Art & copy & cinema

I just spent half an hour going through the program for the upcoming Melbourne Film Festival.

As usual there's lots of interesting films to see. Especially the series dedicated to the original Melbourne punk scene.

Sadly Art & Copy is one film I didn't see listed in the Festival program.

Hopefully this film about adland will make its way down under eventually as it sounds fantastic.

Click here to find out more.

Good advice

Wisdom of Malcolm

Always knew Malcolm McLaren was a smart thinker, but I never thought his ideas from the 70's would fit so neatly into much of the way I go about my day to day life in the ad biz.

Thanx to Eaon for the pic.

Creative Twitter

These tweets by @grahamcreative appeared on Twitter yesterday.

Whilst I'm no fan of people offering to work for nothing, I love the silliness of advertising your creative services on Twitter.

So much more interesting than the usual social media guru self promos we normally see on Twitter.

To find out more click here to visit Graham's blog.

Wonder when we'll see an Aussie creative trying something like this?

I love Pina Coladas

Escape (The Pina Colada Song) is one of my fave guilty pleasures. So I had high expectations for this ad.

Boy was I disappointed.

What should have been a fun throwaway idea is seriously let down by non-existent production values and incredibly wooden acting.

Even the timesheet reference wasn't enough to make me love this dud by DraftFCB in the US.

The personal approach

Radiohead introduced a whole new way of retailing music with their album In Rainbows.

In addition to the pay what you want online release they also offered a very pricey special edition boxed set.

Now Nine Inch Nails have taken the Radiohead model a step further.

They offered a $300 deluxe version of their new album. It sold out in 2 days! Grossing them somewhere in the region of $750,000.

The album was released under a Creative Commons license, yet it managed to gross sales of $1.6 million.

Goes to show that if you have something worth buying people will pay for it.

So maybe the future is not, as many experts will tell you, all about free.

Maybe, just maybe, it's about offering something a little more personal.

Drive and drink

Love this car window decal. Reminds me a lot of the Carling iPint app for the iPhone.

It's an ad for a popular brand of Chinese beer.

Which is a bit of a shame to be honest because it would have made a terrific take a cab if you've been drinking ad.

Oh well.

How many is too many?

How many agencies does the average brand need?

Ask an old school adman and he'll tell you just one.

Chances are these days it more likely to be a couple.

But I doubt anyone reading this could guess how many agencies Sony work with in the UK.

Believe it or not it's 130. And no that's not a typo!

Rumour has it Sony are looking to whittle those 130 UK agencies down to just a handful.

Carl Pring, head of UK brand and advertising, told Marketing magazine that Sony UK wanted "consistency in its marketing activities."

Given that Fallon do most of the high profile Sony work, what on earth do the other 129 agencies work on?

Shred those documents

Gotta get me one of these! Especially as it comes with its very own USB cable. Click here to find out more.

Whole lotta Rosie

This wartime poster of Rosie the Riveter is one of the all time classic advertising images.

The inspiration for this was a hard working woman called Rosalie Kunert. Sadly Rosie as she came to be known passed away this week at the age of 86.

Yet for all the talk of Rosie the Riveter, that isn't the real Rosie in the poster! It's a model by the name of Geraldine Doyle.

You can read all about Rosie here.

Bubblegum rocks

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that music is important to me. So I think you can appreciate just how excited I was when I came across this collection of rockin' bubblegum cards. Brings back memories of the graduation invite that the RMIT advertising kids did a couple of years ago.

Is selfish is good

You really need to click the pic to appreciate this ad.

It's one of the nicest long copy ads I've seen in ages. Yet it doesn't use long copy. Well not in the traditional sense anyway.

Click the pic to enlarge and see for yourself.

Lovely work by BBDO Jo'burg.