Look around. It’s all happy people with big grins on their faces. Let’s admit it. Winning feels good.

Yesterday night we, the lovely people at Dare, enjoyed a bit of the sweet feeling as the agency picked five awards at the Campaign Digital Awards including a very well deserve one going to Mr. Collier as the biggest achiever of the year. Congratulations Mark. It’s not that usual to see every single member of a team being that honestly happy for their boss.

But above all, the night was a very special one for those of us working for the Vodafone account. Picking awards for the three nominations we had (including the one for the best ongoing brand campaign) is a fantastic result for a wonderful and bright team of people who work really hard in a daily basis and not always enjoying the recognition that this huge effort deserves.

Well done and many thanks to everyone involved. You are the best and most talented team one could dream of.

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We are finally done with our latest job for Vodafone. This campaign to promote the mobile Internet services is their biggest digital campaign ever and it has required a huge effort from the team at Dare to put it together and bring it to life on time. Massive thanks go to everyone involved.

This is what Campaign says about the work:

Dare has created a digital campaign to promote Vodafone’s mobile internet service, which launched last week with a road-block above-the-line campaign.

The campaign includes a website, banner ads and homepage takeover ads to demonstrate how websites can be used via Vodafone handsets.

The takeover ads fold up whole web pages including Yahoo!, lastminute.com and Tiscali and then drop them into an image of a mobile phone to show visitors how the service enables them to “take websites
with you”.

The banner ads promote Vodafone’s tie-ins with media owners including MySpace and Google by using colourful cartoon animations to explain that customers can use the services from their mobile phone.

Finally, the website offers a tour of a fictional street in London. As visitors scroll over the scene, text appears explaining the benefits of mobile internet in everyday life.

See the some of the work here.

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I’m just back from one of the D&AD President’s Lectures by Dan Wieden and David Kennedy. I very much like the brilliant work that their agency has consistently delivered during the past 25 years and for that they’ve got all my respect and professional admiration.

The lecture was death boring though. It lacked of rhythm, both guys seemed to be pretty uninterested about it and I didn’t get much clear from their sometimes vague answers (the format was an interview conversation). I really had hoped for something more inspirational. Shame.

But the highlight of the night was about to come; when in the Q&A round Ron asked this in front of over thousand assistants:
(Read more…)

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This is my own QR-Code.

Be honest. You might not be quite sure about what this is yet but you can’t wait to get yours. Well, don’t panic. You can easily generate your own one here.

(Read more…)

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Direct Response TV ads are all tedious and uninteresting. Perhaps not all but most of them are and this is something many people would agree with. So… how to turn a ‘dirty’ DRTV brief into a sexy piece of communication?

Just adding a bit of extra care to the execution. Let’s face it. There’s not much crazy stuff that one can do with the narrative. You need to show the handsets, display the ‘call to action’ on the screen for the entire length of the advert and explain the offer (x minutes + x SMS + free phone) in the clearest way possible. Add some very long t&c’s and you’ll have a DRTV ad. This is what this is all about and these few golden rules simply work very hard so no reason to ignore them.

However it’s not written anywhere that this needs to work against aesthetics and a bit of interesting storytelling and this is what we have done at Dare, where we’ve just delivered the final response to our first brief to create a TV ad for Vodafone. The result is a solid piece of work with some nice illustrations lovely animated by Monsieur Gavin, who’s invested some good long hours to crack this on.

Put your headphones on and judge by yourself. Then let me know what you think (sorry about the crappy YouTube quality, I’ll try to get a higher quality copy in the future and I’ll post it here).

Some credits (magazines always get it wrong so hopefully this will be a one place where everyone gets the right credit for the work):

Director: Gavin Leisfield
Account Director: Katherine Davidson
Group Account Director: Claire Hynes
Producer: Hannah Hilbery
Copywriter: Amy Gould
Art Director: Amy Gould
Illustration: Gavin Leisfield / Luke Stenzhorn
Animation: Gavin Leisfield
Postproduction: David McNulty
Planner: Amy Whittaker / Nick Emmel
Creative Director: James Cooper
Creative Lead: Eduardo de Felipe
Music: Samuel Sim
Voice over: Sean Pertwee

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The new digital advertising campaign for Vodafone to support the sponsorship of the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes F1 team is now live. As everything we do for Vodafone, the brand message ‘Make the most of now’ is central to the campaign. This time the proposition focuses on how Fernando Alonso and Lewis Hamilton made the most of their now to chase their childhood dreams.

Click below to see the work:

Dedicated website (rich media site only available to PC users - bohoo!)
“3d track” expandable leatherboard
“Boxcart” MPU
“Go kart” MPU
“Toy car” MPU

Read what Campaign magazine said about the work: here and here.

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Make your voice heard and vote for our three Dare nominations to the awards:

Mobile Office Solutions under IT Hardware/Software category.

Walkman Worlds under Telecommunications category.

Lynx Blow under Beauty and Cosmetics category.

Vote here.

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In the high-speed world of Digital Advertising most of the times being the first is not good enough.

Too often, the brutal competitiveness within the industry and the agencies keenness of being the first ones to launch an idea mislead in poor executions with unsuccessful results.

John Bartle (co-founder of Bartle Bogle Hegarty – BBH) always states that everything is about the work, the work and the work. And he is right.

Digital advertising is probably the only one discipline within advertising where agencies still get away with bad executions. Often the clients still lack of the necessary knowledge and experience to evaluate the quality of the products and seem to demand lower quality standards that those they would expect from broadcast or above-the-line campaigns.

This might come hand with hand with the inner features of digital media where the huge amount of factors to be considered make extremely difficult to deliver a high-quality product without a perfect understanding of the channel and the right integration of all the different inputs from the different agency departments.

Also, the quick evolution of the digital technologies and the very particular role that users play in digital advertising force the agencies to constantly recycle their skills and to permanently reinvent themselves, leaving them more expose to failures.

That is why delivering good executions is as important as being innovative. An innovative idea can be brilliant but most likely it will become wasted if it is not supported by a good consumer research or a good evaluation of the user interaction with our product.

For many years the brilliant slogan from Pirelli says, “Power is nothing without control”. And now we should say that the right balance between innovation and quality is the key warranty to deliver a successful campaign.

So, don’t just try to be the first one. Try to be the first one to do it well.

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