Postcard from Hawaii - CLIO2013 (without giving anything away)

Spent last week locked in a windowless room assessing work in the Direct and Engagement categories for this years CLIO awards...in Hawaii no less.

One thing that became clear during the week has been that the delineations between the various disciplines in advertising are getting fuzzier and fuzzier. And while the term engagement might seem hackneyed already, it may yet turn out to be where all the cutting-edge communications sit. Obviously, I'm sworn to secrecy, so I won't even reveal the handful of tropes that have become almost commonplace during the sessions, but I can report a couple of thoughts that are indicative of where things might be heading.

1) Unsurprisingly, social media is everywhere. Very few entries didn't feature it in some form or other, but what often separated the men from the boys was how they used it. The best had a clear idea of an outcome they were striving for and regarded the inevitable viral activity has a lucky bonus, while the less-worthy seemed to regard social media mentions as an end in itself–a sort of spray-and-pray strategy that seemed more like PR than anything else.

2) Print is definitely feels like a forgotten medium. There were pretty much no solus traditional mail packs–everything was tied to or part of a wider collection of activity.

3) That said, with case study films for most of the entries, it was interesting how inspecting the physical items changed the jury's mood and provided some much-needed energy and relief from staring at a screen all day.

4) Most interesting were a number of sophisticated and intelligently thought out campaigns aimed at behavioural change, some of which featured no discernable messaging at all. They were pure exercises in getting people to think and act differently, usually by the deployment of prompts, nudges and changes-of-incentives.

The biggest challenge we face here is defining engagement and unravelling it from direct as a category. It might be that engagement is a catch-all hopper for work that is otherwise category-agnostic or that it's work that drives a range of behaviours, rather than the singular purpose of direct. It might also be that it's work that is aimed at changing people's behaviours but without the rigid direct-like marriage to a metric or that it's work that's aimed at attitudes and feelings, not just behaviours.

I certainly feel privileged to have been part of this definition process and to have witnessed so much amazing work from around the world in one week. I feel that I've glimpsed the future of advertising. I'm not quite so sure where print will in all of this, but if the future simply means that anything goes then it will certainly have a role to play.

Thank you to all the CLIO team for their impeccable organisation and for making me feel so welcome (and for flying me to Hawaii). It worth it, even though we were locked in a windowless room for the week.

A tour of ARTOMATIC buildings

I wandered past our very first studio in Curtain Road, Shoreditch a few days ago. The temporary hoarding that had been up a while had been removed and the original fascia is still there, just painted black. It's now part of Strongroom Studios, which were there when we were there in the 80's along with Malcolm Garrett's Assorted Images–the first designers in Shoreditch, when it was just a dirty one-way system on the outskirts of the city.

I've often thought it odd that all the ARTOMATIC buildings are strangely intact. 

Our second studio, in Wharf Road, Islington doesn't seemed to have changed one iota, indeed it's now the home of Nirvana who do much the same as ARTOMATIC now.

Our third (and fifth) premises in Acton, which was a proper factory (we'd grown tired of man-handling pallets of paper across the cobbled courtyard of the Wharf Road building) and is now home to a faceless food processing company. So faceless, in fact, the original screen-printed sign is still on the door.

I'd not been passed the fourth one, in Shelford Place in Stoke Newington for a long time and had assumed that, given the trendiness of Stokey nowadays (we had a habit of occupying all the achingly trendy neighbourhoods while they were still industry-friendly), it'd had been redeveloped. But, no, according to Mr Google, again, the building is exactly as we left it.

The fifth and last building, the site of the ARTOMATIC shop and Library in Clerkenwell is, again, exactly as we left it. The present occupiers haven't touched it a bit, and have even kept our original projecting sign, just replaced the graphic with theirs.

I'm sure this is a meaningless coincidence, but it does seem a little odd that none of these buildings have been extensively redeveloped or knocked down or even re-purposed. 

House of Illustrious

Martyn Ware and Vince Clark's anthology of their ambient collaboration is a hefty 10 CD set.

Martyn's close friend, Malcolm Garrett was asked to help create a suitable "desirable object" befitting the significance of the audio feast on the discs. So, way back in May 2011, Malcolm and I started to kick around some ideas on what it might look like.

Our principle challenge was how to package 10 CD's compactly and without creating loads of different unnecessary bits. After a few false starts, we settled on an idea we'd used many years back for a CD for Alexander McQueen, which used to thick acrylic discs to sandwich a CD on an acrylic spindle that screwed the discs together.

10 CD's would require a longer spindle, but initial tests showed it to be very weak and both prototypes we had made in the far east (which I don't like doing) broke in transit. The solution was to make the spindles from metal, which also made the discs simpler, so it could all be made in the UK. For authenticity's sake, the chance to make the spindles in Sheffield was too good to miss as was engraving the spindles with 'Made in Sheffield'.

With that in place, we then thought about how to house it. Again, after a few cardboard missteps, settled on sitting the whole CD / acrylic set into a solid block of foam, given a water jet finish to mimick granite and with the Illustrious bitmap logo engraved into the front face. 

The real challenge was that the acrylic had to fit exactly into the aperture in the foam, requiring an interference fit that made it easy to remove but snug enough to hold it if lifted from a table top (the last thing we wanted was for the heavy acrylic / CD set to fall out of the foam onto the floor).

Martyn and Malcolm were also insistent the surface of the acrylic be exactly flush with the foam, which was difficult because there are variances of up to 1mm in the thicknesses of the acrylic discs. This meant making a number of foam and acrylic prototypes in varying thicknesses to find the best match for the foam and to then match the pairs of acrylics to a uniform overall thickness of 16mm combined.

Mute Records, who were releasing it, were generous with the schedule and, unusually, we had enough time to resolve all these problems prior to production, the only hiccough being the celo-wrapping that kept the booklet attached to the main pack and kept it from getting damaged. 

Unusual sized CD formats in limited editions (1000) are usually shrink-wrapped because it's easy, cheap and quick and requires no adjustment from one format to another. However, it marked the crystal finish on the foam and blunted the corners, making it look less like stone, more like black soap. Thus, we had to opt for celo-wrapping, which is normally used for mass manufactured products like tea bags, perfumes and cigarettes and because it requires lengthy set-ups to get right.

One of the few packaging houses to even consider short run celo-wrapping proved not to be a wise choice, so a couple of days from the release date, I found myself driving the whole job up the M6 to a fantastic company called B&L Contract Packing who, with otherwordly patience, made it work perfectly.

The finished set is available here, if you're interested.

 

Making the MarketReach business cards

The idea for the business cards was prompted by a thought from the client, MarketReach, initially. Their positioning thought is We believe In The Power Of Real Things and had thought about producing cards with images of their consutants' favourite objects on the back. Some of these objects were quite obscure (like a lipstick) and extended the connection with Real Things almost beyond a connection with print and thus mail.

We wanted to make a clearer connection with print, mail and more importantly, maximise the medium of business cards in thier crucial function as an introduction.

What we wanted to capture was the twinkle in the eye that comes when people talk about their personal passions. Essentially, people succeed in sales positions because of the force of their personality–people buy people. It was also an opportunity to convey the indivuality of the people within the structure of the organisation.

The project was kicked off by interviewing the consutants to get to what made them happy and provided their own personal fulfillment. It was easy to tell when we'd discovered it–you could see it their eyes–and that's what we wanted to capture for them in front of their customers.

With that, it was a question of identifying the signifying object and an appropriate material that would work as a business card. More interesting was that it wasn't necessary for the connection between passion, object and material to be obvious. Ultimately, these are conversation-starters and it's up to the consultants to explain the connection (we briefed them on the techniques used to make them).

Then it was a question of making them. This involved sourcing materials and finding suitable print and manufacturing techniques. The diversity of materials meant a lot of phone calls, mostly to people I don't know and often involving asking them to do something outside of their normal activities. 

Ultimately, this project was an exercise in trial-and-error. We took risks on trying things that hadn't been done and, crucially, because we had authority over both the concept and the production execution, we were able to make big changes to how they were produced without having to revert to the client or an external designer–had we have done, the project would have taken months, not weeks to deliver.

Billion Dollar Babies mailer

My good friend Paul Foster does new business development for creative companies under the name, Billion Dollar Babies. He's very good at what he does and is quite clear about his proposition–to get them meetings they wouldn't get themselves at a fraction of the cost of hiring new business people full time.

There's all manner of companies offering business development services of varying quality, so Paul wanted something that was irresistably arresting and that went to the heart of their ambition–growing their business and making money. Hence, the idea of printing on a real dollar bill. Since his business is calling other people, we deliberately left off any contact numbers, so they get the mailer and wait for his call, thus getting the authentic experience of his approach.

The bills were letterpressed at Axminster Printing–a small local print shop in Devon–and they kindly took some fantastic photographs of the bills on their small Heidelberg press.

Putting the bills on a printing press makes another association we were keen to invoke–that of printing money–the outcome hiring Billion Dollar Babies can make to any of its clients.

The notes were sent out in US-sourced envelopes, with their distinctive yellow-manila colour and a Royal Mail airmail sticker just for laughs. Oddly, American stationery shops don't make envelopes to exactly fit their currency, which meant we had to trim the dollar bills a millimetre or so–and putting a wad of cash under a two-tonne guillotine is a sobering sight.

Paul doesn't have a URL for client-confidentiality reasons, but if you're interested in hiring him, he can be contacted at paul[at]billiondollarbabies[dot]biz