Seeing as IKEA was recently named as Advertiser of the Year at Cannes I decided I'd drag myself away from tweaking my portfolio in preparation for Portfolio Night 9 in two days time to root out a few of my favourite IKEA ads. There are an awful lot of great ones to choose from as in general IKEA have produced some outstanding advertising over the years. This could turn in to a very long post so for the sake of brevity I've limited myself to three ads and only allowed myself to choose one from any given medium - no easy task.
First up is this brilliant ambient piece from Frankfurt in Germany:
When it comes to TV it's so hard to choose. I went for their recent 'Kitchen Party' ad. The music is as if it were written for the ad (although it wasn't) and the design of the set is simply brilliant. I could just as easily have gone for the ad directed by Spike Jonze or the Cats commercial either.
And lastly I like this press ad, also from Germany. It's nothing astounding or groundbreaking, just a funny idea, well executed to make a simple point.
In college recently we worked on a brief for IKEA and some of the work was pretty outstanding, even compared to some of the stuff above (I'm not talking about my own campaign here, but some of my classmates') so if any IKEA bigwigs happen to randomly fall across this site then you could do a whole lot worse than drop over to www.adgrad.ie (our shiny new class website) and check out some of the burgeoning talent we have among our ranks.
Right, that's it, time to get back to this blasted portfolio. Wish me and my fellow adgraders luck for Thursday night.
I wrote a few weeks ago about some cool new projects that are being made possible thanks to new social media like Twitter, Facebook and Youtube (How long do these have to be around before we stop calling them 'new'? They've all been around for a good few years now. Or is it just me that's still calling them new?). I'd forgotten about this one at the time but it's another brilliant example.
Eric Whitacre is a young grammy nominated composer from the states who used Youtube to put together a 'virtual choir' to perform a number of his compositions. I won't go into too much detail about it because he explains everything you need to know in this talk from Ted 2011. The video is about 15 mins long and even if classical music isn't really your thing it's still well worth a look. The sheer volume of work that must have gone into a project like this is in itself pretty astounding.
Personally I prefer the music of Lux Aurumque but I love the artwork on Sleep, it's really clever and does a great job at visually demonstrating how the whole thing was as much about connecting people as it was about the music. The full version of Sleep is available on youtube here, Lux Aurumque is here, and if all this stuff has really got your juices flowing then Eric's personal website is positively brimming with information.
As is said on Eric's own site, this project is another example of 'the power of the internet to connect people of all backgrounds and abilities and create something beautiful across time and space.'
Remember this ad for Rolo? While my opinions have obviously changed since I first saw this I remember at the time thinking that it was the funniest thing I had seen in my life. I also remember that it very quickly became common practice whenever you had a packet of Rolos to offer one to a friend, quickly withdraw the offer and laugh at them while singing the 'na na na na na' line at them. It became a bit of a catchphrase in my school playground at least.
I had intended on making this an all confectionery blast from the past and showing a classic Milkybar ad as well but they are surprisingly difficult to find. Anything I could find was either too recent, from abroad, or too old. If anyone comes across a Milkybar ad from the UK or Ireland from the late 80s or early 90s be sure to share it.
So I'll have to deviate from confectionary a bit but we won't stray too far, we'll stick in the food category at least. For years the Pat the Baker jingle was probably the best known jingle on Irish TV. I've never actually tried Pat the Baker bread (haven't a clue why) but hearing this song and seeing this ad always makes me think "OK, I'm definitely gonna buy some next time I'm shopping." I always forget about it though. Still, it's a great ad.
I had a bit of fun with an older brother of mine a couple of months ago recording cheesy jingles like this one. I was on drums and he was on guitar and vocals. We spent the best part of a day recording the likes of Pat the Baker, Saved by the Bell, Toys'R'Us, Postman Pat and a bunch of others. We videoed them too but I think it's probably best if they remain hidden, the world's not ready to see some of it's favourite jingles butchered beyond recognition.
I was shown this in college earlier today and I've since seen it on a few blogs, where it's making quite an impact. It's not hard to see why.
What an ad, almost leaves you speechless. A combination of exquisite copy and an astonishingly good young actor, it's pretty rare to see child abuse tackled in such a head-on and in-your-face manner. Hats off to Ogilvy here in Dublin who created it. You can be damn sure that this will get a lot of attention over the next days and weeks and will definitely get people talking. I'd expect a similar reaction to a lot of the road safety ads I was discussing previously. I doubt that was the reaction that Ogilvy or the ISPCC were looking for but it could work out quite well for them. Hopefully it will encourage people to donate to such a worthy cause.
So it's all systems go over here in DIT. The Big Project, as it is commonly referred to, is in full swing. A lot of the fun stuff like choosing a name for our agency has been done and now it's time to get stuck into the nitty gritty of the details of the project. First on the agenda: Research - Is that a mighty cheer I hear rumbling in the distance?
Luckily for me I'm a copywriter so instead of trawling through business reports and lengthy transcripts of interviews and focus groups a lot of my research involves doing something I spend a lot of my time doing already - looking at ads. Oh what a troubled life I lead. You could spend days on end looking at road safety ads from around the world and only see a small percentage of them. There are so many ads out there that are trying to convince people to drive carefully on the roads and quite a range of techniques are employed in order to get the message across. Unsurprisingly, attempting to shock audiences is the most common one, although not always the best.
As with all advertising there are some truly inspiring road safety ads out there, then there are some decent enough campaigns and of course there are some absolute shockers. An honorable mention in this last category has to go to the 'Don't be a Dickhead' campaign from the Transport Accident Commission in Victoria, Australia (there are a series of ads there if you fancy torturing yourself). I like the angle they've taken and I think being slightly abusive and derogatory towards people who drive dangerously or do stupid things when driving is a tactic that could be used more often but in this case they've taken a decent idea and done everything in their power to make sure it results in a truly awful series of ads. That takes a lot of work so fair play to them, they should be proud.
But now, for some road safety ads that I did like. I've already posted Enjoy The Ride from the Safety Countil of Western Australia before so I won't take up precious blog space with it but I think it's a beautiful ad, everything about it just works.
Then there's this little beauty from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership in the UK which proves that you don't have to shock and disturb your audience to create an incredibly impactful ad.
I also love this one from the Transport Accident Commission in Victoria (so they CAN make good ads). To be honest if watching this doesn't force you to think about your driving habits then I don't know what will.
This last one is from Brazil and while it's not the most amazing idea ever it is a really simple and clever idea used to make a very simple point: Never drink and drive.
I could go on and on here but I'll leave it at that. What's really interesting is to see how advertisers are using new technologies as part of road safety campaigns. There are a whole bunch of great new apps and digital campaigns using unique and clever techniques to encourage people to slow down on the roads or not use mobile phones while driving or whatever the particular issue may be. This is an excellent example from OVK in Belgium.
The challenge for us in DIT is to create ads that will be just as meaningful and impressive as these and that will ultimately change the way people act when on the road. No problem at all.
Now make sure you drive safe y'all.
As a little aside: Over the next few weeks I've got Portfolio Night on 26th May and the presentation for this project on 9th June so I hope to be meeting various creative directors and general ad-people from Dublin who will be just bursting to give me (and my classmates) a job. To remind them that they want to hire me (as if they would forget) I've gone and kitted myself out with some fancy business cards - a pretty unimportant and dull issue for most people but I've never had my own business cards before so allow me to feel important for just a few moments. Anyway, being a copywriter my design skills are, well, limited at best, so I got some (I say some, I mean a lot) help with the design from Curious Design who are a great new design company here in Dublin. They were so so helpful and even though it was a tiny project for them they really paid attention to detail and helped me to get a design that I was happy with. Why not pop over to their site, see the kind of things they do and have a read of their blog while you're there?
Last week I was quite excited about Budweiser's new Ice Cold Index app. Well it appears that an awful lot of other people were too because Budweiser apparently hadn't expected the app to be so popular and have temporarily pulled it. If you visit www.icecoldindex.ie now you're greeted with this message:
(Sorry about the poor quality image. Visit the site to get a clearer image)
So Budweiser are claiming that the unexpectedly large number of downloads crashed the servers I have heard that there are other reasons for removing the app but I haven't been able to find much else online about it so maybe I shouldn't add fuel to the fire. If you were that way inclined, though, you certainly could take a very cynical approach to the whole thing.
I have to say that despite my initial excitement I wasn't really impressed with the app in the few days that I did get to use it. Most days the temperatures the app gave were completely different to the actual temperatures. I had a look at the terms and conditions and saw that they take their readings at 12 noon each day - hardly the hottest time of the day and most likely a completely different temperature to pretty much any time during the afternoon or evening. I suppose they have to take the temperatures at some stage and can't really monitor or change them throughout the day but this is beginning to look more and more like a poor marketing gimmick rather than a genuinely creative and clever way of getting people to drink your beer.
Unless they can rescue it soon then it will ultimately have been a failed poor marketing gimmick, just one more in a long line.
Well it's finally here. This morning we had the briefing for the end of year project on my masters. The class are split into two separate 'agencies' and given a real brief from a real client. Then for 6 weeks both agencies put all that they have learned over the past 8 months into practice and develop an integrated advertising campaign. On the 9th of June (a date for your diary if there happen to be any agency folk reading this) there will be a very daunting presentation to roughly 300 of the movers and shakers from the advertising industry in Dublin. It's a bit intimidating, but all very exciting.
Every year this is the most exciting part of the course and realistically this is what we've been looking forward to since we began last September. The client for the project is always top secret information right up until the day of the briefing so there was a lot of suspense and anticipation floating about over the past few weeks. There was also quite a lot of speculation, I even dreamt last night that the client was Bostik glue and that we were given a tour of their factory as part of the briefing, it was all very random.
Thankfully we were put out of our misery this morning and for the next 6 weeks we'll be working on a campaign for the Road Safety Authority. I don't think I'm supposed to be keeping schtum on what the actual campaign is but I won't mention it here just in case. I'm really excited about it though, it's a great brief and something that we can really have fun with. It's also nice to work on a campaign that will hopefully have a positive societal impact.
It's all very real now that it has started and we're literally hitting the ground running. The next few weeks will be spent intensely researching - oh how glamorous - and then after that the real fun of the creative work begins. I spent a lot of today looking at road safety campaigns from all over the world (one of which I'd already posted about here) and there's an awful lot of great stuff out there, and a fair amount of terrible stuff too. I'll most likely post some of it here over the next few days.
It's a very tricky and challenging brief. As I already mentioned when I previously talked about public service advertising it's hard to avoid being too preachy and talking down to people. It's also very tempting to just go for the shock factor but that's not always the best technique and the real challenge is to create something that people will actually care about and will encourage them to change their behaviour. These are all challenges that we'll be facing over the next 6 weeks and I'm honestly looking forward to them, for the moment at least. But for now: let the shouting begin.
