Cardiff Advertising

IMG_0464, originally uploaded by julian marshall sykes findings.

Another piece of advertising I found on the streets of Cardiff this morning.

45 advertising brains

Do these ambient advertising techniques work?

Recession what should we all do?

It's funny that when recession hits peoples first instincts are to reduce their spend on nearly everything. Being a director in Hoffi a brand design business it obvious that I am going to say that our clients should keep there advertising and design budget the same and if they want to become a bigger player in the market then they should even look at spending more. However where is the proof? I came across this article via twitter and Paul Rowen. This is some of the first historic information I have found to support the concept of increasing spend during times of recession. 

See here for the article

Public advertising No2

The second piece I saw was from IKEA in the centre of town. Really nice fun piece os advertising again that made me remember it and as Seth Godin would say made it remarkable.

Public advertising No1

I have recently come across a number of really interesting advertising pieces all around Cardiff, this piece was for the up coming european voting. Not sure if it worked to highlight this but it was very memorable, really amazing models.

 

Barclays advert - keeping an eye on your money

On the 15th March Barclays announced the repositioning of their brand. The stills above show one of their new television adverts centred around trust – allowing the customer to keep their eye on their money. For those of you who have not seen the advert there are three safes and they run around with you having to guess the safe that has the bag of money in. The advert has a very playful feel and I don't think it is but the narrator sounds very similar to Jimmy Carr. The interesting idea about the advert is that once you have seen the advert then you kind of know what is going to happen. This is the case with all adverts but with this one in particular you can imagine the advert can become stale very quickly.

So for me this week was a stroke of genius the advert has once again been aired and initially it looks exactly the same, however the voice over is different and they have filmed a slightly different sequence. I therefore like the idea of an awareness of things becoming 'old news'. The shock of the new has been used to keep the message fresh to the customer. 

It's a bit like a brand new car, I always remember the first time I saw a Fiat Coupe, it was so different in design from any other car at the time, it was the first time I thought of a non-supercar being beautiful. Now over many years I feel very different and it seems boring. In time you things are taken fro granted and so it is always for a brand to refresh itself in someway.

Billboard give away

I recently attended a lecture given by Peter Snadden, his talk was about Japanese culture such as Hello Kitty. As well as talking about Hello Kitty he also spoke about current retail spaces and how they could potentially change in the future. In particular there was the question of retail spaces crossing over into galleries. I remember reading 'The Value of Things' a number of years ago which spoke about the relationship of how museum's have heavily influenced the original department stores such as Le Bon Marche and later Selfridges and Harrods. In recent time places such as the Californian cafe/shop/art space ROYAL/T, which looks at the relationship between this even further. For somewhere closer to home there is Dover Street market in London's Mayfair area. All of these were used as examples to show how the retail space is more and more becoming an experiential space that is not always obviously about selling 'kit'.

I was particularly interested though in the really challenging idea of those spaces that are even more obscure or indeed temporary. In a previous article I spoke about pop up stores and it is this idea of temporary and also the idea of pet architecture which was introduced to me for the first time through the lecture that really intrigues me. Pet architecture is  a really fun study of buildings that have 'grown' or 'chiseled' or 'fitted' into what many people would see as hugely built up areas. I will try and post a few images to demonstrate the idea in a future post. A very interesting piece of news I came across a few days ago, it made me think even further of what is a retail space. The above image is from Austrian Outfitters Northland Professional who produced a series of billboards that had samples of there clothing range attached to them. Each day the samples were replaced and the campaign took place of a period of a month. the idea is interesting on a number of levels. Firstly what has become known as tryvertising and trying before you buy also in this case the item can be kept and even passed on. For me I was interested how the billboard had almost for that month become a shop front for the company. A retail place if you like. 

Canadian Drink Driving TV advert

WARNING GRAPHIC CONTENT!!

Amnesty International Advertising Campaign

A great piece from Saatchi & Saatchi Highlighting Human rights in Belarus.

New Form of advertising

My first post of the year. Firstly may I wish everyone a very happy new year. I spent christmas and new year in India. It was only for 21 days but I had an amazing time. Went all over the place but I particularly liked this new form of advertising in one of the holiest of cities of India. During the next few months I am going to be publishing a number of other images and posts to share some of the things I have experienced. Hope you enjoy them.