Well done to Greenroom Digital for winning the March Creative Showcase for the Resident Evil: Extinction campaign. A really nice campaign which mixed gaming with live ads - well done.
Runners up were WCRS for Cycling Safety and CMW Interactive for the humourous Creme Egg campaign.
Originally uploaded by Tobias Gärtner
Internal remark: My wine arrived today - thanks to Piero and team. Just in time for a great weekend with lots of sun. And this reminded me of the summary I promised to write.
(Filippo Innocenti - as seen and drawn by Flo)
At CS Florence Filippo Innocenti of Zaha Hadid faced the challenge to start of the sessions - and gave us a brilliant insight into the mind of architects. And creative people do to think alike - no matter if they are building a train station or a website.
First of all, there’s the language barrier. Not so much the “language” (Italien vs. English). It’s the typical expressions that architects use when they talk amongst each other. And this usually leaves bystanders puzzled and bored. Sounds familiar.
Filippo set aside his architecture-speak and gave us a glimpse of the challenges he and his collegues face when coming up with an idea and how the idea comes to life. Architecture is about “organizing” - giving the world some order and structure in its tremendous complexity. To understand all details of the idea Filippo imagines that the structure he has just designed is filled with water giving hi the chance to “dive” into it and look at every detail from different angles - tyding every detail until the design is perfect. He sais that of course, computers and 3D-programs help you understand the details - but they will never substitute the “feeling” you need to devolop and sense for the form, structure and appearance of a project. And architecture does not end with the design of the building. Sounds familiar.
Once the idea is there the nitty-gritty work starts - without which nobody would award them the job. It begins with such “simple” challenges: When we dig a whole in the ground to build a train station, how to we get rid of the soil we dig out? And how much soil do we need to get rid of? This calculation can easily amount to 2.500 freight waggons to get rid of the excavation material. (Don’t ask me where to drop them…).
Escape routes have to be tested, the dispersion of smoke in a building as well (to make shure an escape is possible at all). It is even needed to simulate the buildings impact on the level of ground water and it’s natural flow. Not to forget the costs of building it. With all circuits, aluminum casings and structural tests during the building period still needed.
So a “presentation” can easily consist of 700 to 800 pages. Or more. And not all of the competitions are paid for. Sounds familiar.
So thanks to Felippo we now know that our lives are a piece of cake - I don’t even know I to get rid of the sand in my sons trousers after a day on the playground (open for suggestions).
(Image taken from http://www.zaha-hadid.com/ and from Flo’s sketch-book)
Those guys at Uniqlo have done it again. After having created my favourite campaign in 2007, this is certainly my favourite for 2008 so far. Another fantastic way of showcasing and getting people to share their products - I even get you guys to rate my own mixes (and yes I did more than one). Genius - I think I might have to go and visit the shop this weekend
We are looking for talent, and we don’t care whether it is salt or pepper, old school or new school, black or white, from Earth or from Mars, carnivorous or vegan.
We don’t like limits, but we are not out to rob children of their precious youth or adults of their deserved retirement: at HerraizSoto&Co we are looking for talented people over 18 and under 75. Check out our new recruitment campaign (and spread the word ;)).
Last Friday we were extremely lucky to have Shepard Fairey speak to us over a few burgers and fries at Ogilvy. Thanks to Louisa from B&A and Jan from Ogilvy we had nearly two hours of art, subversive culture and politics.
I guess Shepard is most famous for his Andre the Giant street art and then following on from that the Obey work. But he also ran Swindle Magazine and now has his own studio, Studio One for more commercial ventures and most recently has been doing some signature design work for the Barak Obama campaign.
He started by talking about street art. He has been arrested 13 times, 4 times in New York. He told the story of one cop arresting him with loads of stencils, paint stickers and bragging that he had once caught ‘the real Obey’ guy four years earlier. It was the same cop he just didn’t recognize Shepard. Lucky they are not so smart.
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If you can’t wait until Cannes in June, visit the far more interesting Cans festival this bank holiday weekend in London. Banksy has put together an exhibition of street art in a disused railway tunnel in Lambeth along with other 40 other artists including our good friends, Faile. Well worth the visit. If you can’t make it, check out the photos I took earlier today here.
If you thought we were Fools before, wait until you see our new Mentos KissCam production for BBH London. KissCam enlists your webcam to deliver some pretty fresh “interactivity”. Check it out at www.mentoskisscam.com. (WordPress’ image upload tool didn’t like me today so I’m going to leave this as a text post)
Originally uploaded by Carolina Vallejo.
When we thought the meeting at Castello di Nipozzano couldn’t get any better, brothers Marco and Saverio Lanza blew up our minds with their work.
Under the name of Pastis the brothers started working together three years ago in Florence when they realized that each one in his own discipline -photography and music- had been approaching the same topics from a very similar perspective. They named the collective after the famous French drink but also took the name from the concept of “pastiche”, a collage of a variety of things of different nature assembled together to produce something new.
As a photographer Marco observes reality as it is, abstracting situations from their context by means of a white background placed in the most random places: a plaza, a street, the woods. He waits and observes, and is ready to shoot whenever something happens in his white frame; he doesn’t edit the pictures or intervene with reality. Saverio, the youngest brother, is a musician whose compositions focus on creating music by abstracting sounds from normal life and setting them together to create new rhythms and songs from things that weren’t created for that purpose. In the piece Madrelingua a recollection of voices of immigrants recorded in public spaces is used as base and background for the music he plays on top.
In their work together they are moved by the same motivation: witness, observe, cut, paste together and compose something new that comes almost entirely from abstraction of reality.
In their very entertaining talk they presented some of the latest works they’ve been doing using mainly two techniques: framing and video.
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After an amazing 243 course round table meal sampling Piero’s family wines on the Frescobaldi Nipozzano Estate outside Florence we decided we would hold our discussions on the lawns outside overlooking the rolling Tuscan hills. It doesn’t get any better than that and we found it quite hard to tune into the discussions initially, but it got quite heated and intersting soon. Probably fuelled by the most execllent wine.
Our topic for discussion was: “Have traditional agencies significantly raised their game in digital over the last year.”
We all felt that this is quite an outdated question now and we are collectively thoroughly bored by it, nevertheless the answer is probably no “traditional” agencies (I hate the term) haven’t raised the bar, but nor have the digital agencies. If digital is all about engagement, honesty, entertinment, usefulness and creating multiple-way discussions why are we still producing dull microstes with one and a half way conversations?
It was great to have Graham Fink in our group who gave an insight form his “side”. He said “Get in touch or die.” He talked about the creatives at M&C coming up with loads of non-traditional ideas, but they are finding it hard to sell them and convince media people.
Mark Chalmers (who was half asleep on the lawn in the background) suddenly woke up with a spark of genius: “I think the nature of products has changed. I am not sure that Coke would be able to launch with a sugary soft drink today. Look at brands like Google or ebay – they are a different kind of product. The world doesn’t need anymore products, only the good ones will cut through.” Products need to be good to sell. They need to have a point of difference. Something that connects with people.
The times where advertising has to manufacture metaphors to create an emotional bond with a brand are over. The product becomes the brand and our communications need to happen on a product level. Working with clients on creating souls for their producs and brands.
This got everybody very excited and we found out that traditional agencies and digital agencies are not that different at all. We are just approaching the big idea from different angles. Traditional agencies are very good at story telling and need to get to grips with technology and on the flipside digital agencies are very good at techically sparked ideas but suck at storytelling. Piero added : “We need to move from copywriting to scriptwriting.”
No surprise, but successful advertising is about ideas, the right kind of ideas, ideas that can be advertised as opposed to advertising ideas. These ideas are in essence PR ideas.
Ed from the Viral Factoryhad a great example of one such idea. Coke in Afrika did this thing where they designed the bottle with an inverted screw in the bottom. When you had drunk the bottle you could screw in the top of another bottle and so on to create a water pipe. Genius.
Vincent Jansen summed the discussion up at the end with a simple statement: “Get the best talent in one to make the best communications without thinking about above the line, online or whatever line.”
Reporting back to the wider group on our findings I got a bit carried away with the PR idea thing and declared: “Advertising is dead.”
Later that day I asked AQA “Is advertising dead?” It came back with: “No advertising is not dead. It’s very much alive and is all around us in our everyday lives. However, PR is stronger tool than advertising.”
Phew… i still have a job then.
It was great to have Mattias, CEO of Hyper Island, involved with Creative Social and I am extremely excited by the prospect of delivering a course together for the new talent coming through into the industry. In the meantime if you are interested in getting more involved with Hyper Island, there here are some ways to do so:
Talk at Industry Days
Support a Hyper Island Chair:
Be a lecturer
Have an intern
In the meantime if you are interesting in being involved with this groundbreaking joint course to provide a platform for the new creatives and project managers coming into the industry, then please drop me a mail.
P.S. You may recognise some of the agencies involved in the Why Hyper Island video below:
