When we started the Leo Lab we were told it's was going to be a period of live briefs to gather experience. In the beginning it was pretty much what they promised. Now things have changed. All three Leo Lab teams were gathered on Tuesday for a meeting. The creative leadership wants to change the direction of the Leo Lab - instead of putting us on daily work briefs that need solving and have lots of limitations we are asked to do stuff that's 'really great'. Literally Leo Burnett's client list is our brief, pick a brand, do something great for it. Sounds good to us. It lowers the chances of getting work out, but if something does get through, it'll be pretty damn good. 
Eating shit, killing babies, beating Jude to death, anal sex, murdering a man of the law, pissing on the stage, throwing shit at the audience, spitting spitting spitting, tearing off Satan’s penis and beating him with it, farting, singing about rape, whores, paedophiles and rotten grandmothers. Those are just a few of the things the Tiger Lillies shared with us last night when they guided us from heaven to hell in the New Player Players Theatre in their new cabaret piece '7 Deadly Sins'.
We missed Short&Sweet last night, they took a break for a couple of weeks and came back with a bang yesterday. Good that our spy Bernd, from Inspyed distilled the evening to one great short movie from Phillip Van 'Come wander with me'. Have a look, it's gorgeous. And if that makes you want to wander on this rainy London day, make sure to check out Björk's new music video, wanderlust as well.
Fourteen days, three placement teams, two briefs and one big table. Time for a short recap. We've spent most of our time on a brief for Child Road Safety, which is pretty open, very exciting and quite huge (a big idea type of brief). The other one on our desk is for an online campaign for Beefy & Lamby, we've got to get more people eating meat. To spice things up, this week we've launched an attack on traffic to get more assignments to keep us going.
After a quick beer with the agency lads, we jumped on the tube towards Russell Square. We were really excited about it, not Russell Square but Pecha Kucha Night. A format of presentation that was hosted by the D&AD last night. And it was quite brilliant.
…who's the most creative of them all?
We were virgins to this event but some teams had been coming for the past couple of years. A few minutes after 9:30 the arena was filled with 24 creative teams, the highest number of participants ever in it's six year life. The conditions to participate were, you need to be a creative team and work in the advertising industry for no more than three years. Most of the teams were in their first jobs, with only a handful still on placement, like us.
We bumped into lots of familiar faces and even more new ones. We were quite glad to see so many people from our course, the new bucks university.
Tanked on Coffee we gathered in the main room to get briefed.
Al Young, the Creative Director of St.Luke's took the creative lead and introduced us to the tricky part of the brief: local media. The brief was set by Vodafone, we had to come up with an idea translating their existing strategy 'Make the most of now' into local media to communicate closer to the target audience. We were the keenest kids in town, right on the front row. During Al's brief speech he told us that we were here to win, like gladiators, to defeat and to kill (well not quite), but you get it. The eager competitiveness of this event was the best thing about it.
Armed with pens, pads and the brief under one arm the creative teams then spread through the building, every team was assigned a place.
Our spot was 'the Art Studio', we were sharing it with Imogen & Lianne from McCann-Erickson, Manchester.
It was a race against time, with ideas and moments flying by, we jotted down our initial thoughts and then worked on further. Although the seating was comfy, Wal strangely dropped on the floor to search for inspiration on the ceiling. The minutes pretty much ticked on in the same fashion. We had five hours to come up with a campaign idea to fit the local challenge and like most teams we used and needed every last second.
At 4pm the work was stopped and the teams rushed down for their well earned break before presenting their ideas to the groups of judges. Everyone was stressed out as the pressure was high – everyone wanted to succeed.
After presenting we spent the time waiting for the results with calming beer and nervous chatter.
The break gave us a second to catch up with a few mates and take some snaps. Here's James & James & Jai & Wal. They're great guys and are currently on placement at Lowe, they work in our former cheese factory office.
Next the announcement of the winners. Short, sharp and straight to the point. Naturally it left most disappointed but the two winning ideas totally deserved it, they were quite brilliant. Sadly none of them was us but hey there's always next year, a great day like this deserves a second try.
To drown the sorrow and celebrate the lesson the whole bunch went on to the pub.
Where people discussed the work, made new friends and enjoyed the Friday evening after this day of brain acrobatics.
Congratulations to the winners, Miranda and Zoe from LeanMeanFightingMachine and Enrique and Borja from Mother. Even crestfallen about not having won we agreed that their work was great and earned them the prize: They will attend the European wide competition, which will be held for two days in Stockholm in a months time. So fingers crossed for our UK teams! Go on guys make us proud.
After a couple of hours things became hazy and the photos blurry, good times. It was a great learning curve for us and can't wait for next year. 
This week D&AD is judging all the work for the 2008 competition. As our friend Ray is covering the event I ended up at the judge party last night, which was filled with creatives from all around the world. Everyone seemed tired but I guess that's pretty understandable after a day full of reviewing work.
Monday morning Jai and Wal floated into Leo Burnett to find a buzzy place full of super friendly people. The office is crazy spacious, great for throwing our beloved hacky sack around. One of the other teams arrived with us yesterday, the third team of the Leo lab join us today. We spent our first day introducing ourselves, admiring serious finger boarding skills and acquainting ourselves with the two floored cafeteria.
