Hasta La Creative!

A new Addy campaign from Rochester RAF Connect folks asks, “What’s Your Spirit Animal?”

They’ve created a 2014 Spirit Animal Generator, inviting advertising professionals to answer a series of questions to summon their inner spirit animal. Once you’ve completed the quiz you can upload a photo to have your spirit animal superimposed over the image, or opt out and just get the details behind your spirit animal. It’s a bit ridiculous and silly but also kind of fun (then again, this is how the ADDYs roll), like most online quizzes of this nature. Give it a try for yourself and share your spirit animal in the comments section if you’d like.

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The latest from the “Behind The Cubes” series showcases Y&R New York executive creative director Marc Sobier and his work for Land Rover.

Sobier discusses working with a group of parkour experts in the “Roam Free” campaign, which takes the practice out of its urban environment and into a natural setting. “Roam Free” was designed to promote Land Rover’s “Terrain Response 2″ which “seamlessly adapts to nature.” So Sobier and crew brought on some of the world’s best parkour experts to do their own stunts and exemplify Land Rover’s new feature in as exciting a way as possible. Sobier marvels at the possibilities of advertising, asking, “In what other business do you get to randomly work with a bunch of cool, free running stunt men?”

Behind The Cubes also showcases Sobier’s “Race The Sun” campaign — also for Land Rover. “Race The Sun,” an “interactive suspense film” that mixed in gaming elements. When filming “Race The Sun” Sobier and crew ran into a rather large problem, the sun, thanks to smoke from nearby forest fires, was nowhere to be seen. Instead of giving up, though, the crew kept filming, and they were rewarded with an especially awe-inspiring sunset perfectly suited for the spot.

You can check out “Behind The Cubes: Roam Free” above and stick around for “Behind The Cubes: Race The Sun” after the jump. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The team behind Young Glory, who this year added a design category to “the only industry awards program rewarding creative consistency” have launched a new, global talent agency called YG Talent.

Young Glory mines the best under 30 talent for a competition spanning 8 creative briefs over 8 months. Over the years, they’ve attracted talented creative directors such as AKQA’s Rei Inamoto, R/GA’s Nick Law and Wieden+Kennedy’s Jim Riswold as judges. This has positioned Young Glory’s organizers as the caretakers of an ever-growing database of well-tested young talent.

“We realised that we were sitting on a real goldmine of talent  – talent that was tested and vetted by some of the industry’s finest. So we thought why not allow agencies to tap into that? Through our monthly participations, we’re able to identify the next generation of  creative superstars before everyone else. And most importantly for agencies, before they become too expensive,” says Young Glory co-founder Rafik Belmesk.

YG Talent will offer agencies “the opportunity to hire young to mid-level art directors, copywriters and designers from the four corners of the globe, solving an ever-present issue on agencies’ agendas: hiring the talent that will keep increasingly digital and diverse creative departments brewing,” providing talent in North America, Asia, Australia, Europe and New Zealand. Check out the video above, and head on over to YG Talent for more information.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

ADC Behind The Cube: BBH’s Ari Weiss discusses “Good Shirts” from ADC Global Network on Vimeo.

Last week, we brought you news of ADC’s “Behind the Cube” video for Student Thesis Gold Cube winner Dani Wolf. This week, ADC has a new “Behind the Cube” installment, featuring BBH New York executive creative director Ari Weiss.

Weiss discusses UNICEF’s “Good Shirts” campaign — which sold t-shirts depicting an item of aid, priced at the amount it cost UNICEF to donate that item — and its unexpected success. As a driving force behind the campaign, Weiss believed “Good Shirts” would be the “conversation piece” of the campaign, building buzz and getting more people to donate. Instead, the idea really took off, and the t-shirts raised around half a million dollars — including the sale of a $300,000 shirt to an anonymous San Francisco buyer. It’s an interesting look at the process behind one of the more buzzworthy Gold Cube campaigns from last year, including a look at some of the excellent t-shirt designs, and an excellent reminder that sometimes even the creatives behind a campaign can be surprised by its results.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Dans la lignée du Reuters Photos of the Year, la compétition des Sony World Photography Awards invitent chaque année les professionnels et amateurs à faire concourir les meilleures images. Alors que la compétition se termine le 6 janvier 2014, voici déjà une sélection des images les plus impressionnantes.

Be Cheerful Even in the Darkest of Times – Samantha Fortenberry

Last Summer Day – Igor Kryzhko

Bhutanese masked dancer and boy – Joyce Le Mesurier

Underground – Holger Schmidtke

The Knight and His Steed – Nicolas Reusens Boden

The sons of the Angh of Nyahnyu – Sergio Carbajo

Fashion Muslim – Simone Sapienza

Abore Sand strom – Carlos Duarte

Open Low Light – Pedro London

Bonding – Cory Kipa

Sorrow – Eugene Stulov

And now for the simultaneously most goofy and most hipster-y thing you will see today…

Hungry Castle and Umbrella teamed up to create Laser Cat, an art-eating cat that projects said art with its laser eyes, constructed by ADC Hall of Famer and SVA teacher Kevin O’Callaghan.

In the Laser Cat video, directed by Luka Kostil, the guys at Hungry Castle claim there are three things everyone loves: “lasers, cats, and art and craft.” Laser Cat combines all three (or four, depending on your count) for the 93rd annual ADC Awards in Miami. They want you to submit your art (drawings, sculpture, painting, photography, cat photography, etc.) to Laser Cat. Depending on the number of works submitted, Laser Cat will project the works onto different objects. With 100 artworks submitted (fed) to Laser Cat, he will project the pieces onto a wall; with 1,000 submissions, a building; and with one million submissions, Laser Cat will project the art work on the f***ing moon. If that sounds cool to you, start submitting at lasercatmiami.com. So far 360 works have been submitted, with Ogilvy, BBDO, and Fallon listed as the first three agencies to submit. The first to feed Laser Cat their art was well-known designer Stefan Sagmeister, who you may remember from the Art Grandeur Nature/Absolut controversy.

Laser Cat will be eating submissions until November 30th, so get your work in now. The ADC Annual Awards of Art + Craft in Advertising and Design will take place at the Bass Museum in Miami Beach on April 8, 2014. Laser Cat will be there; what he projects his art on remains to be seen. Why not try to make it the moon? 

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

WPP-owned, Toronto-based john st. continues in its great annual tradition of taking the piss out of the industry as part of its pitch for Strategy‘s Agency of the Year awards (we covered fellow Toronto agency Lowe Roche’s entry earlier today). In its follow-up to last year’s introduction of a “professional clicking service” called Buyral, john st. gets more aggressive, scaring the bejeezus out of total strangers (well, at least let’s play along) as part of the a new marketing strategy that the agency’s christened “exFEARiential.”

It’s just as absurd/amusing, if not more so, than previous john st. AOY videos including Buyral as well as predecessors, Catvertising and Pink Ponies. It looks like we aren’t the only ones that get a kick out of “exFEARiential” as it picked up Best Agency Video at the Strategy awards, where john st. also took home gold for Agency of the Year and bronze for Digital Agency of the Year. FYI, if you stick around til the end of the clip, you can click on separate videos of the stress tests featured above (or if you’re just unwilling to wait, go here and here). Credits after the jump.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Existant depuis plus de 30 ans, le concours photographique UK Picture Editors Guild réunit les meilleurs clichés de l’année sortis dans la presse, le tout à travers l’Angleterre. Découvrez les principaux finalistes de cette édition 2013 avec en premier ce cliché d’Anthony Devlin. Plus d’images dans la suite.

Young Finalist – David Hedges

Citizen Finalist – Bjorn Olsson

Business Finalist – Jason Alden

Young Finalist – Daniel Mullan

Sports Finalist – Mike Egerton

Sports Finalist – Ian MacNicol

Royal Finalist – Mark Stewart

Royal Finalist – John Stillwell

Regional Finalist – Anthony Chappel-Ross

News Finalist – Justin Tallis

Finalist – Lia Toby

Essay Finalist – William Wintercross

Essay Finalist – John Giles

Citizen Finalist – James Wood

Back when it was first announced and details were scant, I made mention of the 3% Conference, an effort to call attention to the lack of female CDs in the ad industry.

Since that time, conference founder Kat Gordon not only organized a successful conference in 2012, she’s doing it again this year. And she recently took her “Where are all the Donna Drapers?” presentation here to Seattle for an evening which also featured a discussion panel of local CDs. I attended, and I was one of only 5 or 6 guys in a room of 100 or so. (Which is truly is an odd feeling.)

Kat’s presentation is pretty brief but statistic-heavy to back up her assertions: That women are dominant as consumers, social network participants and even gamers, yet woefully underrepresented in agency conference rooms and corporate boardrooms.

She makes a very convincing case, but more than that, it’s clear she’s thought through many of the common criticisms people bring up whenever someone tries to advocate for this issue: That CDs hire the best book, regardless of gender; that more women choose to get off the corporate ladder for family reasons; and that women in creative departments are either too passive or too bitchy vs. being confident and assertive. And she goes to great lengths to insist men aren’t the enemy here.

I won’t get into all those issues — having worked for many (yes, many) female creative directors, I certainly have opinions to share another day.

Admittedly, I came the presentation to see if Kat would touch upon what I’d consider to be the core, thorny issue at the heart of this: The white male dominated award show/industrial complex, and the idea that what often gets considered the best advertising comes from a male perspective. Because for decades now, that perspective has shaped our collective creative output and influences what younger creatives imitate as they find their voices.

Kat does address this, briefly. She uses this Minute Rice ad as an example of smart marketing to women:

On her blog, she gives it a “Warm Blanket” Award for its resonance with its intended audience. But until more work like this receives equal praise at high-profile awards shows, we won’t see more work like this. Is it the best ad in the world? Probably not. But it’s more resonant than some jerk-off visual solution or something with more attitude — the kind of work that would ordinarily win for a product like Minute Rice. It’s only unworthy of awards because of our industry’s own ingrained awards biases.

As long as middle-aged white guys proclaim themselves the ultimate arbiters of award show worthiness, then vote for their own work and that of their friends to win, the cycle perpetuates itself. And right now, young creatives need to get the credit for their work, win awards, and make a name for themselves in order to advance and make more money. We all play the game in some regard, which means gaming the system and for many female creatives, it means learning to play it like a man. During the discussion, some on the panel and in the crowd acknowledged that they once did ads specifically to win awards, not ads that reflected their own perspective or voice.

Ultimately, this means many female creative directors, and some of the work they’d champion, won’t make much progress. If there are more female CDs throughout the ad industry, and making decisions come award show time, you’d see different kinds of work prevail. And students and juniors entering the industry would look to that work for inspiration. I think it’d be better for advertising all-around and we’d be more valuable to our clients.

But the award show discussion is only a small part of what Kat and the 3% Conference is about. Kat offers other suggestions for clients, agency management, and creatives to help recognize female talent. But it’s entirely possible that the answer won’t come from within the current industry structure. As Cal McAllister of Wexley School for Girls said on the discussion panel, the system was built that way and can’t be fixed — it needs to be broken. Which is why he’s running his own agency his way. Maybe the 3% would be 50% if female creative directors made themselves female agency owners. And then you’ll see real changes.

Find out more about this year’s 3 Percent Conference here.

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