Hasta La Creative!

LONDON – New Look has expanded its website by adding a teens section selling its full teen range and in-house teen brand Generation 915.

LONDON – Global Radio’s Capital 95.8 has adopted a new logo as part of a drive to restore the station to its number one position in London.

So, “Charlotte’s got a lot,” huh? That’s what BooneOakley asserts in a tourism campaign for a city I’ve now learned is in North Carolina. (Having never been farther south than Teaneck, N.J., I had to waste six seconds on Google Maps to find out for sure.) The visual wordplay in the ads is appealing, but the slogan seems best suited for a declaration scrawled on a public phone booth or men’s-room wall. In our cellular age, do they still have phone booths anywhere? Or men’s rooms, for that matter? I don’t see either in the Charlotte ads, which cast the city as the Riviera of the New South, so I guess visitors will have to hit Raleigh or Durham to drop a dime or spend a penny. Which begs a question: Why so down on Raleigh, BooneOakley? It’s a question that may need to be addressed the next time state ad contracts come up for review. UPDATE: Check out some of the city’s earlier “Shhhhhharlotte” ads here.

—Posted by David Gianatasio

(TrendHunter.com) While the Google phone, the G1 phone, has set the tongues of geeks wagging, the debut of Knight Rider on NBC has supercar enthusiasts super excited. The excitement stems from the unusual star of Knight…

After much hand wringing and thinking I have come to a conclusion regarding campaigns submitted before they were due to run, approved or even properly thought out, and here’s our new policy.

I will no longer delete ad campaigns that have been submitted to Adland at the brand nor the ad agencies request – or anyone elses request for that matter.

I will correct the submissions, place them in SPEC WORK category, pixellate trademarks, add official statements from brands or agencies to the post and add to the information we have on the ads, but I will no longer remove the ad images.

There are several reasons for this. Ad campaigns submitted to us are likely submitted to quite a few other ad sites as well, and I can honestly say that I have never seen them remove or correct anything. By adding a correction coupled with the ad images, people researching the ad campaign, such as bloggers or journalists can find that the campaign did not run here, and what the campaign actually is instead (internal spec work, unapproved client work or whatever it may be). With spec ads even winning prestigious awards like Cannes Lions these days, I think it’s pretty safe to say that you can never get an ad offline once it’s online anyway – but it would be really nice to have a place to check if the ad really ran or not in the sea of adblogs who only list ads+credits, and have no other information regarding any campaign.

Also, It is not my job to keep your creative department in check. If it is, I need a raise (remember that I do this pro-bono on my spare time). If I get ads submitted from “firstname@adagencyname.com” I have no reason to suspect that the work is not kosher, and it steals away time from posting new work when I keep having to go back and remove non-kosher work several weeks later.

I realize that ad agencies may dislike this policy, fearing that they might get in trouble with clients for spec work done within their walls. I understand your need to keep it inside, and have always been very accommodating in the past, helping to track down other places where the ads have been published and only accepting work submitted by the ‘official’ person at said agency after such an incident. Many things have changed now with the web, and they added up to push me to implement this policy. The inconsistency of ad agencies or clients to have everyone working for them to march to the same tune is driving me batty.

For example, work that is submitted here but under embargo, shows up on youtube weeks before I am allowed to breathe of the campaigns existence. Often this is due to inconsistent release dates at ad agency versus web agency, or ad agency vs PR agency, or ad agency vs post production agency. I’ve watched you guys dance out of sync for years and it’s only getting messier. Work submitted is sometimes “strategically” submitted to certain ad publications, like Lürzers archive and us, only to suddenly be discovered by people who dislike it, and then agency admits the client had nothing to do with it. This happens so often we don’t know if we can trust the agency anymore. Don’t be one of those agencies, let the people who work for you know your policy now.

Work submitted by photographers that were lead to believe it was bought to run is often unfairly pulled – we like showing off peoples skills here and it really isn’t the photographers problem that you didn’t manage to sell the campaign. Allow them to put their work in Spec and I will happily leave the agency name out of it.
And the opposite, work submitted by agencies who forgot to negotiate proper releases with photographer will not be removed either – it is not my fault that you fucked up, and even a nano-seconds publication counts as a publication so removing the ads does nothing to “fix things” you still owe the photographer money. Go sort it out with them – I’ll help smooth things over by adding links to their sites or anything else you might suggest to make them a little happier though.

We’ve come a long way from the days when I had to beg on my knees for submissions and everyone checked “with the legal department” before sending us anything. The pendulum has swung too far in the other direction it seems, with record amount of removal requests in the past month. Since people working for or at agencies are confused about the internal policy at heir own place of work these days, I can only help by laying down my own policy, and here it’s quite simple:

I will not remove any campaigns from Adland, ever again.

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Only search within 100 degree, why not use Yahoo! 360 degree search engine!
100 degree has a double meaning, one is the angle of a search area and one is a metaphor to Baidu, Yahoo’s no.1 search engine competitor in China. In Chinese, Baidu means 100 degree.

Advertising Agency: DDB Shanghai, China
Creative Directors: Michael Dee, Jody Xiong
Art Directors: Jody Xiong, Leo Wan
Copywriter: Meredin Xu
Illustrators: GongKun, Aif Xie, Jody Xiong
Published: May 2008

Time saved, Offers you a 10-minute superior personal pathway that saves your time of waiting.
Virgin at UK David’s Heathrow Airport Lunched for first class passengers, the 10-minute Expressway Service, which was targeted to fast-moving businesspeople all over the world. In order to enable consumers to be aware of the benefits of this expressway, such as time-saving, super convenience, we published the print ads on Time as the cover page and entitled it as ‘Time Saved’. This is to emphasize the creative idea of ‘time-saving’ by double meaning.

Advertising Agency: DDB Shanghai, China
Creative Directors: Michael Dee, Jody Xiong
Art Directors: Eric Sun, Jody Xiong
Copywriter: Meredin Xu
Illustrator: Xiao LongHua
Published: January 2008

China Win! This is the dream of all Chinese in 2008. As the Olympic Official sponsor, McDonald’s wished that every Chinese people could join to the grand event by all means. ‘i’m lovin’ it!’ is McDonald’s slogan; based on that, we came up with a new theme, that is, ‘i’m lovin’ China win!’. It was anticipated that during the Olympics, the whole nation was to cry out ‘i’m lovin’ China win!’ and cheer for China. We designed a speaker-featured Olympic Cheering station. It was equipped with a webcam, microphone, interactive screen, web link, etc. Every consumer who went into the ‘speaker’ could record their own video of cheer for China – ‘i’m lovin’ China win!’. Then via interactive screen and web link, the videos were transferred to McDonald’s website and viewed by people. The Cheering station had raised a huge amount of attention and over 9,500 pieces of cheer videos had been collected within a month.

Advertising Agency: DDB Shanghai, China
Creative Directors: Michael Dee, Jody Xiong
Art Directors: Jody Xiong, Leo Wan
Copywriter: Meredin Xu

This is one time you’ll love rejection.
99 out of 100 beans aren’t good enough for Berkley & Jensen.
The ‘Q’ seal on Berkley & Jensen bags ensures that only the highest quality beans are inside – ­rated in the top 1% in the world by the Coffee Quality Institute. Better yet, it tells coffee lovers that they’re going to enjoy an extraordinarily delicious cup of coffee.

Advertising Agency: BJ’s Wholesale Club In-house, Boston, USA
Creative Director: Susan Kurnas
Art Director: Tim Needham
Copywriter: Kevin Acciaioli
Photographer: Michael Indresano
Co-Creative Director: Loretta Kennedy
Designer: Gary Hoare
Published: September 2008

Advertising Agency: TBWA\CHIAT\DAY, USA
Creative Director: Patrick O’Neill
Associate Creative Directors: Robin Fitzgerald, David Steinke
Art Director: Beau Hanson
Copywriter: David Povill
Photographer: Giblin & James