Here’s Jack Nicholson in the film ‘The Passenger’ passing through the Brunswick, slightly lost as he didn’t have our address.

You can find us here:

We had a good night at the Emirates Stadium last week. At the inaugural Drum Design Awards we came away with a total of 4 awards. Something that we’re very happy about, of course. What makes us absolutely delighted is the fact that the awards are in 3 different categories. And we mean really different categories.

First up, two gongs in experiential design for the Johnnie Walker House in Beijing and Umbro St James’s Park (in Burton upon Trent).

Next, copywriting for design, for Johnnie Walker Director’s Blend

And finally, for the real time interactive experience that is doodlr, a product of our in-house LOVE Labs initiative.

There’s a lot of navel gazing about whether you should or shouldn’t enter awards. Do they make a difference to your business? Do prospective clients care whether you’re award winners or not? Is it just vanity on the part of agencies, exploited to the full by the organisers of such events? Our answer to all of the above is ‘we don’t know’. But what we do know is that they are a great way of reminding a ridiculously talented and hard working team that all the hard work is worth it. And, in the case of last week’s haul, a great platform for us to demonstrate what we mean when we say that we find out what’s most interesting about your brand and then find the most interesting ways to communicate it. Some people don’t like the fact they can’t pigeonhole us – are we a design agency? A digital agency? An ad agency? Packaging designers? Well, yes, we do win awards for all of those disciplines, but what we’re really about is developing ideas that help brands connect with their audiences in the most creative, engaging and memorable ways possible. And then executing them with wit, craft and passion, whatever the medium.

FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) invited us to install Artr to help celebrate their 10th birthday last Saturday. In collaboration with our friends at Rhythm, we got Artr ready for its first installation in an arts venue, projecting the collaborative canvas in the main lobby of the building while a bunch of other great techy installations filled other spaces.

By visiting factartr.com* on their smartphones, anyone could draw a brush-stroke and see it instantly added to the ever-changing composition on the wall. A truly collaborative masterpiece… bringing art to the masses!

* This event is now over, so please don’t try the factart.com URL.

To celebrate the Chinese New Year, the team at our Shanghai office have made this delightfully delicious visual feast of Chinese delicacies and their symbolic meanings. It’s both mouthwatering and educational.

From all of us here at LOVE, we wish you a very happy, prosperous and flavoursome Year of the Snake! Xīnnián hǎo!

We always put our creatives in front of clients, so an ability to articulate your thinking is important as is a willingness to travel, our clients are global.

If you’re interested, send an email (with Designer as the subject line) containing your CV and portfolio of work to iwantajob@lovecreative.com

LOVE is an agency which tries very hard not to be pigeon-holed as one thing or another. In many ways we’re a bit of a mongrel – a mix of skills and disciplines that make us more fleet-footed than our bigger, pure-breed Advertising and Branding agency rivals.

We believe that nimble agencies like us have a very important part to play in helping big brands navigate the ever changing landscape of consumer/brand relationships. And we have the portfolio to prove it.

The types of creatives that do well at LOVE are mongrels too.

We are looking for creatives who want to push themselves beyond their core competencies, who like operating outside their comfort zone, who dare to not be pigeon-holed. Who are multi-disciplined.

We’re interested to hear from people looking to work in Manchester, London or Shanghai and we’re recruiting for the following roles. Click on ‘em for more detail.

Design Director

Senior Designer

Middleweight Designer

Conceptual Writer

Technical Project Manager

Digital Creative

Most important of all, you must have exceptional creative vision combined with a thorough understanding of the creative process. You should be culturally voracious and able to draw reference from a wide spectrum of influences.

If you’re interested, send an email (with Conceptual Writer as the subject line) containing your CV and portfolio of work to iwantajob@lovecreative.com

You’ll become the primary technical contact for all our digital projects, taking a leading role in scoping and managing them through the full production cycle from IA to deployment. Whilst not necessarily a developer yourself, you’ll take ownership for specification, time management and quality assurance working with internal and external teams.

Remaining up to speed with latest digital trends to stay at the forefront of creative digital development and meet current best practices should be a given and the ability to contribute to client and new business meetings will be a regular requirement.

If you’re interested, send an email (with Technical Project Manager as the subject line) containing your CV and examples of projects you’ve worked on to iwantajob@lovecreative.com

You’ll lead and produce work that answers client briefs in an insightful, innovative, creative and lovingly crafted manner, building and maintaining  direct relationships with the rest of the digital team and offline creatives.

We’ll expect you to effectively present creative work both internally and to clients, as well as engage in discussions about the work, from rationale to execution. You’ll be working as part of the wider creative team and collaborate with colleagues to develop thinking that sets LOVE apart from other agencies.

The type of work you will be expected to deliver includes, but is not exclusive to: responsive websites, mobile apps, email marketing, custom social media channels, online media.

This is an integrated agency, a mongrel if you like, so an understanding and affinity for print would be beneficial. Experience in moving image or animation would be a bonus and knowledge of code/markup would be nice too, but not essential.

If you’re interested, send an email (with Digital Creative as the subject line) containing your CV and portfolio of work to iwantajob@lovecreative.com

Watch With Mother by The Glue Society.

Last ever printed edition of The Dandy with guest appearances by Paul McCartney and Harry Hill amongst others.

Campbell Soup 50th anniversary Warhol Cans by Campbells.

Vice magazine 10th Birthday cartoon by Johnny Ryan.

12″ Record Sleeve by David Rudnick for Erol Alkan’s and Alex Ridha’s Lemonade single.

The film Amour by Michael Haneke.

The long playing album ‘On And On’ by Syd Arthur.

Have a great Christmas & New Year break from everyone here at LOVE.

This week we launched our Christmas gift to everyone – the LOVE Xmas Webcam.

Following on from our earlier prototype, this is another exploration into the wonderful world of Mural Projection Mapping.

We’ve all heard about the wonders of 3D and 4D projection mapping, yes? Well, this is… 2D projection mapping. With a twist.

We commissioned the brilliant Ian Stevenson to create an alternative festive scene, which we printed and pasted up on the wall (that’s the ‘mural’ bit). On top of that we project elements of the illustration on top of itself (the ‘projection mapping’ bit). This has a couple of nice results – we get to animate and illuminate specific parts of the image. Projection during the day is usually a pretty washed-out affair, but by projecting on the mural, the colours really ‘pop’ (as they say in the business). And at night… whoa!

That’s not all, we will project your messages onto the mural too. Using the form, you can create a personalised message, then send it to a special friend. So I guess we should call this Personalised Mural Projection Mapping.

Try it out: xmas.lovecreative.com

Merry Christmas!

PS: Here’s some ‘making of’ shots:

Find out more here and keep a look out for the European leg on the horizon…

Look what’s appeared overnight in Selfridges festive shop windows. The display is an extension to the global campaign we launched back in September. A huge well done to all who worked through the night to make this happen.

(Look out for more pics soon)

These posters mark the beginning of our latest global campaign for the Diageo brand. We shot Christina with Johnnie Walker Red Label and Johnnie Walker Black Label on location in LA for a poster and online campaign that is currently running in both the UK & North America. Keep your eyes on Johnnie Walker’s facebook page for the film. (And yes, she’s lovely in real life!)

Our roving reporter Jody Mitchell set off to Shanghai last week on a 3 month tour of China. Just in time for Mid-Autumn Festival moon cakes.
He’ll be collecting little snapshots of life – the people, the cities, travel, the parties, events, lifestyle and really tall global sport stars in mannequin form – and reporting back through the LOVE China Slurp Tumblr.

Have fun Jody – and bring us back some of those cakes.

Welcome to the world of Johnnie Walker. A world where flavour is king.

Our new global campaign for Diageo showcases the spectacular flavour experience of Johnnie Walker. While other whiskies obsess about age declarations and/or provenance stories, Johnnie Walker has always been about unparalleled taste sensations. To represent this we created sumptuous scenes replete with colossal citrus fruits, bombastic cherries and layered smoke, starring the Striding Man as master and conductor.

Distinct flavour worlds were crafted to express the unique characteristics of Red Label, Black Label, Gold Label Reserve, and the latest addition to the Johnnie Walker family, Platinum Label.

The project was realised by a creative team featuring the award winning photographer Finlay MacKay, renowned set designer Robin Brown, GQ Style Issue editor and stylist Luke Day, and Michelin star food stylist James Hayward.

We have some more images and a behind the scenes video on the work section of our website.

The international campaign spans outdoor, radio and digital channels.

I went along to a workshop arrange by Manchetser Digital a few weeks ago on IBZL.

Once I got over the disappointment of it not being related to Ibiza and weasels, I discovered IBZL stands for Infinite Broadband, Zero Latency.

For the predominantly Arts industry crowd, the workshop imagined the technologies and services that might develop with unlimited bandwidth and near-zero latency and how these would impact their audience.

One big question was, do we even need IBZL? What functions that we need from the internet are really that dependant on Zero Latency? Yes, Skype (and other video conferencing systems) could be more reliable and it would be great to get rid of video buffering, but for all the major technological investment, will that alone justify return on investment in IBZL? Probably not.

It got me thinking: what industries need IBZL?

As luck would have it, one of my colleagues, Sivert, is something as rare as an eSports journalist and retired professional gamer (yes, there is actually such a thing!). Fresh from attending Insomnia (big UK gaming festival) at the weekend, I caught up with him to hear about the impact IBZL could make to the gaming industry.

SIVERT:
For any type of online computer gaming, zero latency would be somewhat of a revolution.

We’ve already seen Spotify and Netflix changing consumption and availability of music and films as we know it.

For the typical gamer, the revolution could come with streaming services such as OnLive. Instead of buying a physical console and game, you get your game streamed by video. This means all the processing is done on a central server, and users won’t be limited to the power of their personal computer, or a specific console. All you need is an input device, and a means to display the video.

GRAEME
This is what people mean by ‘cloud gaming’. Sounds great, but this is already happening, no?

SIVERT
If you exclude the fact that several people are still on poor internet connections, there remains a major hurdle to overcome: Sluggish feel to controls due to the latency between an interaction input and the action showing up on your screen.

Delay caused by latency in video games can be a matter of life and death.

The further away you are from location of this streaming service, the bigger the latency. Thus this service is reserved for those living in heavily populated areas, where at best, there’s still a gap to be bridged for that instantaneous interaction.

This gap can (and will) get bridged with lower latency connections, in combination with bigger penetration of high speed broadband connections.

GRAEME
Yes, and it seems OnLive has really struggled with these limitations over the last couple of years. And I suppose global multiplayer action, in particular, can be compromised by differing latency for each player?

SIVERT
For a multitude of online games, user interaction is currently fragmented into local communities. Cross continental distances give so high latency, it severely reduces the enjoyment of the game, particularly games involving real time reactions (such as shooters). Also, those further away from the gameplay server will be at a competitive disadvantage. Smaller communities in remote locations such as Australia or South Africa tend to get excluded from bigger entities all together.

Madonna’s world tour? No, just another South Korean Starcraft tournament.

By overall lowering this latency, we could see much bigger communities interacting together, and host online tournaments with a worldwide scope.

GRAEME
Thanks Sivert. We’ll watch this space with interest – an IBZL revolution in gaming could provide interesting brand opportunities.

Even with the massive crowds something like Starcraft or Major League Gaming draws, the industry and its audience still has a feel of ‘underground’ or ‘sub-culture’ about it. With worldwide instantaneous connectivity, it’s not hard to imagine an elevated status for professional gamers, bringing with it global brand sponsors and mainstream celebrity status – and, you never know, gaming in the Olympics may not be that far off.

Further reading:
Competitive computer gaming is rapidly expanding as a viable sport. Here are some facts about the state of competitive gaming in South Korea

With IBZL still a long way of being a reality, companies like OnLive are struggling to make cloud gaming work in todays marketplace.

Gaikai, a similar service to OnLive, has recently been bought by Sony (PlayStation). There is no public plan for how they will implement the service, but one of the most obvious choices would be for streaming demos – giving an instant snippet of gameplay. Eurogamer published a good article about the possibilities a while back

We’ve expressed our excitement for the new football season via the medium of Twitter.

#LOVEball let’s you track the performance of the most popular premiership football twitterers, LIVE! You can affect their position in the team with a @mention or a RT. Plus, double points and the coveted Manager of the Moment for using the hashtag #LOVEball.

Let’s see how long Joey, sorry Joe, Barton stays top player.

Get stuck in!