A cool book for Advertising Students

And, unlike most advertising books that require the removal of limbs to pay for, this one is merely £4.99 in waterstones. It's called A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young, and what's better is the foreward is written by Bill Bernbach himself.

Now if you're an advertising student, or even someone in the industry, and you do not know who Bill Bernbach is then stop reading this at once and find yourself another industry. The guy swears by this book, and rightly so. It's effectively an elaborate step by step of the creative process, the way it should be done. It was first published in 1965 and is just as relevant today as it ever was, and seeing as it was Bernbach who revolutionised the industry to what it is today his recommendations should be taken into account.

To sum up, BUY IT!

Banks

Can be both a students best friend and our worst enemy. Allow me to explain:

1. I'm entitled to a student account with £200 overdraft that shifts up to £500 with no interest.

2. They screwed up (Lloyds TSB) so I didn't get mine through properly resulting in stupid charges costing me a lot of money.

3. This in turn demolished my credit rating and left me pretty skint the past couple of weeks or so.

4. They neglected to even tell me what they had done until today, when by chance, someone who gave a shit happened to spot the error.

5. This resulted in me spending a day at the bank sorting out this error, with this one person who gave a shit, while he rang every single department who were just ever so reluctant to help me out.

6. This guy actually told me I was being screwed over by Lloyds, even though he works there, and to change banks if they refused to help me further.

7. His persistence payed off and he got me what I was entitled too, fixed my account, cancelled my charges and helped me get reimbursed for the ones I wrongly received.

8. This faff on made me miss a day at uni, which with a heavy coursework deadline approaching, isn't great.


HOWEVER!!!! I'm financially peachy now and that guy has restored my faith in human kind, so thanks man!

We aren't going to lie. This advert is intended to make you come.

This headline was written in big bold white letters across a plain black background, accompanied by The Baltic Art Gallery logo in the bottom right corner. Fantastic. Two page spread in the middle of a free student magazine I came across in the Sunderland University design centre. Now, quite often do I open a magazine directly on the centrefold pages, and that day was no different. I Was amazed by how bold and simple this was, and it got me thinking, why complicate things. It tells me what the purpose of the advert is, what it wants me to do, and it's a rather impressive, bold statement, executed in a brave way.

We (Dom'n'Ayton) now have it pinned right in the middle of the wall of our work space, as a reminder to us that we should always try and chip our work down to it's simplest most effective form! Fantastic piece of advertising.

Relentless Part II

So we have a strategy, a series of scamps and a mocked up ad on photoshop!!
We've gone with the idea of "Relentless" being like batteries for people, giving people energy of course. So we have three press ads and a poster, the poster being the photoshopped ad. The other three (press ads) have a running theme of extreme sports with the "batteries" placed within the body. For example, should the person be doing the long jump, the image will depict a battery box inside the persons leg, containing a couple of "relentless" batteries.

Any comments or criticisms will be appreciated.

Relentless

adjective
1 persistent, relentless, unrelenting
never ceasing; "The relentless beat of the drums"

So yeah basically, one of the 5 campaigns we're working on is for Relentless the energy drink, and I'm currently still at the research stage. The dictionary is actually not a bad place to start. Of course I already knew what the word itself meant, however it does help to look at the meaning in its entirety, explained as well as it possibly can be, because within that dictionary entry lies several words/phrases that could greatly contribute to a strategy and a tagline.

D&AD Student Winner 2008

I must admit I'm not particularly fond of the Yellow Pencil winning entry for the MTV brief. It's not a bad entry, it is rather creative and an enjoyable piece of short film, however I don't believe it was the best entry. I think the line between a good piece of film and a good piece of advertising was blurred, observe:



I just feel that it doesn't really push the brand enough and lacks... believability if that is the word for it. Nice, but not effective advertising. I was fairly disappointed with a lot of the MTV brief entries really, they were nearly all very nicely designed pieces of film but as pieces of advertising they were poor.

I don't pretend to be an advertising expert, however when I started the first thing I was told was that a good ad required three things;
1. Impact
2. Persuasion
3. Communication

No I may be an isolated case but I don't believe it has any major impact, It doesn't persuade me to watch MTV and I don't believe it communicates a real message to me, at least not a relevant one. So by those three principles, it is poor. Cool, and very nicely done, but poor.

feel free to disagree with me.

In the beginning

I started an Advertising Design course in September and I'm in my 8th/9th term week of it now (or something close to that). So far it's been pretty cool, you get a lot of creative freedom with an abundance of useful advice and help along the way. It's pretty intense, the work seems to come pretty thick and fast and December the 12th is the final Deadline for our first years advertising work, which includes 5 ad campaigns amongst a lot of other things, but I'd still recommend the course to anyone interested in being creative.

One of the first things I learned was that a blog or a website is eventually going to become vital for getting your work noticed. My "book" isn't exactly overflowing, it's early days yet, but I like the idea of being able to discuss the creative work of others or just general random crap that pops into my head.

Anyway yeah, this is just the first entry to get the ball rolling really, so I think I should probably include something "creative".
I found this a little while back, it's a stop motion animation called Muto and it's by Blu, really cool it is, enjoy...