in Ganton St. in Soho. The building it's stuck to is horrible, but this bit of art makes it cool. And it provided me with a reminder of what it's like to be genuinely surprised and delighted.

So, from now on, I'll be giving my new concepts 'the green plug test'. If I can't realistically imagine my work getting the same reaction as I gave the Big Green Plug (which, by the way, used to be orange - as shown in the 3rd shot which I pillaged from Flickr), then I promise not to go round claiming it will!

[Anyone know any more about this installation? Who did it, for example? My googling has led me nowhere...]