LONDON – IDS, the sales house for UKTV, Virgin Media Television and Setanta Sports, has signed a deal with Quality Standard beef and lamb to sponsor Market Kitchen, the daily magazine-style show on UKTV Food.
LONDON – IT training company Computeach has retained Manchester-based MediaVest for its £3m account, after a competitive pitch against Brilliant Leeds and McCann Erickson Central.
(TrendHunter.com) The ‘Stand Up to Cancer’ campaign, featuring Jennifer Aniston, Ferrera, Christina Applegate, Lance Armstrong is now reporting results. The event, which took place on September 8th, raised more than $100…
LONDON – ITV has offered Setanta £500,000 to show highlights of tonight’s England World Cup qualifier match after doubling its offer from £250,000, but has still not reached an agreement with the digital broadcaster.
LONDON – Future, the special interest publishing group, has launched a two-month digital campaign to promote Land Rover Group’s Rover Sport on its gadget website, T3.com.
(TrendHunter.com) Air New Zealand is looking for 50 frequent-flyers who are willing shave off their hair for two weeks and sport temporary tattoos on their bald heads.
This innovative type of advertising – “cranial billboards”…
LONDON – More than 70 editorial jobs are to be cut at Express Newspapers, across the Daily and Sunday Express, in an effort to cut costs.
We received a nice little e-mail yesterday from a person who shall remain nameless indicating that he/she (ugh, it was a she, and we’re only telling you that because it’s so annoying to do the he/she, his/her crap for an entire post) was having trouble finding a job because her name was mentioned in a couple AgencySpy stories.
In reality, nothing even remotely negative was mentioned about this lovely flower. In fact, the tone of the story was such that she came out smelling like roses. So we surmise that the only reason she’s having trouble finding a job is because…she’s wilting. And we don’t mean getting older.
Nonetheless, this addy implies that merely by being mentioned here on AgencySpy, one’s reputation could be hurt. We politely disagree. Take SuperSpy’s “Hot Ad (Wo)Man” posts, or stories like, “John C Jay is a Real Baller“.
The point is, we’re not out to get anyone — just make fun of the douche bags that are dumb enough to get caught making asses of themselves. There’s nothing wrong with that people — or if there was, you wouldn’t be reading these words…right…now. See?
function() {
links = document.getElementsByTagName(‘a’);
query = ‘?’;
for(var i = 0; i = 0) {
query += ‘url’ + i + ‘=’ + encodeURIComponent(links[i].href) + ‘&’;
}
}
document.write(”);
})();
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media
(TrendHunter.com) Food is an essential component for life; as such, it naturally dominates even the non-culinary realms of our existence. These 30 food products may have been inspired by actual cuisine, but they’re certainly…
Personal Life Media’s Susan Bratton tells us, “While you were basking on the beach, raving at Burning Man, getting your kids back to school or relishing the last days of summer, I was busy producing some of my best ever episodes of DishyMix.”
Personal Life Media’s Susan Bratton tells us, “While you were basking on the beach, raving at Burning Man, getting your kids back to school or relishing the last days of summer, I was busy producing some of my best ever episodes of DishyMix.”
LONDON – ITV has launched a website to mark the return of ‘Secret Diary of a Call Girl’ on ITV2 at 10pm tomorrow night.
Advertising Agency: The Vidal Partnership, New York, USA
Creative Directors: Mauricio Galvan, Thomas Schimoller
Art Director: Aaron Alamo
Copywriter: Alfonso Mena
Director: Arturo Pereyra
Aired: August 2007
Advertising Agency: The Vidal Partnership, New York, USA
Creative Directors: Mauricio Galvan, Thomas Schimoller
Art Director: Aaron Alamo
Copywriter: Alfonso Mena
Director: Arturo Pereyra
Aired: August 2007
LONDON – HMV has said its decision to promote a broader range of games and technology alongside its traditional music offering has helped it to buck the downward sales trend in the tough retail market.
I made it just on time to see the last day of Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video From Japan, an exhibition that closed a few days ago at the International center of photography in Manhattan.
The work of the 13 Japanese artists on show visits three main themes. The one i found most fascinating and probably also most Japanese investigates the tension between individual expression and collective identity in contemporary Japan.
Tomoko Sawada. From the series “School Days,” 2004 © Tomoko Sawada. Courtesy of MEM Inc. and Zabriskie Gallery
She might not be as beautiful as Cindy Sherman but that doesn’t prevent Tomoko Sawada to create compelling images. Her “School Days” series shows groups of girls in their high school uniforms lined up in neat rows. At first sight, they are all different. But a closer watch reveals that each of the girl (including the teacher’s) has the face of Sawada who with subtlety varies her smile, adds an accessory in her hair, stands with an arrogant stance or adopts a demure posture. What was a sweet and innocent school portraits turns into a satire of Japan’s homogeneity and emphasis on conformity (interview of the artist on Pingmag.)
Hiroh Kikai, November 17, 2001 and A Performer of Butoh Dance, 2001
Photo: Hiroh Kikai
Hiroh Kikai‘s portraits also talk about individuality. Since 1973 the photographer has roamed the Asakusa district of Tokyo, looking for people whom he defines as having a ‘take my picture please’ aura. So far he has collected 600 b&w portraits of strangers posing against the blank walls of the Sensoji Temple. Most of the people he selected seem to be ordinary. Yet, there is something definitely unconventional about each of them (more images).
Masayuki Yoshinaga, from the series Goth-Loli, 2006 (more in Radar’s slideshow)
We knew about Masayuki Yoshinaga’s portraits of goth-lolitas but the photographer also spent 7 years making portraits of B?s?zoku, the teenage biker gangs, often linked to the Yazuka. A former member of the Bosozoku himself, Yoshinga managed to get access to their activities and had the gang pose for him.
Masayuki Yoshinaga, from the Bosozoku series, 1997-2003 (image topgear)
Masayuki Yoshinaga, from the Bosozoku series, 1997-2003 (image topgear)
A second theme in the exhibition examines the relationship of the adult to the child, a key subject in a country facing a rapidly graying demographic.
Kenji Yanobe‘s works explore the idea of survival in a post-atomic world.
The installation Blue Cinema in the Woods centers on a child-size movie theater set on the back of an elephant. Outside the theater stands a ventriloquist’s dummy called Torayan, who appears frequently in Yanobe’s work. Torayan is wearing a mini Atom suit (‘Atom’ comes from the robot character in Osamu Tezuka’ s comic book Astro Boy), a child version of the radiation suit that the artist wore in 1997 when he carried out a performance at Chernobyl.
In the video shown inside the movie theater, Torayan appears with Yanobe’s father, an amateur ventriloquist. Using American civil-defense films of the 1950s, he instructs Torayan about the measures to be taken if atomic disasters were to happen again.
Kenji Yanobe, Blue Cinema in the Woods, 2006 © Kenji Yanobe. Courtesy of the artist
Miwa Yanagi‘s b&w photo series, “Fairy Tale,” consists of reinterpretations of western stories in a very Film Noir fashion. The protagonists are all young girls. The young girls are set upon by nasty old women but they have very little in common with the Disney-like innocence of their age. They put up a fight and prove not so helpless after all. They use their youth and cunning to triumph in rather heartless fashion over their aged tormentors.
Miwa Yanagi, Fairy Tales Series: Gretel, 2004 © Miwa Yanagi. Courtesy of the artist
Miwa Yanagi, Fairy Tales Series: Sleeping Beauty, 2004 © Miwa Yanagi. Courtesy of the artist
The third theme in the exhibition Heavy Light is the conflict between human culture and nature, best exemplified in the work of Naoya Hatakeyama and Naoki Kajitani.
Naoya Hatakeyama, from the Lime Works (Factory Series) 1991-94
Hatakeyama being so famous, i’ll focus on Naoki Kajitani. The young digital street photographer takes his camera primarily in the Kansai region around Osaka, one of the traditional centers of Japan’s “low” entertainment culture. Despite of this clear location, Kajitani’s photos are ‘generic’, they represent fragments of the whole country. One which is saturated with garish commercial imagery. His large-scale, Pop-style photographs shows Japan as a cramped environment saturated with noisy billboards, posters, pachinko parlours, power lines, adult shops and advertising displays that appear both playful and sordid.
Naoki Kajitani, JPEG / Starlight, Nagasaki, 2006 © Naoki Kajitani. Courtesy of Third Gallery Aya
In an interview for the catalog of the exhibition, the photographer explained that the areas his work focuses on are being redeveloped at a fast pace and are rapidly disappearing. His work might therefore end up becoming a valuable record of the period he is busy portraying.
Alan Wolk has a great entry today over at The Toad Stool. He tells of watching “Field of Dreams” with his two young children:
It was only 1989. A year that most you reading this blog had already been born. Yet there were no cell phones. No internet. In one key scene, Kevin Costner and James Earl Jones can only keep in touch with their families by calling them from a pay telephone. With a dial on it. My kids stared at it and wondered “what’s that?”
While we talk about things like “digital natives” and all, we can’t really fathom what it’s like to come of age at a time when all this isn’t new anymore. Or how rapidly the world and the way we act in it has changed. My kids (and they are not unique) are somewhat wigged out when we visit their grandparents who do not own DVRs. The younger one, in particular, does not quite get why Grandma can’t just pause the TV or call up the shows she want to watch when she wants to watch them.
And so they didn’t quite get why Costner didn’t just call his wife on his cell phone to tell her where he was. Or at the very least just text her. The microfilm scene was also a complete mystery: their world is neatly indexed, PDF’d and fully searchable online.
Children today are completely immersed in a world full of easy access to advanced technology. But does it impede their critical thinking skills? What would happen if a kid today had to do a term paper or report without accessing the Internet? Could they do the research? Could they conceive of a world without all this technology?
Remember, these kids will be entering the workforce someday soon–and the ad industry. Will they have the critical thinking skills, or the patience, to do research and complex assignments? Will it even matter?
Burger King just fits this so well.
LONDON – Jobsite, the online recruitment service, has awarded its £15m media planning and buying duties to Publicis Groupe’s MediaVest without a pitch.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
