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?

Students? Really?

Look at the fucking size of their lounge!

(Taken from AMV BBDO's ads for BT - which to be fair are a hell of a lot less annoying than these kind of set-ups can be.)

Mercedes "Escape The Map"

This campaign has been going for some time now, with apparently over 72,000 people playing the Google Streetview-based dystopian maze game Escape The Map, aiming Mercedes at a younger (but presumably still affluent!) audience.

What's heartening is to see that the TV Ads stick strongly to the plot and theme of the game - they're notably different in tone to your average TV ad, and all credit to the client for going ahead with it and to AMV BBDO for the creepy, unsettling execution.

Where I'm not certain if it works is on viewers with no previous knowledge of the game. The "I need to escape the map" could have been taken further as a standalone concept, in the sense of "I use the car to escape the dullness of driving in a familiar city". But perhaps the advert was only ever intended to jog the memories of those 72,000 odd players - so it's only a minor, and possibly invalid, criticism.

Heinz whistle

At Sir John Hegarty's talk to SCA students last night, he said "find facts and build your communication around that fact". Great advice, but sometimes you can see creatives casting around desperately for some behavioural truth to dramatise, even if it isn't the most meaningful or emotional. In this slot for AMV BBDO, they've alighted on the fact that people blow on soup before putting it in their mouths.

Can you guess the tune? It was so disjointed I couldn't pick it out, and I'd count myself as pretty musical. If you recognised it as "Love Me Tender", then I'm impressed.

But apart from that, I'm just not convinced it's the strongest product truth. And while I know plenty of people who blow on their soup, I'm not aware of anyone whistling while they do it.

It tries to be feelgood but comes out forced.

Snickers - popular with homosexuals*

*I, of course, am asexual, for the purposes of this blog.

But I thought I would continue the theme of featuring ads that had been mentioned by friends of mine, with no outside prompting. This AMV BBDO slot for Snickers, featuring Joan Collins and Stephanie Beacham, was featured on the wall of a somewhat fabulous friend, with the comment "JUST SAW THE JOAN COLLINS STEPHANIE BEECHAM SNICKERS ADVERT AND CAME ALL OVER THE LIVING ROOM!!!!"

It is quite a wonderful thing, I have to admit. So many of the ads I've featured previously have squandered promising premises on poor, thoughtless execution. But this allies a marvelously bizarre initial setup with good lines and good acting.

Just ask yourself, how would you replace Mr T with Joan Collins as the face of your ad campaign while still keeping the creative strategy exactly the same?

Choice FM - slowmo bullets

We had Paul Brazier, ECD of AMV BDDO, in the school today - and we got some incredibly valuable feedback on our work. In honour of this, here's a great AMV ad; a heart-stopping one minute spot for Choice FM's "Kill The Gun" campaign.

Twinings - gets you back to you

One of a plethora of adverts to be released during an episode of X Factor (it's a fun game spotting the ones where the entire budget has clearly been spent on the timeslot and not the ad), this is the new effort for Twinings by the good folk at AMV BDDO. Stephen Fry is nowhere to be seen.

I find the song on the dreary side, but as Adele is currently Queen Of The Entire World, I suspect I am out of step with the times and it's a sensible choice. It certainly fits the mood. But it's a solid piece of positioning - aimed squarely at women who sometimes feel a bit run down and miserable, which is clearly all of them. I wonder if the woman embracing herself led some men to become momentarily excited about the thought of some  twin-on-twin action, but it's the only morsel to chew on.

The strapline - we've been talking about these a lot lately - of "gets you back to you" is weaker. It could be any tea or hot chocolate or anything comforting really - I hope they don't try to use it to define the entire brand.