Hasta La Creative!

LONDON – Trinity Mirror is to launch 11 regional mobile sites by the end of the year that will offer advertisers a range of formats such as sponsorship and banner ads.

The forest will get more dangerous.
New Terios Pirsch. Built to hunt.

Advertising Agency: Cayenne Werbeagentur, Germany
Creative Directors: Andreas Ruthemann, Marco Obermann
Art Director: Roman Lukowski
Copywriter: Sönke Brehm
Illustrator: John Holder
Published: September 2008

LONDON – CarbonCreditz, a green loyalty scheme backed by Tesco, Marks & Spencer and ASDA, which launched last week as a way of letting consumers invest in carbon offsetting projects has been criticised by a competitor, Green Rewards.

Ads in Washington, D.C., for Fallout 3, a post-apocalyptic video game set there, have upset a few subway riders who’d rather not see images of city landmarks ravaged by war. One guys says the ads are “a daily reminder that Washington is a prime target for an attack.” Of course, it is just a video game, and the entire planet looks bombed out, not just D.C. Admittedly, though, Bethesda Softworks is obviously trying to be provocative. “The immediate visual of the Capitol and the Washington Monument and things like that, they tell a story immediately,” executive producer Todd Howard tells the Washington Post. “The imagery is really evocative, these American icons, these big, epic structures kind of destroyed. It has the feeling of, what would you do? How did it get that way and what would you do in that world?” Still, if they are going to take the ads down, it should be to protect the series’ legacy from the blemish of a dumbed-down third installment.

—Posted by David Kiefaber

Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi Southeast Asia Regional/Bangkok, Thailand
Executive Creative Directors: Steve Hough, Andy Greenaway
Creative Directors: Sumesh Peringeth, Joel Clement
Art Directors: Sumesh Peringeth, Brandy Vu, Linda Pham
Copywriters: Steve Hough, Joel Clement
Illustrator: Tran Thanh Truc
Photographer: Pier Laurenza, Teo Studio
Published: 15 March 2008

Advertising Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi Southeast Asia Regional/Bangkok, Thailand
Executive Creative Directors: Steve Hough, Andy Greenaway
Creative Directors: Sumesh Peringeth, Joel Clement
Art Directors: Sumesh Peringeth, Brandy Vu, Linda Pham
Copywriters: Steve Hough, Joel Clement
Illustrator: Tran Thanh Truc
Photographer: Pier Laurenza, Teo Studio
Published: 15 March 2008

Over in Sweden, Lego has been accused of sexist advertising toward children. The country’s Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising (ERK) has cried foul over Lego catalog ads that show a girl in a pink room playing with a castle and ponies and a boy in a blue room playing with fire trucks and a fire station. ERK says this use of pink and blue constitutes a form of gender stereotyping that’s degrading to both men and women. Lego defended the images, saying that boys and girls are seen playing together elsewhere in the catalog. Two U.S. sites, Parent Dish and Mom Logic, have also gotten uppity over the ads. What I don’t get is how some people think the fairly recent, 20th-century concept of assigning pink to girls and blue to boys is an old-fashioned gender stereotype. Doesn’t something have to fall out of fashion before it’s considered “old-fashioned”? Maybe someday we’ll return to the Little Lord Fauntleroy style of the late 1800s, where small boys wore lacy collars and little velvet suits and had long curly hair. Until then, Lego might avoid the issue altogether by sticking to a nice, environmentally fashionable green.

—Posted by Rebecca Cullers

“Clients get the advertising they deserve.”

I trot out that one a lot, and former Comcast CMO, Marvin O. Davis, explores the issue further in a great Adweek column:

I recall an occasion when I was traveling with several company executives. Everyone was expressing their opinion on their favorite and least-favorite company commercials. When I mentioned a few ads I didn’t particularly like, one exec was startled and interrupted me with a question: “How could there be commercials running that you, as CMO, didn’t like?” I explained that I respected the creative judgment of my team and the agency. And, if they collectively felt very strongly about an ad, it would be somewhat arrogant and all knowing for me to dismiss them. Now, to be clear, I have on occasion vetoed spots — usually because of tone or for being off character — which I knew were wrong for us. But the one-versus-all vote should be rare.

It’s hard to approve advertising you don’t love. But if you must, at least give more of a reason than “I don’t like it.” That is unactionable feedback. And if an exec takes that position often enough, the marketing team will lose confidence and begin to play not to lose. That almost always leads to mediocre advertising.

LONDON – Not Actual Size has appointed Laura Derbyshire as a senior account director to manage experiential campaigns for clients including Walkers Crisps, Nike and BMW.

Then 19th edition of Art Futura, the Barcelona-based festival of Digital Culture and Creativity, closed on Sunday with the Prize Giving Ceremony. Awards were handed to the creators of best pieces in 3D and digital animation and of the best Spanish videogames. Not one single girl jumped on the podium to receive a prize (that’s ok, ladies, i’m not into 3D either) but most of the awardees thanked either their girlfriend or their mum for their support. There was even one ‘gracias a mi abuela/thanks to my granny’. How sweet!

I’m back in my kitchen, so time has come to write a couple of posts to share what was for me the most interesting moments of the festival.

First one is the presentation of a sculpture called Splash.

Image by Núria Jordán & Salvador Barceló

Mona Kim, Todd Palmer, Olga Subirós and Simon Taylor from Program Collective took the stage to share with us the whole process that lead to the spectacular sculpture they created for the Water for Life exhibition at the Expo Zaragoza 2008, a fair that focused on water and sustainable development.

The challenge was to fill in two entire floors of the Water Tower, the Expo’s signature edifice. Two floors might not seem much until you add to that a huge empty space of 40 m high that the designers had to occupy with a work which could somehow balance the architecture and get people to walk up the ramps that wrap around the tower’s interior.

Photo: Matias Costa for The New York Times

The result of that brief was a series of installations and a very photogenic hanging sculpture called Splash which freezes in solid form the kinetic properties of water hitting a surface, like the arrival of life on our planet. Video:

As visitors climb to the top of the tower, they can enjoy a panoramic view of the city but also discover all the layers and facets of the sculpture. Besides, Splash’s shiny surface reflects the environment around it, becoming a distorted mirror of the video images playing below, and of the people watching it from the ramps that circle around it. The designers had to break down the sculpture into its most basic elements, ending up with 84 giant pieces that had to be suspended from the tower’s ceiling by a total of 140 cables, some of them as thin as 3 mm.

Image by plus arquitectura

The forms of this 22.5 meters (74 ft) high installation were generated through digital animation technologies that modeled the deformation and energetic scattering of a drop of water being acted upon by various extreme planetary forces – including gravity, wind and heat. The dynamic simulation systems were carried out by Pere Gifre from IKONIC ARTS.

Image on the homepage by Gallo Quirico.