sparking curious mind

"The proposition behind both ads has been to communicate 'Colour like.no.other'. With both ‘Balls’ and ‘Paint’, our intention is to show the depth of colour that can be taken for granted if you have a BRAVIA high definition LCD TV. We know that consumers still value colour above all else when choosing a TV set so we’re continuing to promote Sony's credentials (Live Colour Creation technology etc) in all our communication about BRAVIA."
David Patton, Senior VP Marketing Communications, Sony Europe

From an interview at If!

Also, check out the Sony Bravia blog. They give access to "behind the scenes" footage of the next BRAVIA advertising campaign, "Paint". For the making of the advert they used 70,000 litres of paint - 358 single bottle bombs - 33 sextuple air cluster bombs - 22 Triple hung cluster bombs - 268 mortars - 33 Triple Mortars - 22 Double mortars - 358 meters of weld - 330 meters of steel pipe - 57 km of copper wire.

Quite impressive!

Montreal culture jammers Rob Maguire and Ezra Winton, the cofounders of the anticorporate activist collective berculture began sharing their recipe for berbr , an all-natural hemp ale, with Canadian microbrewers as a way of spreading a message and funding their work.

Two microbreweries in Montreal and Vancouver are making the "uncorporate" beer, and about a dozen bars and cafés are selling it. The profits are split with berculture, which produces political documentaries and film festivals, and campaigns against corporate giants like Wal-Mart. Like open-source software code, the ale's recipe is free for anyone to use and modify, so long as users in turn share any changes.
To support local enterprise and cut down on pollution from shipping, Maguire and Winton want berbr to be made locally, from mostly local ingredients, wherever it is sold.



Überbr isn't the world's only open-source beer, nor is it the first. That title is claimed by Vores Øl (Our Beer), a meaty brew with a caffeine boost from South American guarana beans. The beer was created last year by a group of students at Copenhagen's IT University in a workshop on copyright and intellectual property taught by artist Rasmus Nielsen. The project applies the logic behind open-source software, which flouts Microsoft's corporate hegemony by tapping the creativity of the masses to design ever-evolving programs like the Linux operating system.

"If I am to succed in leading a person towards a particular goal, I must first find out where he is now and start from there. If I cannot do this I am deluding myself when I believe that I can help others. In order to help somenone it is true that I must understand what he understands. If I cannot do that, it is of little use that I can do more and know more.
If , however, I want to show how much I can do, that is because I am vain and proud, because I really want to be admired by other people instead of helping them. All true helpfulness starts with humility towards the person I want to help, and for this I need to understand that helping is not wanting to dominate, it is wanting to serve."
Soren Kierkegaard

This is what a planner should be about. To serve the consumer, we first must understand who he is, how he lives and so on.

Client: Guinness
Agency: BBDO / New York

The prototype of a revolutionary new type of vehicle only one metre wide specially designed for cities has been developed by a team of European scientists. The vehicle combines the safety of a micro-car and the manoeuvrability of a motorbike, while being more fuel-efficient and less polluting than other vehicles.

The CLEVER (Compact Low Emission Vehicle for Urban Transport) is a tilting three-wheeled vehicle that is fully enclosed and has seats for the driver and a passenger. Its strengthened frame protects the driver in a crash and the vehicle has a top speed of approximately 60 mph (about 100 kph) and an acceleration of 0-40 mph (60 kph) in seven seconds.

via TechEBlog

From Jetta Official Backseat Driver’s Manual.
Inserted in magazines, the guide, done by Crispin Porter+Bogusky, informes us that "being a backseat driver is not a right. It’s a privilege. And a responsibility.”
It also includes a quiz and an official backseat drivers license at the end.


At Brettner you can view the scans from each page.

Tres cool.

This is a little piece done by Piers Fawkes from PFSK about the omnipresent urban spam around us.



You can also download Piers presentantion - "Gathering Inspiration - Being Random"- delivered at the AAAA Account Planning Conference in Miami.

Hurry, is free until 1st of August!

Never hurt a woman's feelings. It may use outdoor advertising to get back to you.
And good copy and the right exposure it does the job.

Great and fun idea!

More logos here

Client: Volkswagen
Agency: DDB Berlin

Copy says: Maximum power. Minimal consumption. The new TSI engine

Companies strategize at the highest levels – push the marketing and communication teams to craft customer messages, invest in expensive marketing campaigns – yet employees are often the last to truly understand their company’s brand.
Companies are learning that their brand stands or falls on the internal relationship with its employees as much as their external promises to customers.

Still, many organizations fail at enfranchising their employees in their branding. They are so externally focused on the customer, and the shareholders, that they are pursued above all others, excluding the actual messenger of the brand – the employee!

Not long ago, I was at a sales training for the sales force of Coca-Cola Romania. The company just introduced two new products to the market and they organized this conference to familiarize the sales people with the new drinks. Around 900 hundred people were present, the company brought Ilie Nastase and Nadia Comaneci to deliver these motivational speeches, a well-known TV star was the host to the entire evening. They introduced the new drinks, the communication campaign; competitions among different teams were held ad-hoc. The audience was hyped-up.

My role there was to hand out these promotional objects as gifts from the company for its employees. The plan was to give a mob style hat to the guys and a feathers scarf to the girls. That was the plan. Unfortunately, when the show was over, the crowd just erupted from the venue and literally grabbed in total disorder the gifts from the boxes. It was like a herd of wild beasts running amok! In 15 minutes the place looked vandalized and we were incredulously asking each other if those were people from Coca-Cola?!

There and then I promised myself that I will never drink again anything made by Coca-Cola. I still keep my promise.

Explore and play and confuse yourself. The perfect way to while away the hottest period of the year.

Great fun with words at Uncontrollable Semantics

Click on 'play' and take it from there, in a whirl of words and colours.

Created by Jason Nelson

"Good copy also is grounded in consumer insight. Through efforts ranging from quantitative studies to consumer interviews, brand marketers and agencies must gain an understanding of consumer preferences and develop creative executions that flow from those insights.

Understanding consumers' life stages will guide informed decisions about tone, vocabulary and content. The challenge is for a brand to be courageous enough to choose a focused target audience and speak in their language, rather than speaking in a vanilla vocabulary that tries to reach everyone.

Trying to target everyone is like targeting no one."

Rob Depp, VP of client services Deskey

from P-O-P Times

Go face-to-face with the giants of advertising. Watch interviews and archival videos of the industry's top creatives and inluencers.

via Creative Classics

Client: Electrolux
Brand: Zanussi
Agency: BBH London

The newly launched "Get a life, Get a Zanussi" is the first pan-European marketing campaign of the brand. The campaign's total investment stands at EUR 10 million for the year 2006.

WPP has struck a joint venture with a social-networking service, Live World, to build out blogs, buddy lists, message boards, chat rooms and community sites for its clients.

The joint venture, named LiveWorld-WPP, will be equally owned by each company and is exclusively dedicated to collaborating with WPP agencies to offer, create, and deploy LiveWorld’s online community and social networking services as marketing venues for WPP’s clients on a global basis.

Peter Friedman, CEO of Live World, says that "consumers aren't reluctant to be part of a community formed around a brand as long as it's a venue in which the consumer can build relationships with other people who have common interests. For the brand, it can be the ultimate research tool."

I believe that this is going to work. Brand focus and strategic objectives will determine the characteristics of the content offered on an online community . However, the science of community is far more difficult. Communities are delicate collections of people with varying opinions, experiences and prejudices (both positive and negative) on technologies and companies. Traditional uses of marketing and PR are entirely inappropriate for community relations, and it instead requires a deep understanding of community, people and a commitment to the principles that the community is ingrained in. If there is an attempt to subvert these principles, the relationship breaks down.

Cool campaign launched online by HP. The ads are available on a variety of video sites, including YouTube, iFilm, and Google, as well as HP's own microsite for the campaign.

The video clips represent the latest phase of the online portion of HP's current branding initiative, which carries the slogan "The Computer Is Personal Again," and aims to promote computers as expressions of users' individuality.







Goodby, Silverstein & Partners created the units and designed the microsite, which was built by Agency.com.

"Creative without strategy is called 'art.' Creative with strategy is called 'advertising.'"

Jef I. Richards, advertising professor, The University of Texas at Austin.

Dubbing the movies that are shown in movie theaters is something that varies from place to place. In some countries all movies are dubbed, whereas in others you hear the original language. There may be advantages and disadvantages in both systems.

I believe that movies are best watched in the original state. I am a big fan of sarcastic jokes, puns and all sorts of refined word/mind games. All these are often spoilt by translation. Some things just can't be translated into another language. In other cases there's a natural double meaning to a word or a subtle connotation, which gets lost in the process of translation. I've noticed many erroneous or lousy translations, and usually have some fun about the translation besides the meaning of the movie. Dubbing the movie would deprive me of the chance to hear the original and would leave only the imperfect translation.

Voices are, indeed, a very important part of any movie! I can remember a ubiquitous annoying voice that dubbed most Hollywood movies into Russian in Soviet times. It had a monotonous, mumbly voice that seemed to belong to a phlegmatic person with a chronically clogged nose. Furthermore, the same irritating voice dubbed all the characters! So, on one hand, I think it is best to hear distinctive voices rather than a single one speaking on behalf of all the characters (both women and men)! On the other hand, I want to hear the genuine voices, which some of the actors consummate to real art! I would never want to hear the annoying phlegmatic voice of some lethargic dude instead of listening to the real voice modulations of Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, or especially Anthony Hopkins! By the way, think of Brad Pit's voice when talking to the old lady in the hospital in "Meet Joe Black"?

Now, of course, Germany has their own Woody Allen voice-impersonator, Italy has its Harrison Ford, Spain has it's own Sharon Stone (most of France's has the common sense not to dub its films), but generally these country's citizens grew up with these voices matched to these actors and they've gotten used to the strangeness of it all. But aren’t these people missing the genuine experience of movie going?

Client: Sony
Brand: Playstation 2
Agency: TBWA, Paris