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.