Campaign

When you wish upon a well

Here's a nice little thing to get you in the Christmas spirit without spending any money.

SpinVox, the people who turn your talk into text (you know, when you accidentally text your friend’s landline and they end up being blessed with a message from Stephen Hawking on weed), are building a Wishing Well in Covent Garden’s East Piazza. You’ll be able to walk into it, call a number and then see your wish projected inside the Well.

It's one of the wordsmithery group 26's latest projects. Check out some of the wishes here, and feel free to add your own: htttp://beingbeta.blogspot.com/2008/11/26-spinvox-wishing-well.html 

'Tis the season to be pikey...let the voucher hockey commence

It's only November but the voucher hockey tournament has well and truly kicked off. I think we speak for most people in office based jobs anywhere when we say that there seem to be more vouchers knocking about this year than ever. Must be the thing beginning with ‘R’.

We’ve both been getting them from friends for months, and we've only been at BBH for three days, but already our inboxes have more coupons in than we could possibly use in a lifetime.

Now, call me curmudgeonly but, I (lol) just wondered whether I’m alone in my distrust of money-off vouchers? When they work out they are great, sure, but they can also be largely ridiculous for the following reasons:

- You print them off and then leave them on the printer.

- You remember to take them out with you, but when you get to the counter, laden with goodies, they tell you ‘this branch is not participating’ and you end up paying full price to avoid the humiliation of putting everything back on the shelves.

- You remember to take them out with you, but when you get to the counter, laden with goodies, they tell you ‘this voucher is fake’ and you end up paying full price to avoid the humiliation of putting everything back on the shelves.

- You hoard vouchers on your desk and forget to use them until exactly the day after they expire. You have to be a master of organisation to be able to deal with them all correctly. Take for example Zizzis, the prime example of a previous voucher-induced debacle. I had one of their 2 for 1 vouchers printed out on my desk at Euros for weeks, weeks... and we were too busy to take lunch until one day me Nat and I decided It Was Time. We went to use it and it was only valid mon-thursday so we paid full price. Then the next time, when weeks later we allowed ourselves lunch, we went to use it and it had of course expired.

- You lose half your lunch hour discussing the merits and downfalls between 40% off at Pizza Express versus 1/3^rd off at ASK. A friend told me she recently had to resort to using a calculator to make sure she made the right choice. Is this time well spent, when you could just be eating where you’d rather eat, and enjoying your full hour?

- Someone recently reminded us that London is actually 10% more expensive than everywhere else – so really we’re not saving all that much anyway – if anything we’re just paying what we ought to be.

Now, admittedly many of the above reasons have something to do with one’s own degrees of personal organisation (or lack thereof), which is usually related to whether one is a suit or a creative, but nevertheless I would hope I’m not entirely alone in my occasional bouts of voucher-induced misery.

Looking back over previous voucher seasons, I remember when I was at AIS..., one poor, bored account man (he shall remain anonymous) took it upon himself to collate them all into one excel grid with all the links and codes, so this became 'the master document' with them all in, so you could then delete all the others. He then dutifully circulated it for everyone. Has anyone done that this year?

Having said all this, Nat and I are now going to attempt, all being well, to go and use the Pure California voucher we’ve got on our desk. And tonight is the Carnaby Christmas 20% shopping event which we’ve all got vouchers for here. Fingers crossed we don’t forget them or try to use them outside the hours of validity.

London is a piece of cake

On Saturday I, (Nat), went to Old Street for a very sweet event put on by ‘The Great Cake Escape’. http://www.myspace.com/thegreatcakeescape

‘The Great Cake Escape’ is the brainchild of two female artists going by the wonderful names of Cherry Bakewell and Fondant Fancy. Their creative mission is to line the streets of London with beautiful, decorated cup cakes with little flags that say, in a very Alice in Wonderland kind of way, ‘Take Me’.

The 25 year old ladies hide the cakes everywhere and anywhere - from derelict buildings, to pavements and window ledges.

Apparently, what drives them to do what they do is, "to add a dash of vibrancy to this urban utopia of ours," and "make people smile".

Last Saturday's treasure hunt was in honour of their first birthday. To celebrate they hid loads of cakes all around Hoxton Square, including a very special ‘golden cake’ that apparently no one has found yet...

I only managed to find 3 cakes that day. They were decorated beautifully with Smarties, fizzy things and other dentist's nightmares. 

A few people have asked me if it’s sensible to eat random cakes placed by strangers on the street (goes against what all our mothers taught us)… but so far so good - I'm still alive so I'm sure they weren't laced with anything poisonous. If I have to ring in sick from BBH, I'll know who to blame. 

Just don't think of running water

This poor man must've been a bit bored this week. He was stuck to a billboard for 5 hours, in order to draw attention to the new Benrik book 'this diary will change your life'. And attention it drew - in yesterday's London lite and today's Sun we're told.

Nice work from experiential ad agency Jack Liberties.  If you've not heard of Ben and Henrik they're an eclectic duo whose humble mission in life is 'to introduce a welcome element of branded anarchy into our predictable lives'.

They and their antics are worth checking out, if you've not seen their work in the Media Guardian already.  At least it didn't rain. Apparently he wasn't allowed any fluids before he went up. Can't think why.

The dogma's bollocks

We're sure you've all probably heard about this by now, but we're both so excited by what Ariane Sherine and Simon Veksner are doing that we wanted to give a little mention of the atheist bus campaign. It has been launched as a backlash to the heavy handed Christian ads that are running at the moment. The bus side that will be running says "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

It's slightly ironic that this existing creative is actually an agnostic message, but maybe they were erring on the side of caution.

Simon asked creatives to send in some other ideas for bus side headlines, so just for the hell of it (sorry) in between other briefs we sent in a bunch of properly atheist ideas. We looked quite a pair, sitting in the breakfast club pouring over a bible yesterday.

We've seen a few comments on Scamp saying that if God exists he'll 'blow up' the atheist-clad buses when they run, so we'll wait and see what happens in January when the campaign breaks.

Happy Anniversary, Shish and Sam. So what's the secret to a happy marriage?

The Friday before last was Shish and Sam from DDB's 10 year creative anniversary. They held a large celebratory lunch at The Fat Badger in  Notting Hill. Everyone who came got them romantic cards, anniversary gifts and even a special iced cake arrived. The traditional gift for a 10 year anniversary present is 'tin', so Lol and I gave them some 'tin tin' books.

It got me (Nat) thinking that our advertising relationships should be just as honoured and celebrated as marriages. You spend more time with your creative partner than your real partner anyway.

Creative partnerships can be difficult at times. They take work. (A creative director I spoke to recently said that with some creative teams he had to act like a marriage guidance counsellor). I think creatives should have anniversary parties more often and we should get our partners gifts and cards each year to say how much we mean to one other. Why only do it for real relationships?

We'd like to know - what are the most important things that keep a creative relationship going? For a partnership to work, there are so many things that you have to have in common. Most importantly sense of humour, then ambition. If one of you is happy to settle for a worse job so they can get a mortgage and the other will happily live with their parents until their dream job comes along, then there may be problems. You've also got to share the same work ethic. Otherwise one of you will always be bitter that you are working harder. And another obvious thing is you've both got to share a similar creative appreciation of ideas otherwise you will produce work that one of you isn't happy with. But then again a lot of people say successful relationships are when two very opposite people come together. Different views fuse together making more interesting work.

Are creatives meant to find a soul mate or is it better to play the creative field? Do you get lazy with the same partner and stop making as much effort as you did when you first met? Do you lose the drive to impress them? (I always thought it would be a fun Nabs fundraising idea to do a partner swap week or a swinging month).

Who holds the record for the longest lasting partnership? And who has the shortest? Also, we've touched on this whole issue before in our Ménage à trois blog, but has anyone ever strayed, or been tempted to have an affair?

And how do you know when you've met 'the one'? Is there someone out there for every creative that is your perfect creative match?  Does anyone have any stories about how they or their creative partner 'proposed'? When I was with my old partner Danni, when we got together 7 years ago she 'proposed' to me in Amsterdam in a fairground with a jelly ring. I accepted. But then 7 years later we divorced, divided up our idea belongings and went our separate ways. And that was when I met Lol online...

After being with one partner it made me realize what I wanted more from the next partner. I knew a bit more about what my 'type' was and what I was looking for in my dream man or woman. So when I put my 'profile' up online on the single creatives d&ad site I was quite specific as to what I wanted.

From Lol's point of view, having been solo for much of her career, she's 'dated' lots of people but no-one seemed quite right until her first 'date' with Nat, where it was 'love at first sight'. I guess for both of us it's a mixture of being industrious, reliable, and each having something the other person doesn't... so you've got to end up greater than the sum of your parts.

It's mine and Lol's one year anniversary in December. So 'paper' themed presents will be greatly appreciated. How about a nice layout pad?
And on that theme, if in wedding anniversaries the common gifts are based on tin, silver, gold, diamond, crystal, sapphire etc, then what should the equivalent be for advertising anniversaries? Should the presents be stationery themed? Pencils, pen, magic tape then stapler?

To those who aren't as lucky in love as Shish or Sam, we'll end with a bittersweet  little film about how creative break-ups are never easy...

Funny and bleak in equal parts: Stoppard does Chekhov in the West End

So Lol went to see the Donmar production of Ivanov the other night. It was brilliant all round - incredible music, set design and performances. The translation was as witty as ever (and being a massive Stoppard-obsessive this came as no surprise).

The only slight quibble on people's lips was the way that Stoppard had thrown in a bunch of oddly modern phrases. Being as the setting was meant to be the late 1800s, it did seem strangely anachronistic to hear Brannagh and co. saying things like 'Going like the clappers' and 'knackered'. There were lots of phrases which upset the purists in the audience - as though Stoppard was trying to 'dumb down' the words of Chekhov.

It got me thinking though - if you translate Russian into English, does it matter whether you change the language to that of the modern day? Surely if we're being pedantic, they ought to be speaking Russian anyway??

Either way I really recommend seeing it - not if you're feeling remotely depressed though. Although it's funny, It's not the most uplifting of night's out.