6 Words

Another excersize we did with Roger Horberry: The six word story.

So the Guardian ran a blog competition for readers to upload their own six word stories:

Where the fuck's the door handle?

Life. I want my money back.

They also published a few from some more experienced writers:

Armageddon imminent. Make list. Tick most.
Ian Rankin

Found true love. Married someone else.
Dave Eggers

Big bang. No God. Fadeout. End.
Stephen Baxter

And here are some of my attempts:

Hit pheasant. Should have worn glasses.

Red wire? Blue wire? I'm colourblind.

We ♥ Ogilvy

Last Thursday Vicky and I made our way to London town to see a couple of agencies. Our first visit was to Adam & Eve in Covent Garden, where we showed our portfolio to a creative team. They were really helpful and went through each campaign telling us what they liked and what they thought we should change. They also gave us the great advice that it is OK to stalk creatives for book crits as they would've had to do it too at some stage. So watch out creatives, we're going to harass you until you give us a restraining order, or a book crit.

Next our journey took us to Canary Wharf to meet a female creative team at Ogilvy. They were both really friendly and positive and probably the most helpful people we will ever meet. Also, they said that we could come back the next day as we were visiting Ogilvy again anyway for our course. So we left extremely happy about the day's events and with plenty of ideas about re-doing some ads.

Friday came and we met up with some people from our course to go to a proper crit at Ogilvy. We met a team called Serge and Steve who seemed to have worked at just about every advertising agency going. They went through all our work and gave us feedback and definately didn't hold back. Its always good to get an honest opinion! They also suggested that the future for us graduates may not be that bleak. Agencies will undoubtedly be looking for cheaper employees - and what comes cheaper than a work placement team at £80 a week?

Once our crit was finished we went back down to the creative department at Ogilvy 1 to see our best mates in the world. We were shocked to discover that they required another look at our portfolio, which we had not brought with us! A journey to my home in St Albans and back (with book) ensued. Finally managed to sort out a photocopied portfolio for them (scary shit), and we should hopefully get some more feedback this week, hurray!

So all in all a very successful trip. We're already planning to visit both agencies again in Easter and hopefully a few more, if we can do enough stalking!

The Horberry

A couple of weeks ago I attented a copywriting workshop wit a man called Roger Horberry. Why am I only telling you about this now? Well I've had things to do and people to see.

Roger has a book:

(No you can't click to look inside, I just stole the picture off Amazon)

He got us to do some really fun exercises to get our creative juices flowing. One of which was to re-write a paragraph selling a product in the style of a celeb we would get at random. I was given the name of Peaches Geldof and decided to get her talking about wine...

"This wine is like totally epic, and like really fruity. It's got loads of grapes in it, not that I give a shit. I've got better things to do. It comes from Burgundy - my dads probably been there, he's like... really famous. You can buy it from Asda, I've never been there, but you could send your assistant? That might be cool."

I really think I captured the Peaches we know and love.

Roger also told us a few things about tone of voice:

It is content + expression + audience.

It is personality in print.

It is everything you don't have to say, but probably should.

He told us some other interesting things like how we could summarise text down into bullet points but it would take out all the character and tone of voice. He showed this by getting us to cut down famous speeches into bullet points - they were very uninspiring after that.

I would probably buy Roger's book if my Amazon wish list wasn't a mile long already. I still believe that I will one day win the This Morning competition, pay off my student loan and buy all the books I want. One day...

Down at the bottom of the garden..

As requested by Vicky, this is my attempt at a Poddington Peas post. This was the hit cartoon series, first shown on the BBC in 1989. To my horror they are now recreating a new batch of 3D animated peas!

Take a look for yourself: www.poddingtonpeas.com

I am all for new technology, but I do not think that these peas will have the same hand-drawn charm that they had back in the 90s. Just look at what happened to Postman Pat and Fireman Sam, I know the plasticine models must have taken ages, but how great did they look?

Rory Sutherland

The famous Rory Sutherland of IPA and Ogilvy fame gave a lecture to my course (Creative Advertising) on the 10th of Feb to talk to us about consumer behaviour and economics. It was really very interesting - In fact it was SO interesting that I couldn't write down notes fast enough because I was trying to concentrate too hard. However, I've manage to write down a few interesting points:

John Kay is releasing a new book (that you can pre-order now) called 'Obliquity', which is basically another way of looking at creativity and how we should think about all the other oblique ways to skin a cat.

One of the main reasons behind the Smash martians' advertising success was because audiences were seduced by the funny, likeable aliens and weren't conscious to the hard sell.

He went on to remind us that people like animals more than humans - especially in the UK. We can't judge animals, they're innocent. So people will always prefer a non-human ad.

He told us lots more:
The difference between caravans and yachts

Why banks have marble pillars

The value of seduction over force

The downfall of web design/internet advertising

How to sell coach travel

To stop my rambling, here is another of his great lectures for TED:

R.I.P. Borders

Having worked in my local Borders for a few years I was really distressed to hear that they had finally given up the ghost. However, this wasn't much of a suprise as we were always told they were losing money. It was an excellent place to work and although it was only your average retail job they still let me indulge my advertising skills (ha) through the medium of chalk...

My personal favourite has to be Space Weekend.

Don't be precious...

After Vicky and I spent a good couple of days toiling over our YCN work for P&O, we were told it was a load of rubbish. As you can imagine, this was mildly frustrating as we had reworked and reworked and just didn't realise that the visual idea was impossible for us to realise...

We only had 3 days left until our crit, but we 'sucked it up' and came up with something new and photographed our ideas in the nick time.

This just goes to show that we can't hold our ideas too dear. There is always a better idea, and if you're too precious you will never find it. Our new P&O work is now a whole lot better - a lot simpler and was much easier to visualise... So fingers crossed we get some YCN recognition.