Wednesday, April 30, 2008

And the winner is...


BBC's AD Breakdown just published a list of the most complained about ads of 2007. What's the world coming to hay? Wasn't it Saatchi's that got their own ads banned for the PR - clever we's think. Have a look and share your thoughts. Here is the list.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

See.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Bow ties

Are back. So are paperhats.

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Leo Playground

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.

We think it's a great way of using placement teams, agencies have enough teams who can crack briefs and please clients. Seems like they want a team who will challenge the norm. Exciting times for us.

What would you prefer? Getting the real briefs? Or working on whatever you like, trying to turn it into something amazing? The Leo Lab experiment commences.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

What is you favourite deadly sin?

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'.

Ninety minutes filled with darkness, laughter and obscenity left us entertained and our souls stained with macabre joy, greedy for more. In their words: 'Only fools and idiots are optimistic'.

Wander

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.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Two weeks at Leo Burnett London

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.

The agency's in Kensington Village, the office seems quite isolated, but that's quite nice as it has it's own outdoor area with lots of green, benches and pigeons; fab for those rare sunny hours. On the inside, it's feels really chilled, light and spacious, and not like a big agency that's a part of the Publicis machine. In fact there's just enough space for some after hours football, maybe we'll give that a go.
We're working hard on every brief and eagerly waiting for our reviews. That's what this placement is about. We want to be better than the other teams, the ones on placement, and the ones with jobs.

Friday, April 18, 2008

20 Slides - 20 Seconds

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.

Unlike most lecturey lectures, there were no long winded speeches that bored you half to death and half asleep. Instead, 13 speakers were invited on stage and were given 20 slides that lasted for 20 seconds each to tell us what they thought about stuff, all kinds of stuff. It was similar to Interesting 2007 last year, just a lot quicker.
There was one who stood out from the rest, perhaps because of his name (Sanky), perhaps because of his hair (big) or perhaps because he engaged the hell out of his audience for 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Whatever it was, I doubt anyone will forget the only slide of the evening that silenced the entire hall. He presented about 15 slides of stuff he loves, mostly funny and good ideas. Then he hit us with a picture of the falling man (9/11). 20 seconds of pindrop silence in the audience and nothing but applause thereafter.
A great evening full of AHA's, our favourite D&AD lecture so far.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Tarako!*#

Welcome to random red wednesday. Strangely we're both wearing red today, and fortunately we found these ridiculously awesome odd japanese commercials. They are showing how Tarako's Kewpie Pasta Sauce is invading the planet with their red dolls. Sticky music, great casting and fabulous costumes from the 50's give those videos a crazy spin way beyond quirkiness. We love them, we would die to see stuff like this running in the UK. Tarako!









Found on Kitsune Noir through Notcot

Monday, April 14, 2008

Mirror Mirror on the wall…

…who's the most creative of them all?

On Friday, Leo Burnett was great and gave us the day off so we could attend the wanted ads awards here in London, held by the Newspaper Society. The purpose; to gather talented young creatives from all over Britain, put them in a sexy building and let them compete against each other for one day. Delightfully this day started off great and was pleasantly sunny as we arrived at the London Art House in Islington, a great location we must say.

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.

Another one

Looks very much like Fallon likes the 14th of April, two strikes on one day. Don't think we'll get that track out of our heads today. This new Budweiser spot is directed by Harmony Korine, it's the second spot for him, the first one was already gorgeous (Thorntons 'Stuck') and one of our favourites from last year. Creative Kudos to John Allison and Chris Bovill for this great choice and spot.

Sony Foam City

Fallon's spoiling us, the waiting has ended. We do like the Sony spot way more than the Cadbury Trucks commercial.

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

D&AD judging week

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.

There I met Brett McKenzie, chief writer for ihaveanidea.org. He's one of the guys responsible for Portfolio Night, which is happening for the second time in London this May. The last tickets were sold yesterday and the list of creative directors is still growing.

Brett and Ray are blogging about the D&AD judging week at ihaveanidea.org/live, check it out for the latest stuff.

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Leo Lab Landing

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.

Friday, April 4, 2008

Ready


Wednesday, April 2, 2008

More Creative Blogs

Lately lots of creatives have started blogging, we like that! So we thought we'd feature them. Without further ado. Lo and behold, new blogs for your creative advertising pleasures.

Carb Free Creativity http://carbfreecreativity.blogspot.com/
Big G and Digital Roy, two young creatives from glue London are writing this fun blog about random geeky stuff they stumble across and some bits and pieces about their sandwich revolution.

Ping http://lookingforping.blogspot.com/
Conrad and Alex are looking for ping, a creative team studying at Manchester Met, they documented their journey through the D&AD Workshop and share some of their work with you.

All about the Crit http://allaboutthecrit.blogspot.com/
Rachel Dutton and Debbie Castaldo, two young ladies trying to break into advertising, relentlessly going to crit after crit and reporting back from the opinion front.

Happy Thoughthttp://happy-thought.blogspot.com/
Matt Squarebrain is a guy with a pleasantly positive attitude. He works at AQKA London and writes about all kinds of fun and thought provoking stuff around our favourite topic – advertising!

The naked Copywriter http://hayesthompson.blogspot.com/
Hayes Thompson is a freelance London based copywriter bringing us amusing rants about interesting and annoying things.

After the savoy truffle http://afterthesavoytruffle.blogspot.com/
Chris is from Canada and gives us a peek at what's going on on the other side of the pond. Great read.

Tom's Blog http://www.tomandmike.com/
Tom is trying to get in, like most of us. He blogs about findings and bits of his work.

Inspyed http://inspyed.blogspot.com/
Bernd is a good friend of ours, a great art director (he's looking for a copywriter, give him a shout) and posts things that inspire him, and all of us sometimes.

CREAbites http://creabites.blogspot.com/
Natalie's blog is at the very beginning but we saw her stuff and we think it might turn into a cool place. She's a Spanish art director now trying her luck in London.

Averything Else http://averythingelse.blogspot.com/
Recently discovered we cannot say much about Adam's blog, besides that he posts lots of work, some quite good work!

Pisspoorenglish http://pisspoorenglish.wordpress.com/
A copywriter from South Manchester sharing his work in progress and portfolio on his blog.

No More Suits http://www.nomoresuits.blogspot.com/
Mark Lewis is currently on the Watford course and entered the Blogosphere quite recently, yet we think it's gonna be worth keeping an eye on his blog.

Seemore http://seymoursees.blogspot.com/
Tom Seymour is a young 3D designer who graduated from St. martins a couple of years ago, now he is working as a hybrid creative at Wieden+Kennedy London. He works on pretty exciting stuff – not to miss out on.

Puh, that'll keep you busy for now. Of course there are lots of other 'older' blogs but we've linked them before. Sorry if we missed anyone new, drop your link in the comments and we'd love to have a look at your blog. Happy lunchtime!