2 pieces of atrocious copy that were published

Exhibit 1: a Wimbledon promotion for Jacob's Creek, in the Metro newspaper (click for full size)...

"Has partnered with... to bring alive the brand's philosophy"??? Did they just copy this directly from the Account Manager's email? Did the writer know they would be talking to ordinary humans?

Exhibit 2: Taiwan Excellence...

With the best will in the world, I can hardly take seriously an advert that suggests Taiwan is the only country using innovation in product design, R&D, quality and marketing. What IS unique is their description of this as "innovalue". Perhaps that's what they were trying to say.

Powerful athletes' quivering muscles

Yes, it's the Olympics, and nakedly sexual admiration for the scantily-clad, fat-free, streamlined human body is going to be the nation's top hobby for a month or so. With that in mind, here is the BBC's trail by RKCR/Y&R.

Go fullscreen and HD for full effect:

I mention quivering muscles for a reason - it's actually just one beautiful piece of attention to detail (look at the gymnast on the rings at 0:34) in an animation full of them. A crew of dozens put this together, and no wonder - even though the characters are distorted, it's still one of the finest artificial representations of human movement I've ever seen.

Does it mean much? Not really, apart from a vague aspiration to include the entire country and not just the capital in the Games. It's mostly just an appetite-whetter for an event we know about already. But as a piece of craft, it's hard to beat.

Oh, and it is, of course, nothing like the RKCR ads for Lloyds TSB, whatever the occasional fuckwitted organisation with a vendetta against the BBC might have you believe...

Go (fuck yourself) Compare

I've made a habit on this blog of mentioning projects that my friends mention on social media. And this one is especially satisfying as so many were taken in by it. I'm talking, of course, of Dare's "graffitied" Go Compare billboards that have been appearing round the place.

Here's one friend who was taken in even though he studies advertising...

...and another one who fell for it on Facebook.

As luck would have it, Dare CD Laura Jordan-Bambach was in the School mentoring yesterday and gave us some useful insight into the lengths they went to in order to hoodwink people.

Firstly, they made sure that only one poster in a certain area would appear to be vandalised, to increase the likelihood of someone seeing an unspoiled one. Secondly, they printed the "graffiti" parts at a much higher resolution than the rest of the poster, to make it look more realistic.

It's a useful little lesson into craft and attention to detail - if the campaign hadn't fooled anyone it could have backfired badly.

D&AD Student Pencils / Placement

I've been neglecting this blog a great deal lately, but with good reason. I've had a very busy couple of weeks, on placement at AMV BBDO. More of that later, but big news first.

Olly and I won a D&AD student award for our "EA Peace Day" idea in the Open Brief category. And then we won the award for D&AD Students Of The Year! Here we are with 50% of our awards...

Needless to say we're over the moon, but of course it's as much about the opportunities it opens up as the actual awards. So we're very much hoping to get placements as good as the one we just had, because AMV's system should really be the benchmark.

First of all, they have a system in place - you're looked after by someone outside the Creative department, which actually works wonders. This means that you're not constantly hassling busy creatives for briefs or help - instead, you're making phone calls to Account Managers, Planners, Project Managers - all of whom are invariably happy to help.

There are the little things, too, like the fact that they create an email address for you, and put you on the agency-wide and creative mailing groups. This means that from day one, you actually get emails - and even if they're just telling you that some left an iPhone in the 3rd floor ladies', they still make you feel part of the organisation.

Oh, and they pay placement teams, and there's free porridge before 9am. What more could you want?