For the last couple of weeks, we have been working with those wonderful people in Red Rage Films and Oxfam Ireland, on a campaign that will, hopefully, prevent many needless deaths in West Africa over the coming months. As Oxfam Ireland put it: “What we’re witnessing in West Africa is beyond belief. With little rainfall and a serious shortage of food, the people of Chad, Niger and other countries have found themselves in the midst of a severe food crisis. To get food, people have even resorted to digging up ant hills in order to gather the grain that the ants have stored. This is how some people are feeding their children – and it’s utterly shocking. Mamadou Biteye, Oxfam Humanitarian Lead in West Africa, said: “The situation is looking extremely worrying for millions of people in West Africa, but the worst is not yet inevitable. The crisis has been identified early, and we know that there are cost-effective measures that can be taken now to protect those most vulnerable. This time we can act before the emergency hits.”

The TV commercial features footage supplied by Oxfam in West Africa, of Adjitti Mahamat, a mother with a young family, as she desperately digs up ant hills in order to retrieve a few grains of wheat. Time is running out for the people in West Africa. If we act now we can prevent needless deaths.
If you would like to donate please click here. Thank you.

The upcoming Fiscal Stability Treaty is really beginning to dominate the headlines – perfect timing for our second campaign on behalf of the Referendum Commission.
The Referendum Commission’s role is ensure that voters know there’s a Referendum, to encourage them to vote and to make sure they understand what they’re voting on.
It’s always challenging to achieve all three but we’re delighted with the campaign we’ve developed.
As before this is a multi-media campaign using traditional and digital media including a first ever Facebook App for the Referendum Commission.
Everything, including 2 million printed Guides and a website, was produced in under three weeks.
The TV ad (shown here) was produced by the always brilliant Fish Films and directed by the excellent Chris Cottam.
Don’t forget to vote on May 31st.

Our new Dubliner Cheese TV spot had its first airing on Monday 7 May. The commercial is set at the cheese counter in a grocery shop and focuses on an amusing and modern-day misunderstanding between two adults. The counter is manned by the rather hunky Dubliner Cheese man, who is getting cheese samples ready for the customers passing by. Two mischievous and curious kids are asking questions about cheese and taking samples. In the meantime a very attractive women approaches to claim the kids whom he assumes to be their mum. “Mum” is as equally taken with the Dubliner cheese as the kids and when it is revealed that “mum” is in fact their very attractive auntie, our Dubliner character is left guessing if she will return for the cheese alone….

View it on our Youtube channel:

This wonderfully offbeat artist has created a series of self portraits taken with her camera phone in airplane toilets. Using only objects found in the confined space (and, ingeniously, an inflatable neck support) Nina Katchadourian’s images play with the poses and style of 15th century Flemish portraiture. It helps that her face has the right shape, though that may be part of what inspired her to do it in the first place. Have a browse through some of her other work, it’s brilliant. One of my favourites is her arrangement of cars in car parks by colour.

I recently took a trip to London to see the Hockney landscapes exhibition at the Royal Academy and the Lucien Freud portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. I felt very grown up.

Sadly, Freud was sold out, but I’d reserved tickets for Hockney a month earlier and the show more than made up for it. I’m a huge Hockney fan and had a good idea of what to expect. But the reality far exceeded my expectations. Most of the work is from the last ten years – landscapes of his place of birth in Yorkshire. Some of the larger ones take up entire walls in these huge rooms, others are placed together in grids of nine, eighteen or twenty four. The oils are incredibly vibrant in colour, the iPad paintings strange and thought-provoking, the charcoal sketches beautifully elegant. You’re left reeling as you and hundreds of others are finally burped out through a large door into the shop.

And it’s just then, with these inspiring images still burning on your retina, that the whole experience is suddenly and cruelly stripped of its awesome power as you’re faced with a labyrinth of Hockney-flavoured tat.

This is nothing new, of course. Merchandising is a key part of any large show and a good earner for the galleries. But here, the ante had been upped somewhat and consequently, the experience cheapened – literally reduced to the status of novelty items.

Alongside the obvious books, posters, postcards, keyrings, mugs, pencils and notebooks there were a bizarre and varied array of tacky goods on offer – bags, wallets, hats, trays, scarves, iPad covers and glass dishes to name but a few offending items.

I was left wondering what Hockney himself thought of all this? He’s obviously bought into it – it’s part of the deal – but seriously, WTF?

My mood was realigned when that night at a North London pub, I told a particularly flamboyant friend I was over to see Hockney. He threw his arms up and exclaimed, ‘How wonderful! Where are you meeting him?’

On the way to work this morning, I spotted a pavement ad neatly positioned outside a watering hole for 48 Go Conquer.
It reminded me that a) this is something that I have been meaning to blog about and b) I am truly tardy with my blogging duties.
The first time I saw the Co Conquer TV ad, it was in the midst of some usual drama going on on the home front. Kids were being roared at to get to jaysing bed and my mother, who operates a strict policy of imparting gossip loudly about people about whom you know nothing, was deftly losing her narrative thread between the competing hot tale du jour and stopping to back-fill this with bios of the people concerned. (Am still none the wiser.)
In the midst of this melee, with half an eye on the TV, out popped the Go Conquer TV ad. My attention was instantly summoned because of the distinct visual language and the dialogue. It looked and behaved like a promo for some teenage drama or mix thereof: “Skins” meets “Hollyoaks” meets the “ Inbetweeners” with a bit of Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” video thrown in.
Aside from providing some misplaced visceral thrill where I felt my inner teenager come alive to the idea that life is a constant drama where you are always at the centre of something interesting (not quite my life, it has to be said), I applaud its singular focus.
In marketing departments and advertising agencies, the crime of being non-specific about your target audience persists.
I have yet to meet the target audience aged 18-34 who is both male and female but his/her presence is famous on briefs, as is its older, equally vague hermaphrodite cohort, the 35-54s.
It is hard to be insightful and connect with people if you can’t truly tap into who they are. Understanding where they are in life-stage and what the needs are specific to this is something everyone agrees with in theory but is often ignored in practice. Some areas of communication are naturally more age-neutral (a sports fan is just as valid at 8 as he is at 80) but others really do merit being more single-minded to net that all-important connection. No more so does this imperative to connect exist than in the mobile market which is uber-saturated and all very “samey”.
So hats off to Go Conquer for its single-minded proposition to market and delivery of this. And you never know, as long as birth certs don’t have to be produced, they may just pick up some wannabe 19 year olds too.

It’s nice to know our work is inspirational!

We got a lovely surprise this week when we received an email from an artist called Gillian.

Gillian liked the BMW ad we created so much she was inspired to paint this scene in oil called ‘First Step’.

Thanks Gillian

2011 for me will be remembered mostly for the VW ad featuring a kid as Darth Vader being brought up as a reference in meetings more times than anything else…

Even if you don’t like Star Wars, VW’s ‘The Force’ was generally considered to be very effective on the ‘is it cute or is it annoying? talkability scale and ultimately a great brand ad for VW. But the car – ‘Was it for the Passat?’ – was in the end a little over shadowed.

(As a side note The Darth Vader kid actually looked like Luke Skywalker and was apparently quite annoying…)

So I was pretty excited about what they had in store when the teaser ‘The Bark Side’ was released mid January – there were loads of dogs and loads of possibilities for where the final ad could end up.

I eagerly started my computer this morning only to be greeted with disappointment– a fat dog losing weight – why? – Where are all the other nice dogs gone and why have they just slapped the Star Wars reference on the end?

You can see this and all the other Superbowl ads that you might actually be talking about for the next year here..

Also Twitter released that there was 10,000 tweets sent per second in the last three minutes of the game – WTF

Here’s a fascinating exercise in brand logo recognition and understanding. A five year old girl gives her impression of a couple of dozen logos presented to her by her graphic designer father. Some you’d expect: Starbuck’s is “the coffee logo”. Some you might not: McDonald’s golden arches “looks like a fry, but it’s an M made out of fry!”. Some you definitely wouldn’t: the Republican Party is “a parade elephant” (displaying a much better understanding than I did in a recent pub quiz!). And one or two very telling observations: GE is the “place where grandpa works”.

Jocelyne Grivaud, a French artist with a bit of a Barbie obsession, has reinvented Barbie as famous works of art and cultural icons throughout the ages. They are all here (along with all sorts of other weird and wonderful stuff) but here are my favourites.

Open pigtail-pulling and slagging off between competing brands is something I’m never too sure about. On the one hand, it’s a very direct way to point out the (supposed) superiority of your product, but on the other…well, kind of feels too easy, doesn’t it?

So it was surprising to see two of the biggest and most high-end brands in the car market – if not the world – engage in a public tit-for-tat via their outdoor ads in Santa Monica, California. It started with a straightforward dig from Audi at BMW, but when BMW retaliated, it was like, so on. So back came Audi with something bigger and cleverer, and then back came BMW with…a blimp.

In fairness, it’s been very cleverly done. But at the end of the day, will either brand really win?

Given the somewhat, ahem, competitive nature of our industry it should come as no surprise that creative people have upped the ante when it comes to the humble resumé. From movie posters to infographs, here are some nice examples of how some have turned their application into a demonstration of their skills. Nice.

And I thought I was great using Century Gothic…

Chemistry is currently recruiting for a planner.
Ideally, candidates will have a minimum of 5 years experience and be motivated by the ultimate goal of producing strong creative work which engages audiences and delivers on our Clients’ objectives.
If you think you would be interested in working at Chemistry get in contact and drop me a line at sinead.cosgrove@chemistry.ie or call me on the Chemistry landline 49888 00

What a sweet idea. Developed by Berg London, it’s a little thermal printer that acts like your own ticker tape. You set up subscriptions via your smartphone, and the Little Printer creates a ‘mini-newspaper’ that’s delivered to you whenever you want. Matt Jones, principal of Berg, spoke last week at an event organised by It’s Nice That, where he described it as being a ‘Cloud companion species’. That’s because the ’publications’ which Little Printer accesses on your behalf are created in Berg’s cloud on the Web. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but as you can see in the video, it allows you to print small pictures of dogs, which can only be a good thing. Launching in 2012, they already have Nike, Foursquare, The Guardian, and Google as partners.

coming to a gym/tanning salon near you soon

It had to happen, but did it have to happen here? The answer, of course, is yes. Welcome to Tallafornia. With the success of Jersey Shore, Made in Chelsea, Geordie Shore, TOWIE etc., an Irish version was sure to follow. After all, no one nation on Earth could hope to monopolise idiocy. The free movement of the lack of ideas, increased multi-lateral trade in insults, and the relaxation of border controls on importing dumbness has meant that stupidity has gone global. If a world flag was to be created, it might consist of an image of Snooki wearing a ‘Meatball Power’ T-shirt, with the word ‘FAIL’ in large letters over her head.

Dumbass behaviour, an obsession with tanning, a borderline addiction to bodybuilding, and a desire to exhibit all three seem to have swept the planet as a sort of airborne toxic event – close the airports now before we get Desperate Scousewives – and we in Ireland couldn’t inoculate everyone in time. Seven Irish people – Cormac, Kelly, Jay, Dave, Nikita, Phi,l and Natalie received possibly fatal doses, and are now confined to a house in Tallafornia where they all live/shout/ride/exist together. That’s the idea. That’s what we watch – that’s all there is to it. This means we get to sit and gape in awe at their talents – the ability to enter, and exit, rooms. The ability to provide a valid, mostly upright frame for a range of clothing, from bikinis to singlets. And the ability to follow each other around the house, reacting to stimuli like bedspreads, hot tubs, food etc.in a protozoan fashion.

Now, we’re an advertising agency, so there’s no point in getting too sniffy about the existence of these shows. They are very successful. Plus, they are created with an audience in mind – like most of our work. And there’s no point thinking that TV will ever go back to these days. Pity. But do these shows have to be so dumb? Surely there’s something they could do to make them less numbing. Maybe include subtitles – in Irish, say, or a useful foreign language like French, or German. That way, at least viewers could learn how to say ‘getting my creep on’ should they meet members of the ECB in Coppers. Or how to ask locals ‘Could you direct me to the World Benchpress Championships?’ on a visit to Berlin. A little bit of Spanish works very well in Dora the Explorer. Perhaps she never made it as far as the Belgard Road.

A Friday afternoon tribute to the most annoying Mac feature. Ever.

Credits:
Stars: Rachel & Adrian
Original Screenplay: Rachel
DOP/Director: Rob
Production Manager: Kerrie
Tech Manager: Eva
With Thanks To: Nicole (for tolerating the shoot)

“Isn’t he the guy Coke owns?”

No, no children. Santa is in fact a “a Concept, not an idea. It’s an Emotion, not a feeling. It’s both Yesterday and Today. And it’s Tomorrow as well.”

For your marketing in-joke pleasure, some excerpts from the Santa brand guidelines.
Link to the full document below.

http://www.quietroom.co.uk/santa_brandbook/

Ah, Christmas ads. Cue the snow, some feel-good music, cute kids, hugging friends, family homecomings, and reactions to gifts that would imply they’ve just been presented with a life saving kidney.

All well and good. But it’s nice when a big brand like Harvey Nichols breaks the mould and has a bit of fun. Taking the legendarily grotty Walk of Shame and using it to advertise a very upmarket department store is a brave move, but it’s been wonderfully pulled off with just the right amount of realism to ensure a smile. And not, y’know, a complete reconsideration of your drinking habits.

(BTW if these girls were in Ireland they’d have totally nicked your man’s coat. I’m told.)

We do wholly approve of the song being used in this manner. I smell a Chemistry staff Christmas video idea…
Take it away sea boys and gals!

There is not a shop in Dublin you can walk into this month without hearing the Mariah Carey Christmas classic ‘All I want for Christmas’. All she wants, it transpires, is you. All the world wants, I reckon, is for that song to go away.

For some, it is a source of great joy. The heralding of Christmas parties, days off and misguided girls in sexy Santa suits. For others, it’s a form of aural torture. So why, you might ask, would anyone in their right mind ADD JUSTIN BIEBER TO IT!? But good Lord, they have. In this tinsel-draped Oedipal nightmare of a video, we see Bieber crushing on a clearly deranged and unaware she’s middle-aged Mariah – dressed, of course, in an aforementioned sexy Santa suit. Bieber’s screeching is just lamped over the original vocals – Mariah just doesn’t have the notes in her any more, bless – creating an overall impression of bad karaoke.

It wrecks it for those who love it, makes it more unbearable for those who can’t bear it, and creates another platform on which Justin Bieber can exist. And on that note, enjoy!

(promise we’ll blog about good Christmas songs later! But the world needs to see this)

Organ donation – how to get more people to carry donor cards – is an incredibly worthwhile initiative. It’s a dream brief for a creative team, offering the opportunity to do some challenging and award-winning work. And judging by one of the two ads we’re comparing in this piece, those are the only assessment criteria. For the other ad, effectiveness is the number one criterion.

The first ad, from the excellent Duval Guillaume agency in Brussels (anyone can have a bad day at the office) would be described as deeply sexist if it weren’t for the fact that it is impossible to consider it as anything other than stupidly misguided. It appears to be based on a belief that the only way to a man’s heart / other transplantable organs is via his penis.  (A theme which has recurred…see blog post below: Men’s health ads – what does it take? 21 October 2011.)

 
The second ad, from Lowe Bull in Cape Town is as beautiful as it is motivating. It will also be effective where the first ad will not. Because, unlike the first ad, the emotion it evokes is appropriate to the action it seeks to prompt. And, by successfully communicating a brave and intelligent proposition that if you don’t have an organ donor card, you will take someone else with you when you die, it deserves to be richly awarded.

The haters and cynics are, no doubt, having a field day with last night’s broadcast of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s new sitcom ‘Life’s Too Short‘. Having enjoyed The Office and Extras enormously (both are in my all time top 10 TV series), I was anticipating the new one as I might a gig by Stevie Wonder (no, really) or a short foreign holiday.

The premise sounds great: Warwick Davis, an out-of-work-down-on-his-luck dwarf actor, attempts to revive his career by taking part in a documentary about his life. The actor plays himself, frequently referring to past glories in movies such as Willow, Return of the Jedi (in which he played an Ewok) and Harry Potter. This is not the only post modern touch – the creators of the show also appear as themselves, playing Davis’ reluctant agents (they even reposition their office bell just out of his reach).

So, is it any good? Aside from the obvious and boring accusations of offensive, un-PC writing thrown at Gervais by the aforementioned haters, regretfully, the show feels like a tired amalgam of Gervais’ greatest hits. The biggest problem shouts at you from the moment Davis first opens his mouth: he is David Brent. As a dwarf. It seems Gervais’ ego can’t cope with the fact he hasn’t written the main part for himself, so compensates by bizarrely transferring his / Brent’s personality traits and ticks into the body of the unfortunate Davis.

I say unfortunate, not because of his physical stature and all the difficulties that go with it (the script certainly doesn’t shy away from this), but because you can’t watch him act without thinking of another, more famous actor. And, because of this distraction, the supposed star of the show becomes the least interesting thing about it.

Like Extras, each episode will feature a cameo from a bona fide mega-star. Last night it was Liam Neeson sending himself up as the ‘serious’ actor he’s perceived as. It was this scene that stole the show right in front of the nose of Davis who sat uncomfortably on the sidelines.

In the end, there simply weren’t enough laughs to make me watch again. I actually felt sad. And I’ll never get that 30 minutes back.

Our Halloween kids party was a rip-roaring success, thanks to the stars of the show: Jackula and, of course, the kids themselves. They wouldn’t stand still long enough for us to count them but we think they numbered between 40 and 50.
(Click to enlarge images, then click again for full size)

Australian photographer Lincoln Harrison has created a stunning set of landscape images, using ultra-long exposures to capture star trails. Lovely.

Here’s a bit of lighthearted, old fashioned fun. Fox Retro, the channel that broadcasts wall-to-wall old school series like Kojak and The Love Boat, have commissioned animator Punga to create their new Italian TV spot. The station’s slogan ‘Play Again?’ fits like a glove for the retro arcade game style adventure, featuring many of the characters from the shows they broadcast. The 8-bit digital soundtrack is the cherry bonus on the Pacman cake.

(click on pictures for larger image)

There were tense scenes at Portobello’s Lower Deck pub last Thursday night as agency types gathered for the TABs Battle of the Bands.

Picture the Eurovision where the different acts huddle around small tables looking for opportunities to sabotage their closest rivals, while turning on a wide smile every time the camera is on them. Outside, it was more like Anchorman with the different agencies squaring up to each other outside Max Films on Richmond Row, muttering references to Dorothy Mantooth.

Chemistry’s two man team initially seemed diminutive compared to the six piece band put forward by Irish International only moments earlier. But as soon as art director Adrian ripped into those drums (he had some frustrations to work off) and golden-boy copywriter Rob opened his mouth to reveal some never-before-heard monstrous lungs, the crowd put down their sketch pads and got worried.

Decked out in laundry detergent garb befitting their band name (The Whiter-Than-White Stripes), the guys began with a loud and punchy twist on Tainted Love, then moved on to a punk-rock medley made up of everyone’s favourite jingles. Touching on everything from Wi-Max (a-comin-across-the-nation) to the old classic Flake (only the crumbliest flakiest chocolate), Rob and Adrian ripped up the competition.

Chris Cawley, MC, was seen rocking out back stage while front stage the Chemistry crowd went mad, with Fintan Cooney leading the way, ripping up the dancefloor.

Four agencies moved through to the final and Chemisty had another trick up their sleeves by way of female backing vocals in the form of copywriter Rachel and planner Anna who had been practicing non-stop for three weeks. The song of choice was Always find him in the Kitchen at Parties, which despite popular opinion was not written by the CEO of IKEA.

In the end, Cawley Nea TBWA’s wonderfully named Tender Documents led by edit-genius by day and rocker by night Rupert Morris nailed it with Chemistry rocking in at a very respectable second.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank Fintan for supplying jumbo sausage rolls to the agency the following morning and to Adrian and Rob for doing Chemistry proud.

Rock on.

As titles go, it’s axiomatic and yet the notion that there are millions of compelling stories happening everyday on Twitter everyday is foreign to many. That’s likely why Jack Dorsey and the Twitter team were motivated to create a site (http://stories.twitter.com/) and feed (@twitterstories) that expose some cool stories about people who use Twitter to make great things happen.

There’s the story about the Japanese fishermen who tweet pictures and details of their catches as soon as they’re out of the water so people can check the fish out and then order them via a hook-up with an online delivery store and have it delivered within 12 hours. (It’s interesting that the current John West TV spot centres on being able to trace where your tuna has come from by entering an on-can code into the John West website.) Two very different ways of communicating the same message and no doubt, two very different budgets.

On a different scale, Burberry disrupted fashion industry conventions when, at London Fashion Week, they tweeted pictures of models wearing next season’s range before they hit the runway. Suddenly the privilege usually reserved for the elite became the privilege of the masses and became clear that Burberry recognise the calibre of their followers on Twitter and the influence they have on brand equity.

One more story, this one my personal favourite, is that of a bookstore in the hipster haven of Portland, Oregon. When, shortly before Christmas, a son found out that his Mum’s bookstore was soon to close because of reduced trade, he sent a tweet telling anyone in Portland that if they spent $50 or more at her store before Christmas he would personally buy them a burrito. The sincerity of the tweet and the promise quickly touched the hearts of many and made multiple news stories. People wanted to know who this son was, who his Mum was and they wanted to get involved. Cut to three years later, and the bookstore is alive and well and the interim years have been the most profitable to date.

The thing about Twitter is that its personal. With that comes a lot of unnecessary information (I don’t really need to know that your kid only slept 3 hours last night – but there’s likely a network of parents who really do care.) Likewise, people in Portland weren’t on the lookout for some bookstore hero but the network connected them and by being connected they became part of a story that otherwise would never have been heard. Twitter Stories is a testimonial of the power of experimenting, listening and being open to new ways of communicating.

It was the great American graphic designer Paul Rand who first said: “Don’t try to be original, just try to be good”. And this advice is nowhere more valuable than in the discipline of typography.
These days any fool can knock up a half decent piece of design, given the wonderful menu driven, template based, digital design tools, we now have at our fingertips.
However, in order to produce something that is “good”, you really need to understand the fundamental principles of typographic design.
This stuff isn’t subjective, it’s like music, there are some things that are right and some things that are just plain wrong. It’s like you need to learn classical before you can express yourself in free form jazz.
We came across two great introductions to this esoteric art recently.
The first is this neat little online game which teaches you the mysterious art of “kerning” (top tip: vertical letters like “I” and “I” always need to be spaced apart whilst letters like “O” and “O” always need to be closer together).
The second is this handy reference chart that summarises some of the more important principles of the discipline.
And as the man says: don’t try to be original, just try to be good.
Because It’s only when you get to be good, that you have the ability to express your originality.

It being almost Movember, a wonderful initiative lots of us in Chemistry supported last year by enduring a month-long hairy-lipped humiliation, we got to thinking about public service advertising (originally public service announcements). They’ve come a long way. From stilted black and white ads telling people to park properly (who remembers Reginald Molehusband?) to a couple of recent ads concerning men’s health that are, frankly, out there.  The first, a UK initiative for male cancer awareness encouraging men to inspect their testicles for potentially dodgy lumps, is constructed like a porn movie (so we’ve been told, never having seen one ourselves…) with a reveal which is certainly shocking.  See the ad here – and it’s not safe for work.

The second, for the same cause in the US, is called the Prostate Czech, a brilliantly awful pun, and a hilarious and worthy communications effort.

I really, really want the US version to win. Surely guys don’t need even our health warnings packaged as porn?

Unfortunately, the online views show the blokes conforming to stereotype. 1.5m views on YouTube for the raunchy UK version, compared to the Prostate Czech’s 20k…now I wonder which performed better in getting us to take action.

Here’s a really interesting piece from France 24, the international news channel, announcing their Twitter presence by celebrating the power of social networks in both shaping and disseminating news. The references to Gadaffi are either incredibly timely or scarily prescient. See the commercial here.

There is so much hype about Durex’s new interactive ad, “Digital Love“. And it is such a disappointment. The ‘prank a friend’ aspect, which allows you to upload a friend’s picture and send them the piece, would have been okay…three or four years ago. Great production values cannot disguise a weak idea and, if you’re going to do interactive, your use of the technology should either be really smart (Intel’s “Museum of Me“, for example) or really simple.

And here’s a nice example of really simple. It’s an animated GIF for HSBC which is not over-reliant on production values. It uses the technology in a very simple way to demonstrate an important point about encryption and it does so in an eye-catching and very smart way.

‘Buy less’…may not be a ridiculous thing to say to your consumers

Outdoor brand Patagonia has teamed up with eBay to create a market-place for used-clothing Patagonia gear. This idea is closely linked to Patagonia’s brand value of ‘buy less, buy quality’. The hope for the used clothing is that some will sell it to get cash to buy newer Patagonia clothing and others will use it as a way to get into the Patagonia brand (their clothes aren’t exactly cheap).

I really love this. I love that a brand is acknowledging the truth of their consumers’ lives, that they understand that people want to share, recycle and re-use and rather than fight the trend, they are supporting it.

There are lots of examples of businesses learning to adopt their models to incorporate the collaborative consumption trend. One of the most exciting has to be car industry. Peugeot and BMW have both developed innovative concepts in which they rent out their cars to registered members who can drive them for weekends. So they have more people test-drive the car and they are surely stealing share from the established car rental businesses.

People want to be associated with brands that make them feel good about themselves, so its small gestures like this that help people make particular brand choices.

Our new campaign for eircom launches this week, focussing on the many reasons 60,000 customers decided to switch back to eircom last year. And there really are tons of reasons; from the expected, like really fast broadband, to the lesser-known extras like StudyHub and discounted mobile packages. The tricky part was presenting all of these individual features – and subsequently the sum of their parts – in a more interesting way than the usual ‘here’s someone using this thing’ formula.

The answer? Sneaky kids. Oh come on, you don’t remember being a sneaky kid? We all attempted to pull the wool over Mum and Dad’s eyes so we could get up to boldness at some stage. Ah yes, you remember now. And given eircom’s core target audience is the family, we knew customers would be familiar with it too. So it was fun to present the kids’ attempts at trickery as the trigger for their parents’ wise decision to switch back to eircom.

Shot around Dublin with a group of frankly staggeringly good young actors (and some great older ones too!), the ads were directed by the ever-capable Brian O’Malley of Red Rage Films, while Nic and Rachel with Mike as Creative Director made up Chemistry’s creative team. The campaign launches with the TV ad below, with further TV, outdoor, digital and radio to follow.

On September 8th Chemistry was appointed by the Referendum Commission to produce a communications campaigns for the two Referendums which take place on October 27th

In the 4 weeks since then we have produced:

A ‘Guide to the Referendums’ in Irish and English which will be delivered to over 2 million homes in Ireland
A website in Irish and English in desktop and mobile formats
Four television commercials in Irish and English
Five radio ads in Irish and English
Five press ads
Four online ads
Two of the TV commercials can be viewed below.

Referendum Commission Ice Cream

Referendum Commission Waiter

Huggies, the sellers of nappies in which babies can pee and/or poo themselves, wanted to let parents understand that their kid will be protected no matter where or when the moment takes them.

Convention demands an educational approach, explaining the elasticity of the nappy, the layers of fabric to absorb the matter and the comfort baby will experience during these private moments.

But Huggies (care of Ogilvy Brazil) took a less conventional and instantly more appealing route of featuring publicly sourced shots of babies’ facial expressions as they poop themselves. It’s a simple yet universally relatable insight (not sure if it qualifies as an insight, more a smart observation) and the look on a baby’s face as it comes to terms with what’s happening to it makes for some lovely work.
Here’s hoping Imodium don’t follow a similar creative path.

The campaign is currently shortlisted in the Tomorrow Awards.

The cat video. A veritable phenomenon of the YouTube age. There are entire websites devoted to them, newspaper articles written about them, fan pages set up to worship their feline stars. In fact, the number of Facebook friendships based entirely around the sharing of these fluff-filled capturings is estimated to be in the millions*. Impressive stuff. So, let’s get this formula straight: simply video the quirky antics of your or any cat – antics can range from cute kitten hugging to frenzied curtain climbing and video quality is unimportant – upload it to the web, then amass the plaudits, love and admiration of upwards of 20million people.

As advertisers, are we missing a trick here?

How come more of us aren’t festooning our advertising communications with feline capers? Not the humdrum catfood head-rub-against-the-leg action but the crazy stuff. Surely the evidence demonstrates that this could result in nothing but warm fuzzy feelings and an inability to resist loving whatever it is that cat stands for. So why aren’t we on it?

Well, it could have something to do with the fact that cats aren’t exactly willing performers, or that the cat video may lose its intrinsic charm if taken out of its natural, bad-camcorder environment. Or that a protagonist with four legs and an inability to speak doesn’t exactly slot right in to say, an ad for online banking. But hey, that’s what we call a creative challenge. And they exist only for us to overcome. So on that note, I’ll leave you with this gem. And as a challenge, send your appropriate taglines to post@chemistry.ie.

*by me

It’s no secret here that I have an addiction to online discounts on Daily Deal sites. Over a year of courting with different websites, I am starting to wonder whether I really am making savings, or simply encouraged to spend more? I mean, it’s a happy day for me when someone introduces me to a new Daily Deal site (Todaysdeals is the latest addition to the family) but like a lot of relationships, the honeymoon period is soon over, and I’m faced with vouchers I forgot I bought, and a visa bill I wish I could forget.

It’s no surprise that it’s predicted that in the US alone, the market is projected to grow to $11 billion in 2015, and instead of 500 Daily Deal sites, there will be 20,000!! The most popular deals categories are: food & drink (26%); beauty (20%); fitness/nutrition (7%); sports & recreation (5%). The average discount is 53%, but I spoke to a beautician one day and she told me that the Daily Deals site they used (they shall remain nameless) insisted on 60%! Considering the salon gets 50% of the 40% I paid, I felt bad about how little they seemed to be getting. But it certainly didn’t stop me having the massage I paid for!

I got some advice a few months back which I thought was clever although I haven’t had the guts to do it myself. If, like me, you spot the odd good bargain online, get in touch with the vendor directly. If they are offering something for €60 (for example) on this Daily Deal site, offer them €50 for it and leave out the middle man. They’ll get the full amount rather than split it, you get an even further discount. But another tip for saving money is simply not to spend in the first place!

I’ve been recently asked by a mate to help them find a hotel deal as ‘I’m so good at finding good deals’. I provided a list of sites to help her with her search but it got me thinking. Perhaps I should work part time and advise people? After all, it could help me pay off the visa bill that I can’t seem to forget.

Once in a while, if you work in advertising, and you say your prayers, you get to work on a TV ad you really, really want to work on. One that makes all those evenings spent in dusty studios, drinking Red Bull and eating Custard Creams, watching a food stylist drip some yellow fat onto a ‘hero scone’ art-directed within an inch of its life, hopping from foot-to-foot in frustration as the director goes for the 500^th take, worthwhile.

It was worth waiting for our new ad for BMW. First of all, it’s a car ad. Second of all, it’s for BMW. In terms of opportunities, there are few better. Especially when one considers how few car ads are originated in Ireland. There have been honourable exceptions from VW and Toyota over the years, but most automotive work tends to be local adaptations of campaigns created for other markets, or bottom-of-the-barrel, retail-driven scrappage ads. So the chance to write, shoot, and air in Ireland an ad for one of the world’s premium brands was almost too good to be true.

Add in a great client, and a brilliant director and production company (Anthony Byrne at Russell Curran Productions) and you get a piece of work to be proud of. Ok we’re slightly biased. But did we mention it was a car ad? For BMW? In Ireland?

Watch it here: 

Our series of print ads for the Irish Examiner promoting their Special Investigations has been attracting major plaudits within the industry, locally and internationally. First up was the “Hell On Earth” outdoor which was awarded Best Outdoor last week on BestadsonTV.com, the global ad industry website, showcasing the world’s best in every medium. The following day, The Inspiration Room ran a piece on the campaign, featuring all of the Special Investigations print to date. And, this week, TVads.ie has awarded the ads 1st, 2nd and 3rd place for Print Advertising in their August Ad of the Month (for Sex Trafficking, Teens & Pornography and Mental Illness respectively).

It’s comforting to think that in the midst of the destruction that swept the UK recently,

there were those more interested in creating things rather than destroying them.

Or at the very least amending them.

Witness the delightful “Photoshoplooter”…. click here to see more

I love billboards because of the sheer size of the damned things. You see, sometimes scale IS the idea. Any one who does not recognise this characteristic, when creating a large format outdoor execution is wasting a very large (format) opportunity. I was reminded of this recently when looking at the work of sculptor Ron Mueck. Conventionally, sculptors who use scale in their work have done so for the self-aggrandisement of public figures such as generals or politicians. Mueck does the opposite and creates work that speaks strongly to human vulnerability. Photographs of Ron Mueck’s work in galleries, where there is no reference to scale, rarely do it justice. I thought it would be interesting, therefore, to put together these images of the sculptures where the scale is clear. Either in the context of the artist’s studio or viewers in a gallery. In these images, scale redefines everything. Because sometimes, scale IS the idea.

A couple of months ago there was a photo of Enda Kenny on the front steps of our building.

This was taken while we were working on the Fine Gael election campaign and before he became Taoiseach.

Today we surpassed that moment. Actually we didn’t just surpass it, we made that moment seem positively insignificant.

Because we met arguably the two most powerful Irish people in the world at the moment. Strike that, the two most powerful Irish people ever. Two leaders, two men (well boys) of character, a duo that will lead this country out of the doldrums and into a new Irish utopia.

Yes we met…Jedward.

The only way to describe the occasion? “OMG like totally Jedly”.

From July 29th you can listen to their new album ‘Bad Behaviour’ on eircom Muscihub before it’s ‘loike officially released’

And to mark the occasion we’ve made a ‘Music for when you meet Jedward!’ Album o Matic album

Featuring tracks such as

Teenage kicks – The Undertones
Walking on Sunshine -Katrina and the Waves
Devil’s Haircut -Beck

And

Double Trouble – Otis Rush

According to a recent article in New Scientist magazine, a primatologist at Yale University, Laurie Santos, is currently conducting research into a subject close to all our hearts: advertising to monkeys. What Santos is trying to establish is if the behaviour of monkeys can be influenced by messages similar to advertisements.

Santos’ team have created two brands of new food, Brand A and Brand B, that will be unrecognisable to the test-subject monkeys, but “equally delicious”. They will create billboard-like advertisements for Brand A, but not for Brand B. These billboards will be positioned outside the monkeys’ cage and, after a period of exposure to the ads, the monkeys will be given a choice between the two brands. If most of the monkeys opt for Brand A, the team feels they can safely conclude that the monkeys have been influenced by advertising.

Where it gets funny (to me, at any rate) is in the description of the “creative” behind the ads. They haven’t been made public yet, but the researchers said “[Monkeys] do not have any language or culture and they have very short attention spans. We really had to strip out any hip and current thinking and get to the absolute core of what is advertising.” (Note to clients: apart from the “hip” bit, this is wrong.)

So what is this “core” of what is advertising, according to the researchers? Very simply: fantasy. In the billboards they have designed to advertise Brand A, the supposed monkey fantasies appear in two forms: sex and social status. One billboard basically shows a female monkey with her genitals exposed. (Clearly there is no monkey ASA.) The other billboard shows the alpha male monkey of the particular monkey troop somehow “associated” with Brand A. In what way associated? I don’t know. Could it be that he’s pictured trying to have sex with it? Time will tell.

Meanwhile, the research continues…

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20618-the-first-advertising-campaign-for-nonhuman-primates.html

Can you imagine an ad running regularly on Irish national radio that did not name a single product or service?

It did happen – recently. There was no branding of any kind on this ad. There was barely a call to action. There was simply a bloke with an acoustic guitar singing a cheerful song about his relationship with cigarettes, at the end of which he gave the URL of a fairly innocuous-sounding website.

What was going on? What was this an ad for? It felt a bit like an official communication – perhaps from some HSE-sponsored agency tasked with reducing the numbers of people smoking. But, on visiting the website, this proved not to be the case. In fact, the website promoted a pharmaceutical product designed to help people give up smoking. Being available on prescription only, the product cannot legally be advertised on Ireland’s airwaves. So what was actually happening in this puzzlingly brand-free radio ad was that the cheerful guy singing was a kind of ruse – a way to divert listeners to where the “real” ad appeared. This was, in effect, an ad for an ad. More than that, it was an ad for an ad for something that wasn’t allowed to be advertised.

This was the first time I’d come across this “second order” style of advertising. Of course there have been other ads designed to direct listeners to websites before, but never, to the best of my knowledge, ads in which the product is not mentioned even once. Could this be a new kind of advertising, one designed to circumvent rules about what can and can’t be advertised? Where else might this “stealth advertising” go…?

On the face of it, stealth advertising would seem the ideal strategy for clients in any number of industries that would otherwise be barred from the regulated media: the arms trade, the euthanasia game, the contract killing business, the oldest profession… the list is endless.

It will be interesting to see which organisations utilise this opportunity, in what ways and how the authorities respond to it, if at all…

(via: Tumblr)

The concept of The New Work Style has been floating around for the past few months and I recently came across this nifty little chart that endeavors to explain a little bit of what it means with the convenience of some stats* to back it up (*stats are based on US market data).

What’s interesting about this chart is not just the fact that it points to the inevitable shift in workplace habits (as TBWA guru, Lee Clough says ‘let us not confuse busyness with productivity) but it also exposes opportunities for businesses and, in turn, brands to establish and communicate points of difference and interesting stuff about themselves.

In my experience as a planner many brands tend to focus on what is most interesting about their end product or service as a means of communicating why we should care about them.  But there is a lot to be said for building a story around the internal culture of a business, the kind of people who work there, the way in which they work and the values the company has when it comes to its workforce.  It might not be what converts interest into a sale but it speaks to the character of a brand and increasingly consumers want to buy into sets of values that they believe in or aspire to.

I see The New Work Style as a movement that brands can consider tapping into –  the story of how a workforce actually works can be quite compelling and can turn a previously anonymous entity into a pretty interesting asset.  Take for example (I can’t believe I’m referencing this) Mary Byrne and Tesco.  When Mary got through the auditions for X-Factor, Tesco UK and Ireland soon realised they had a very likeable and relatable asset and ambassador for their brand whose story touched everyone (whether they care to admit it or not). Tesco were quick to point out their support for Mary no matter how far she progressed and no doubt her job was waiting for her if she wanted it.

The point is, every organization has interesting people doing interesting things and it all comes down to how organizations choose to look at their staff.  The ways in which they work could make for interesting points of difference and can become a real part of a brand’s story.

This Flickr set illustrates what makes each and every one of us unique by documenting what individuals carry with them. Some are funny, some scary, some intriguing. But, as a cross section of apparent randomers, one has to ask two very specific (if unsavoury) questions – where are the tampons? And, has everyone stopped protecting themselves from HIV?

In related news, the film below asks New Yorkers what song is currently playing on their iPods. I bet the guy who says LCD Soundsystem is actually listening to Michael Buble.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvHRUY0tBcs&feature=youtu.be]

If there’s one sector it is hard to advertise in right now, it’s the financial sector. In a sea of overwhelmingly negative publicity it is very hard to launch any kind of boat. What made our job even harder was that the subject of the ad is arguably the most delicate of all: protection products, including life assurance – in short, death.

With all that in mind, managing the tone of the ad was going to be our main challenge. Of course, the fact that Irish Life has actually been performing really well, even in the past couple of years, did make the job easier. And working with clients who trust their agency helps too!

The script for “Dad’s Voice” was written on March 25th 2011. Two months later, on May 25th, the ad was on TV. As a turnaround time – especially when you factor in research; inviting, receiving and assessing directors’ treatments; pre- , actual and post- production; commissioning music; mixing the sound – that’s about as quick as it gets. And we’re extremely happy with the finished ad (even if we expect controversy from some quarters).

Great credit must go to the director, Damien O’Donnell. His sensitivity in auditioning, casting and coaxing quiet, understated but expressive performances from the cast, played a huge role in managing the tone of the ad.

The production company, Russell Curran, were as efficient and effective as ever. Post-production was done at Screenscene and sound mixing at The Slate. Music was by Carl Harms.

Say hello to Zorro – one of 3 baby foxes living under (yes under) Chemistry. Actually, they’re probably not babies anymore, but they still possess a pre-pubescent cuteness and haven’t started rummaging in the bins yet. Our ground floor offices at the back are the perfect ‘hide’ for viewing opportunities. With our agency dog Charlie paying fewer visits these days, Zorro and his merry band of brothers are a welcome four-footed sight.

It would be fair to say we’re a bit proud of our new campaign for the Irish Examiner.  It’s a campaigning initiative on the Examiner’s part about suicide – every year, some 500 people in Ireland are lost to suicide – promoting discussion and greater understanding of the causes of suicide, the signs to look out for and the help available.

Monday’s blog warned you about wasting your time on the Internet. Today’s blog offers some advice on how best to spend your Internet time.

In the time it took you to read that sentence, 236 amazing things and 14 more kitten photographs have been uploaded to the web. In this blog I will tell you how to get them first, and earn the respect of your friends and family by being the first to pass them on.

A few months ago, to make Internets easier for myself, I decided to sort my Web browsing out and organise what I looked at with the help of some aggregators. There are lots out there, but just as I did with who I follow on Twitter and my Facebook “friends”, I have now purged the aggregators and narrowed them down to one a day.

So here is my list of weekly advertising, art, design and culture aggregators. (I have also included their Twitter feeds if they are any good).

On Monday I get my roundup of the best of last weeks ads and advertising stories from adfreak or, on Twitter, @adfreak.

from the inspiration.com

On Tuesday I check quipsologies – a beautiful site that chronicles the most curious, creative, and notable projects and events of the graphic design industry.

On Wednesday I get my fix of awesomeness from theinspiration, a beautifully designed and curated gathering of advertising, art, design, music and photography stories. Twitter: @_theinspiration.

Every Thursday I get an email from Three Thousand with a great selection of “cool or fool” videos and photos from the previous week. You can see it and sign up here.

Friday is a weekly roundup of the week’s best photos and videos on the Internet from another Aussie aggregator, the vine.

On Saturday it’s the best of the Web in The Guardian’s Culture magazine, and online here.

And on Sunday I get a weekly roundup of the best in illustration, design and photography from public school or, on Twitter, @go2publicschool.

Enjoy – and please don’t email those kitten photos before I do.

IGNORE THE BELOW
Last week’s blog about the 75 year old Georgian lady who broke the internet because she was so far behind in her status updates and tweets made me wonder about this “information overload” we hear so much about. I think about this “information overload” every time I update my status: “sleepy”, check my email – 14 new emails; check my news aggregators – yes, there are still a few wars going on; check my Twitter streams – there’s a new Rubik’s Cube for the blind; see if I’m still the winning bidder on the “6 Million Dollar Man” board game – no, $47 is too expensive; and all this before I get out of bed.

40 minutes later when I get to work I have to do it all over again as there will inevitably be 10 new emails and a full stream’s worth of tweets, 2 new bids and a few new wars started.

Image pixelated to protected the guilty

I think about information overload at lunch when I am catching up on the 4-hours-worth of important information I have missed. Could I live with myself if I missed out on important nuggets such as the tweet reminding me about Colbert roasting of Chevy Chase, or seeing the latest 82 photos in Paul and Emma’s* facebook album of their son Simon aged 14 – 18 months?

It’s still on my mind when I get home after work and I am back to square one. But now it’s different. Now I will have plenty of time to keep up as I have nothing to do while the ready meal is in the microwave. These little gaps in my busy evening allow me to bid at the last minute and win the “Tom & Jerry” board game from 1962 that in no way will make up for my earlier loss of Steve Austin. I have even less to do between episodes 11 and 12 of “Breaking Bad” so it’s this 2-minute window that allows me to tell my tweeps about David Lynch cooking quinoa.

example of hilarious photo

And after I finally get to bed after a busy day of internetting that involved composing 1 blog entry, writing 17 tweets and reading hundreds, 8 bids, 136 emails answered (25 not answered), 3 status updates, 1 new album of 25 hilarious photos on Facebook, I have nothing left to do but save some time and RT my first tweet of the day: “sleepy”.

IGNORE THE ABOVE
Instead of reading about an anonymous blogger’s day’s-worth of useless information, you could do as Timothy Ferriss says: ignore it. Ferris is the author of “The 4 Hour Workweek” and has become something of a legend in Silicon Valley because of the low-information “manifesto for the mobile lifestyle”. It sounds as nasty as the Atkins, but if you are tough enough to stick it out this book could make your life “suddenly become more peaceful”.

To save you the time it would take to read it, here’s the gist… It all seems pretty obvious: stop the instant messaging, cut out multi-tasking, restrict emails, and conduct business the old fashioned way: by telephone. It also tells you to clear out the RSS feeds, and practice “selective ignorance” which involves tuning out random Twitterers, dumping some Facebook “friends” and switching off the news. Ferris says he gets most of his news from asking waiters. He also recommends hiring cheap virtual assistants to answer your emails, and even find you dates. He is not saying that iPhones are evil: “It just like medicine, it’s the dose that makes the poison”.

Once this e-rubbish is cleared, it is claimed that you will have the time to do the things you dream that working the 14-hour day will allow you to do. But, just like the Atkins, this diet can lead to a shock to the system. How happy would your clients or friends be if it takes you 3 days to get back to them, or comment of their latest batch of baby photos, just because you have finally found the time to go mountain climbing? I have no interest in the climbing of mountains, or the scuba diving that he claims I will now have the time to do, so I’m going to stick to the old fashioned Twitter, Facebook and Angry Birds.

IGNORE THE ABOVE AND THE BELOW
But, if you want to de-clutter your life, you can buy the book here or read his blog here

* Paul & Emma’s names have been changed to protect the guilty

image has been pixelated to protected the guilty