Hopping, Skipping and Jumping on the Bandwagon

It's the Olympics next year, and let's face it - every marketing department wants a piece of it. You can't really blame them I suppose as it's going to be watched by billions worldwide, and any positive emotions it generates might just rub off on your product (even if your product is a fat-filled burger or a chocolate bar crammed full with a glass and a half of monosodium glutamate).

BMW are no different. They've spent a great deal on securing the prestigious position of Official Supporter of London 2012 (or something) and so they wanted everyone to know about it.

That's where we came in. We had to tie in an event which celebrates the amazing feats a supremely trained human body is capable of with a company who makes cars. Cars you sit on your arse to drive around in. Often just to the shops down the road. Added to this, every headline had to include the word 'Joy' which formed the basis of the current global campaign for BMW. Oh, and we had to have a car in every one too. 

You see the difficulty?

Anyway, we decided to concentrate on the similarities between the athletes and the technology/design behind each car, and as such across the whole range in general. We think we did this pretty well in the end.

You can see them by clicking on the folio to your right, or here.

The ads were shot by Rick Guest and the images will be dotted about the Olympic park if you are lucky enough to get a ticket to the big event next year.

We haven't got any. Just saying, like...

MINI POSTERS

We've done some posters for MINI Coupe too. They're based around the old action transfers you probably played with as a kid. You can see them here.

Jonathan Ross Sponsorship

As promised, we've put our favourite idents from the campaign we did to sponsor the Jonathan Ross Show on our carbonmade folio. There were about 20 or so, but we thought you'd get bored and so opted for 7.

Click here, or on the Bag 'o' Fun to the right.

Another Day, Another MINI TV Sponsorship Campaign

We've got some actual, real life, adverts on your screens at the moment!

We recently won a pitch for MINI Coupe and their sponsorship of the Jonathan Ross Show on ITV. The campaign line is "Another day, another adventure" so we purposely set out to make as many different 'adventures' as possible by keeping the structure of each ad very similar, but adding little changes to keep them fresh and interesting. We shot about 50 scenarios and whittled them down to the best 20-odd.

We'll post our favourites as a video file at some stage, but if you can't wait you can see them on Saturday nights on ITV for the next 10 weeks or so (don't know the time - you'll have to look it up yourselves).

The ads were shot by Pedro Romhanyi through Outsider, with brilliant post production done by Prime Focus.

Happy and not so happy customers

Always nice to know how your gifts go down with your gift-ees (?).....

Here's Tanya and her housemate looking super chuffed with their Miss Jane tea cosy.

And Isaac Briers, less than pleased with his Miss Jane Bear suit.

Does he know how long it took me to make it??

Crafty catch up

Haven't updated the craft news for a while now, but don't worry, the needles haven't been idle.

It's amazing what you can make out of an orange towel...an Owl for one thing.

And a super soft lining for a net book case for another.

A lot of personal firsts in this little lot. First quilting experience; first zip; first sewing in a curve with the sewing machine - more difficult than you'd think!

What a successful sunday....

Who Can?

The Homeserve Man Can!

Who on Earth is The Homeserve Man? Well...

Here's some new TV from us which is currently running in the Granada region. It's a test campaign for a service called Homeserve, which deals with all sorts of home emergencies. We didn't want to associate all the negative feelings involved with disasters with the service, so we deliberately went for a more cartoon, over-the-top approach. The jolly song and happy actors help to keep it all up-beat and friendly.

There's a 40 and a 30 second ad, and if all goes well it will be rolled out across the country at a later date.

The ad was shot by the excellent Pedro Romhanyi at Outsider.

Classy!

We've done some print work for The Corinthia Hotel. It's a very posh hotel that probably wouldn't allow the likes of us to stay, but has allowed us to do some nice print for it. We did four ads for the current campaign and you can see them if you click on the portfolio to your right.

More Work! (And It's Only February)

We've done some print ads for BMW. They're finance ads, so not something to get too excited about, but we think they're pretty nice for what they are. Especially when you consider everything other than the car was built using CGI. 

In Your Face, Bitches!

Last night Jane and I picked up an ANNA for this BMW April Fool ad from last year. Although we didn't actually pick up the award as we weren't there. Jane was at a singing lesson and I was doing bedtime stories.

Anyhoo, we won in the Topicality section. You can read more here.

Exciting Times!

2011 is only 25 days old and already the advertising world is left shuddering by the news that we've only gone and done some actual, real-life, appearing-in-magazines-and-all-that-sort-of-shit advertising.

As I write Jane is in a darkened studio in Acton, watching as a top-notch photographer moves a light a tiny amount to the left, stands back, thinks for a bit, then moves the light back to where it was in the first place.

THIS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!IS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!ADVERTISING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's a campaign for BMW announcing their sponsorship of the 2012 Olympic Games. Many cars are being shot, as are athletes and then (using the magic of computers) these two seemingly opposite entities will be merged, melded and formed to make one seamless piece of visual communication. Or some adverts as you and I might call them. Watch this space and we'll post them as we complete them.

And that's not all - we've also done a campaign for BMW flogging cars in the wake of the VAT rise. A very exciting brief as you can imagine, but the resultant print ads we devised look pretty nice and work quite well.

If that wasn't enough (I feel Brenda in the photo above may have a stroke if she reads this) we're hopefully going to get some pitch work we did last year made real in the next 8 weeks. 

It really is, as Shakespeare might haves said, "all go" at the moment.

Time for a sit down I think.