Hasta La Creative!

Global creative agency iris Worldwide appointed Mike Giannone as Chief Strategy Officer for the Americas and Marie Davidheiser as managing director of its New York office. 

At iris, Giannone will lead strategy and planning teams across the agency’s New York, Atlanta, Chicago and Sao Paulo offices, and across creative, digital, social, CRM, experiential and content disciplines for the agency’s entire client roster. He arrives at the agency from Grey New York, where he served as group strategy director for the past two years. Prior to Grey he spent just over two years with Innocean, serving as vice president, planning director and working with clients including Hyundai and See’s Candies, as well as working on new business. Before that he spent a little over a year at The Garage Team Mazda as senior vice president, director strategic planning. That followed over three and a half years with Saatchi & Saatchi, working on new business and with clients including Toyota and Square Enix. He has also served in account various account executive and account director roles with Deutsch, TBWAChiatDay and JWT, working with brands including Coors, Apple, adidas, Taco Bell and Domino’s. 

As managing director of iris New York, Davidheiser will be responsible for overseeing day-to-day management of the office, which launched a Super Bowl spot for Jeep in February. She arrives at the agency from Jack Morton Worldwide,  where she most recently served as senior vice president, general manager. Davidheiser originally arrived at Jack Morton back in 2007 as a production designer on the agency’s Verizon account. Three years later she was promoted to vice president, executive producer/director of production. In that position she worked with clients including Samsung, Walmart, Verizon, MasterCard and Kimberly-Clark. Three years later she was promoted to vice president, director of operations, receiving the bump to senior vice president two years after that before being named to her most recent role with Jack Morton as senior vice president, general manager this March. Before joining Jack Morton, Davidheiser spent time as a producer with C2 Creative and a freelance events producer with Todd Street Productions. 

Leave it to a bunch of six-year-olds to put urban planning into perspective.

In honor of Singapore’s 50 years of independence from U.K. rule, Lego and creative shop Iris created an impressive model of the city, made of the toy brand’s tiles, representing what the metropolis might look like 50 years hence — then invited some kids to improve on it.

Today, Singapore is already an impressive, modernistic marvel. Shimmering skyscrapers thrust into space, and dense, complex grids snake through the concrete canyons below.

But the adults’ Lego vision of the city in 2065 takes things to an extreme you might see on the cover of a science fiction magazine. Many of the office towers resemble fearsome Transformer robots, as if poised to break loose from their foundations and set out on fantastical adventures. There’s an especially striking modular building with a black-and-white “dice” motif (ready, no doubt, to roll big in high-stakes games of future-commerce). Taken as a whole, the model looks a bit like a combustion engine, or circuit board — perhaps an energy grid — primed to power Singapore through 2065 and beyond.

The kids have other ideas.

These “future builders,” as the project’s three-minute “Lego SG100: Rebuild” video calls them, focus on what’s taking place closer to the ground. They create intimate, comforting spaces, like parks and playgrounds, that people of all ages can enjoy. Predictably, they tug at your heartstrings. A small girl builds a house next to an office so her dad can get home faster to play with her. Meanwhile one little boy notes that he “put them together with animals, so they can make friends,” says one little boy. “Dogs without friends are very poor things.” True enough. (And hopefully, Future Singapore will have strong leash laws.)

“It was fascinating to see what their priorities were for Singapore,” says Dan Luo, country manger for Lego. “Sometimes we might lose what is most important in the pursuit of development: spending time with loved ones, and taking care of our communities.”

Sure, it’s all a bit too precious, and, of course, and shameleslly manipulating our emotions. What did we expect the kids to build, a hoverport holo-tainment shopping-mall complex? (Frankly, I hoped that one of them would.)

Regardless, the film does an admirable job of illustrating that “home,” for kids of all ages, consists largely of the small pleasures that make each day a gift. While it is necessary for a city to build up and out — building inward is equally essential for nurturing progress.

Ultimately, cities failing to nourish the human spirit are poorly constructed — because their true building blocks are the joys and aspirations of the people who live there. And the dogs, too.
 

Para promover a linha adiZero f50, de Lionel Messi, a Adidas lançou o game Play Fast or Fail, criado pelo estúdio MediaMonks. O cenário é o Rio de Janeiro, durante um jogo da Copa do Mundo 2014, e o objetivo é simples: fazer gols. Só que, para isso, o usuário tem de ser rápido e driblar os jogadores do time adversário.

A sacada, entretanto, é que a velocidade do jogador é definida por tweets ao vivo com a hashtag #Teammessi. Quanto maior o buzz da torcida, maior a velocidade do usuário, que pode acompanhar o “buzz-meter” em tempo real.

Além do game, a campanha inclui um filme criado pela iris, e também produzido pelo MediaMonks, que ficou responsável pelo CGI. Vale o play.

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
Twitter | Facebook | Contato | Anuncie

I sometimes think billboards are watching, beaming out messages meant just for me. Then I get back on my meds, and everything seems fine. Anyway, BMW's Mini, as part of its "Not Normal" campaign, worked with agencies Iris and Vizeum over the summer to personalize content to drivers of its cars on nine consecutive digital billboards along a busy London motorway. Spotters armed with iPads identified approaching Minis, and the text and images on the boards were then tailored to the individual cars. Drivers' photos were even flashed on signs further up the road. Offers of commuting snacks, car washes and flowers were also in the mix. For example, a driver in a grey Mini drove past successive signs that read, "Early start, Mr. Grey Mini driver? … Need a pick me up? … Fancy a tasty bacon butty? … Mini's buying … See you at the next garage." Nearly 2,000 Mini drivers received such personal greetings in a week. All those folks driving Vauxhalls probably felt sullen and neglected. But that's nothing new for them, now is it?

The Creative Circus, Atlanta's advertising school, has hired the most famous, perhaps infamous, stripper in town to pimp its do-goody-goody advertising contest known as A+, where all the winners receive a pimp cup. They're trying to make Atlanta a "more livable city" one stripper promotion at a time. Blondie is Atlanta legend. I heard about her before I even moved here. She strips at the Clermont Lounge, officially known as the place strippers go to die. Her great trick is crushing cans with her boobs. But she's not all flash and bling. She's a sensitive soul who is also well known for writing poems. (It is considered an honor to receive one.) Watching the promos, created with ad agency Iris, where Blondie is dressed like a ridiculous caricature of a southern belle, posed in front of a plantation and giving advice about how you have to dig deep down to your nasty self and bring it out like The Exorcist, one can only blink and repost. There simply are no words. More videos below.