Remember we won a couple of PR Lions at Cannes last year? Well, apparently that makes me eligible to be a juror for this year’s PR Lions. It’s totally amazing here on the Côte d’Azur - great food, awesome parties, and most importantly, hundreds of brilliant entries showcasing totally awesome PR ideas. The UK PR industry needs to take this comp more seriously – hardly any entries from UK agencies, the ad ladz are showing us up.
This is really cute. The Feed is an weekly blog type thing for Orange which seems to be rolling out a clever new twitter idea every week.
Last week they partnered with a bunch of students from UCA to create Secret Portraits of people based on their tweets – you describe yourself in a tweet with the tag #secretportraits and if they like it they’ll draw a portrait of you. Nice eh? To give the campaign a wee boost, they also targeted individuals with large twitter followings and drew them unsolicited pics in the hope they’d get retweeted by the subject. A nice way for a nice brand to be nice. And in doing so, get some nice new followers while at the same time giving some nice students some work experience at a nice agency (presumably Poke).
I fucking hate it when people do good stuff. You know, good stuff that would have been so easy to have thought of yourself. Except you didn’t. W+K did.
The agency has opened their very own online shop. Not only can you purchase important objets d’art such as the “Handmade Office Shank” (above) but you can also buy a 10 minute chat with a creative team (below). Inspired. You pay via PayPal and get given a number to dial. Oh, and you can buy an entire agency too (EUR10M).
The logical next step is surely to start selling speculative pitch ideas? Or the ideas the never got made?
Hugo will cost you €100 for a 10 minute call... But he does have very nice hair.
Disclaimer: This was created by Guided. They’re my mates.
Nevertheless, mates or not, this kind of stuff mates me green with envy. Culturally relevant, engaging creativity that creates super dope content for sharing online as well as serving up a sweet ass photo op for them offline meedja lot. And the production is just superb. Major props to Sam Reid and everyone else involved. This is the sort of stuff PR agencies should be all over.
Agencies are forever taking speculative ideas to clients but it’s pretty rare that one ever gets made exactly as you first imagined it.
This piece of work has pretty much consumed my life for the past 3 months – it feels so very, very good to have finally put it to bed. The campaign objective was to help the Royal British Legion become relevant to a new generation of supporters. The idea: shoot a two minute silent video (featuring a mix of celebs and forces folk) and run a campaign to get silence into the UK charts for Remembrance Sunday. I’ve never been so proud of a piece of work.
I also never expected it to be such a big success. Plenty has been written about it already but here are my highlights:
Over 200 offline pieces of media coverage
Over 35,000 Facebook likes in 3 weeks
Social media love and support from Coldplay, Radiohead, David Beckham, Stephen Fry and dozens of others.
In just two weeks we secured appearances of 30 of the leading UK celebs (including David Cameron, Thom Yorke, Bryan Ferry, Plan B)
I got to have a 2 hour private Mark Ronson gig at Hackney Empire. And I met the PM at 10 Downing St.
Tens of thousands of singles sold online
WE SECURED THE FIRST EVER COMPLETELY SILENT TOP 20 CHART HIT!
I was asked to supply some comment for New Media Knowledge a few weeks ago about the imminent launch of Facebook Places.
I really hope that it doesn’t sound the death knell for FourSquare (I’m not bovved about Gowalla). While my usage of FS has probably been gradually on the decline over the past month or two, there is definitely something really nice about it and I’d hate to see it get swallowed before it’s properly able to work out how it will monetise itself. I think I’m probably also slightly resistant to the idea of broadcasting my whereabouts in my Facebook feed – my FB friends haven’t opted in be continually updated about my whereabouts, whereas my FS friends have. I think checking in using Places might start to make me feel like I’m spamming everyone.
I got sent this link to Wee Places t’other day – it’s just a really nice way of mapping where you’ve checked in over a period of time. I’m positive there’s something in this that could be sold to a client (by which I of course mean, useful to a brand). POSITIVE. Just no idea what it is yet. Any ideas?
Facebook Places The big recent news is Facebook has launched it’s geolocation tool, Facebook Places. It’s only in the USA for now, but by the looks of things, it’s a fair bit more “social” and engaging than FourSquare and Gowalla. We’ll need to wait a bit until it launches in the UK but when it does, the question for us will be around how brands can use FP to reward and incentivise their fans.
Yet another example of PRs snatching a piece of work out of the increasingly slippery grasp of the digital agency – in this instance it’s Edelman FTW. They’ve created Moo Vision – a rather sweet augmented reality thingy for Ben & Jerry’s.
