20.8.10

Short Story Competeezy

Guess I got my swagger back.

Off brief. Not being from the shrewd world of advertisers and agencies, I’m not entirely sure what this term means. I’m out of the loop. If anyone wants to fill me in, feel free. Seeing as it’s being used in context with my blog posts I can only assume that it’s ad-jargon for something which inspires awe, takes one’s breath away, gets one moist, or any other number of positive connotations. A pretty safe assumption, I think.

Moving on. Distance tonight, bitches. If you’ve never heard of Distance but can name a Mt Eden Dubstep song, I suggest you kill yourself for your foolish irreverence. Distance is a metal-influenced, veteran dubstep producer from South London. He crafts some tooth-jarring, chest-rattling – yet consistently melodic – tunes, without all the excessive mid-range, robot-fucking-a-chainsaw noises, that the new-skool of dubstep tends to lean so heavily towards. I am excite.

The gig is at Zen. I find myself at Fu and Zen fairly regularly, nodding away with the other bass heads (not base heads... although I’m sure they appreciate some breakbeat goodness too). I have huge respect for the scene, but over time I have come to realise something startling about this venue, something which seems to escape many of the punters:

ZEN IS NOT A BEACH.

So put your fucking shirts back on. Jesus Christ.

...

In other news, I’m cooking something up for a short story competition that the Sunday Star Times is running.

First place prize: a cool $5000.

3000 words, due next Friday. How hard can it be?





18.8.10

Competition Gets The Better Of Me


These other two.

Shit. Alright since you’ve been told that I am going to tell you about how our agency brief is going, here goes.

The first rule of agency brief is: Don’t talk about agency brief.

Big confidentiality sorry guys. I can however say that we are working at Saatchi & Saatchi, and that wancers, is pretty fuckin awesome.

Now on to the meat of why you have come here. Today’s post is about competition. Competition drives us. In New Zealand advertising is a tight industry which compresses competition to the max. In such a small pool competition is crucial for maintaining the edge. The home truth I’m trying to get across here is like it or not, the world is riddled with competition.

Look at this blog for example. I believe it’s a subconscious act but it seems like each week the posts are working harder to outwit previous posts. Example, Jelly’s outright attack on mine and Ben’s end of post videos. It pissed me off to be honest as it made me feel like my post was viewed as superficial, gimmicky if you will. Jelly has an incredible writing style and aptitude for the craft but if he was ever to be in an agency, judging by his work, it would be discarded as ‘off brief’.

Who knows. Competition bugs me, I live for the shit, but it bugs me. I like to play fair and in my eyes playing fair means being cool, rocking out some sweet work, showing you’re dedicated, and then winning. Playing fair does not include seeing how far you can get your nose up the ass of the person giving you the opportunity. It just seems degrading, like, I’ll be your friend and respect you, do whatever you ask, but at the end of the day I’m not gonna beg for a job since I showed up and worked hard, plus my portfolio will do that for me anyway.

Seeing brown nosers get ahead, now that shit grinds my gears, fuck.

When I own my own agency I’m going to bring in potential creatives. I will look at their work while making them sit in total silence. Next, I’ll put down their works on my desk and without showing any emotion say “alright, what makes you so good”. If at any point in time they try to bullshit me with some brown nosing I will stand up and yell GET THE FUCK OUT NOW! Unless of course their work is epic then ill just say “shut the fuck up, no one likes a brown noser”

Ok.

App of the week: FlightControl. Essentially you use your finger to draw flight paths for landing planes. Red ones go on red runways, yellow on yellow etc. I’d warn that it is highly addictive, and by highly I mean if your ipod/iphone/ipad runs out of battery you’ll be cock for cashing all the way to a charger to get back in this game. $1.29 from the app store

Oh and here is some TV One stuff from us. Our line was “We’ve got news for you” the campaign explored the juxtaposition between opinion and fact.


Print:




Billboard:


16.8.10

Last Week Was A Good Week


Last week was a very exciting one and I want to share it with you all. Also, don't expect any laughs today (not that there normally are).

First of all, Charles and I gave our presentation on Friday for the TVOne project we've been working on. Our crumby ideas were looking even worse as we realised how close to the deadline we were: we still had to produce the ads and chuck it in a power point ready to present.

Charles rocked up on Wednesday morning with a rough idea using a funny little Facebook status, Twitter update or something along those lines which is widely considered as 'news' and contrast them to TVOne's brand values; honesty, commitment, credibility etc. With this we basically wanted to say that One News is real and that they're serious about what is portrayed as news.

We thought up some potentially funny scenarios in which this idea could be effective and ultimately decided that the tagline would be key in cracking the brief so we spent an hour or two toying with some lines,

"Real news for real people."

"We say, you say, don't believe in hearsay."

"Maybe the internet isn't always the best option."

We weren't getting anywhere. After a quick meeting we were advised to work on the line "We take news seriously" which is shitty and boring but it was the only one the really fit with the idea.

After having a beyond average sleep, on the bus ride to Uni on Thursday morning I came up with "We seriously concerned." It actually kind of worked. It was not only saying that One News are serious about putting out quality news, they're also seriously concerned with the quantity of shite that's out there that tries to pass as credible information. With only a few hours to go, we went with it.

Charles managed to slap together some billboards and I wrote a meh radio script and this is some of what we came up with.



We're mildy happy with the results given how much time we had really put into it. The power point presentation was especially bad. We know it's not very good compared to some of the other worked produced by the others but we know that after this are fully capable of producing something awesome. We've got PlanetFM coming up this week and we've got a gem.

Secondly, we had a guest speaker talk to us on Tuesday. She is a suit working on the McDonalds account at DDB who had graduated from my degree only two years ago. She went through her entire Uni career thinking "creative, creative creative" and apparently was one of the top copywriters in her year.

Anyway, at some point in her final year she was offered an opportunity to give suiting a go. She said it was difficult at first as she thought everything she had worked on at Uni could potentially have gone to waste. She ended up convincing her partner that they should give it a go and now she's never looked back. Suiting simply suited her better. Even though she wouldn't be thinking up the ideas, she still had a creative input in her job through reviewing the creatives work, keeping them on task and rewriting their briefs.

After sitting through the lecture, I started to realise that what she was saying was ticking all the boxes. After hearing about suiting at first, I was mildy interested but never really looked into it. There were many pros and cons to go over but it didn't take long before I opted out of the agency brief and signed up for the suiting internship.

I know it was fast but I really think things have taken a turn in the right direction for me. I also realise that the whole idea of writing for WANC was to improve and explore my creative side however all is not wasted and things can only go up from here. I'll look into talking more about suiting next week as this week we're getting a lot more information on what we need to know about suiting and hopefully placements at either Colenso or DDB.

Finally, the creative all-stars got thier placements at agencies all over Auckland this week. They'll be getting thier briefs in order to compete with each other for work experience at their respective agencies over the break and the buzz up in the Ad Hut was at an all-time high. Teams will be heading off to loads of agencies such as Saatchi's, DDB, Y&R and the like and you're definitely going to be hearing about it from Hugh.

Look forward to Hugh's addition on Wednesday, follow this blog and like the Facebook page!