Nike has used 1,440 clips of cricketers, expertly edited and meticulously pieced together for a spot that celebrates the Cricket T20. It’s an amazing piece of content and really does rival anything that the brand has done in football – which is going some.
There’s good news and then there’s great news. This falls into the latter category.
We’ve heard that we are to work with Disney Interactive Studios and with Disney Infinity as their European creative agency – a brief that encompasses coming up with creative centrally that can be implemented in local markets across EMEA and delivering global launch events and stunts for some exciting new titles.
For those who don’t know, DIS do all of the brands mobile games – not just for Disney branded properties, but also for Star Wars amongst many others.
Disney Infinity, meanwhile, is their “sandbox” interactive gaming platform in which you can play across a host of Disney and Disney Pixar worlds – including Cars, the Incredibles, Toy Story, Pirates of the Caribbean, Tangled and Frozen (just for starters!).
Work has kicked off pretty immediately and we are hard at work getting planning kits written and implementing a couple of the ideas we’ve already developed for them ahead of some exciting new developments for the rest of the year. Watch this space for more as that happens.
… unless you’ve a proud motor racing heritage and happen to make lawn mowers. Honda is one of the few brands in the world that can claim both …
We found out this week that we’ve made our debut in the Holmes Report Sabre Awards shortlists with four campaigns up for gongs.
Our O2 campaigns for Chargers out of the Box (for Best Corporate Image) and for O2 Walkie Talkies (for Best Telecoms) both get the nod for the mobile phone giant.
In other news, we’ve been shortlisted twice for Best Consumer Campaign for an Existing Product. Meantime’s Hops in a Box and The Royal Mint’s “Silver Penny Fit for a Prince” are both up for gongs.
We now have to wait until the glittery event in May to find out whether we can turn any of those into wins. But in the meanwhile the team’s made up to make the list …
Then at the end of this week we’ve been told we’re up for four awards at the CIPR Excellence Awards. Which is lovely – only Brands2Life and Unity were more-shortlisted.
O2 got the nod for Best CSR Campaign for the Big UpCycle while The Royal Mint is up for Best Public Sector Campaign. Meantime bagged a brace of shortlist appearances, up for Best Integrated Campaign and for Best Digital Campaign.
Awesome work by all the teams involved across all the shortlisted – a cracking performance altogether.
From South Africa, for Bells …
What’s more our pants idea got some rather splendid coverage, with Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, City AM, Grazia, Pocket-Lint, Digital Spy and a host of others picking it up as a favourite.
Meanwhile Capital FM Breakfast’s very own Dave Berry was seen sporting them on air as he tried to work off his breakfast in clenches. Of course they saw fit to give Virgin Active a cheeky mention!
Oh … and the marketing trades rather liked the story too. Hence we found ourselves with memorable mentions across Campaign (who used our story as their own April Fool’s story), Marketing Week, Media Week, The Drum and AdWeek … even Management Today got in on the act.
What a “cracking” day’s work.
If you’re in London then you can’t have missed the fact that Selfridges is all about the board sports inspiration right now.
That’ll be why we found ourselves in the Old Selfridges Hotel car park – deep beneath the streets of London – launching the whole shebang last night. And following fast on the pretty awesome HTC One (m8) launch, it’s all part of a full-on week in H&G.
Anyway, we won’t trouble you overmuch with the ins and outs, but suffice to say that the team has pulled out some stunning coverage (with some crackers in the pipeline and about to hit the page).
Stand-out pieces came from Vogue, UJ, Dazed and HypeBeast, while The Guardian, Evening Standard and ITV all saw fit to cover the launch. Then there were some stunners across the blogs – consumer tech and street sports – with Digital Spy, CNet, GadgetsBoy, Pursuitist and MPora just some of the crackers the team has landed.
Here’s a little teaser for it. Worth a watch …
It’s been all hands to the pumps over the past few weeks for the team on HTC as we’ve been helping the Taiwanese technology and design company to launch their all-new HTC One (m8), the latest and greatest iteration of their award-winning smartphone.
The programme has been gruelling for all concerned, with over 40 journalists put through pre-briefings, hands-on reviews, video and photography sessions before the phone was confirmed. The list of media who got to see the new HTC One (m8) in action read like a who’s who of national, consumer and consumer tech media as all of the great and good tripped through the office to see the handset in action.
Then – the centrepiece of it all – there was yesterday’s showcase media event.
Olympia saw over 600 journalists from across Europe head in to see Phil Blair (EMEA head), Cher Wang (founder and Chair) and Scott Croyle (HTC’s Head of Design) take to the stage to present the new phone. With over 100 UK media, we had the world and it’s wife present to see the official launch … from The Guardian, Evening Standard, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror and The Times to ITV News and all the major broadcasters to every one of the major onlines that matter. Alongside a fair smattering of lifestyle and design media – from Dezeen, Core77, Wallpaper* and co to Esquire, ShortList and Mr Hyde.
Having filled (and nearly over-filled) the main hall at Olympia, the media were able to get their hands on the new phones with hundreds of demonstration models available to enable the assembled media to get up close-and-personal and feel the beauty of the design, experience the radically revamped Blinkfeed, experience the power and elegance of BoomSound and see all that the dual-lens camera enables from a creative perspective.
It was pretty awesome to see.
And, as you might expect, as the handset was revealed, the news and reviews hit the web.
So far, we’ve had over 300 pieces of coverage from the launch – with all of them wildly positive about the new phone.
There were stunning write-ups in The Guardian, Daily Mirror, Independent, Daily Telegraph, Daily Mail. The handset has cropped up on the front cover of both Stuff and T3 Magazines (not a bad little feat and some fancy footwork required to pull that one off). Stuff named it the best handset in the world in a belting two-page review, while T3 gave glowing feedback and made it number two in its Hot List of the best tech in 2014 (one place behind Google and five ahead of Samsung, ten ahead of Apple – can’t say fairer).
To say that there has been some pretty extensive coverage from the consumer tech folk would be an understatement on an epic scale. From Digital Spy announcing it’s a “design that puts its rivals to shame” to Pocket Lint‘s five stars to top-class coverage across Mashable, Wired, Gizmodo, HuffPo, The Verge, CNet (another five stars) and quite literally hundreds of others besides. It’s been epic.
So there you have it … a rather successful launch altogether. And one that we couldn’t have pulled off without the epic talents of the EMEA team at NBC and all the other lovely people who were involved.
