Shut up and listen

Love these posters.

Beautifully designed to capture the look and tone of classic safety posters.

Sadly I think they should actually go into production because we really need them.

In our trains. In our offices. And in our restaurants.

Posters designed by Ted Slampyak.

The genius of CDP

When I was a kid growing up in England we used to often say that the ads were better than the programs.

Not all the programs obviously. But many of them.

And most of the ads that have stayed with me for a lifetime were created by Collett Dickenson Pearce.

This morning someone sent me a link to a YouTube channel of 100 of CDP's best tv ads.

It was a real trip down memory lane. Back to a time of Chopper bikes, Spangles and Space Hoppers.

And like those three iconic seventies products CDP are no longer with us.

But gee their works still looks great.

Go check it out here.

Groovy advertising man!

This classic from the mid sixties looks and sounds like it was written by two old blokes in tweed jackets who had never even heard of The Beatles.

Still kinda groovy though.

What I love is the short sharp feature led voiceover.

Kinda like what Apple do now really.

But back to those two old blokes for minute - looks like they did a "hip with the kids" press ad too!

The business we're in

At lunch with a friend the other day we had a great chat about how we'd been spending less time doing ads and far more time creating stuff.

Obviously the definition of stuff is open to interpretation but I think you get my drift.

Anyway our key point of discussion was how agencies now say they're in the ideas business rather than the advertising business.

Which is great. But is it really true? 

Tweet of the week

Extreme flooding in far north Queensland at the moment and for some strange reason people are stupid enough to think they can drive through raging floodwaters.

Love this tweet by the local police looking to get people to resist the urge to drive on through.

The use of the #YOLO  hashtag is inspired I think.

Says so much about who the problem drivers are.

And as for the tongue cheek wit - well I'd class that as what Rob Sitch would call champagne comedy.

The Creative Confessional

Hat tip to my boy Bernie in Brisbane for alerting me to the wonderful Creative Confessional.

If you have an agency related sin that you're having trouble keeping to yourself then the Confessional is the place to go to cleanse your soul.

I particularly love the sin below. Hopefully I'm not the idiot that the confessor has been showing that never changing copy to!

Click here to go confess your sins. Go on. You know you want to.

The only game in town

I often wonder how we lived before the internet came along.

In fact it's hard to imagine life without it really.

But life there was. And work. And computers.

If we felt like wasting time back then we didn't go onto Facebook or scan our Twitter. We cracked open a game of Solitaire.

I can't imagine how many hours of productivity must have been lost playing solitaire when the boss wasn't looking.

But I can guarantee you it was a hell of a lot! 

Goodbye Bob

You'll ind this ad in the D&AD Copy Book. It was written by Bob Levenson who was an integral part of the Bernbach crew that invented modern advertising.

Bob passed away this week. He was 83. Here's what Bob had to say about the state of our industry many years before it found itself in the state it is currently in;

"We are a nation of smart people. And most smart people ignore most advertising because most advertising ignores smart people."

Click the pic for an easier read.

Freelance Survival Guide

 

Had an interesting chat with a freelance consultant the other day who was bitching about chasing overdue invoices.

And when I say overdue I don't mean a week or two. I mean several months.

I also heard a horror story from a friend about the terms of payment of an agency she had been freelancing with.

So I decided to knock up the Freelance Survival Guide to help anyone who works for themselves to avoid many of the pitfalls associated with freelancing.

Love to hear what you think of it. And if you have any tips of your own feel free to leave them in the comments. 

Time for some more ads!

The announcement this week of Graph Search by Facebook seems to have generated plenty of articles from agency and media folk about new and exciting opportunities to advertise.

Well I don't know about you but I wish people would stop coming up with new ways and places to advertise.

And sooner rather than later.

Everything's going down down

I don't know who writes the messages on the sign out front of the church in Elsternwick but every time they put up a new one it makes me smile while I'm stopped at the traffic lights.

The one below is an absolute cracker I reckon.

My kids think it's dumb. And I'm sure many other people do too.

But if nothing else its shows how a memorable ad campaign can work its way into the language.

And that is something money can't buy.

The writer's diet

Not sure I'd recommend this diet but it seemed to work for Hunter. Click the pic for a better look. 

Colour of the year?

I'm a big Pantone fan.

Pretty sure you probably are too.

But seriously who the hell comes up with this colour of the year shit?

Emerald?

Really?

Don't know about you but I can't wait to start dressing like a bloody leprachaun!

And why can't they spell colour properly either? 

Vuitton gets digital

Fashionwise the global superbrands generally leave me cold.

They're just not my thing.

But it has to be said that under the creative direction of Marc Jacobs Lous Vuitton really gets the power of digital.

From collaborations with The Shelby to Kusama via Muhammad Ali this video showcases some of the gorgeous content they produced last year.

And of course it's all beautifully art directed.

Someone mentioned on Twitter the other day a job for a video editor at a digital agency that was paying $16 an hour.

I commented at the time that that hourly rate was probably reflective of the quality of finish of much online video.

Which is why I love Vuitton's digital stuff so much.

It looks like it was made by passionate professionals not overworked kids on sixteen bucks an hour.

Words to live by

Very sad news.

Looking forward

Just read an interesting article on Fast Company about where marketing may (or may not) be headed in 2013.

The article had a great quote from Jonathan Cude the Chief Creative Officer at McKinney which sums up his vision and my hopes for the year ahead:

"More interesting. Less tested. More experiments. Less fear. More surprising. less expected. More useful. Less disposable. More honest. less bullshit."

Amen to that.

Duke doesn't dine with vegans

I was doing a bit of work on a brand manifesto this afternoon and while searching for ideas and inspiration I came across Duke Cannon.

Hell of a brand.

Their sole aim (apart from selling big ass blocks of soap) is to provide us with an antidote to the 'mangina' virus.

Here's their brand manifesto:

What are they missing?

In a recent article on an emerging digital divide in the UK Martha Lane Fox says that seven million Brits have never used the internet.

That is a startling figure.

Especially when looked at as a percentage of the UK's total population of around sixty million.

How sorry do you feel for those seven million people who've never ever seen a banner ad, a pop up ad, a pop under ad, an annoying Facebook poll, a homepage takeover, a flash loading page or a spam email?

I don't feel sorry for them at all.

Unhindered by experience

It's a ridiculous idea I know but I've always wanted to brief a blind person to come up with concepts for a TV campaign.

Why you ask?

Because I believe someone without experience of something is not hindered in their thinking by their experience or knowledge of what had been done before.

So you can imagine how excited I was to discover the Instagram account of Tommy Edison who has been blind since birth.

You can see his Instagram photos here. 

First post of 2013

So here we are in 2013. Holiday time is well and truly over at Brand DNA and it's back to work with a vengeance today.

During the break I intended to put together a little Top 10 ads of 2012 list but I found that a lot of the ads on my list were from overseas.

That list was tossed into the bin and I set about a whole new list based on the best ads I had seen on Australian TV last year.

Ads that appeared during the shows I watched.

Turns out my list wasn't a list at all. It was a rant.

A rant about how our Australian TV networks ruin programs with way too many ads.

So many ads in fact that I rarely watch TV as it is broadcast. Preferring instead to start recording a show then start watching it 10 to minutes after it began.

This way I can jump through the seemingly endless ad breaks.

I suspect I'm not the only person who does this. And I wonder what the TV networks are going to do about it.

That's if they do anything about it.

Personally I think it's up to the media agencies like Mindshare, Mediacom and co to take a stand and generate some real value for their clients by demanding the TV networks rethink their approach to selling ad space.

Because as far as I can see that ad space is annoying the shit out of viewers at the moment.

And I have it on very good authority that most of those viewers are more than happy to resort to bit-torrent to avoid the advertising overload in their favourite new shows.