Hasta La Creative!

We are children of our age,
it’s a political age.
All day long, all through the night,
all affairs—yours, ours, theirs—
are political affairs.
Whether you like it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin, a political cast,
your eyes, a political slant.
Whatever you say reverberates,
whatever you don’t say speaks for itself.
So either way you’re talking politics.
Even when you take to the woods,
you’re taking political steps
on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And though it troubles the digestion
it’s a question, as always, of politics.
To acquire a political meaning
you don’t even have to be human.
Raw material will do,
or protein feed, or crude oil,
or a conference table whose shape
was quarreled over for months;
Should we arbitrate life and death
at a round table or a square one?
Meanwhile, people perished,
animals died,
houses burned,
and the fields ran wild
just as in times immemorial
and less political.

— Wis?awa Szymborska

FROM

Adbusters #124

The Year of Living Dangerously Pt.1

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The post A political age appeared first on Adbusters | Journal of the mental environment.

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Back in March, AdAge reported that Beats by Dre–the premium headphone brand started by one Andre Young and sold to Apple in 2014 for the super cheap price of $3 billion–would be reaching out to various agencies as it continues its international expansion under the leadership of marketing VP Jason White.

Today, reliable sources tell us that New York’s Anomaly has won the subsequent review.

According to sources for the initial story, the client’s agency outreach is related to its plans to sell more premium headphones overseas. White, who previously ran the global Nike account for Wieden+Kennedy and managed its Shanghai office, will reportedly see his role at the company expand moving forward as well. Sources tell us that CMO Omar Johnson, who according to AdAge will become more involved in promoting Apple Music in conjunction with the Beats brand, has actively worked to help guide the creative direction of its past and present campaigns.

Beats has a longstanding relationship with R/GA, which was not involved in this review. We also hear that 72andSunny was among the agencies in the initial group considered by Beats before it eventually went with Anomaly.

Late last year we learned of a series of departures within the creative department at Hustle, the L.A. unit of the IPG network that handled some aspects of the Beats work. This time, however, we hear that the addition of another agency to the Beats roster will not affect its relationship with R/GA, whose London office has driven creative on most of the brand’s biggest efforts to date aside from those produced by its own in-house team.

An R/GA spokesperson declined to comment for this post. Anomaly and the Beats organization itself have not yet responded to our queries.

This is for the tree-climbers.

France’s GMF is the leading insurer of public sector workers. But, typical of the modest sector it serves, it’s spent the past 80 years of its existence running ads that the brand itself has acknowledged are “cautious” and not too screamy. 

Well, the world has changed and everyone’s screaming. So, it teamed up with TBWA Paris to assert its position in a way that feels loyal to who the brand is—it’s a quieter competitor, but therein lies its power. 

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Hundreds of years from now, a new bionic race of human beings will look back on this moment—among other vestiges of our time—and conclude we all shared a god after all. (It’s happened before.)

Remember Glimpse, the socially conscious agency that wants to fill a London subway station with nothing but billboards of cats? With just three days left on their Kickstarter campaign, they’ve found a way to sweeten the deal.

Battersea, the animal rescue center and one of the U.K.’s biggest charities, has agreed to partner with Glimpse to put stray cats on the posters—so, in addition to thinking fewer ad-cluttered thoughts on their commute, Londoners may actually be able to take a furry friend home with them. 

But that’s not all. The agency could still use help getting this off the ground. 

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