The return?..

Well, just briefly.

We're still at The Union, its all going well (as far as we know) and we're getting work out there, cracking briefs and scoring extra business.

Its great fun. We love it. Bring on 2009.

The suspense....

From the comments, you all seem to want to know where we're going...

For the month of November we will be residing in The Union, Edinburgh.

Set in an amazing building, with talented people within and work of great quality, we are really looking forward to working with the people at The Union.

For those who may not be familiar with them...

The zoo...

We went to the zoo... fun!

The congratulations...

Well we've given ourselves a pat on the back.

You may have noticed a lack of updates over the last few weeks. Thats what hard work does to you!

We had a trip, and a few meetings and we were given a fantastic oppurtunity to prove ourselves. Have fun. Yep you heard it.

So we had fun pushed that direction into our book and the reward came. WE HAVE A PLACEMENT! Its not for a little while but thats ok, its letting us relax a bit more in the safe knowledge that we are going somewhere.

For the first time in our work, our strategies were apparently stronger than our executions. It used to be the other way round! Great!

It was quite a strange day. 1st meeting: very good and positive feedback but they are doing some changes in the next few months and we might be involved.
2nd Meeting: OK more advice but next time we go we'll see the CD
3rd Meeting: Started quite strange, they said we had the basics but needed to inject some fun into our work. But told if we make changes we'll get a placement. We did (It was a bloody fun weekend)

So we'll keep you informed. Another trip next week. Fun Fun Fun!

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!