The Peter Saville Sportswear...

I recieved a pair of trainers today and theyre a few years old but thankfully are only going to be worn by me in their lifetime! The reason I'm putting them on here is because they've been designed by Peter Saville.

He recieved the brief and of course, thinking differently and thinking simply, Peter Saville went back to basics and got rid of all the adidas branding and added some quirky, intriguing comments on the laces. With the trainers they gave you 5 different pairs of laces and the brief that Saville had to work from.

Here he is talking about them. (He mentions his friend Malcolm Garett in the video, he was our external examiner on our degree!)

The clash...

Ok, In trying to be environmentally friendly British Gas thought they would send out four free lightbulbs to all their customers (yay free stuff!) We wont mention their catastophic prices though...

Anyway... the other day we got one of those post office 'come and get your parcel' notes. I hadn't ordered anything and my mum couldn't think of anything they ordered so we were rather curious. Then the post person turned up again on the off chance that we had come back. We had.

And it was the lightbulbs. So the 'energy saving' lightbulbs that we were given for free were too big to fit through the letter box and would have required us to drive down to the post office collection center wasting petrol and emitting CO2 into the atmosphere....

p.s haven't a clue who the people are in the picture...it was the only picture available!

The stella stuff...

With the resigning of Stella, I thought I would post this that Direct Daily wrote about.

Australia wanted to push the sales of Stella to more Bars and restaurants and instead of sending a few brochures they thought a free PSP would be more productive....

Of course it was full of selling material and the wi-fi allowed up-to-date information, but I think it might have spent more time in use for playing games on rather than selling beer.

The Amiga Advertising...

I was cleaning out some things in the loft last night and found the Old Amiga still up there. Generations of computers have gone by since then, all the way back in 1990.

After the recent release of the ipint from BMB for the iphone/itouch I was quite amused that advertising had sneaked in there. Then when I came across the Amiga last night I suddenly remebered that advertising as a main part of a game had been going on since the Amiga!

Pushover: A small ant arranging coloured tiles in order for them to fall smoothly for him to pass onto the next level. I have no idea what this had to do with crisps but Curly (the big dog character) featured in the opening sequence and as I vaguely remember you picked up packets of Quavers along the way!

Cool Spot: Now I remember this mostly for Virgin advertising but it was actually promoting 7up.
The little red spot running all over levels picking up more spots!

What made me think however, is that advertising doesn't happen like this in more modern games!

The return...

Scamps back! Apparently he got closed down because people started talking about sex with midgets. Mystery solved!

The Powerade visuals (revised)...

Well following the theme of things missing today... Scamps blog going missing, Calvin Klein ads being banned and now these beautifully shot Powerade visuals from Mother.

Powerade is the official sponsor of the bejing olympics and even though I don't know what the strategy is yet you can almost tell what it will be just from the visuals.

The Banned Calvin Klein ad...

This was banned the other day... For a nipple that you see for less than a second....

This happened about 10 years ago on something like a nivea shower cream ad. Are we not past this yet? As long as it goes on after the watershed, whats the problem?

The lack of Scamp....

Im sure you've all noticed that Scamps blog is being investigated by Blogger. Not good.

But what happened?

• Did scowling AD press a wrong button?
• Did someone get sick of all the slagging off going on about certain ads and put a complaint in to blogger?
• Did Blogger get it wrong?

It happened to Liam at the biscuit barrel, as soon as he started up blogger turned him off for being spam, but they were wrong.

So anyone else got any thoughts on what might have happened over there?

The symmetry...

A bit late but the Bejing olympic games opening ceremony was something to behold.

Some of the images captured look like the work of M.C Escher or something out of Magic eye.

Beautiful. Thanks to Barry and Troy for pointing this out.

The best use of a saying ever.....

Good things come to those who wait. One of my favourite campaigns of all time.


Surfer


Dreamer


Tipping point


Fast hands


Evolution


And the one that started it all.... Did I miss any?

The new blogs...

Happy thought has been blogging for a while but for some reason its taken me all this time to find it. He writes a very good post about whether Juniors should be blogging or not, career beneficial or career suicide?

And the forum for junior ad creatives, something tells me this might not stay this way for long but Ronnie Blogsville has his head screwed on and has some great advice for budding creatives.

The oopsie/ the names Cabral. Juan Cabral

the combination of bad Internet and my meddling with posts led to the deletion of the Fallon post!

If you missed it, basically I said that even though I haven't been a fan of the latest fallon work, I'm quite excited for what their going to do with Sony's new ad featuring Daniel Craig.

The guys an amazing actor no doubt they'll have a great location and a good script, so this one can't really go wrong. Or can it?

The only thing is, of late Fallon have been focusing on brand status rather than products. What does the latest orange ad tell us about their network? What amazing deal can they offer me? I don't know all I know is that I am what I am because of everyone around me.

The moving on...

Dave Birss has always been extremely helpful in showing us the error of our ways in our book and we've thoroughly enjoyed our chats with him.

Today however he has announced that he is leaving POKE and concentrating on his Unchained project. Best of luck Dave.

The Dark Knight...

Yesterday, Debbie and I finally got round to going to see The Dark Knight.

After yelling at two little underage muppets near us to shut the hell up and sit down, we weren't disappointed. Despite what we heard from other sources, this movie is fantastic, having so many lead characters usually a movie would lose quality but this has high quality acting, action and twists all the way through.

Heath Ledger does steal the show, he is incredible as the joker, you are actually freaked out by this character, the portrayal is unbelievable and had us turning away at one stage.

His disappearing pencil trick is rather good too.

We were right when we posted that image a long time ago of the new two-face, it is that graphic and very well done.

There is nothing I can fault with the movie except the rating, this movie is not a 12A no-where near.

The thanks...

Some fantastic help from ckny, has enabled us to find a perfect line for our Tetleys ad, Thankyou its a fantastic line and will really improve this piece of work.

Pour it all out. Tetleys

The landmark...

Well we started blogging in March this year and today we finally got to 10,000 hits on the blog!

thanks for visiting us!

The new poll...

Tetleys, with suggestions of making the line warmer, I have thought of an alternative.

Let me know what you think!

The quick idea...

Here's an idea I've thought of today, quickly threw it together, is it worth pursuing?

opinions please?

The steady stream...

Of things being released today!


However, although I appreciate the effort of trying to pursuade me T5 is ok now, does it really need that extra paragraph to clarify where, when and how they came to the bigger statement?

The Newsflash!: Noah takes over Fallon!

Well I'd assume so because everything is coming in twos...

first they released Foam City and dedication on the same day,

and now they've released ASDA and the new Orange ad "together we can do more"

Look out for the lions and tigers guys,

The ASDA advert I've been wondering about...

Made by Fallon, reviewed by many but could I find it? No. Well someone kindly found it for me and here it is for everyone to see!



Directed by Shane Meadows.

The longest week...

We are awaiting a decision, and seriously, I hate waiting for decisions.

The end of this week can't come soon enough.

New book should be finished round about then too.

The commercial Breakdown...

Ok I thought Tarrant on TV was brilliant when it showed you those ads from abroad, in amongst all that other tv stuff. Jimmy Carr with much better humour has his own show on a sunday night about 10.20 ish on BBC1 devoted to ripping it out of adverts. Brilliant.

This is just a couple that stood out for me.

The drawing interaction...

Two Ads both very similar in style, very different products. Whats the sudden fascination with picking up and moving drawn lines?

Very nice but if all adverts are doing the same, is that a good thing?

The drenching...

Well, its seems that Drench didn't want to stop at a TV ad

They've now opened a "brain gym" in London. People can go along and train their brain for the week ahead. Not sure whether it would do much use but good brand expansion.

Watch the news report here:

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/itn/20080802/video/ven-brain-gym-cf04a8a.html

The fun of wordle...

Some fun I've been having on Wordle using the commonly used words from this blog...

Wordle fun here.

The car breakdown...

Car ads, possibly the best sector in advertising.

Mercedes: Beautiful and thought provoking

Audi: smooth, well made and functional

BMW: strong, hard selling and fact based

Honda: Its Honda, need I say more?

Yes these brands get beautiful ads but the automotive sector has one major flaw... The small car.

The last great small car campaign I can remember is Renault Clio's Nicole and Papa.
(Bringing Theirry Henry into the mix just makes me think football not cars.)

You could say that VW's golf has good ads, but the price and size has kinda pulled it out of that area now, polo/fox/lupo yes, golf no.

Smart car constantly bangs on about how small it is, actually come to think of it all small cars only play on that point. There must be something else other than "I'm small" but it doesn't matter how many new "small" cars come out the advertising is rather... uninspiring.

Example: The suzuki swift: Really really bad advertising in my opinion, which got mildly better when they added wall.e to it (but im an animation freak so that doesn't really count), however I still want one. The advertising has done nothing for me but the reviews of the cars performance have. How can all this great stuff in a small package lead to such bland advertising?

We've tried to make small car ads, its hard. Really hard. We understand how difficult it is.

Its probably going to end up as one of my aims in life: make a good small car ad.

Surprisingly the only people recently who have done everything right with small (ish) cars is Skoda. If you had asked me which brand could put out a good small car ad it wouldn't have been them, obviously its going to be hard to follow but it reinvented the brand and sales have gone through the roof.

Whats even more surprising is that it hasn't translated into the larger end, the Octavia and Superb. My family are a fan of the new Skoda's and I can tell you they're damn good cars. (Bought before "favourite things" so not a product of the advertising.)

Im ranting, and to be honest I'm not quite sure what my point (except the fact that I really want a car at the moment) is but I suppose the first line said it all.

Car ads, possibly the best sector in advertising.

The OOOooooooooOOOoooooo moment...

Well maybe not that much of an oooo. We had a bit of a facelift. I got bored last night.

So new title panel but thats about it. For now.

The shock...

Another one bites the dust... Pisspoorenglish went and got a job and so the blog had to give way.

But today comes sad news. Lunar BBDO has decided to stop blogging.

Well I say that, other people do occasionally blog but the majority was done by Ben and he's decided he doesn't want to anymore.

Sad day people. Sad day for blogging.