Hello

hello – come in and make yourself at home

The Woodies have a blog. It’s a kind of collective. Not sure we’re about to start a revolution baby, but we might kindle a small debate or two and perhaps raise a smile. Anyway, rather than just blogging corporate Woodreed by fielding our top Woodie (as so many other companies seem to do in a thinly veiled attempt at impressing with their profundity), we wanted all our individual voices to be heard. An agency’s most valuable assets are its people after all. Everyone’s got something to say here and with us everyone’s ideas and opinions matter.

Each week someone different will be blogging. It's mostly about stuff that rocks our world as well as the flipside – the things that just don't cut it with us. We'll blog about inside and outside – inside this glorious industry where we work and outside in the real world.
It's a bit of an experiment, so go with us on this one.

Hope you enjoy.

Friday 29 July 2011

Inside out thinking for brands

Proof that getting the inside right is as important as getting the outside right.

According to Design Council innocent drinks ability to develop and sustain a creative culture has enabled them to remain true to their brand values.

“Crucial to the company’s success to date has been its employment strategy, striving to employ experts in every relevant field from ethical procurement to web design. Last year, Innocent was named as top employer by the Guardian newspaper. In the same year, the company recorded a turnover of £38 million – proof, if proof were necessary, that a commitment to company culture and wholesome brand values really can lead to outstanding commercial success.” (http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/innocent)

Tuesday 26 July 2011

A lost art of the Acct Manager

Back in the day, one of the main attributes that set good suits apart from the average was their ability to get scripts (both radio and tv) past the regulatory bodies. The old BACC and RACC as it was.
I'm sure we all watch ads now, and think 'that's a tad risky...' and indeed it may be. But pushing things to and past their limits is what it should be about. If it's not memorable for whatever reason, people forget it, don't buy it, and that campaign is deemed a failure. Even ads that get banned get coverage, and with the advance of YouTube it'll get aired no matter what.
The Lynx Acct Agency team have clearly got their defence / substantiation down to a fine art, as on the surface you'd argue that pretty much every one of their ads contravenes sections regarding 'enhancing perceived attractiveness to the opposite sex'.
Having a well structured and persuasive argument for supporting a principal, a thought, a creative route, a recipe.... is a skill in itself, and sometimes we are in too much of a rush to properly consider it. You wouldn't buy a half baked cake now would you?

Monday 18 July 2011

All aboard the boat


One of my favourite shops is Magma Books in Covent Garden, you always find some absolute treasures and during my latest visit I spotted the first edition of a new magazine called Boat.
What caught my eye initially was the headline SARAJEVO.
The editor has one goal - to tell a story.
So... he picked up his studio and moved it to Sarajevo for a month. The idea is to get people to take notice of amazing but forgotten cities around the world and update people's views of these places when the only information out there is dated and tied to past events.
"Since the war in the Balkans ended in 1996, the media has left and haven't returned, leaving the images and ideas we have in our heads of Sarajevo war-torn, gruesome and depressing."
Boat Magazine has been an inspiration to me on this very much forgotten city. The writing leaves you feeling connected to the lives of the people there, the photographs are breathtaking and moving, the stories humbling and haunting but most importantly the articles present a city of hope, of youth and of extremely talented people.
A must read if you happen to see this new and exciting magazine.


Friday 15 July 2011

Inspiring olfaction

That's the sense of smell to you and me, and a nice simple one today. My mascara smells all wrong - its not a designer brand, just good old Boots No. 7 but it smells of rotting fish. I've never known cosmetics smell of rotting fish before - makes me wonder what's in it. It's all wrong.

And yet smell can be such a wonderful, evocative thing. Some smells are just so right and some just so wrong. They can transport you back to places and people from decades past. Here are just a few of my faves and my hates - some predictable and some less so. And you might spot a theme in the hates.


Inspiring smells
The top of a new born baby's head (thanks Bono)
Home baked bread
Newly mown grass
Freshly brewed coffee
Summer rain
BBQ wafting in from next door's garden
Tanquerey and tonic, with lime of course
Lilies
Baked dry oregano and thyme on the air when you get off a plane in Greece
Slightly rotting damp vegetation when you land in SE Asia
Mint Source shower gel
A log fire, burning apple wood


Dire smells
Teenage boys
Lynx
Dog poo on your shoe
Car park stairwells
Burning rubber
Crop spraying in the orchards
One term old sports kit festering in a bag
Wine bottles waiting to go to bottle bank
Trainers

A log fire, burning a telegraph pole (oh yes!)

Anamorphiques trompe-l'oiel


I'd like to share with you this guy's amazing talent.

English street artist, Julian Beever’s sidewalk chalk drawings have been a viral hit all over the internet, and it’s easy to see why: he’s a master of the anamorphic technique, which he’s been perfecting since the mid 1990s.

Each of Julian’s creations take a full day to complete, and by the next day they’re just a memory, washed away by rain or walked upon by pedestrians.

Anamorphic illusions drawn in a special distortion in order to create an impression of 3 dimensions when seen from one particular viewpoint.

Images courtesy http://www.julianbeever.net



Thursday 14 July 2011

The selfish elite

My Friday nights are often spent in a bar catching up with friends. Most of the time conversation is light and friendly but on the odd occasion an interesting debate emerges out of a passing comment. Last Friday someone started ranting about iPad users.

Since then I discovered this article published on the 'mail online'.

"Are you wealthy, sophisticated and smart but don’t care about anybody else?
The chances are you own an iPad.

A survey has revealed the typical person who has bought Apple’s latest gadget is unkind and has little empathy for others.

They have been branded the ‘selfish elite’ by a poll of 20,000 consumers carried out by an American research company.

The £429 device has become the most desired gadget in Britain since its launch in May and 600,000 are expected to be sold before the end of the year.

But the next time you see someone sitting on a train smugly using theirs, take comfort from the fact they are probably not a nice person.

According to Tim Koelkebeck of MyType, which carried out the survey, iPad owners are six times more likely to be ‘wealthy, well-educated, power-hungry, over-achieving, sophisticated, unkind and non-altruistic 30-50-year-olds’.

They are self-centered workaholics with an overwhelming interest in business and finance who cherish ‘power and achievement’ and will not cross the street to help others, he added.

Mr Koelkebeck said that the high price was one reason why the iPad attracted such a specific clientele" (the mail online) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1298722/iPad-users-selfish-elite.html

Comments anyone?

Tuesday 12 July 2011

How lost are we without technology?

This is a real test and not rehearsed, written, to be re-written or carefully edited. As I type, my PC has been taken over by Cyrus the Virus and I find myself at the mercy of a pad and pen ( oh and this I-pad)
The point is, what happens when technology fails us.
We end up failing.
The average family spend 9 hours watching TV every week. What happens when that blows up?
What happens when the electricity shorts out for a bit - minutes end up feeling like hours or even days.
So reliant are we on gadgets and appliances we forget what it is like to do without.
Don't get me wrong, I like my tv and gadgets, but we need to be better rehearsed at what to do when technology fail us.
Dont Panic I believe the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy suggested - may be we should just open a book.

Sent from Si Pad so excuse grammatical and punctuation issues.

Friday 8 July 2011

The erosion of trust


Sorry to sound all maudlin on a Friday, I am coming over all Winston Smith - there’s something on my mind. It’s trust or rather the utter lack of it

Trust is such an evocative word. I’ve been thinking about it lots recently. It’s the most over promised and undelivered word there is. I saw a van the other day proclaiming that the company was ‘trusted to deliver’ Trusted by who, why should we believe them? Then the biggest explosion of trust occurred, the NOTW hacking scandal (creating one of the best headlines I’ve seen in ages in the Times this morning “Hacked to death”.)

Yes I know you can’t trust the media, which was no revelation in itself but the news the police had potentially received payments from journalists for information rocks the very foundations of trust in the UK. Can’t trust the media, can’t trust the police, can’t trust the politicians (see expenses scandal), can’t trust the banks. Those four institutions that potentially have so much power over our lives and not one of them can be trusted it seems. Too much knowledge, too much power too much greed.

Then there’s Google, one of the above or a genuine force for good? Unsure. They know more about us than all the others put together, they know what colour our curtains are for god’s sake. Knowledge is power, power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely after all. However in a similar way to how Bill Gates has used his fortune as a force for good, Google seems to be using its global reach to try to begin to tackle the world’s biggest problems. Google Ideas is forum that seeks to unite people to trust each other to search for solutions to world problems. The other week they had amassed the who’s who of the extremist world (the reformed types I hasten to add) to talk about how to fight extremism.

Perhaps it’s true that the older the institution the more likely corruption is going to happen while the optimism of youth keeps the new global super brands honourable in their motivations. But can we trust them? Who knows?

Wednesday 6 July 2011

Cobbler, baker, what next a candlestick maker?


What do you get when you combine the skills of a high fashion cobbler and a master patissier?

Trendy cupcakes!

A photographer I know who uses a unique light revolution system was commissioned to photograph not only the featured cup cakes, but also some noted neon signs in central London where the patisserie is.

Although not partial to cup cakes, I think the styling ideas and look of them is sensational.

You can actually leaf through some of the pages of the finished book, and read the story of how these two guys got together by going to this Amazon link (and read the forward by David Furnish and Sir Elton John).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cox-Cookies-Cake-Eric-Lanlard/dp/1845336445/ref=sr_1_4


Copyright Eric Lanlard, Patrick Cox and Patrick Llewelyn-Davies

Friday 1 July 2011

Incredibubble....

Marketing Age's piece on Salman Rushdie's recent speech at the IAPI's Advertising Effectiveness Awards is a great read. Here are some highlights. Of course we all know Sir Salman as an author and unwitting recipient of a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini but before that he was a copywriter - memorable campaigns like 'Naughty. But nice.' for fresh cream cakes and 'Irresistibubble' for Aero chocolate.

He talks about failing a copy test at JWT - including 100 words explaining how to make toast to a Martian who mysteriously spoke English (Charlotte one for the Monday workouts perhaps?)

He recounts working at Ogilvy's where you saw large numbers of people wearing red braces, because that's what David Ogilvy liked to wear - such sycophancy. “The other thing that we all knew about David Ogilvy was that when he was in the building you had to lock your desk before you left work because he would prowl around the agency and open people's drawers to see what was in there. Of course everybody there had sitcoms and novels and first drafts of plays, all kinds of unsuitable things, so you had to keep your drawer locked." So Dave, is that a film score on your Mac book?

But the story I really love is about Aero 'Irresistibubble' and how the campaign was born out of panic. He believes panic to be very helpful in the creative process. "The writer whose job it was to do this had frozen and was panicking and when he was panicking he'd begin to stammer". Rushdie was asked into his office to help as the client was due in that day. He describes the phone ringing and this poor chap panicking so much that his stutter became very pronounced and whatever he was asked he said he couldn't do - "It's impossib-ib-ib-ible". That was enough for Rushdie who thought ... ping! While the guy was still on the phone sweating and stammering he wrote down every word he could think of that ended with 'able' or 'ible' and turned it into 'bubble'. Hence, 'Adorabubble', 'Delectabubble', 'Irresistibubble' and 'Incredibubble'.

Rushdie says one of the most important things he learnt from his time in our industry was personal discipline. "One of the great things about advertising is you have to say a lot in very little. You have to try to make a very big statement in very few words or very few images and you haven't much time.

"Beyond that, it taught me to write like a job. If you have, as my sweating friend did, the client coming in that afternoon for his new campaign, you can't not have it. You have to have it. What's more, it has to be good. You can't afford temperament, you can't afford days of creative anguish; you have to sit there and do your job and you have to do it like a job, get it done on time and well."

Pretty inspiring stuff wouldn't you say?

If you want to know the story about 'Naughty. But nice' the read the article in full at http://www.businessandleadership.com/marketing/item/11676-a-writers-tale