sparking curious mind

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

David Lubars is Chairman and Chief Creative Officer of BBDO North America, and this year's Titanium Lions Jury President at the Cannes Advertising Festival. He started his career in 1981 and has since won every major creative award out there several times over, including a Cannes Titanium Lion, an award especially created to honor the outstanding achievement repre­sented by the internet films for BMW produced during his time as President of Fallon Worldwide and Executive Creative Director of Fallon North America. He has also won 17 "regular" Cannes Lions and the Emmy for Best TV Commercial in America no less than three times. He has been named Crea­tive Director of the Year 2000 in Ad-week, and his BMW films are now part of MoMA's permanent collection in New York City . David Lubars answered questions put to him by Michael Weinzettl for Lurzer's Archive, covering everything from his career and future plans for BBDO, New York , through to his views on advertising today.



L.A. : What, in your opinion, makes a good advertising creative?

David Lubars: Extraordinary natural talent, of course, but also an almost, but not quite, debilitating insecurity. The best people have trouble living in their own skin because nothing is ever great enough, nothing is ever smart enough. They worry someone else is doing something better, they're afraid of disappointing the client, and on and on. It's a tough way to live but the best ones are like that. I once heard a saying to the effect that the best peo­ple are afraid of being fired, whereas the mediocre ones are always shocked when they are.

L.A. : How do you view the state of advertising in the US at present as compared to, say, 15 years ago?

David Lubars: A couple of months ago, Peter Souter of AMV/BBDO flew to New York to work on a project together. Unfortunately, he came down with a nasty flu on the plane so, in­stead of going to dinner with us that evening, he stayed in his hotel to recover. The next day, he felt better and came into the office. The first thing out of his mouth; "I watched primetime American television for 6 hours straight last night, the first time I've had the opportunity to do that. The hotel had 50 channels and I flipped back and forth between them all. I didn't see one brilliant commercial the entire evening. In England , I'd have seen five or six." Depressing, but he's right. We and our clients must con­stantly remind ourselves that brilliant creativity will bring disproportionate results, that it is an economic multiplier. Creativity is the best tool we have, in whichever medium we apply it.

Some like it, some hate it, others are not so sure.
The logo, designed for the 2010 event in South Africa, represents the shape of Africa in the colours of our flag. Superimposed over it is a somewhat abstract figure of a footballer, possibly inspired by San art, executing an overhead "bicycle" kick.

Graphic designers in Cape Town said they were generally disappointed feeling that it had had potential to be much better.

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