Jai / Wal

We've been holding that down for a bit but we'll share it now. We're not a creative team anymore as we've split up. The main reason is that we have different ambitions in advertising and they don't seem to go along. We still have a couple of projects we're working on together and it would be awesome if they work out. Jai' accepted another three months at the Bank which he's following up at the moment. I'm making a new plan. I applied for a postgraduate course outside of London and I'm waiting for a reply. In the meantime I'll be looking around and speaking to agencies on my own. See what happens.

The great masters of advertising

Last thursday we went to the NABS talk at the London College of Fashion. It was all about TV advertising. The talk was moderated by Sir Hegarty and the panel consisted of Tony Davidson of W+K, Ben Priest of Adam&Eve, Nick Gill of BBH and film director Danniel Kleinman. What a great lineup! They've all chosen three ads each and I enjoyed watching all of those oldies and gems on the big screen.

Some of the things they've said stuck with me, one of them was that television is a shared media, people watch it together and talk about what they've seen. They also shared insights about the craft, like the importance of characters in a piece of film, sometimes over the plot. The right choice of music being crucial and of course they discussed the current question of 'Is Tv dead?'.

The answer in my opinion is simple, it's film what's important and impactful, no matter on what screen it appears on. And clearly, no matter the media, it's all about the story being told, right?

You ain't seen sexy till you've seen us

Jai & Wal will be doing the same thing today at Regent Street at 4pm, come and watch ;)

Weeklyish campaign

We've been bad at keeping with posting new work weekly as the Bank is keeping us very busy, we'll try harder, for now a campaign for J2O that's been in our book for a bit now. For those who don't know, J2O is a bottled juice drink that is sold in bars & pubs and is often drunk instead of alcohol. We're happy with the strategy, we know we need to change the executions and make them work harder. We've also got lots of stuff for digital and ambient media on it. We'll post it once we change the poster executions.

Quick one

Quick update, we'll post more when deadlines allow. Busy at the Bank. Got tickets for the NABS talk next week, it's a great lineup. Also thinking about going to Portfolio Night 7 in Amsterdam, why not? And it looks like some agencies are looking for talent, which is good news. Maybe intersting stuff happening. No swine flu between us yet.

Portfolio Night 7

The Portfolio Night madness is starting up again with videos popping up slowly, like this one from David & Goliath who are hosting the event in Los Angeles. Tickets are already on sale for some cities, others are to follow. The event is a freaking great thing, it gives young creatives the chance to see Creative Directors with their books and get advice on them together with meeting like minded people. We enjoyed last year a lot, but this year it looks like there is no agency to host it in London. Come on people, who can we imagine hosting that event? Last year it was JWT.

The beautiful word

Totally awesome campaign from Ogilvy & Mather Paris to revamp Scrabbles image. We love it.

Wanted Ads Public Vote

Remember the Wanted Ads competition last month? The newspaper society uploaded all the work online so everyone can have a look and vote for their favorite. The brief was to promote HSBC's new world selection investment plan using local media. Tell us what you think of all the work.

Lunar BBDO folded?

Did we read right? Looks like the Hotline section of campaign tells us that Lunar BBDO, the offspring of AMV BBDO is closing down and making all 30 staff redundant? Bad News for ad land. We're curious about the whole story to be told on Ben's blog.

Life at the bottom

At the agencies we've been in London we met many interesting creatives. They had great stories to tell how they got into the industry and we thought often about it to sit down and record interviews with them to publish on this blog. We didn't have a chance so far as we need to sort out a job first. Saying that there is a fabulous website that just does that. Just recently they interviewed Tom & Selena from Fallon London which especially interesting for all aspiring London creatives. They also talked to teams/single creatives from places including Mother NY, Anomaly and W+K Amsterdam. Check them out at lifeatthebottom.com, it's a great read, especially the category Monday Morning Whip should keep you going.

Weekly campaign – Innocent

We had our first couple of days at the Bank and there are some great briefs on our desk. After dark we sit down and get out the special pens to work on spec work for our portfolio. And we decided to post a new campaign every week. It might not make the book, maybe it will be in a very early stage or whatever but it's gonna to be a good exercise, right? Right! So here's the first campaign, a quick one.

Love from New Zealand

Looks like someone on the other side of the globe is seriously displeased about London's ad industry after loosing the 42 Below Vodka account. We like their reaction, some pretty fun references huh?



Via Lucy & Jade's blog

Advice from W+K London

Hope everyone had splendid Easter days. Catching up on my RSS feed I found the a recent post on Wieden+Kennedy's blog. And it's advice for young creatives with a list of book tips from the team in charge of placements, Ben & Sophie. Here they are.

Ben and Sophie’s top 11 book tips.

We decided to write a list of things we’ve learned along the way. This is just what we think, somebody else’s tips might be completely different.

1. Keep it quick. Creatives looking at your book have limited time so make the most of the opportunity. Keep storyboards and radio short and sweet.

2. A balanced book tends to have between 7-9 ad campaigns and a few other creative ideas.

3. Get to the bottom of a brand. Try to find out what makes them different to everyone else and what’s at the heart of their product and their company.

4. Demonstrate different tones of voice. How does this brand talk to people? What’s their personality?

5. Find different ways of talking to people. You don’t always need to conform to the conventional. Logos don’t have to sit in corners. Photos don’t have to be funny. And long copy is not scary.

6. Do more than just press ads. There are many other interesting ways of exploring an idea. What are the appropriate media for your idea? What medium is right for your audience? What will draw people in and surprise them? (TV, press, radio, online, viral, ambient, talking dogs…)

8. Expand at least one of your ideas into a big campaign and prove it’s not just a one off poster or TV ad.

9. We like to find out about you as well as seeing your book. Show us your matchbox collection, the short film that you’re making on the side or your greatest baking success. We see tons of ads, but sometimes it’s these little funny things that sums up who you are.

7. Listen and take notes too. You’d be surprised how many people don’t! Which is annoying to creatives who’ve given up their time to see you.

10. The advertising world is small so don’t piss people off or others might get to hear about it.

11. If you like a particular team, try to go back to them again with more work. Try to build a relationship. This will help you make more contacts, they may recommend you to their advertising friends and colleagues.

And here's link to the whole post.

Graham Fink

We were lucky enough to see Graham Fink the executive creative director of M&C Saatchi yesterday. Out of nowhere he dropped us an email around Christmas inviting us an in to see him. After one canceled meeting last month we were in his diary again, but this time we made it.

You hear all sorts of Mr. Fink so we were quite curious about his office and were not disappointed to find he has one of the coolest offices we've visited. Graham was already familiar with some of our work as he met us at the Cream Exhibition and enjoyed the new stuff in the portfolio. He gave some great advice on specific campaigns but the overall guidance was ever better and very motivating.

He took some time to write us a comment at the end of the book which sums up the meeting pretty well. We'll make sure to take it in.

Need a portfolio?

Looks like a London creative team is selling its advertising portfolio on ebay. Have a look at it and tell us if you think that it's advertising that sells. Sorry for that pun – couldn't resist.

R&R at DLKW

We got a call the other day from Richard from DLKW after being recommended by a team from Leo's. So yesterday we went in to see him and his partner Remco with our work. They are top blokes who included us in their office chocolate round and told us about the changes going on in their agency, including their new ECD George Prest who we worked with at Lowe. All our fingers are crossed for that oportunity.

In the meantime we had a short meeting with the bank and secured a month freelance contract starting next wednesday. All good.

Cut & Paste

On Saturday I made my way to Elephant & Castle to attend this years Cut & Paste. It's a digital design tournament with three categories, 2d, 3d and motion design. There are several rounds and the competitors have a slot of 20 minutes to design something that fits the given theme. The briefs they get were quite open like a record sleeve that's 'tongue in cheek', or a billboard about 'tough love'. It's interesting that the design process, which normally is quite intimate and happens behind closed doors, is shown so transparent to everyone.

It's good fun to have some beers and watch the designers on the stage sweating away trying to rock the show in this ridiculously short time frame with a genius idea. The crowd is cheering for their favourite competitor while the DJ plays a matching tune – it's designers performing on stage like rock stars, a great concept.

Visiting creative orchestra

Earlier this week we traveled to visit a new agency here in London called creative orchestra. Several people were chatting about this place in the first few weeks since they opened shop and this made us quite curious. Their office is hidden away in north Islington although full with nice stuff and a bunch of young people, in fact that's what this place is about: Young creative talent. Chris & Victoria, the founders and creative directors, want to assemble a force of 25 juniors from different creative disciplines and offer their services to clients on a project basis and to advertising agencies as an independent creative department. For the talent it means a different way of compensation, the more you accomplish the more you earn.

They have a few briefs floating around the place for interesting brands and seem to be a hive of busy idea bees as they also encourage the youngsters to realize their own ideas and develop original intellectual property. The place seems to have a a good vibe about it, fun is an integral part of their creative process. They pulled off a couple of stunts to introduce themselves to the industry, send aging cream to Mother, wrote a April's fool article on campaign and held a creative session for a day on the circle line.

They do enjoy being called the new Mother by others and had some positive comments from other rock star agencies like Anomaly. We'd say it's a teenage pregnancy so far, we'll have to give them the nine months to see how it works out with the motherhood. We salute their fresh approach which is rather relevant to us and many other young creatives out there. We're curious where it goes and the work to come out of creative orchestra. Maybe we'll even get to contribute.

Wanted Ads retrospective

Friday was the day of the clash of the creative teams. Hosted by the newspaper society in the London Art House the Young team of the Year competition attracted 22 junior teams for a one day brief. It was set by JWT, the client being HSBC and a new product called World Selection. It was all about using local media like newspapers, local websites and events to bring the message across. The day went pretty well, we had a room to ourselves and were way less stressed than last year, which helped a great deal concentrating on the task.

After 5 hours of work we presented our idea to a panel of judges (we had Al Young, Paul Belford and an account manager from JWT on ours), which went pretty alright. Unlike last time we were rather happy with our idea and this competition seemed very close.

Lots of excitement and anticipation before the announcement of the results kept everyone nervous. We knew half of the teams participating and had a great time catching up and chatting during the waiting period and afterwards in the pub.

Joe and Alex spanked it with their winning idea and the runners up were Enrique and Borja, the same guys from last year. A job well done lads. This year the Newspaper Society are doing things a little differently and will be putting up all the work from the day online so the public can have their say. That's going to be really interesting as we didn't get a chance to see the other entries. So lets wait and see what London's junior talent had to offer. Also, there was lots of filming on the day so watch this space and we'll keep you posted about a rumored viral that will be circulating soon. Big thanks to the newspaper society for making all this work, it was a fun and competitive day. Finally a good luck to the boys for the European competition and hopefully on to Cannes from there.

Knock some sense into them

Today Obama rolls into London to meet Mr.Brown – the City is expected to go nuts with demonstrations due to the G20 summit tomorrow. A lot of activists and charities are are on their toes trying to reach those politicians. Friends of ours are too, for Save the Children.



Take a few seconds, they don't want any money but you to sign the petition, it's a great cause.

Drawing of Spikey

Since installing the Brushes application I can't stop playing around with it, sketching random things. It's a super simple program that lets you paint with your fingers on the iPhone. But it just got better as I discovered you can use the free Brushes viewer that tracks every single stroke of your painting so you convert it into a movie. Here's the time lapse of my first effort, Spikey the cactus.



Have a look at the finished painting.

Droga5 goodness

I like this Puma spot from Droga5. It's super fresh and a lot of fun to watch.

Barclays Waterslide Competition

You might have seen BBH's waterslide ad for Barclays Bank. The digital counterpart to this is a youtube film competition to remake this ad. Friends of mine had a go their entry's called the Body waterslide, it's quite charming. If you agree give them your vote, they'd love to win the price – a world waterslide tour.



Looking through the entries there's another one that I find nice, the 8BIT waterslide version.

Another lunch tale

A path never walked upon is not a path.

It is by human definition an undiscovered place out in the open. To be exact, it is to be found in a far away land, the backyard of the galaxy, in the Chihuahuan desert. The only mention of this untrodden path, besides in this story, might be a blank space on some forgotten map. Yet an uncompleted map, made by a careless discoverer that hurried through the sands claiming left and right to be identical. But little did he know what he missed out on. Rooted to the ground vegetated a little fella, a goody-good and devoted peyote cactus.

Spikey, as he likes to call himself due to lack of imagination, has only one single purpose in life, to guard the path that is never walked upon. From the the first he shoot through the soil he immediately began to watching the path very carefully. Whether he knew who assigned him to guard this wonderful place of nothingness we dare not guess. You see, Spikey pierced his lips when he tried to speak his first words back in his green childhood. Ever since, he remained silent, yet always proud of his mission.

With every rain, which came achingly seldom, he grew taller and saw more of the path. His responsibility grew with every inch of his body and it was just a matter of time, he imagined, until he'll spot the first intruder of his habitat. In the the meantime – only when no one was around, which happened rather frequently – Spikey used his favourite 39th thorn to inject his own vegan mind with a tiny bit of his own poison, mescaline. Such a moment is about to happen as we speak and it just might be the most exciting and maybe last day in Spikey's life…

vision's clouded. no wind, yet dangling slightly back and forth. the one reoccurring thought of the peyote cactus comes back again. free, free from the ground, walking loose on the earth, abandoning the path. what an idea, sacrilege! discover everything. leave no blank spaces on any maps, and free all those creatures who guard them. even the rabbit. what rabbit? the one rabbit. spikey shakes away the dizziness and sees the rabbit. it's eyes are filled with madness. the rabbit's undignifying the unwalked path. running towards him, tossing the feet high up in the air. think quicker, what to do? thorns. adjust them in the rabbits direction, en garde! spikey cries out just before the rodent rams the guardian of the place. separated from the ground and the roots the cactus whirls into the air, glancing at the rabbit waiting at the same spot on the ground. spikey lands on the rabbit. the loudest silence since your mom walked in on you. precisely 1982 thorns are rammed into the rabbits back, his eyes now glowing green, the mescaline kicks in. stuck to the rabbit. tears run down spikey's dry body, and a last glance on the path…

Read the first lunch tale here.

Friday 13th

Who says it's a day of bad luck? Today's good. An hour ago we got the good news that the agency just won the big pitch we've been working on. But it's our last day at the Bank for now, they've asked us to stay on but we de-freelanced our diaries for the next two weeks to get a move on with our book and to see people. We're excited about seeing Mareka & Kim at BBH & Graham Fink (it was canceled yesterday). Also the preordered Resident Evil 5 is waiting at home for a relaxed evening of gaming horror. The first bottle was opened at 3 o'clock to celebrate the new client. We've got tickets for one of Michael Jackson gigs. And the envelope with our entry for the Cannes Young Lions print competition should have arrived at the guardian by now. Here's the poster we've submitted to answer the brief. Knock on wood.

Let the games begin

Time for another public service announcement. Like last year the Newspaper Society is searching for the next top young creative team on the 27th of march in the London Art House. It will be judged by Al Young from St.Luke's and it's free to enter. We're definitely on board as we had a great (but stressful) time there and learned a great deal. Conditions of entry are:
Conditions of entry:

(1) You must be in a team of two

(2) You must have 3 years or less agency experience

(3) You must be free to also compete in the Best Yet competition being held in London 7-8 May (expenses covered)

Get in touch with Angelina McGaw on angelina_mcgaw@newspapersoc.org.uk or 020 7632 7446. Last year they were oversubscribed so get a move on if you'd like to compete. We're very much looking forward to it.

Rodchenko & Popova

The Tate Modern is hosting a marvelous exhibition of the Constructivism movement that emerged in the Soviet Union. Rodchenko and the rest of the Constructivism gang compared the artist to an engineer – someone who arranges different materials to make something that fulfills a purpose. They applied their ideas to many medias and contributed to graphic design, architecture, clothing design and advertising. It's pretty amazing to see what they got away with working for the Bolshevik government.

As this movement rejected art for art's sake I'd like to imagine that this was the beginning of artist-designers in a modern sense. People who were using art in order to improve everyday life in practical aspects. For me Alexander Rodchenko seems like the first Art Director ever, he even designed lots of ads that Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Russian poet wrote copy for. It's well worth well checking out.

The Bank

We started another freelance gig today at an agency called The Bank. It's not finance but integrated advertising. One of the sweet things they did was to remake La Dolce Vita for Peroni.
They did some sweet stuff for Peroni, remaking La Dolce Vita. We'll be there for a couple of days, maybe longer helping out on a pitch. Fun and lots of work so far.

Young Lions 2009

Like in the last couple of years Cannes is having an international competition to determine the best young creative teams (under 28 years old) in the world. Last year didn't go too well for the UK teams. In all three creative categories Film, Print and Cyber no pivotal achievements were made. How did they choose the teams to go to France and compete under the UK flag you might ask? In 2008 young teams submitted three pieces of work according to the category. This time the UK Young Lions competition is held by the guardian. Rather than submitting work they've set briefs that resemble the real competition in Cannes. Meaning the clients are charity and you just produce one answer to it and craft it. I like that, it's way more transparent and might make for a more equitable choice of competitors.

Check out the website for this competition. The brief for Cyber and Print is on Christian Aid and the issue of HIV in third world countries. The deadline is pretty close, it's the 6th of March, this Friday. We're working on a print entry ourselves. Check the guidelines if you're eligible to enter. It'll be great if the UK could make an impact this year. Get started.

So what's the brief for the film category, being the most prestigious of them? There's none. The guardian decided to ditch the participation in film for this year instead opting for the media category which isn't for creatives really. Rather disappointing, right?

Erik & Philippe interview

I'm a bit late on this, but ihaveanidea.org published their interview with Erik and Philippe here. I admire their optimism towards the industry, these guys love what they do. If you want to be a great creative, it can be simple, it is all about hard work and staying yourself, staying unique. Many times this had been said, but it's good to hear it again. I'm off to town now, we're meeting at NABS today to do some work and contact people.

A Day in the Life of Abbey Road

A simple idea makes a great music video. I have yet to visit that place.

David B

The mighty David 'DeathSpin' Buonaduidi welcomed us yesterday in his white Karmahouse for a chat about our book. We heard that they were not particularly looking for teams but always keens on seeing them. I was glad that Dave recognized me from back then when I've met him at the Under the Influence talk organized by Iris.

The meeting was rather positive as Dave was precise and to the point with his opinions on our work. Stuff like Paperchase and TfL he found nice, but not in the best way. He was more keen on our Greenpeace, Ryanair and the direction J2O was heading. We wanted to see Karmarama for some time now and were happy to finally done so. We left our contacts and entered his freelance radar, a good thing we think. Back to work now. Jai is helping his mum, she's a singer, and has a concert today. She does all the time but rarely it is in London. On my end I decided to look into a bunch of strategies and write a list of new ones. We're getting ready to continue our visits to creatives who wave their arms. Who's next?

Brainsnacks

The weekend was great, Pink Floyd music, snow in hamburg, foreign movies, fish, crazy americans and friends. Now catching up with Mad Men and mulling over the notes from todays bookcrit, we saw another creative director. More about this tomorrow.

Dave Trott

Yesterday we went to see Dave Trott, creative director at CST. We knew it would be interesting to talk to him and show him our work – and it t was a brilliant session indeed. Dave certainly knows how to be a brand himself. He compares getting a job to selling a product – of course he's right, we are the most important product we'll ever sell. It's about researching the market (creative directors) and looking into the product (the creative team) and matching those two together. We like the fact that the whole topic was more how to get the job rather than the work. In fact, we spend two hours with Dave, and he didn't even look at our book.

There were lots of nuggets we took away from this meeting, lessons you won't find on his blog. A lot to take in, and a great deal to talk about. Perfect to kick the January blues in the ass and rock on. Thanks Dave.

Trophy heads

One of our readers, Alfred, just pointed out this Superbowl ad.



Making us happy to see that there are other people out there thinking about what's on the other side of a trophy head. Watch Jai the horseman, as we shot it on placement at W+K London. We really should have made it much shorter, right?

All white

London's crumbling under a white cover, no buses, tube stations are closed and lots of snowball fights are taking place on the streets. When I arrived after a 2 hour long journey at the agency it seems half empty. It was fun walking through the snow not trying to slip away and cover myself with the coffee I was carrying. The real tricky part will be getting home. And once this is accomplished there will be time to watch yesterdays superbowl ads. That is if I make it through the public transport chaos. It is quite impressive how vulnerable this city is to such weather.

Back to AR

Stubble Jai concepting away while evil Wal planning his daily piano assault. We're back to Agency Republic for a few days to work on some stuff.

Comments

We’re following Scamps example and switching to comment moderation. Now whenever a comment is left it will end up in our inbox waiting for approval. Restrictive? Maybe, but it’s our blog and we don’t like the way some people are abusing the comment function. Your opinions are always welcome as long as they stay constructive and don’t insult anyone.

Cheers.

Portfolioing

Bookwork rules our daily schedules nowadays and it's big fun. Even more after our first bookcrit this year with WCRS on Friday. We saw Oli and Alex, a team who helped us a great deal. We have a few new pieces and they seemed to liked them and wanted more, so we give them more.

This week starts off with seeing Rory at The Talent Business and an integrated agency about potential freelance work tomorrow. We're charged.

Erik & Philippe

You know ihaveanidea.org right? They brought us things like Portfolio night and lots of great articles. Continuing the awesomeness they are going to get Erik Vervroegen (former ECD of TBWA/Paris) and Philippe Meunier (co-founder of Sid Lee) in front of a camera for ihaveanidea's first video interview.

O' course they are smart boys and girls and have thought of lots of clever and interesting questions in order to squeeze some advertising wisdom out of those two stars. However they are still giving everyone a chance to quiz these masters – especially as most of the readers of ihaveanidea are North Americans, we shall see what London's creative crowd is curious about. Send your questions to Brett (brett@ihaveanidea.org subject: Erik & Philippe) or leave a comment before Monday the 26th of January. State your name and location if you wanna be credited in the video.

Here are some of my favourite print ads done under Erik V.

Smile Yasar

There's war in Gaza. And I think there's not much we can do about it. But if there's one thing we could change and make the life of one person better in this difficult time – with a single comment, should we not try? Have a go and http://makeyasersmile.blogspot.com

Creative Sensei

It seems like young creatives cannot afford to be picky about their first job nowadays. Yet we shall all have ideas where we'd like to work – and there are a lot of ways how to make that choice. I imagine many a creative is attracted by the glamorous name and the reputation of an ad shop and chooses the place they apply to by the name above the door. So were we. When we started out, we admired the coolest ones, always checking Campaign's new business charts, the award annuals and of course the recent work.

After some placements you realize that there's much more to it. Now there is one main criteria we're looking for in order judge whether a place is for us or not: a creative (director, or team) we can learn from. I think that's the critical point when you start out in this business, to find someone who can act as a mentor and help you moulding your potential and make you a better advertiser. A creative whose opinion you can absolutely trust and seek out if needed. Not someone who solves your problems, but rather helps to find the solution yourself. Finding such a person is not as easy as it seems and once you find that mentor, showing them enthusiasm and hunger is the real challenge.

When we look at an agency, we do not care about the name above the door. It is a only an indicator for where the great people are. We care more about the one person that can teach us to reach the next level – a creative sensei. Scamp and Dave Trott are great examples for this breed of advertiser. We're interested in your thoughts. Do you know more creatives like that? Or have you found your sensei already?

Back to business

After the the cold winter hibernation we warmed up and put together our plan of action for the next weeks. We're excited. The first part is to bring the ideas we gathered over the holiday season to life and on paper. We can't wait to share them with people.

Happy 2009!

Happy new year to all our readers – we hope everyone's celebrating this one properly, we certainly are. Jai Wal will be back next week when we're together again in London. So long, fill the first days of this year with fun and happiness.