DEC AD PICKS

Welcome to the last of this years Ad Picks. I hope you've enjoyed reading them this year.

I wanted to start with this ad. It's actually a lot more than just an ad and will help a lot of people from online scammers.

I know a couple of people who have been scammed and it's very sad when they lose money or something worse. Netsafe have created a chat bot immitating victims to fight scammers. All you do is forward the scammers email to them and they lead the scammer on with the virtual bot, so they don't pick on their next target. Taking the fight to the scammers, game on.

This is an interesting way of getting people's attention in entering the country of Palau to protect the Island's environment. The stamp that goes in your passport when you visit a foreign country has been turned into a little pledge that people need to sign. It's a lovely way to get the message across that will make people aware and it isn't just another banner in the airport.

This next one is called 'Tomorrow's News.' It's based around a school shooting in the USA to give people the warning signs that something isn't right. I hope people in the USA watch this and it saves people's lives from the terrible shootings that happen.

I know it's just after Christmas, but I wanted to share one of my favourite Christmas ads, that you may not have seen as it's from Portugal. It's called Santa's Number, where a Dad gives his son Santa's number and it goes viral. It's beautifly shot and it's got some great reactions throughout. Have you tried calling the number?

I hope you had a great Christmas and you've got a great New Years Eve planned. See you next year.

NOV AD PICKS

Welcome to November's edition of Ad Picks.

I didn't want to share any Christmas ads until December as there are so many out there. But anyway, this month I've got an interactive piece, an outdoor/experience and a hard hitting charity ad to finish things off.

This first ad is a great innovative way of using a pre roll ad to catch people’s attention.

The fashion brand Yoox created 15 second ads, that would show you a fashion item to purchase and if you skipped the ad, the item would be gone and offered to someone else (it couldn't even be found on their website). It's brave from the fashion brand, but I bet it got some good analytics of people visiting their site trying to find it and purchasing someone else.

You'd have to know what you like. It's not an ad for indecisive shoppers.

How good are you in interview situations?

Well CNBC with Droga5 upped the interview hardness by a thousand. They created a glass box in the middle of New York to promote their new show, which had real interviews held in them. Some of the people's reactions inside and outside the box are gold.

Could you handle this?

This is one of the most hard hitting ads I've ever shared. It's an Oxfam ad that needs sharing about the effects of companies in poor countires avoiding paying their taxes, which amounts to a staggering £78bn annually.

It's not easy to watch, but it hooks you in and it's well put together.

I hope you enjoyed this month's edition and I'll see you again in month.

PADC AWARDS 2017

Last Friday night was the Perth Advertising and Design Club (PADC) 2017 awards. We had a great result at Gatecrasher this year with projects I've created and worked on achieving these results.

2 Golds, Integrated Campaign Community/Charity and Use of Social Media
Cancer Council WA 'Stick it to No.2'

2 Silvers, Creativity for Good and TVC Community Service & Charity Individual
Cancer Council WA 'Stick it to No.2'

1 Bronze, Best Use of Ambient
Transperth 'Radio Lollipop stickers'

1 Finalist, Print
Perth Zoo

OCT AD PICKS

Welcome to September's edition of Ad Picks.

This month I've got a few pieces that will hopefully bring you a smile.

Warburtons bread have enlisted Peter Kay trying to pitch a new TV period drama to Jonathan Warburton in his office. Even though it's a few minutes long, it's very funny and it gets the product info spot on, without forcing it in. You'll want to rewatch it a couple of times.

I spotted these and I know they are only for a camera repair shop in Ireland. The illustrations are very well crafted and it's funny to think how we take photographs has changed so much.

Everyone knows kids can be fussy eaters, so the V&A Museum of Childhood have created the world's first interactive edible exhibition. They involved a creative food company to make up some new food creations out of fruit and veg. Even the ads were edible.

My favourite is the bubbles made out of vegetables. What's yours?

As it's Halloween today, I wanted to share an ad for today that caught my eye.

If you hate clowns, I wouldn't go anywhere near a Burger King on Halloween. As they are giving free whoppers to people dressed as clowns. They have even got a jibe in the ad with Ronald McDonald wanting a whopper.

Happy Halloween.

SEPT AD PICKS

Welcome to September's edition of Ad Picks.

Can you remember any of the room layouts from the the recent IKEA catalogue? Me neither.  IKEA have discovered this lady who can memorise the whole catalogue from cover to cover.  You can question her on anything - like which page has a lady who needs an eye doctor. It's certainly a different, fun way for IKEA to show off their catalogue and I love it.

The energy on this next ad for H&M is fast paced (after a slow start) and exciting. It shows off their Fall collection in an engaging way in a karaoke bar music video. The music track will get you tapping along, it's got some nice touches like the sing a long sub titles and the mike drop at the end.

I wanted to share a print ad last month, but I didn't find one I wanted to share. But this month I found this lovely simple and fun print visual. The aardvark is a perfect animal choice and I like how the copy is kept on the eraser.

I hope you've had a great month and I'll posting October's Ad Picks towards the end of next month.

AUG AD PICKS

Welcome to August's edition of Ad Picks.

I'm really liking the type treatment in this first ad I'm sharing this month for The Telegraph Newspaper. It uses existing footage (some of which have been used many times before) in a fresh and engaging way with the typography.

Imagine getting a brief from a client with a budget like this ad. If you love sport (like me) you'll love it, if you don't just skip to the next one.

This next ad called 'Heist' shows that your identity is the most important thing you have, even more than money. It's quite an intense watch, but very truthful.

Ever wondered what Donald Trump see's on his Twitter feed? Wait no longer as The Washington Post have created this Twitter page retweeting every tweet from the accounts the real Donald Trump follows. Check it out: https://twitter.com/trumps_feed

I hope you enjoyed this post and you'll share it with someone who would enjoy it. Keep your eyes peeled towards the end of September for next month's edition of Ad Picks.

JULY AD PICKS

Welcome to July's edition of Ad Picks. This month I'm sharing a few fun ads that will make you smile on a Monday morning.

The first ad I'm sharing this month is a print ad for Lego called 'Build futures'. Lego has lasted so many generations and I can't see it slowing down at all. I love the simplicity in the ad and the kid growing into that future role.

Kia have been using hamsters in their ads in the last couple of years and they've found a fun way to introduce a new car ultilizing the hamsters. I don't want to give too much away but: ace of spades and babies.

Meat and Livestock Australia have created some cracking ads in previous years for Lamb (if you haven't seen them, check them out). They've released this singing ad for beef, claiming it's the best meat on earth, can you argue against them? My favourite part is 25 seconds in.

More airlines have been making their safety videos their ads since the success of Air New Zealand's ones. So now it's British Airways turn, who in conjunction with Comic Relief have got their hands on some fantastic British talent. It's all held brilliantly together with a director in the ad who doesn't know some of them and is in love with the others.

I've watched it many times; make sure you watch it until the end to see Mr Bean.

I hope you enjoyed this post and you'll share it with someone who would enjoy it. Keep your eyes peeled towards the end of August for next month's edition of Ad Picks.

NEW WORK

A new campaign about bowel cancer awareness for Cancer Council WA was recently launched.

Bowel Cancer is the number two cause of cancer deaths in Australia, yet an alarming percentage of people aren't using the free screening kit that gets mailed to them when they turn 50. Fear is a major barrier on two fronts; people are either afraid to face their poo (literally), or they're worried of what the test might find.

Here is the 45 second TVC below:

Credits
Agency: Gatecrasher Advertising
Client: Cancer Council WA
Art Directors: Henry Billington, Michael D'Silva
Copywriter: Adam Barker
Digital production: Scott Pelham, Jackey Leung
Sound: Brainestorm
Engineers: Mike Fragomeni, Justin Braine
Strategic Planner: Sophie Lawrence
Digital Planner: Aimee Binstead
Account team: Tony Scampoli, Emma Lambert, Joe Ferrante
Client: Melissa Ledger, Shannon Wagner

JUNE AD PICKS

Welcome back to June's edition of Ad Picks.

This first ad has a lot of craft to it. This is a beautifully shot ad for Lacoste of a man's quest throughout the decades, following a girl, with the fashion changing as the years do. The energy and the transitions through the years are very well thought out and it will keep you hooked throughout. See if you can spot the one piece of clothing that's in most of the years.

When I watched this next interactive ad/stock savour, I was so happy. Getty images have created this app that recognises your drawings and will show you photos that could/should match your drawing. If this worked it could save me hours going through stock sites.

These animations for Uber caught my eye when I was visiting London a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoyed watching how these illustrated characters moved between A and B in fun ways.

I hope you enjoyed this post and you'll share it with someone who would enjoy it. Keep your eyes peeled towards the end of July for next month's edition of Ad Picks.

MAY AD PICKS

Welcome back to May's edition of Ad Picks. There have been a lot of great ads this month and I could have shared quite a few, but I limited myself to these three great ones.

I'll start with this interactive campaign for T-Mobile. They have released a really cool app which uses the camera on your phone to transform anything in their magenta logo colour into exclusive content. They even got the band Gorillaz involved, which gave people a reason to see their exclusive content. It's a great use of technology, owning the magenta colour and I'm pretty excited to give it a go.

'My dog is my medicine' when I'm stressed and this ad shares that message. Royal Canin used this ad to spread the message about abandoned dogs seeking homes in the pound. They have transformed a pharmacy into a Furmacy for a day. When people came to buy a drug, such as Paracetamol the pharmacist told them about dogs' healing properties and the idea went all the way down to the products in the store.

The reactions of the people when they bring out dogs at the end are brilliant and I hope a lot of dogs got new homes. A great way to share the message.

I'll leave you this month with a fun ad by Apple named 'Barbers'. It made me smile all the way through and I really enjoyed the edit, especially the cuts from the people in the chair to their photographs on the wall.

It made me want the iPhone 7 Plus even more than I already did and I think it was a factor in me buying one at the weekend.

I hope you enjoyed this post and you'll share it with someone who would enjoy it too. Keep your eyes peeled towards the end of June for next month's edition of Ad Picks.

APR AD PICKS

Welcome back to April's edition of Ad Picks. 

This month has been a super busy one for me, so the timing of the public holiday this week (in Australia) was great to see what ads there have been to share with you and these are a couple that really stood out for me.

The first is a TVC that I watched a couple of times, as it really got my attention (you'll want to watch it twice too). It starts by showing a few different scenes of a solider on a battlefield. Then we get hit by the messaging and we get shown all of the sounds in the first scenes are actually noises we hear in our everyday lives e.g balloons popping, drilling and fireworks.

Remember how some of these noises startle us in life and then think how it must be for a war veteran as it may trigger a difficult memory from the battlefield. It's powerful and it really makes you think.

This next one is a digital outdoor piece that catches unaware pedestrians crossing the road on a red. As they cross the road without looking there is an adshel next to the crossing that makes a loud sound of a car breaking in an emergency. The adshel also takes a photograph of them looking shocked and it shows them the picture with the messaging 'Don't take the risk to face death'.

As you can imagine people jump out of their skin, thinking that they're about to be hit by a car. It's a nice use of the medium, the messaging comes across well and it's a strong case study video too.

I hope you enjoyed this post and you'll share it with your friends. Please keep your eyes out for the May blog post towards the end of the month.

2017 CAMPAIGN BRIEF AWARDS

Last Friday night were the Campaign Brief awards in Perth, WA. It was a fantastic night at the Crown Towers Ballroom and we won best press campaign for St John Ambulance  'Play a Bigger Part' (the work is shared below). We also got finalist in the same category for our Livelighter 'Olympics' campaign too, see it here.

MAR AD PICKS

Welcome back to March's edition of Ad Picks. 

This month I've got an interactive ad, a print ad and I'm ending this post with a fun online video.

This is a fun GPS game to keep the kids quiet on the way to Legoland in Florida. Whilst the parents are driving, this app theme's their real time route with characters, games and fun trivia along the way. It's using digital for the right reasons and I think many parents will enjoy their drive to Legoland a lot more now.

I hope they expand it to the other Legoland locations too.

I bet you've already seen this one shared over your Facebook feeds, but I still really wanted to share it being a fan of the Mad Men series. Many ads were created in the series, but bringing one of them from our screens to reality is genius; this story has had so much PR around it.

It's a win/win for the client and the series, giving people nostalgia about the series and making people watch it again. It would be interesting to see if the viewing figures have gone up for the Mad Men series on Netflix.

Adobe always seem to produce great ads, past ads have been 'click, baby. click' and 'the launch' (click on either of the names to watch them). They've produced the goods again with a spot named 'Hovering art directors'. It's promoting the Adobe stock imagery range, whilst having fun with the working relationships of designers and art directors. I hope we're not this bad.

This blog is quite old now, but it's very funny, topical and worth a reshare: hoveringartdirectors.tumblr.com

I hope you enjoyed this post and you'll share with your friends. Please keep your eyes out for the April blog post towards the end of the month.

ONE OF MY FAVOURITE ADS

I was recently asked at Gatecrasher to write a blog post about one of my favourite ads, and this was my choice below.

Asking an advertising creative to pick their favourite advertising example of all time is like asking a musician to pick their favourite song. With countless award-winning ads out there, the one I’ve chosen not only stands out, but it showcases other great ads that have come out in recent years.

So what is this ad? It’s called The D&AD Ad Filter. It’s an extension for Chrome and Firefox that blocks regular pre-roll ads and automatically replaces them with D&AD winners from past years.

No longer do you have to hover your mouse over the 5-second countdown and wait for the ‘skip’ button to appear. You can sit back and be entertained by a swearing bear or Jean-Claude Van Damme doing the splits on two moving trucks.

Why I love it: 
Advertisers are always looking for new, creative ways to use YouTube, social media platforms, and other online advertising mediums. Lately we’ve started to see a rise in brands experimenting with the unavoidable YouTube ‘skip’ button, but The Ad Filter feels fresh because you’re too busy enjoying the award-winning creative content to even realise that it’s an ad for D&AD.

It’s a lovely way to showcase the standard of work that wins the top prizes at award shows. Plus, it makes you even hungrier to win an award for yourself. I wouldn’t be surprised if it increased the number of submissions for the D&AD Awards. With this filter installed, you’ll often be left wondering why the standard of pre-rolls is suddenly so high.

If it ran today
It only came out in 2015, but I hope that it keeps being updated to showcase new award-winning work every year. It would be great if they included D&AD student winners to help get them the exposure that they deserve.

Download and enjoy it yourself here

FEB AD PICKS

Welcome back to February's edition of Ad Picks. 

The month started with one of the biggest come backs ever in the NFL grand final. I was going to share one of the ads, but with so many articles already out there about them, I decided to share some ads you may have missed that I also enjoyed.

The first is a massive creative campaign for Mailchimp (the email marketing client), who have had problems with people mispronouncing it e.g FailChimp. So Droga5 played on that fact and created loads of different content from music videos to short films of its different mispronunciations.

The content is fun and they picked some clever mispronunciation that still linked back to the brand and even if people didn't think of Mailchimp and were interested in e.g SnailPrimp and googled it, it would say 'did you mean mailchimp?'

The next one I wanted to share was for crisp brand Tostitos.

When people go out for a beer or two they don't realise they are over the limit until it's too late. So Tostitos created these special crisp packs for bars that have a little hole to blow into and a graphic on the pack lights up to show them clearly if they are over the limit. This idea is a clever use of their packet and it will help save lives too, making it even better.

This last one isn't so much an ad, but it's a very fun Trump website. You can type in whatever you want him to say (to a certain level) and it finds snippets of him saying those words from different speeches and puts it together. Check it out: http://trumpwith.love

I hope you enjoyed this post and you'll share with your friends. Please keep your eyes out for the March one towards the end of the month.

SaveSave

NEW WORK ADDED

I've just added two new campaigns to my website and I've also shared them with you below.

The first one is an outdoor campaign for Livelighter to start a conversation: why are major sporting events like the Olympics being sponsored by junk food and sugary drink brands? Thanks to the very talented team at Cream Studios

The second piece is a print campaign to recruit more St John Ambulance Volunteers. We highlighted the fact that St. John Ambulance volunteers play a big part in their communities by providing life saving services and learning new skills to develop their careers. Thanks to the photographers Thom Perry and Sam Passante.

JAN AD PICKS

Welcome to my new monthly posting 'Ad Picks'.

So what is it?
Well, every month I'm going to write an article with a few ads that have caught my eye. I'm aiming at sharing ones that you may have missed or just love seeing again.

So here is my first month - January.

Malteasers - Outdoor
This adshel caught my eye when I saw it on Best Ads, mainly from the simplicity of it and the nice use of Malteasers for World Braille day. What do you think it says?

The Dyslexic Captcha - Interactive
I'm dyslexic and was lucky when I was younger that mine was discovered early, so I got the help I needed and now I'm a lot better. So this ad stood out for me.

This hospital in India took photographs of dyslexic kids handwriting to create a captcha (the boxes on websites that ask you to copy the numbers into box) to raise awareness and the signs to look out for, for the parents.

It's a very nice use of the different mediums and I hope it helped many dyslexic children be diagnosed.

The Association for Safer Driving - Online

Over 80% of accidents are caused by people using their phone whilst driving and with people ignoring ads, the association of safer driving in Israel had to get through to people. They used a famous vlogger and created a real car crash in one of her videos.

It would have definitely caught people off guard and the message hits hard.

I hope you enjoyed this post and you'll share with your friends. Keep your eyes out for the February one towards the end of the month.