Going to the advertising festival in Cannes on Saturday, staying for a whole 7 nights and even though it looks like it’s going to be mentally busy, let me know if you’re going down there, whoever you are and want to meet up for a drink (i.e buy me a drink). It will be expensive, hot, drunken and filled with advertising people, can’t think of anything better. Hopefully we’ll pick up some sort of Lion for Diesel as well.
Good ol’ PSFK still delivers and I really like this video, even though I’m tired of the planningspheres obsession with the constant definition of things, like the post a day we saw for the last two years of what social media means. I know the importance of understanding what we have to be able to bring things forward, but the constant linguistic defining and word twisting of every damn particle of this industry seems more like a way for planners to keep their Twitter streams interesting than actually changing stuff.
This video features some great planners, including ex Anomaly Jonathan Isaac and Anomaly’s Director of Innovation, Natasha Jabukowski, talking about creativity and intuition in planning. In my constant struggle of trying to walk forward on my hybrid path in creative marketing, the creative delivery is the only thing offers stable ground. I really like the general dissing of logic here, stop obsessing with it. I think building rational and logical arguments is a skill you can learn, study some Aristotle, copy the structure of some great presentations you’ve seen, and spend time on practicing lateral thinking and the development of emotional arguments.
Domenico Vitale founder of People Ideas & Culture says (4.47):
“It’s OK to be messy, it’s OK to evolve your thinking every 5 minutes. When you’re young, you’re trying to prove yourself by trying to be right. The best way to prove yourself is by being wrong as it creates the best ideas. I’ve never seen anything in science, in the creation of art that wasn’t a journey or an evolution. The journey is not logical, it’s not linear, it’s messy, really messy.”
We’re flying to our New York office on Friday to watch England – USA in the World Cup, will be fantastic to finally meet a lot of people that I’ve e-mailed with for a year now (yes, it’s been a year since I started at Anomaly London now, and how we have grown). Check out the ad with did for Umbro that will run for the next few weeks. I personally love it.
Our latest ad for Sony 3D TV. Any feedback appreciated.
Cannes Lions‘ film category in their Young Lions competition works a bit differently than the entry systems for the other categories. In the Film category you get 48 hours to film a piece of content, and phase two is about getting it viewed. They jurors take both view count and the quality/idea of the film in account when they award a winner. Since the briefs are always for charities this makes a lot of sense, because the films actually are live, and by adding an incentive to share the film they do active work for the charity in question. It’s not just a battle of ideas, but a battle of doing, which is what advertising should be about. The brief this year was for Wateraid, to make people aware of the water crisis in the world and I’ve seen many cliches and even more just flat ideas. But this one really stood out and I thought I would try to do mine to help these guys go to Cannes.
We won Young Lions in the UK. It’s a competition for creatives under 28 in the UK’s advertising industry and the winners get to go to Cannes and compete in the global Young Lions competition as UK representatives. The brief was to communicate that Centrepoint, a charity for young homeless people, sells virtual gifts i.e. you can buy a meal or a bed for the night for a young homeless person in the name of somebody else. They wanted to create something for their Christmas drive that could last longer than that. We won the Cyber category with this entry:
Please view in full screen for a full, fantastic, immersive experience. In other words, it looks a bit weird in that little player.
We were also one of five finalists in the print category but didn’t make it all the way there. Any feedback on the film is much appreciated and I’ll keep you posted on how it goes in Cannes.
This is the latest thing we’ve released for Diesel as part of the BE STUPID philosophy. Diesel asked us to create an online catalogue for their SS/10 collection. A creative called Matt Jerret had a great idea on how to turn this rather uninspiring task into something rich, engaging and interactive that would not only engage the target audience, but feature and promote it alongside the clothes. The idea was to create an interactive music video for the unsigned artist Josep and his song A Hundred Lovers. Every piece of clothing in the video would be tagged and linked to the online store as well as every person in the video, who we recruited online. If you click on the people you get a bit of information about them, links to the social networks on which they promote themselves and their creativity, and it’s all bound together with a rather clever stop/pause function enabled by hovering over the video.
The production of this idea was vital, I can see so many things going wrong from beginning to and and tagging every single frame of the video was a big task. But Jon Shanks, our super producer has done an absolutely amazing job together with the production company that we partnered with, Stink Digital. Never seen anything like it and they’ve literally turned a dream into reality.
And oh, we signed Josep and released his track from our new record label Anomaly Music Group. Buy it here.
This is the first piece of work to come out of Anomaly London since I joined almost 7 months ago that I’ve been involved with. I had nothing to do with the brilliant copy nor the selection of photographers, I’ve mainly been working on the digital side of the campaign but I must say I’m quite proud of it all. Adland seems to be fucked off with it, but as soon as you look at what the target audience thinks about it (on Twitter, Facebook et al), it has spurred the same reactions and inspiration as Diesel’s famous advertising in the early nineties. It’s a campaign built on cultural relevance and insight. I haven’t seen such a discussed campaign in years, but then again, I don’t often Google around after reactions to advertising.
I love everything about Halo 3’s ads. It’s amongst the best campaigns of the 00’s. Apart from the videos themselves being immaculately executed (THE MUSIC!), with insights and respect for gaming culture, the media placement is a-w-e-s-o-m-e. They know that their audience doesn’t watch TV between 8 and 9 pm, they live online. So place the ads there, properly on gaming websites such as IGN and Gamespot. And every view of the film will be relevant. The future of TV is placement, the video medium is still fit to do the job of storytelling, but TV isn’t. Release the ads on DVD’s to be rented for free on Blockbusters, screen them on city walls, locations only released to a relevant audience or if it’s good enough, sell it on iTunes.
This is all very old media planning/thinking, sorry about that, it’s just that this video was so awesome.
