STANLEY CHOW

As its Champons League on peasant TV tonight and I get to watch it, I thought I'd do a football related post. I give you these great illustrations from the forthcoming book ‘Football Heroes Gold'. See more of the Stanley's stuff here.

WATERCOLOURS

Lovely style from artist MJ Forster

POSTERS

Great set from Mr Simon Misra

SIR JOHN TALK AND A FARTING DOG

Cracking talk last night by Sir John Hegarty. The theme was '10 reasons why now is the best time to be in advertising'. Here's the 10:


1. Technology is the liberation of creativity - Oasis album launch

2. Agencies can create media opportunities - Audi TV

3. Agencies can create programming - Axe GameKillers

4. Agencies creativity can be the media - Smirnoff Tea Partay

Budgets, use them wisely. BBH put it all into production rather than media and launched it on YouTube. It went massive.

5. Agencies can persuade clients to be brave - XBOX

BBH found a way of getting clients to buy risky work. In this instance he showed us the XBOX ad. Basically he said it would have been hard to convince the client to go with this straight from a script. So, within production budget, they made 4 different ads - put them on the interweb and monitored the publics reaction to the ads. Client could see which ad was working best and then that ad gets broadcast on TV. Brilliant.

6. Agencies can tackle growing social issues - Banardos

“The largest advertiser in the UK is not a brand; it’s the British Government. In advertising, we have a fantastic opportunity to change habits, solve social problems, and influence mindsets.”

7. Technology has always been a spur to creativity, now more than ever. MySpace

see all about it here http://bbh-labs.com/a-kind-of-magic-myspace-music-fan-video

8. Agencies can expand their influence with clients.

It's no longer a TV ad, press and radio. There was an Audi R8 spider diagram that went something like this:

Internal comms

Product placement

Factory TV

Interactive TV

Online

Outdoor

Press

TV

Microsite

Web banners

Magazine PR

9. Agencies can make products.

BBH have a something called Brand Lag where they look for gaps in the market and make products. For example, walking a dog at night is time when women feel uneasy. Enter the ila LEASH, a dog lead with a built-in flashlight and a piercing 130dB alarm at the ready.

10. Agencies can use the recession to be more creative

I think was the 10th - you can imagine what was said.


So finally, what a great evening. Insightful, inspiring and nice to see a bloke, who probably has more in has wallet than I have in my bank account, who's created some of the most memorable ads of all time, is running one of the most successful agencies of all time, be so down to earth - there's a few people who could learn from this approach. Summed up in his response to a question from the audience:

Audience member "John, would you hire a 44 year old who wanted to be a creative?"

Sir John "I'd hire a farting dog as long as it was good"

TYPOGRAPHIC TYPE POSTERS

Nice set of posters from Ryan Dixon

ACTION SLACK

Great blog collection of weird/great/funny/creative/whatthefrig stuff.

For more of the above visit here

FLOSS

Nice ads. Line seems to stumble a bit, but the art direction is lovely.

AN EATOCK THANK YOU PICTURE

Got myself one - see more here

CREATIVE CIRCLE

More awards again. It was the Creative Circle the other week - lots of great stuff, obviously, included in that is a doff of the cap to Mark Williams at Propaganda for a Silver in Best Charity Commercial for their Sophie Lancaster Foundation work. The only northern agency to be rewarded as far as I can see. Nice one Mark, well deserved. Nice to see the regions being represented again after the last years great work from The King's Arms for Frosty Jacks.

ROSES AWARDS 2010

The nominations are out for the Roses Awards. Only one for me this year, bit disappointed, thought the Christmas website me and James did might have got a look in, but hey ho etc.

There's a few stand out pieces, but I think best of all is the Tevez poster from Manchester City Council. There's better ideas in a creative sense but the impact and publicity this poster got really makes it stand out against all others. It's got, what I'd like to call, 'The Trott Factor'. i.e people will have talked about it down the pub and it became common knowledge - it went beyond a poster - seem to remember people phoning in to Talksport about it.

It wasn't done for the awards, it was done for maximum impact in the public domain. But most of all, doing a something like this makes it easy to describe what us creatives do for a living.

Instead of:

"so what do you do for a living?"

"When you see an ad, we come up with an idea then I do the pictures and my copywriter does the words"

"So you're artist"

"No, what I mean is..."

You can say:

"so what do you do for a living?"

"you know that Tevez poster?"

"yep"

"that"

FIRST POST

Welcome one and all (probably one) to my new blog. You may have seen my last blog, which I did with my copywriter James. Well we've now gone our separate ways, so i've given birth to OOOOOOFFFFFF.

So why OOOOOOFFFFFF? Simple really. When I worked back at Poulters we used to love the Nutrigrain ad (see below) . Since then anything deeemed good creative gets an OOOOOOFFFFFF.

I'll be putting up stuff I like, stuff I don't like, opinions on creative work be it advertising, design, photgraphy, illustration etc. Hopefully it'll be a good journey, cheers.