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!