Category: advertising

Visit the Spectacle


Poster by Cara Clara Murtagh

So the ICAD Upstarts programme has come to an end. We’re all in final prep mode for the exhibition — the Spectacle — which opens on Thursday night.

I’m looking forward to seeing finished work from the other Upstarts, both design and advertising, as well as the ‘grown-up’ ICAD members’ work too.

In the meantime, I’ve uploaded my own final work to the portfolio section under Deep RiverRock.

For this campaign, I wanted to reassure Dublin GAA fans that no matter how unwholesome their All Ireland celebrations, Deep RiverRock cleaned them.

ICAD Upstarts Brief 1 – Cawley Nea

Client
The Institute of Creative Advertising and Design

Objective
Encourage young creatives (final-year students and those with less than one year of experience) to join ICAD

Media/Budget
N/A

ICAD functions as a support network for Irish creatives. This led me to think about other support networks, and I hit upon the core idea:

Counselling for Creatives

I created a series of posters that could be distributed to colleges and universities that offer advertising or design courses, and Facebook ads (as these would also allow those of a creative mindset to be targeted more accurately).

I chose posters as they seemed like the best way to hit the people ICAD wanted to target. However, the executions themselves are quite scalable, and would work equally well in trade press or even as direct mail. The structure of the posters was also simplified to fit the character limit of Facebook ads, another place where those of a creative mindset could be targeted relatively accurately.

Many thanks to my mentor, Rory Hamilton at Boys and Girls, for his advice and feedback on this brief!

Links dead at the moment. Will be fixed soon.

Making a Name for Myself

The day is here: the ICAD Upstarts programme starts tonight, and I’ll be strolling down to Bonfire Advertising to meet the other Upstarts and our mentors for the next six weeks of workshops.

We were asked to make a nametag for the first meeting, so I decided to make a wee backlit LED one. A quick lunchtime hop to Maplins and O’Sullivans, and I had all the materials I needed.

The first step was to flip my name backwards in Illustrator and print it out. After taping it to the black card I was using for the tag itself, I used a hobby knife to carve out the letters.

After that, I stuck a bit of layout paper to the ‘inside’ of the tag: thin paper that would let the LEDs shine through.

Next up, I wired together the circuit for the LEDs. I wasn’t exactly concerned with a tidy appearance, and it looked distinctly IED at this stage.

Finally, I strung the LEDs through the inside and stuck it all together. It was done, though it still looked slightly like an IED hidden in a piece of black card.

Unfortunately, as you can see, the light from the LEDs wasn’t quite strong enough to illuminate the whole thing, but I’ll chalk it down to experience. It was fun making it, and now I’ve a heap of wires, resistors, and LEDs that need to be made into something else.

For the time being I have to head along to the first of the Upstarts workshops; after that, we’ll see what else I can cobble together.

Four Things I Learned from Portfolio Night 9

It had to happen sometime.

After nine months of college, countless late nights, and 0.38 sequoias-worth of scrunched up paper, those of us in the DIT MSc Advertising creative stream took our books into our arms, marched nervously down to Ogilvy Dublin and prepared to face down creative directors for the first time in our careers. Or what would hopefully become careers.
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Inspiration

Inspiration

Busy week here in DIT, as the Project kicked off on Tuesday.

The client is the Road Safety Authority, and the brief is to devise a campaign to stop drivers texting when behind the wheel.

I’m really delighted with it, and hugely thankful to both the RSA and Irish International for setting the brief. It’s a hugely interesting topic, and I can’t wait to get to grips with it as a creative.

As I said, it’s been a hectic week, so there’s not much to report that isn’t project-related. We are building up a nice little pile of inspiration, though!

What Would Don Draper Do?


Image by Sara Goodman (and AMC, probably)

So here’s the thing: I’m currently studying for the MSc Advertising in Dublin Institute of Technology.

I’m in the creative stream of said course, with my particular goal (as this site may have mentioned in one or two places) being to emerge from the course in six weeks time as a reasonably skilled copywriter, with a portfolio that’s not absolute muck, and to wedge my way into an internship in the hopes of getting some real experience.

Before I get there, however, we have to get through what is referred to as The Project. You can hear the capitals.

The Project involves splitting the class in two, arming us with machetes and Mausers, and goading us into a Battle Royale with the promise of internships. Okay, maybe not. It does involve splitting us into two groups, setting up each group as a mini advertising agency, and giving us a real brief from a real client. For six weeks, we do everything as it would be done in Real Life.

At the end, we stand up in a big room and pitch the campaign we’ve developed to the client. And also to the heads and decision makers of every agency in Dublin. In effect, every potential employer in the country will be there to see us strut. It’s an amazing opportunity, and it’ll be a great experience for us.

It’s also slightly terrifying if you’re one of those chosen to take responsibility. I’ve been given the position of creative director for one of the agencies, and I’m equally honoured, excited, and scared.

For anyone who doesn’t know advertising: creative director is the Don Draper position. The creative director manages the copywriters and art directors who come up with the ideas for ads, and decides what to run with for the campaign.

For anyone who doesn’t know me: I don’t exactly rock Don’s swagger.

I’m nervous about the whole thing, because there’s a lot of really good creatives in my ‘agency’ that I want to do justice (including the also-wordy Conor Flynn). They’ve done brilliant stuff throughout the year, and now I want to give them room to keep doing so.

The challenge for them is to produce good work. The challenge for me is entirely different. As I see it, my job is to shepherd them along while actually controlling them as little as possible. The last thing I want to do is restrict them.

The Project kicks off on Tuesday.

It’s gonna be interesting.

And a whole lot of fun.

Stop Eating Daddy, Darling: the Trouble with Videogame Advertising

Video games are very big business: the biggest entertainment industry in the world, in fact. As revenues and budgets grow, production values rise, and consequently, the advertising grows ever more interesting.

In the last few years, I’ve seen numerous teasers and trailers for video games that go beyond ‘That looks like fun’ and into the realm of genuine storytelling.

The Mad World trailer for the original Gears of War was a simple idea that worked because it went beyond the guns-and-guts mechanics of shoot-’em-up games. Instead, it recognised the increasing confidence in games as legitimate storytelling devices instead of brainless diversions. The trailer for the sequel, Last Day, again focused on the characters and their stories, not the game mechanics.

I’m a gamer myself, though I’m hardly hardcore — I’ve never beaten Ruby Weapon. I’m glad to see gaming emerge from the ‘just for kids’ pigeonhole and speak to its predominently adult audience on an equal level. I look for games with strong, engaging narratives: the Mass Effect and Fallout series being perfect examples.

But what’s interesting about game trailers is that as technology develops, more and more in-game footage is being used to create cinematic trailers. The launch trailer for Modern Warfare 2 was entirely composed of scenes from the game itself, cut together with an Eminem track to build anticipation for the game. And it worked: the macho, bullet-porn game trailer rivalled any Hollywood blockbuster for spectacle and hype.

We can acknowledge that the power of a good trailer to build buzz is well-understood by developers and publishers. However, a recent example points out the problems that come with this territory. The trailer for Dead Island is problematic in that it doesn’t contain any footage from the game. Instead, it simply builds buzz with an (admittedly excellent and emotional) animated short film.

The criticism levelled at Dead Island is that this trailer is being used to promote a game that could be nothing more than average, and is doing so by portraying the game as something it’s not. As if to support the critics, more and more trailers are appearing online using in-game footage to promote the product: Batman: Arkham City for one.

As an advertisement, does this practice lie to gamers by offering an inaccurate portrayal of the game, or is it acceptable to write it off as a teaser or mood piece? The issue will only be settled when the game is released: after all, the narrative in the game proper could be as heart-wrenching as the story of the family in the trailer.

However, the probable truth is that the trailer that (very successfully) stoked the interest of gamers will have only a tenuous connection to the product that is actually being sold. Is this unethical advertising, or is it simply a case of caveat emptor?