Orange Film Club

Orange are, I think, my favourite brand.

I like most of their advertising, the 241 cinema spots, endless site and of course balloon race. I even like that their tariffs have animal names. And of course I like Orange Wednesdays.

I've recently discovered their film club http://www.facebook.com/orangefilmclub which has a lot of free film-related giveaways. I have got tickets for their 'Fright Night' on Friday for Halloween. And it's pretty scary sounding:

A screening of The Exorcist in Tower Hamlets Cemetery. The audience will be given state of the art wireless headphones for a cinema experience like no other. Special 4D effects during the screening to really bring the film to life. With an introduction by Empire magazine’s horror expert, Kim Newman.

I'm not really sure what 4D means but I hope it's good!

What I wasn't so impressed with though, was how they decided to give away tickets for the night.
At first, they posted long, confusing horror riddles on the fan page, with the first person answering correctly winning tickets. This went on for a few days. Next, you had to register to say you were going to pick up your tickets at a secret location in London between a certain time frame on a certain day. Bit of a mission on a Saturday morning.

I assume not many people could be arsed with all that as a few days later Orange said all you had to do was email them to get tickets. And this is where I came in.

Might still be tickets left if you have a look on the Facebook page. If you think you can handle it!

Calling All Creatives

We're starting a little project and we need other creatives to help us get it off the ground.

A few months a go when we started at Wunderman we made this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Tjav1JFqi0

Now we want to start a new blog - a big collection of advice inside different agencies to help other creative grads/students trying to get placements and jobs.

So we need all you creatives out there to start making videos of your experiences to share with the online world. It can be a straight forward collection of advice or an agency slice of life.

We already have a few other teams on board but it would be great to get loads of people involved. It's also a nice bit of self-promo.

And you might even have fun!

Please get it touch if you have any questions/suggestions.

Lemonheads

Video Painting

SWEATSHOPPE, 4spots, the landing extras from SWEATSHOPPE on Vimeo.

Amazing new technology from Sweatshoppe, don't have a clue how it works but check it out.

Lemon in ≠Twitterpicture

Illustrator Johanna Basford has been doing an interesting project on twitter recently - ≠Twitterpicture. Anyone on twitter could get involved by tweeting what they would like to see in the picture.

The result was a mad combination of contributions, including our 'all-singing. all-dancing lemon' (circled so you don't miss it). It was a really cool idea, which I'm sure will inspire more social network creativity projects.

You can buy one of the 100 silk screen prints of the artwork on her site http://www.johannabasford.com/blog-article/168 (£150 though).

Great way to be inspired

Stack magazine is a great concept for magazine subscription. They offer a great selection of independent magazines from around the globe and send you one randomly each month. What i like about this, is that as creatives we never know where our inspiration may come from so the thought of randomly having a different magazine each month seems like a great way of helping our thinking.

It's my birthday coming up so a subscription is on the way for me and i can't wait to see what surprise magazine i will get. I suggest everyone get's clicking on to this bit of linkage and starts subscribing.

http://www.stackmagazines.com/

Free Muffin Day

Yesterday Starbucks held 'Free Muffin Day' across the UK. It was entirely promoted on Facebook and to get your free muffin you had to download your voucher on the Facebook event page. http://www.facebook.com/thinklemon?ref=profile#/event.php?eid=145280424069&ref=mf
You had to buy a coffee to receive a free muffin. I tentatively printed off a voucher thinking that the free muffins would be smaller, not so delicious versions on their normal muffins. We pass a Starbucks on the way to work anyway so on Monday morning in we went to check it out. No promotion of the muffin day anyway in store but we asked and it was true. And with normal-sized muffins!

Anyway it wasn't so much the idea that impressed me, (although I enjoyed the lemon and poppyseed), but the way they did it. Through facebook they knew exactly how many people had said they were attending, who they were and where they were from, which they can now compare with how many people actually went in and got their free muffin.

And cakes make people happy. Especially when they feel like they're free.

Brick Lane

I went to Brick Lane on Sunday for the first time. The market was a little disappointing and a little scary at times, although 'dirty perkins' was an amusing find on the clothes stalls.

Made a few arty discoveries though:

The first being a cool little shop called Shelf - http://www.helpyourshelf.co.uk/ which is full of handmade things and works of illustrators.

The second being this: http://www.bigantidote.com/ an on-going screen printed comic, created from a selection of different illustrators and story tellers. The work that was displayed was really good, with a few different styles going on. Check out the website if you want to get involved in the project.

I'm seeing screen prints everywhere at the moment, but I wish they weren't so expensive to buy!

Birmingham B-Hive Competition

It's that time of year again; the Birmingham B-hive competition is back!

We entered last year and bagged ourselves 2 paid placements in the Midlands, gaining a lot of experience and some good contacts. It was it's first year last year and didn't get that much support from universities, but I'm sure it will be bigger this year. They've got a new website, more briefs and more agencies involved, so if your a design, advertising or PR student/grad I strongly recommend you enter! It's a lot of fun and a great way to get your foot in the door. I also have a nice little guest appearance on the site.

http://www.bhive-creative.com/

D&AD 30 day challenge

Came across this today: http://dandad.typepad.com/dandad/2009/09/30day-challenge-for-student-winners.html

D&AD are running a competition for 2009 student yellow pencil winners to encourage students and tutors to enter this years student awards. The idea is to create the biggest buzz, with the winner getting a paid placement at AMV.

It's a great idea to use last years winners to promote the awards to this years students, but I haven't been able to find much buzz so far.

Will be interesting to see what they do with it.

Long copy is alive!!!!!

Back at the end of July Rory Sutherland posted up an article titled 'The day the copy died'. He goes on to explain that long copy adverts seemed to be a thing of the past and that it is a struggle to get the concept through clients. Well, to my surprise in the underground yesterday there were 3 long copy ads side by side (you can see 2 on pic the other is just before the dixons ad). It appears to have become more popular since VW launched their long copy ones a few months back, very good ads they were i might ad.

So is long copy dead? certainly not by the looks of it.