LOVE’s all new global ad campaign for Umbro’s Stealth football boot launched over the weekend and is already causing a bit of a stir by posing a simple question:
‘ARE YOU FOX OR CHICKEN?’
The premise; quick, light and deadly, Stealth wearers become cunning predators on the pitch, allowing them to hunt down and obliterate the competition.
Media includes print, retail, digital, in-stadia, video and guerilla.
The print executions, shot by Tom van Schelven, feature a combination of predator and victim scenarios while the video, directed by LOVE’s own Mike Hughes, sees a more abstract on-pitch hunt play out. See below.
Here’s the press and retail executions:
And here’s some shots from a guerilla projection live from Manchester’s Northern Quarter.
Thank you to Jono Brain, of digital blah blah fame, for his ‘digital brrr brrr’ scarf which we received through the post last week. A great piece of seasonal self promotion, sure to get lots of wear this summer at LOVE.
I think a digital bah bah branded sheep might have been more attention grabbing, but probably not as easy to fit through the letter box. Maybe next year.
Here’s something we just stumbled upon in the retail press from a few months back. It’s some work we did for an old client of ours All About Food. We helped them launch Nando’s Crisps into the market sometime last year (or the year before) with a range of packaging designs and they’ve notched up 1 Million sales (it’s probably a few more by now). We’re not saying it was all down to our lovely packaging that has contributed to this but it’s always good to see something you’ve worked on become a success story. And we think creating a Nando’s range of crisps is such a wonderful idea…
We attended the wonderfully difficult to compartmentalise event, The Story, last week. It was excellent. Curated by Matt Locke, the aim of the day was to get back to what a lot of us in the ‘creative industries’ enjoy doing best… telling stories. Matt had rightly identified that “This is surely the most exciting time in history to be in the story-telling business. Yet most of the conferences and events for the creative industries focus on collapsing business models, the end of once certain monopolies and the perpetual nail-biting uncertainty of living during change. The sheer visceral pleasure of story-telling has been lost beneath the surface of our industry’s obsessions with technological change and economic uncertainty.” I couldn’t have put it better myself Matt.
Many a brief comes our way that asks for the technological bells and whistles of today’s marketing toolkit to be bolted on to campaigns in the interests of generating further reach and engagement, but Friday’s event served as a timely reminder that having a good story to tell and knowing how to tell it are the cornerstones of success.
We’d certainly advocate the use of all the tools in the modern marketer’s armoury to help fan the flames, but an insight into what makes your audience sit up and listen, and a skill in talking to them in a way that leaves them wanting to spend more time with you, will make them much more likely to pass on what you’ve got to say than all the ’share this’ buttons you can throw at ‘em.
Highlights for me included performance artist Tim Etchells,
The very entertaining – and moving - Tim Wright. His tales of correspondence with Harrison Ford’s office about a fictitious meeting, invented solely to wind up his business partner, were first class. (There’s absolutely no truth in the rumour he’s inspired us to do something similar to Dave P). Tim is also the guy who did that Kidmapped thing last year…retracing the route taken in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel for the digital age.
And finally, the avuncular David Hepworth, whose poignant story was a fitting climax to the day.
So, well done again Matt for a great event, right down to the newspaper of the day given to all attendees. There are plans to repeat the event next year, so if you get the chance, go.
But this is what happens when you pass on your old mobile phone to friends and relatives…. It happened to me when I gave my old mobile to my mother. She hasn’t spoken to me since.
Jamie, one of our super talented Flash developers, has recently been working on an exciting little art project for the Southbank Centre. Part of this involves the development of an interface that captures images via a webcam, following a certain user input. Nothing revolutionary about that, but whilst doing some R+D for the project Jamie inadvertently took a couple of thousand pictures of himself throughout the course of a day. When edited together you get a fascinating time lapse film of his entire day (wonder what happened at about 32 seconds…some sort of ‘Computer says No’ moment I think. I’m not getting good vibes from that body language).
Do people still bury those time capsule things to be dug up years from now? It would no doubt baffle a future alien race to see how human beings, once they’d mastered the whole hunter gatherer thing, harnessed fire and invented the wheel, progressed to sitting still all day and staring at a screen.
Sedentary though Jamie’s day may have been, come back soon and we’ll unveil the mind bogglingly clever stuff he’s been working on.
It’s awards season again and we’ve been busy sending off entries to the usual suspects but one we’ve neglected recently is The Chip Shop Awards (work that didn’t/won’t ever get published or was done for your Aunt’s best friends dog). We don’t know why we don’t enter anymore, maybe because there so many of these things that some just get overlooked. But one thing about them, unlike some others, is that it’s always entertaining to look at all the nominated/winning work.
Anyway, we’ve had a dig around and pulled out some oldies from the past for our own Chip Shop Show 2010.
Of course we’re not saying that you should eat paint, that would be foolish idea and make a complete mess of your cutlery.
…there again eating paint may not be such a bad idea.
Best use of Tomatoes over 20 yards.
Surely any ad with Eric and Ernie deserves an award.
I think we came up with this one in a bar, drinking Blacksheep, at the bar.
Tim, is that you?
Can’t beat a good old ‘Knob-Ambient’ gag.
For decency reasons we had to delete the name of this famous ‘Chocolate Ice-Cream’ manufacturer.
And finally, good luck to all those entering this year…
Late last year we were invited to design the cover for the Global Design Resources’s Global Report. We like working on global projects, so globally we said ‘yes.’
And here it is. Based on a theme of ‘positive transition in difficult times’ -
a subject close to our hearts, we came up with this fetching rainbow motif. It symbolises that magical moment between storm and sunshine (credit crunch to economic recovery) that we all hope we’re in.
If you’re a global brand, you can contact the GDR and sign up for one of these reports. If you’re an agency or other, you can’t. Them’s the rules and we didn’t make ‘em.
Oh and well done to Bossprint for a good print job.
