Bye Bye Burnett

Ah, leaving is always tough, especially after meeting a bunch of great people. After two months at Leo Burnett London we packed our seven things and said good-bye to the friendliest agency we've been to. It's been a fabulicious time, we enjoyed it a lot. Cheers to Trevor, Ed, Tony, Bertie, Phil, Christen, Ollie, Richard, Ed, Rob, Nikki, Gaynor and lots of other people we were lucky to meet.

Now – entering portfolio mode and starting the countdown. 24 days to Wieden+Kennedy. Impressions from Leo's:

Honda Ad *Live*

Yesterday evening at 8.10pm Honda and Channel4 broad casted a live advert. We understand it's not the first live commercial in TV history, but it's bloody great. It fits very well in the rest of the Honda Accord campaign Difficult is Worth Doing. The 'real' advert, also about skydiving formations, will break this Sunday. We're curious what W+K has up their sleeves.

The World's biggest drawing

Yesterday we picked up on an interesting piece of work. There's this guy, Erik Nordenankar, who wanted to make the biggest drawing in the world. So he took a suitcase with a GPS tracking device and gave exact instructions to DHL of where to ship this suitcase and in what order. By tracking the device through 62 countries and six continents and recording the travel route on the map Erik made a self portrait of himself.



Erik claimed it would be an art project, his graduation project indeed. We did not believe it and suspected it to be one of the coolest digital campaigns/virals of our time. Done by DHL. Today, we checked back on Erik's site and he states that this piece of work never happened due to his small budget. Read it here. We are a bit sad, as this seemed so so good. A shame that DHL didn't sponsor him to do it for real. It still adds to their brand though as they've let him film in their facilities. Kudos to Erik for the idea and for the very convincing fiction.

London's good

Remember young Wal thinking about going to Qatar to make awards ads? Back then young Jai told him it would be a great opportunity, they thought of going together. In the end, they stayed in London. Now the agency in question, Promoseven Doha has released the first bunch of ‘award’ work for the Dubai Lynx 2008 Award. Our favourite campaign, which scooped the Grand Prix is for the video game Medal of Honor. We like it a lot, it's a really nice way to look at a war game.

We’re very happy we’ve stayed, doing what we do here in London. Our placement here at Leo Burnett is coming to an end, time to move on. We’re looking forward to a couple of weeks off, working on our book and doing stupid things before we start our next, let it be the last, placement at our favourite agency in town - probably all towns - Wieden+Kennedy.

Crack a Bank

Abbey – Open Minded Banking. We've been tearing our hair off over this one. We think there's something in there, although we realize we're 'not there yet'. But as some asked to see more our work, here are three posters as they are now in our book, we'll see for how long.

A fabulous weekend to everyone.

The List

We got our hands on a nice little List. It contains the best strategies, young creatives used in their portfolios. Some might recall it, as it's been around for some time now. John & Chris, now a creative team at Fallon, collated this List back in the day, when they used to teach D&AD and Miami Ad School classes. Some of these ideas are pretty fucking great. There's hardly need to see the executions, you get it immediately – and feel the envy. As John & Chris say, all of the guys who made it on the List have jobs now.

For us, it makes a great test. Reduce the campaigns in our book to one line and see, which of them could make it on the List. A relentless way to judge an idea. See for yourselves – could you make it on the List?

e

West Kensington, that's the location of Leo Burnett, a long(ish) commute for both of us. Time invested best in books.
The last one we both read was e.

We wanted a novel, something easy to have fun with, and we found Matt Beaumont's book very very very funny. It's written completely in email. Amusingly it is set in a London advertising agency, which doubles the fun for us. It's hilarious, the said agency is pitching for a huge Coca-Cola account and everyone has gone bonkers – the Creative Director is stealing ideas off junior teams and tossing in stupid French words in every other sentence, très cool! The creative teams and pretty much everyone is spending more time in the bar than at their desk. TBWA, Trevor Beattie, a team from Watford, a sex tape, PA wrestling, hippie creatives, over-expensive shoots in the southern hemisphere and suicide attempts – the book is crammed with lots and lots of fun. Once you get into the different characters and their email style, you cannot put it down. Well worth a read.

Youtube films for Mother

Like last year, Mother London is asking 2nd and 3rd year creatives from Bucks new uni to produce and seed videos on YouTube. The teams/individuals that get the most views will win a placement.

We dug through all the films and ordered them by views. There are some good ones and bad ones. It's quite interesting that a couple of them are takes on Sony/Cadbury ads fom Fallon. We like the top two. We think that it's a great assignment, creating something viral is one of the hardest things to do, yet everyone, no matter the budget can do it - perfect for young creatives.

• 38851 Views - Raspberry Duet by Tom, Kim and Sarah


• 14684 Views - Real Beat Boxing by Matt and Matt


• 2502 Views - Cadbury Unicycles by Tom and Sarah


• 1610 Views - Terrible Angels by Linda and Alex


• 1200 Views - Dynamite Surfing 2 by Ben and Milo


• 1160 Views - Hit Me by Mark


• 941 Views - Computers in Love by Sam and Jack


• 902 Views - The Hippest Act by Mandy and Laura


• 837 Views - Juicy Balls Like No Other by Jill and Lucy


• 816 Views - When Times get Floppy by Jeff and Mark


• 765 Views - Boris Johnson by Nick and Dave


• 683 Views - Interview with Cadbury Gorilla by Claire


• 668 Views - The Fridge by Ben


• 570 Views - Stress Relief by Laura


• 376 Views - The Disappearance of Bob by Michelle and Clem


• 369 Views - Friends float in space by Alex


• 185 Views - Alfred the Snake by Fiona and Sarah

We call him Shmoo

This is how the mugs look like here at Leo Burnett. They have the green man on them. One of our favourite teams here, Christen & Ollie had this idea. We like this green guy, he's cool.

You ask us why we post a mug? Well, we're cheating really, as we don't have time for a 'proper' post. We're working on a pitch. The tissue meeting (we hate that expression) is tomorrow. So, we better get going. Chop Chop.

Short & Sweet birthday

Short & Sweet, Londons only weekly short film showing celebrated its second birthday last night. Yesterday they showed a crop of the good stuff. Two hilarious films from Lev Yilmaz stood out, see them below and visit his website to discover more.





Also on screen was a short we blogged about last year, Rabbit, make sure to have a look, if you don't mind weird. We want to thank everyone at Short & Sweet for all the fun we had since we went there for the first time, we discovered lots of great shorts and always left inspired.

The best young creative teams are from London

Remember the wanted ads competition we went to a couple of weeks ago? The two winning teams got a chance to compete in the Best YET (Best Young European Team) challenge last Thursday in Stockholm. And yes, they've won. Just like here in London Zoe and Miranda from Lean Mean Fighting Machine won the show, and Enrique and Borja, now on a job trial at St.Luke's, made the runners up. The brief was to promote Lego's warrior toy series 'Bionicle'. We've got our hands on the winning ad from Zoe & Miranda, it's quite sweet:

Kudos to both teams for beating 19 european teams, London represent! We'll be chasing the dream next year.

KesselsKramer Outlet

We have a great meadow in front of our agency, it's vibrantly populated with lots of people from Leo's and the surrounding companies in Kensington Village. Today, while most of them were tanning during lunchtime, we sacrificed our precious food hour and made our way to visit the KKOutlet, KesselsKramer new London office.

There, we met Richard Walker, the Creative Director and showed him our work. We admire the work of KesselsKramer and are very excited about what they might will do in London. If we keep pushing our book, maybe we'll get the chance to be part of it someday. Have a look at some of the stuff they did.

Creative Directors take on Portfolio Night

Portfolio night's over. After the sunny weekend, blog reviews from Creative Directors on the event keep popping up. On the London night, Iain Tait, founder of Poke shares his experience. Check it out on his blog. He has given us a polite mention, which we're very happy about, cheers. More reviews from the other side of the table can be found here; Ronnie Lebow from Toronto, Sonya Grewal and Greg Christensen, Y&R Chicago Creative Directors, and a young creative from Boston who had to fill a creative director slot at the last minute.

Jai & Wal at Portfolio Night London

Free drinks, lots to chat about, old friends and some new ones, a sprinkle of creative directors and six book crits. Blimey, that was a lot to fit into one evening but the guys from ihaveanidea.org pulled it off beautifully. And not just in London, but in 21 other cities around the world on the same night. A global creative orgy. A big hats off to them.

At the beginning we were told to follow a fine tuned system for speed dating with CDs, and were asked to move to the table on your right after every crit. Sorry guys, we weren’t about to follow that – in fact we don’t think anyone did. We went in with a plan of who our book was going to be seen by and nothing was going to get in our way.

Luckily for us the friendly, smiley undertones of 'look at our work' paid off and our night went really well, seeing six creative directors. Quite fantastic. Lots of advice, lots of opinions, lots to take in, lots of contacts and all was lots of fun. We had 15 minutes with each CD to show our stuff, make an impression and try to seal the deal.

The registration was handled by a bunch of first years from St. Martins, good work

The event was hosted by JWT in Knightsbridge

Reunion time in the garden, Rob, Jai, Chris, Wal, Ray and Bernd

The high temperature allured everyone into the garden to drink the nerves away

Don't know 'em, but they're cool

Rob, that's no way to impress Renee

Lusea Arabella Karenza Warner and Tom

Ready for creative torture

Say hello to our new friends Dave, Andy and Jose

Ade and Mike, good luck to them at Lowe

Drop your drinks and gather

While last year was small and cozy, this year was epic

Brian trying to be funny, excuse him he's Canadian

The creative directors waiting for the first wave of fresh blood

The most organized part of the evening

Who do you want to see? You better be quick.

Maybe if we didn't take so many damn pictures we could have got more crits?

The Creative Directors we were lucky enough to see

Laurence Quinn from JWT

Brian Campbell Creative Director at AMV/BBDO

Paul Silburn, Creative Director at Saatchi & Saatchi

Will Awdry, Creative Partner Ogilvy London

Chris Clarke, Creative Director Digitas

Iain Tait, Founder of Poke, brain behind crackunit.com

Last minute crits in the lounge

After too many critiques Jai's having problems controlling his facial expressions

Now don’t ask how, but we somehow managed to score three placement offers, result! So not only was it a jolly but in the end it turned out to be quite productive and not just for us but a load of our mates too. Well done to everyone.

You can take our word for it being the most useful event in our calendar so far this year. Hopefully we’ll never have to go to another one ever ever again.

Cosmetics

Still at work. Preparing stuff for tomorrows review. On the side, styling the folio for Thursday. Here's a one-off.

Street Pop

I had a lovely day on Saturday, I was on the gad around town and decided to visit The Cans Festival, a street art exhibition. A couple of minutes later, on the bus, three lovely British grandmothers entered the bus. One of them asked the others what to do next. The woman with the thick glasses and white hair, answered: 'Why don't we go to Waterloo, and see what this Banksy guy's up to?'

Was that the moment Banksy and alike turned pop? Who cares, their work is fantastic. See pictures on Romanyg's Flickr stream.

In the end, I didn't go, the cue was way too long.