Lost in Hoxton

Sorry about the lack of posts but I have been at home for the last two weeks. The first of these weeks Vicky joined me for our next round of book crits...

We gave in our degree work a whole day early in order to go straight down to London and meet with Lol and Nat. They have a great blog on the Campaign website and work at Glue. After discovering The Breakfast Club 80s themed cafe we got well and truly lost in Hoxton looking for the illusive Tea Building. Despite recently acquiring a wonderful new iPhone, Google Maps just did not want to co-operate! We luckily got there bang on 1pm after going in a few strange buildings and making a panicky call to Lol. They were really nice and down to earth so we'll definately go back to see them again (it should be easier to find a second time round).

Next up we visited the headquarters of Barry M cosmetics. Vicky and I had a few good ideas for their brand so we contacted them directly to show them what we'd thought of.



They really liked our iPhone app idea and said that if they hadn't already got an app they would of probably made it, as they're so expensive to produce. How annoying! However, they did say that it might be worth taking our ideas to another make-up brand as our ideas definately had potential, so we'll see what happens...

The next day we started off by visiting BBH to meet with one half of the team that handles the Audi account. He was a really friendly and helpful guy and said that although all our ideas are ads that could run tomorrow, we should be going a bit more crazy. Basically, we need to stand out more.

Next up was Dare the digital agency. We thought we would be seeing a friend of a friend called Luke who is a designer there but he ended setting us up with two creative directors! What a legend. They both went through all our work giving us advice and telling us what to change. We both really like the laid-back atmosphere in Dare and the people we saw made us feel really welcome - another one we'll have to revisit!

Last of the day was a team at DDB that produced the Marmite ads (the ones I wrote about before).



They seemed to know what they were talking about and gave us similar comments to Kevin at BBH. We definately think that we could learn a lot from them so we'll be going back again to show them what we've changed...

I shall write about the rest of our meetings in my next post as I think that's enough reading for one day.

Vix & Ric

So we had a team from DDB talk to us (3rd year creative advertising) yesterday. Vix and Ric. Vix was one of the first students to graduate from our course, back when it was called Advertising Art direction.


They're so famous, I found them on Google images!

They gave us a really interesting talk about the sort of things they did wrong and what they did right. They also showed us a couple of examples from their original book. They highlighted the importance of digital and having just a conceptual idea for an event or stunt instead of a couple of billboards.

They also showed us an ad that they had done for Esso Optiplus - The oil that heats your house...



A really simple ad that is nicely executed through illustration.

Vicky and I will hopefully get a chance to meet them on Tuesday as we are daaahhhn in Laandan for book crits anyway (a blog post shall explain soon).

Love it or hate it

A recent news headline on the BBC news website caught my eye. A welsh family claim to have seen the image of Jesus in the lid of a jar of Marmite.

"When I first looked at it I wasn't sure, but when I moved it away from me it started coming out. I thought yeah, she's right - that's the image of Jesus."

After making me laugh out loud, this reminded me first of my God bothering sister and second of some recent adverts from DDB for a new Marmite cereal bar:






Love the ads, still hate Marmite.