It’s rubbish when it rains on holiday. There are two good things, though, about the little weather blip on my holiday. One is that it is giving my balding head a break from the evil rays of the sun… and enabling it to stop looking like it is radioactive… and the second is to take a little time out and share with you one of the amazing things about this place. That thing being the street art that seems to be everywhere you turn in this fabulous country.

One of the things I love about going on holiday, is the moment when I start getting the desire to leave the beach and my trashy novels and grab my camera and just go exploring. This happened yesterday. The weather had become noticeably cooler… no longer were we in the energy-sapping heat of the low 90s… so I took the chance to go walk the streets of central Rio.

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The truth is out there

At Red C, as well as juggling our busy schedules, we have a number of Creative team projects and initiatives that bubble along throughout the year. These include filming and editing video case studies to researching search engine optimisation. This time around, our team got the tricky task of generating new business opportunities with our current clients.

Finding new business avenues for clients sounds easy, but there are lots of things you need to consider. Identifying potential oportunities requires a deep understanding of a brand and the directions in which it could and would want to expand. And that’s just for starters. On top of that, it has to be financially viable, fit in with wider brand and marketing strategies and be measurable in terms of return on investment.

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If there was one good thing about getting caught up in the whole volcanic ash cloud saga, it was that I got to spend a few extra days reading books. I love reading on holiday. Sprawled on a sun lounger, cold beer in hand, swimming pool just a few feet away, in case it gets too hot…beautiful!

Of course, you’ve got to have the right books. And on this holiday I picked a couple of crackers…

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith and The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters.

I came across Gorky Park a few months back. I’d just finished Tom Rob Smith’s brilliant Child 44, a thriller set in 1950s Stalinist Russia. What I loved most about that book was the way it captured the claustrophobia of life under a totalitarian regime. Lots of the reviews of Child 44 mentioned similarities to Gorky Park. So when I found it for £2 in Fopp a few weeks later I thought yeah, why not.

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There’s a strange smell at Red C… and no it’s not even coming from Julian’s gallons of Paul Smith aftershave or Nick’s fish dinners. This week has been a busy one, to say the least but it’s funny how much you learn about your colleagues when you are sat in the studio until late.

Jennie and I passed the hours last night playing the marry or push off a cliff game (ok, I played that game whilst Jennie worked hard being all creative). Tonight whilst searching for appropriate imagery for a very important email, we have discovered that even Wayne falls for Julian’s junk food bribe when push comes to shove. He was found last night indulging in a spicy chicken wing in the Red C canteen.

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Last night I caught the back end of Russell Howard’s BBC show ‘Good News’ where after some quite amusing attempts at humor, he introduced viewers of his show to Post Pals. After watching a short film he showed at the end of the show, I thought that as well as posting something to one of the children on the site, I’d also write a ‘We Like’ article about it in the hope that someone reading this might also be compelled to ‘post a smile on a sick child’s face’.

Post Pals is the brainchild of Vikki, who for the past seven years has been bed bound with severe ME. Like so many people with chronic illnesses all her friends lost touch and she became isolated. When she first became bed bound she was sent  many cards which soon became her reason to wake up every day.

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Have visitors to your site added items to their basket only to abandon it before checkout? Has someone gone to your ‘request more details’ page only to leave before requesting said details? Has someone rung your doorbell and run away before you could answer?

Well Google can help. Maybe not with the doorbell thing, for that get a dog, a BIG dog… either that or sit behind the door for hours on end just waiting, patiently waiting for that foolish doorbell ringer. For the other problems Google have added a ‘Google Audiences’ tab to your AdWords account.

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So after partaking in some fine ale at the Newcastle Beer Festival and catching up with some friends I found myself waking up in my hotel room in Newcastle with a slight headache. I now had the day to kill in Newcastle, and certainly one port of call had to be to the gallery which sat opposite my hotel… The Baltic Flour Mill, which for some reason had a bizarre message emblazoned on the side of this impressive gallery. The message simply read ‘The beginning of the war will be secret’. Which when placed on such an imposing looking building, certainly peaked my interest.

The message on the side of the gallery was of course advertising the work of Jenny Holzer, who is currently exhibiting at the Baltic in Newcastle/Gateshead until mid-May. A brief synopsis in the hotel guide had me hooked… as a writer and someone dealing in snappy headlines and slogans, I simply had to see this exhibition.

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Being a working mum with two pre-schoolers, my cultural references are quite limited as I spend a lot of time reading books with the children (and OK admittedly – CBeebies plays quite a big part).  I’ve always greatly enjoyed the magical and mystical world of children’s book illustrations, an interest which started in my own childhood with my addiction to Beatrix Potter books and the wonderful animal characters she brought to life from her own imagination.

Now in the 21^st century, CGI animation is a big draw to the kids, but the more realistic, the less charm in my opinion.  One of my favourite authors and illustrators is Lauren Child, creator of the Charlie and Lola series.   Her quirky style of writing and engaging imagery makes her books stand out for me as well as for my girls (including my very own ‘little sister Lola’ who is also ‘small and very funny’).

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We've come a long way baby!

TV ads. I have to say… I love them. They are the main reason I got into this business in the first place… to create some arresting TV Advertising that my mates might talk about down the pub. One thing that has always infuriated me about TV Advertising, however, has been the inability to really effectively target them like you could other forms of advertising.

Well, it looks like those little niggles I have could soon be a thing of the past, thanks to the thing that has been nicknamed Smart TV. Its real name is Targeted Substitutional Advertising (TSA) and it looks like it could be the thing to deliver accountability and personalisation that digital media advertisers have enjoyed for years.

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At Red C we love letterheads. Which is probably a good thing since we’ve designed quite a few over the years. In some cases, a letterhead is the first thing that many a customer or client sees when dealing with a business, so having one that is aesthetically pleasing, impactful, memorable and professional is incredibly important. It’s safe to say, though, that designing a letterhead for a business is relatively a straightforward design challenge.

So imagine, for example, if instead of a business, we were tasked with designing the letterhead of say… the leader of the Third Reich. Or maybe a scientific genius, a film director, an animation company, a master magician or the Prime Minister. I wonder how we’d go about designing then.

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