Give Brando a Sweet

Brando, the agency I'm currently interning at, are running this really clever and fun project via Twitter. It's called Tweet Sweets and it makes going into work even more fun than it was before.

Some of you will probably have seen an awful lot of #imjusttestingthisatbrando and then, more recently, #tweetsweets appearing in my Twitter feed. Apologies for clogging up your feeds with annoying hashtags for a while, things should go back to normal now.

'But what the hell is going on?' you're wondering?

Well, the clever kids a Brando have hooked a gumball machine up to Twitter so that whenever someone sends a tweet to @Brando_Digital containing the hastag #tweetsweets.

There's a live webcam set up so when you tweet us a sweet you can watch us collect and eat the sweet. We also get up to all kinds of silliness and crazy antics just to entertain our tweeters (and to avoid having to do any real work).



I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing in the photo above but on Friday I made a fool of myself on camera by doing the Hucklebuck, the David Brent dance, playing Rocky and Harry Potter, among other things.

It's great fun and a great way of having conversations with people.

We've had an unbelievable amount of sweets tweeted in so far, the collective weight of everyone in the office has probably risen by several stone in the two days it's been live, I shudder to think how many sweets we'll all have eaten by the end of next week.

The magic gumball machine is resting for the weekend so it's ready to pump out sweets again come Monday morning.

Be sure to pop over to the Tweet Sweets Website on Monday, send us a sweet and make us do something silly.

Are you a Plank or an Owl?

Me, I'm neither. And never will be. I should hope you're the same.

Everyone's seen this new 'craze' sweeping the globe and clogging up my twitter stream - Planking and Owling.

I'm not going to soil this blog by posting pictures of either activity here - I'd rather post pictures of a certain female former minister for health dressed in her birthday suit - but if you don't know what they are a quick google image search will show you everything you need to know about this moronic activity.

Seriously, is this what we've become? I just don't get it. How or when did this become accepted as something that we not only tolerate but that we actually encourage people to do, and then look at their stupid photos afterwards?

We are (supposedly) an incredibly advanced race, capable of amazing and wondrous things. We've been to outer space and to the bottom of oceans. We've created the internet, a mindblowingly powerful communication tool.

And what do we use it for? To post photos of people lying on random objects and squatting as if they're about to poop on top of a chair/table/person/wherever the hell you think it's funny.

I despair, I really do.

Thankfully karma can be a bitch, and has a great way of righting some of the wrongs that these planks and owls have inflicted upon us.

I have no sympathy for this girl. But I do owe her a huge thanks, she made me laugh almost as much as the weird clown girl dancing to Beyonce.



Please be sure to share and more videos of spectacular planking fails.

Apologies for the amount of anger and vitriol in this post but it's Monday, I'll cheer up soon, I promise.

Right, I'm off to curl up in a ball and lie on a lit barbecue, I think it could catch on.

Ireland in Bitesize

I really enjoyed this video with some interesting and 100% accurate observations about Ireland from the brilliant Colm O'Regan.



Colm is playing at Whelan's tonight tonight (and I'll be there, not performing, possibly heckling) and you can find more info about his upcoming shows and read some of his previous articles he's written for The Cork News I suggest that you pencil in a free afternoon for these because once you've read one or two you'll want to read the whole back catalogue) at his website.

Now, time to go enjoy a bit of this rare sunny afternoon.

Er, Keep Your Bits In Luv

So circumstances* conspired against me recently, which resulted in this blog being cast aside like an old mattress when you've just bought a fancy new memory-foam one. Well fear not old mattress fans, I have returned, sans memory foam.

So I know this is a few days old now but I just wanted to throw my 2 cents into the ring on the ad that's making a few waves in the Irish advertising scene at the moment - the new Club Orange ad.



To be honest I don't find it offensive, obnoxious or rude, although I can see why other people may react that way to it. I just find it a bit stupid. I know, I know, the whole point of it is to be controversial, get people talking about it, generate word-of-mouth, get as many mentions on blogs and social media as possible, yadda yadda yadda. I get that that's how ads like these work I just think it's the easy option.

We all know that sex sells. We all know that controversy generates word-of-mouth and that there's no such thing as bad publicity. But it's easy to put those ingredients together and come up with something like the ad above. What's much more difficult is coming up with a clever and engaging way of selling your product, a way that will grab people's attention because of it's creativity or it's uniqueness. Just throwing a few hot women in bikinis in your ad is talking down to people and treating them like morons, it's not trying to speak to people on their level in a way that's never been done before. I'm sure this ad will be pretty successful but for me successful advertising doesn't necessarily mean good advertising (Let's leave aside the discussion on what is 'successful' and what defines 'good advertising', that's for another day).

So fair play to Club Orange, I'm sure this ad is doing exactly what they had hoped it would but in my opinion they've taken the lazy man's approach to advertising.

I really enjoyed this blog from Una Mullally over on The Anti Room about it and there's a good debate going on in the comments there too, well worth a gander.

Anyway, I've given the suits at Club Orange exactly what they wanted, a few extra views of the ad and a bit more discussion around it. I'm just another cog in the machine.

*In reality I was completely snowed under with college work in the final build up to the industry presentation, which went really well, thanks for asking. After that I was getting stuck into job hunting, which I'm happy to say was successful as I've somehow managed to land myself an internship at Brando, an awesome digital agency in Dublin. Wish me luck

IKEA Goodies

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.

Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir

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.'

Ads From Your Childhood #3

Time for another blast from the past.

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.