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?

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.

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

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/

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.)

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)

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.

http://www.referendum2011.ie/

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.

eMobile ‘Adele’ radio, advertising the ‘top-up to top all top-ups’.

eMobile bill pay advertisement, promoting unlimited talk & text plans for only €49 a month.

Radio advertisements for the launch of iPhone4 on the eMobile network.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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: 

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

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

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

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…

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.

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.