Creative Review® unveils its new brand identity which will advance our positioning across media platforms.

Following a universal brand audit instigated in the wake of an immersion expedition led by a cohort of leading brand ideators, we engaged in a thoroughgoing knowledge accumulation programme to facilitate blue-sky thinking and empower Creative Review® in the vanguard of world class best practice in thought-leadership. The following brand muscles were established: innovative, dynamic, square-shaped.

The compelling brand truth uncovered has been articulated in this brand statement: “Creative Review®: Leading ideation infonauts in a media neutral world”.

The word ‘infonauts’ is an invented one, stumbled upon in our brainstorming sessions through the expression of our core values of being an “information” provider for the creative industries boldly going to the outer limits of the new frontiers of media distribution networks in a web 2.0 world.

In a bold break with tradition our new wordmark features simplified and solid lowercase letterforms that are friendly and approachable. It has been crafted in bespoke font CRArial®ounded. Our branding agency conducted extensive research necessitating many days of highly specialised tyPoMetric© analysis before unearthing this rarely-seen vintage typeface that creates a unique visual tone of voice for the brand.

Our unique 3D marque - which we have christened the MaRble® - employs premium cues including the addition of vitreous accents denoting excellence and quality, deep hues, and a glazed lustre with an updated color palette and increased contrast. Its interconnected, dynamic graphic devices leverage CR®’s position as the epicentric enabler of an innovation matrix creating compelling brand equity.

Creative Review® editor - or Executive Infonaut as he will now be known - Patrick Burgoyne comments “Our new brand identity ecosystem positions Creative Review® as a forward-thinking, infoneering thought-leader in the digital and paper-based knowledge distribution sectors. In engineering a brand architecture founded on compelling brand truths I have no doubt that our £500,000 budget has been wisely spent.”

NB: Although the thought engineering that underpins our new brand identity is our own we must acknowledge the assistance of the world’s leading branding agencies from which the above phrases and terminology were sourced

Remember the gravity-defying, car-surfing rock band that appeared in Passion Pictures‘ director Pete Candeland’s animated promo for the video game Rock Band? Well, the band is back but this time they take on members of a rival car-surfing, instrument-weilding bunch of rocking nutters for the craziest game of “chicken” you’ve ever seen… To promote the new edition of Harmonix’s game, of course, Rock Band 2.
Fasten your seatbelts!

Advertising creatives are often known for their side projects, but Alex Bogusky, co-chairman at Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, has come up with a more unusual proposition than the norm - a diet book.

Titled The 9-inch “Diet”, the book has a simple premise: rather than adopting a new fad diet, we should simply eat smaller portions. The revelation came to Bogusky while on holiday, when he couldn’t fit his plates into the 1940s kitchen at his holiday home. “I was sitting there thinking, ‘What kind of idiot makes a cabinet that won’t fit plates?’,” he explains. “You know, it’s always hard to see your own culture. I realised that no idiot does that, the plates must have grown. So I started looking into it and they had grown a lot over a period of about 40 years. So I thought ‘I’m going to write a diet book’ - it’s not like it’s a goal or something that I dreamed of doing.”

The 9-Inch Diet proposes that we return to eating our food from nine inch plates, which was the average size in the US for decades, but are now virtually impossible to buy. “The nine inch plate was around for a long time, and we were all a lot thinner,” continues Bogusky. “We happened to be about 30 per cent thinner, which is about the difference in the amount of food that sits on our plates now. So it’s not complicated and there’s not recipes in the book - although I got a recipe from my mum for meatloaf as my token recipe - but it traces the history, it’s a bit of a cultural send-up of portions and what’s happened and who’s to blame.”

The 9-Inch Diet book will be published in December this year, just in time for Christmas…

Ben Thomas‘ work invites close scrutiny. While many of his dioramas are packed with buildings, traffic or crowds, others offer a more sedate view of the world, of boats on a river, desks in a library, or of two men collecting leaves. But Thomas’ images aren’t crafted models, they’re in fact photographs from real life…

“The process of achieving the diorama effect essentially works around shifting or reducing the depth of field in a shot,” explains the Melbourne-based photographer. “This can be done one of two ways; you can change the depth of field in the shot with a tilt-shift lens, or you can use Photoshop (or similar) to do the same thing, with a lot more freedom.

“The final piece in achieving the style is around the colouring and, to be honest, this is what takes the serious hours.”

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Almost The Same

Thomas, a graduate of Adelaide’s International Design Effects and Animation School, also recently won the art section of the Australian Sony Projections’ new photographer of the year award.

More of his photography can be seen at cityshrinker.com.

Creative Review is hosting its Click conference on digital advertising today in association with the Art Directors Club in New York. I’ll be blogging live from the event through the day…

James Cooper from Another Anomaly is kicking things off. He’s going to talk about capitalism - which, if you believe the news this morning, is feeling rather unwell right now…

James kicks off with this

Cooper says agencies have the opportunity to redefine relationships and role of agency to have a positive affect on society beyond the bottom line - “ideas that modern capitalism craves”.

Keep a Child Alive - on paper, it’s got everything. Charity that ticks all the boxes - celebrities, kids, AIDS and Africa. It should have been awards gold he says, tongue-in-cheek, but no-one really knew about it. Anomaly came up with concept of “lean into frame” - to hijack a media event for your own ends. So they decided to join the queue for the sale of the first iPhone and use it for benefit of the chairty - blogging about it for five days as he stood in line. They effectively hijacked the launch of the iPhone for the charity

They then auctioned the iPhone for $100,000. So a simple idea that was blogged and tapped into a media event delivered a huge return for the charity.

“Pink it & shrink it” - when companies want to market a pre-existing product to women they make the pack smaller and colour it pink. But, Cooper says, such a cynical approach no longer works - need to be more honest with consumers.

There has to be a better way of doing “branded content” than clumsy movie-style product placement. Cooper shows a film and record Anomaly made for Converse with Pharrell and Santogold.

It’s a piece of “content” - music video, youtube clip, ad - whatever. Free content - you could download the mp3 for free. An accompanying campaign used Google for an online Spelling Bee. More here

Cooper argues that having clients as partners as Anomaly does changes the relationship to be much more honest and mutually beneficial.

Cooper’s main points:

Don’t use charity accounts to chase awards, use them to test new ideas and new theories.

Be on the consumer’s side - don’t participate in misleading them.

Have partners not clients - you’re less likely to dick them around and, I guess to be dicked around yourself

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Next up, Paul Parton from the Brooklyn Brothers

Paul went for the old conference shock tactic by starting off saying that they hate advertising and would like nothing better than to see the back of it. Ad agencies were bloated, wasteful and self-aggrandising and yet Brokklyn Brothers does a lot of advertising. So they’re either horribly conflicted or very sad.

he talked about the fact that they realised all ad work becomes digital work eventually - whether it’s people taking pics of a billboard then sending them to their friends or sharing films on YouTube. So you have to approach everything with an online state of mind, rather than a traditional broadcast one. This revolves around three things:
Inviting the consumer in
The ideas is the medium
Advertising is disposable

He talked about the work they’ve done for the NY Rangers ice hockey team where they created a character - an actor named Bobby Granger, who is the ultimate fan. He features in 17 films that were released via hockey blogs rather than mainstream media thus encouraging people to feel he was one of them. He participated in chat online, was totally open about what was going on and, apparently, became accepted by fans - he now has a chant at home games

Pertaining to his last point about disposability, Parton explained that all 17 films were made (with director Kinka “Kerchingka” Usher no less) for $350,000. The average cost of a US 30 second TV spot is $270,000. So, as with James Coper, the message was make lots of small, cheaper content rather than one big show-offy spectacular.

Parton rounded off by saying that their approach comes out in a different approach to strategy - whereas before they would start with the brand and its positioning, now they are much more focussed on solving business problems. They are far more entrepeneurial and pointed and a lot less abstract as “clients are fed up with paying loads for films which may not work”

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Already there are definite themes coming out of Click. Following the Brooklyn Brothers we have had sessions from the nascent Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA) the organisation founded by 18 independent digital agencies to establish best practice and advance the industry through education and advocacy. This was followed by an impassioned session from Poke’s Tom Ajello and an equally eloquent one from Michael Lebowitz at Big Spaceship.

Ajello had a simple message - if you’re not eating, shitting and breathing digital, go home. In other words, people involved in digital communications need to be consumed by the medium and its latest developments - Twittering, Flickring and even good old-fashioned blogging for all they’re worth.

he held up his mobile and informed us that we were all live on the net - via qik.com. You can see the video here

“If you’re not experimenting and seeing this stuff for yourselves you’re ruining your clients’ chances of doing something really amazing - you need to be a part of it.”

Ajello and Lebowitz after him voiced one of the main themes of the day - that what digital agencies do is not ‘advertising’. It’s kind of difficult to sum it up neatly without resorting to awful marketing speak but it’s basically about creating experiences or opportunities for people to interact with brands or organisations. CReating experiences and facilitating relationshsips.

Lebowitz also had a list of pointers for running a digital agency:

1, Everyone’s creative - if you’re not creative, you shouldn’t be working here. He loathes the expression ‘creative department’
2, Don’t hire assholes, no matter how talented. Even the best art director in the world is not worth the hassle if he or she is a pain to have around
3, Hire to be the dumbest person in the room - the old Ogilvy maxim of hiring people smarter than you
4, Give people autonomy - they will care more
5, Experiment constantly - not just for clients. It helps retain staff and do r&d for what could be client projects
6, Small is good - it’s hard not to grow. BS turns away 60 to 80% of possible jobs.

So, themes so far:
Get involved - you have to be part of the digital world to know what to advise clients on, to be a constant student.
It’s not advertising - advertising is part of it but it’s about facilitating a more rich, two-way, engaging experience. Inviting the consumer to become involved.
Do more - big blockbuster, one hit pieces of work are out - a multitude of smaller, cheaper executions are far more effective.
The idea is the medium - you just put it wherever it wants to go.

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By the way, Tina Roth of Swiss Miss is here and blogging too - go here to read her

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Now we’re onto a discussion on education with Liz Danzico, our moderator, Ale Lariu from McCann and SheSays, Mattias Hansson of HyperIsland and Chloe Gottlieb of R/GA

Ale says most important quality in digital is passion for it - everything else can be taught. Matthias stresses importance of people learning to work together.

Chloe talks about using the people within an organisation for continual education of staff - that people may be teaching outside or doing research and how important it is to feed that back via workshops etc for staff.

Mattias points out that HyperIsland has no books, no teachers, no lessons - none of what you’d expect at a college. It’s totally focused on the group dynamic and how to work together on projects.

What’s biggest shortcoming among students?
Chloe - it’s either very strong concept and no craft or other way round. really hard to find people who can do both. Agencies have to become post-grad places offering courses and structures to help them skills they need.

Utility - “Useful is the new cool” says Ale. You have to be giving people something useful but not many understand that.

Chloe - as soon as people feel they’re not learning anything, they want to leave. So rather than education being a risk because people might leave, it’s actually a vital tool to stop them from leaving. Teach them something and they’ll stay.

“You need to fall in love with the fact that digital is constantly changing and ride with that” - Ale.

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And we have Sergio Gordilho from Africa Advertising in Brazil.

How can you be creative in a country where everyone is creative - or thinks they are?

Cultural fusion is one of the keys to Brazilian creativity.
Isolation - we’re surrounded by Spanish-speakers. 11 hours by plane from any major city in world.
History - 50 presidents in the last 100 years. Only the most creative survive.

They only have 8 clients - he says they want to be expensive and exclusive. Why Africa? Because ‘Africa is Brazil and Brazil is Africa. 80% of Brazilians come from Africa.”

Unfortunately Sergio has some issues with his Brazilian technology - it won’t work.

So we’ll move on to the second last speaker - Ben Palmer from the Barbarian Group on being “hopelessly devoted to interactive”

Shows their new internal project Beard. A kind of message board on which they post up every new project that comes in to the agency so that everyone can contribute ideas. So that Palmer doesn’t have to run everything - everyone gets the chance to be creative director. And it’s called Beard because all the tech guys have them (of course).

Beard has involved various disasters - ie 22 year-old kids being given the job of presenting to major companies - but he says it’s led to everyone getting better at everything - which is nice.

The site also acts as a repository of ideas that have no client but might come in handy one day. On example is a T-shirt generator originally thought up for Hanes. Eventually they used it for CNN - it allows users of its site to create a T-shirt whose slogan is a headline from one of that day’s new stories ie Jesus’ Face Seen In Kitten’s Swirly Fur

See more here

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And finally, we have Alex Lieu of 42 Entertainment who created the Year Zero campaign for Nine Inch nails.

Today’s audience he says, is primed to ignore traditional advertising. But if you build cool stuff, they will come.

42 builds Alternate Reality Games - ARGs - where the audience has a central role and drives the whole thing.

Talks about using the world as a platform - any way to engage people, whether it’s projecting onto buildings, events, or digital.

Microsoft hits back against the smugness of the Mac Vs PC ads.

You’re a big brand. Huge. Global in fact, as we say these days. And you need to stand out more. You need a new visual device, something that can stand alone and represent your business and its values, even without the company name underneath. You want a logo that will say a few things about you, what you do – hey – maybe even where you’re going in these crazy times. So, what does the cyan and white sphere above say? Unequivocally, it says: I am another company with a hollowed-out spherical logo…

The latest in a long line of rebranded financial corporations is Barclaycard which, as of yesterday, officially sports a new identity courtesy of Brand Union. In the last decade or so, countless large corporations have smoothed off their edges and sanded down their corners via a rebrand. “Look how soft and round and approachable we are,” seems to run the thinking.

Indeed, according to the designers, the new Barclaycard identity aims to convey a calm, confident exterior while being warm and vibrant on the inside… and that the globe motif represents a “chip” being released from the constraints of the plastic card and welcomed in by new, exciting methods of payment.

The logo cost £600k (part of a £1.5m identity makeover) and while we don’t need to go down the path of bemoaning the fee, what does the new identity actually say apart from what we already know: that many companies are now global businesses (hence the globe shape) and that they’re highly networked organisations (hence the curly bits that wrap the sphere).

Perhaps more worryingly, it says far less about what differentiates the company from its competitors (it happens to be Barclaycard, it could be any number of brands) and more about how achingly similar corporate logos have become. In trying to say they’re about the new, the modern, the global, they’re in fact revealing a willingness to simply blend in with everyone else.

Here are some other familiar spherical jobs. It really is one world out there isn’t it?

Top to bottom: Sony Ericsson, BT, AT&T

Head down to Blackfriars Bridge after dark over the next few weeks and you’ll find that the old Blackfriars Railway Bridge, whose supports still remain in the water, is lit up with ghostly green lasers. The artwork is by Keith Bowler and forms part of Drift, a group exhibition by contemporary artists who have all created new works of art to be shown on the Thames.

Drift continues until October 19, and also includes work by Margaret Evangeline, Mariele Neudecker, Craig Walsh, Julian Berthier, Andy Harper and Elizabeth Russell.

Here’s an interesting architecture-meets-horticulture analogy. If consumers are bees and shops are plants, then shop windows are the pretty flowers that aim to attract our attention and draw us in. At least that’s the thinking behind the latest installation to be unveiled at of London’s Selfridges. “The Apifera is a responsive window that takes inspiration from the science of attraction developed in flowers,” explains its designer Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, “hence the complex fractal geometry and the work’s ability to respond and change its breathing rate according to the daylight and passersby”…

Behind the impressive collage of meticulously folder blue paper is a micro-controller running an Arduino program (a physical computing platform that is used to create stand-alone interactive objects) and an array of computer fans that generate the artwork’s movement.

According to Plummer-Fernandez’s blog, the flower-like shop window is “the part of a larger organism that is responsible for attracting other living species for its survival. Flowers have perfected the art of attraction by stimulating its target’s sense of sight, smell, touch and taste. With this in mind I adopted design traits from flowers such as the fractal geometry that gives the window its complex form.

“Research into ‘phyllotaxis’ (the arrangement of florets) was key to solving the shape, followed by the calculation of folding templates for all 169 segments. Rebecca Lucraft of MA textiles at the Royal College of Art is the talented person who had the patience and paper craft skill to produce the individual segments over a month of full-time production. She also has a thorough understanding and experience in shop window production.

“I also wanted to make the window as dynamic and ‘alive’ as possible so the whole structure pulsates in a natural motion aided by a sequence of fans. This motion is dependent on daylight and passersby as the Apifera reads and analyses changes in light using LDRs [Light Dependent Resistors]. The expected behaviour is that of an excited and active shop window during the day and the most busy-periods, and a passive window at night when it needs to conserve energy.

“The Apifera can also self-adjust its sensitivity to stimulation. For example, if no one has passed the window for ages it will behave extra alert and excited when someone finally does approach it. Vice versa, if the window has regular stimulation from passers-by it will become harder to excite. This self-adjusting sensitivity gives it a more controlled and life-like behaviour – for instance, us humans will detect and react to a bad smell instantly, but after a while we stop smelling it as we no longer need to be alert to its presence.”

Installation the Apifera took three night shifts, working 10pm until 6.30am, during which time Matthew also enlisted the help of his younger brother Nicholas.

The window will remain on the Duke Street side of the shop until the end of October.

Window concept, electronics and programming by Matthew Plummer-Fernandez, production by MP-F, Rebecca Lucraft (who did the papercraft) and Nicholas Plummer-Fernandez.

More at plummerfernandez.com.

Hot Rods & Hairy Beasts is the name of an exhibition that opens on Monday (29 September) at London’s Coningsby Gallery put together by four seasoned professional illustrators, Nishant Choksi, Rod Hunt, Linzie Hunter and Allan Sanders. The featured work will showcase an impressive menagerie of horrendous and hairy beasts, many driving pimped-up rides. The four stars of the show have given CR Blog a sneaky preview of some of the work that will be shown at the exhibition…

No. 66-13 by Nishant Choksi

Hot F**king Ice Creams by Rod Hunt

The Hairy Beasts by Linzie Hunter

by Allan Sanders

Coney Island by Linzie Hunter

by Nishant Choksi

Robot Love by Rod Hunt

HOT RODS AND HAIRY BEASTS runs from Monday 29th September until Saturday 4th October 2008, 10am-6pm at Coningsby Gallery, 30 Tottenham Street, London W1T 4RJ

hotrodsandhairybeasts.co.uk
coningsbygallery.com