nil desperandum

Situational advertising though not very good

Good brand partnership

Somehow Agnes b and Perrier coming together feels right. It's not because they're both French. It's just surprising - in a good way

Nice work

I'm a big fan of the Tiger Woods game franchise. Like Winning Eleven I've been duped in getting it every year for the past decade or so. Sucker! Anyway, the tenor of this entry is to talk about a ad/viral that Wieden came up with for EA. There was a bit of a glitch in Tiger Woods 08 game where players can get their characters to hit balls from water hazards - which i thought was quite nifty. And in response to this the guys at W+K came up with this ad.

 

What I liked about the clip isn't so much about the big idea or art direction or anything like that. I liked the fact that EA had the humility to just have a laugh and geek out with the die hard fans. Nice that.

Shapes

It's really lovely to see consitency in motifs and shapes from a brand. Here's an example of it found in the Thai Airway's ticketing office in Hong Kong. Notice how the shapes on the purple ticket holder resembles that of the wood panelling at the reception desk? Not entire sure exactly how effective these forms of visual integrations are - but why not? Some people might pick it up and appreciate it.

Plenty of media, where's the art?

Every year the Hong Kong Arts Development Council invites people to come to HK to do some "media arts" exhibition. By media arts, it basically an installation with some interactive elements in it. This year the guys from UVA came and installed a bunch of cool interactive LED totem poles. Saw them couple of years ago at the V&A in london and it's still very charming.

It was all well and good until we discovered that this was no more than a publicity stunt for HKADC. In order to get extra column inches the HKADC brought Andy Lau (HK pop star) along. The whole event got hijacked by Andy and his fans:

I have nothing against ol' Andy but people should just let art speak for itself. It's massively disrespectful to the creators of this installation. 

This rocks my world so hard.

No.20 baby!

So courtesy of Faris and Carlos I just found that I'm ranked 20 out of 27 in the "Advertising's Young Minds 27 under 27" blog thing" . This news is way awesome. I only just started blogging again and having gotten some fame and recognition, I'm hungry for more! Yeh baby! It's also way cool to see so many  Nakedites there. Big love to them all. Anyhoo...keep blogging and all that.

Bangkok September Trip

I'm back in Bangkok for my monthly trip.

I paid 3000 bhat to watch some unknown tennis player play at the Bangkok open. Despite watching the entire game, I still don't know their names. And through out the match I was hoping that it was Nadal/Federer playing and not them. Incidentally Nadal, Djorkovic and Roddick pulled out of this tournement because of alledged injuries - my little chinese arse.

It's always good to spend time with the extended family

When I'm in Bangkok, I eat

And when I'm not eating, I like to spend time with the gf and friends

Sometimes I like to roll by in one of our gloabl offices to talk bitniz

This is our BKK office. I think this mad sculpture here is a 3D articulation of Disruption. Cool innit.

adidas regional meeting

Went to a big adidas conference in KL with my TBWA crew Matt and Natasha. It was really cool to see all the parts of a giant machine coming together to challenge, tinker and focus on a shared belief/passion thing. Saw many great presentations in the breakout sessions, notably for running and Originals - two solid categories under the adidas brand. Anyhoo I'll let the pictures do the talking. For professional reasons, I'll only be covering the mundane - I won't be sharing any slides on corporate objectives and business goals etc.

We checked in at the Traders Hotel which is located at spitting distance from the Petronas Towers. Have you noticed how a lot of retail experiences done standing up these days?

Tash waiting for her turn

Big stage for a big meeting

Our people concentrating hard

Team adidas Matt (TBWA), Jess & Mike (Carat) taking a sojourn drink at the bar

View from the bar

Girls having a working lunch - me, just taking photos, not contributing

That's all I have to share at the mo. Great for our client Celine and Clem to invite us there. Very good of them. Will be putting the learnings to work shortly.

Same brand, different voices

People have long talked about brand as people. An individual will have different moods/personality at any given time. Here are a couple of ads from the same company, on the same sport - but with a massively different tone.