When Build Center (one of our clients at Wolseley) called us with an urgent brief to spread the word about their £3 loft insulation plus free delivery promotion, we knew we had a real challenge on our hands. Not only did we have just over a week to develop the campaign and roll it out… they wanted us to deliver something a little out of the ordinary to maximise the impact. Cue one Mini, one woman, 17 rolls of loft insulation, a 56-link chainsaw and a 2 minute viral ad. Read more…

The great thing about city breaks is wandering around taking in the different cultures, the history and the amazing architecture (in between shopping of course).

There are some fascinating buildings around the world that have been built with great care and consideration by talented tradesman and have lasted the test of time and Mother Nature but are starting to show their age.

German artist Jan Vormann has spent the last three years traveling the world fixing some of these crumbling walls and monuments. Instead of bricks and mortar, though, he’s used Lego!

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Like all good Finance Directors, Mark Dowds loves to keep a tight grip on any money that comes his way. So it’s good to hear that this weekend he’ll be doing his best to give some cash to some other people… by walking the three peaks of Ben Nevis, Snowdon and Scafell.

Together with eleven other people, he will be spending the weekend up in the hills trying to raise £5000 in aid of Christie’s Hospital.

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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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Having seen Ghost Stories at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith at the weekend, I now have the tricky task of writing a review, whilst respecting the director’s final wishes ‘to maintain the secrecy of Ghost Stories’.

Described as ‘a truly terrifying theatrical experience from The League of Gentleman’s master of macabre Jeremy Dyson, and Andy Nyman, co-creator and director of Derren Brown’s television and stage shows’, I was intrigued to find out more. I found a teaser trailer on YouTube, which showed nothing more than a petrified audience, wide eyed and opened mouthed at what they were seeing – but nothing about the show itself. I was sold!

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You know when you were little and you went to your Grandparent’s house and listened for hours about what life was like, ‘in their day’? They used tin baths, outside loos and they didn’t have a telly. It sounded alien, especially the telly bit. I used to spend hours wondering just what they did to fill their time. Well, I suppose families were bigger back then.

It never occurred to me that stories I tell to my kids would make me appear just as archaic. I’m only 35, but it’s happened already. I was telling my 6 year old the story about how we didn’t have a telephone in our house when we were growing up. There was a phone booth at the end of the street that took 2 pence pieces and I used to organise my teenage social life from there. It would ring out and either be picked up by me at a pre-arranged time or by a local kid playing out. If it was the latter there would be a knock at the door of number 7, where I lived or a shout up at my bedroom window, “Helen, someone’s rung for you, it’s Louise.” I would put my shoes on and run down to the phone and spend hours racking up Louise’s Dad’s telephone bill.

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Whilst catching some Xmas sunshine it was really interesting to see how South Africa is preparing for the 2010 World Cup in particular in the many townships.

The FNB is the national bank of South Africa a major sponsor of the 2010 Fifa World Cup, and in line with its sponsorship of the much-anticipated event, is transforming the skyline of several of the host cities. With some larger than life outdoor building wrap advertising campaigns in some of South Africas largest townships.

The most striking of these building wraps had to be the ones that I saw on my visit to Soweto – the largest township in South Africa. Here two of the four huge cooling towers, which belong to a currently decommissioned power station, carry FNB’s 2010 Fifa World Cup branding. The artworks are reproduced on canvas – about 12 800m2 of it – and the wraps weigh between 700 and 900kg each. Apparently the whole project took 12 000 litres of paint, and it took the team 720 hours each to complete their sections. Each tower is 60m high with a circumference of 120m at the bottom and 70m at the top.

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Bloody Students

On the 7^th June 2007 I got the phone call to say…..I had secured the position as Junior Marketing Coordinator at Red C in their London Office. I was absolutely ecstatic as this was a bit of a double whammy for me seeing as it was also my birthday! I will never forget how happy I was to hear such good news.

In August 2007 I began my placement year with Red C. Moving down to a new city, was exciting but also made me very nervous at the same time; however the nervous feelings soon diluted as I began my placement journey. During the start of my placement, the routine of getting up early everyday and concentrating for the whole day was daunting and I did struggle to get into a regular pattern in the first few weeks.

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As marketers we are used to marketing products or services to create sales (i.e. profit-making) Public Sector Marketing is about Social Marketing and public engagement (i.e.non-profit), bringing about specific behavioural goals relevant to the public good and, as such, needs a different and more longer term approach and way of measuring. The Department of Health’s Change for Life campaign is a good example of this.

Public Sector marketing started life during the Second World War and helped get important messages out to the masses. While that objective hasn’t changed essentially; we probably all remember the flyers that went out to every single household in the country after the July 7^th bombings telling us all to be vigilant and how to spot a terrorist; or the recent national swine flu campaign; the type of messages and the ways they are delivered have changed substantially as channels have proliferated and audiences fragmented over the years, to a lot of campaigns now being delivered via digital and social media methods.

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We’ve cracked open the Champers and fired off some party poppers in celebration of being shortlisted for our Swinton Mystery Tipper campaign for the IPA Effectiveness Awards 2009.

The IPA Effectiveness Awards are recognised by agencies and clients as Adland’s most rigorous awards scheme because entrants have to prove to a jury of experienced clients that their communications strategies have worked in hard business terms.

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