Wildlife organizations have jumped on the bandwagon in recent years to ‘save the pandas’ forgetting that there are other endangered animals in the world.

A TVC created by Ogilvy & Mather Chicago for APES (A Project of the Conservation Trust) highlights the importance of conserving all wildlife—not just the ‘cute’ ones that everyone adores.

“The panda is the ‘poster child’ for wildlife conservation and when it comes to preservation and protection, it really is ‘survival of the cutest’, not the fittest. We wanted to shine light on the ‘forgotten’ primates, centering our story around a gorilla who sadly knows his chances of protection are greater if he appears more like a panda.” said APES founder, Lee Theisen-Watt.

Are we all guilty of only liking the just the cute ones?

I love W+K and Droga5, I love BBH, and Sid Lee. They are all agencies who repeatedly change the status quo and do this with intelligence, grace, soul and a lot of heart. In this category I also place G, S & P, or Goodby, Silverstein and Partners.

If you really want to understand why I love them so much, there’s no better time. They’ve just celebrated their 30th anniversary. And the way they found to celebrate it is to post  their 30 favourite TV commercials.

Have a look at their 30 for 30 here and see why they are so incredibly awesome. 30 years of work for ever weaved into popular culture. Smart, rewarding to watch, often funny and surprisingly still working after so many years.

And because it’s almost the weekend, see here another demonstration of why they are on my list of agency crushes. Probably the best Harlem Shake eva ,sorta.

Enjoy!

Yas Waterworld Abu Dhabi recently launched their ladies night and we had a lot of fun developing the campaign.  The brief was to showcase how cool the park looks at night and to create advertising that would be exciting.

The photographer Martin Beck helped bring our vision to life, and the talent was a great sport as she was hung upside down for the duration of the shoot.  The campaign appeared in lifestyle magazines and was also featured on Yas Waterworld’s facebook page and website.

Ladies night at Yas Waterworld takes place every Thursday from 5:00pm  – 10:00 pm.  Book your tickets online today! 

Created for Maki-San, Singapore’s first DIY sushi restaurant, the colourful identity features a number of patterns made up using hand-drawn ingredients (such as prawns and avocados). Overall the whole thing comes together really well, from packaging, stationery, instore and online.

Formerly named Hiring Solutions Company, our client approached us for a full brand building service. Following an extensive naming exercise, Hiring Solutions Company adopted the new name Cazar (meaning “to hunt” in Spanish). We then looked at their product portfolio and structured everything in a strategic manner underneath the new parent brand before embarking on a visual identity exercise for the company.

The new Cazar brand launched in March 2013. We managed every aspect of the implementation, including corporate communications and web development.

We are extremely proud of the final product. It was rewarding to be part of the birth of another new brand.

Dove have just released another addition to it’s Dove for Real Beauty Campaign.  The principal behind the campaign is to celebrate the natural physical variation embodied by all women and inspire them to have the confidence to be comfortable with themselves.  One that I am sure you will remember is the time lapse Evolution TVC from 2006.

This latest campaign, Dove Real Beauty Sketches focuses on women being their own worst beauty critics.

Only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful.  Dove are committed to creating a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety.  So with the help of an FBI training forensic artist they explore how women view their own beauty in contrast to how others see them.

Remember you are more beautiful than you think.

Well, I think talking about road handling and road holding falls pretty much in the same category. It usually leads to a bunch of visual puns and too many geckos for my taste.

But here comes experiential, and a brilliant idea from Audi mixing good old fashion model making and toy racing cars with social media and mobile apps. Welcome the Audi Quattro Experience, an interactive installation giving viewers a chance to know what it feels like to drive an Audi A4 quattro.

Almost!

In fact passers-by in Toronto were offered to race miniature models of an Audi A4 around a custom-built 6 x 2m racing track using an iPad to control the car. The iPad app was paired with an in-car camera which gave the driver the perspective from the driver’s seat, a first for this kind of installation.

This is a great way to get people to experience the Audi in a truly interactive way and fits nicely with their push to be an innovative brand.

If you enjoyed it, check out the full length making-off right here:

Now I feel like buying a racing track for my boys…

“I want!”

“I want!” is the English equivalent of Qtel Group’s new brand name. What is one of the world’s fastest-growing telecommunications companies will from now on be known as Ooredoo, meaning “I want” in Arabic.

In my opinion it was really just a matter of time before this re-branding occurred. Qtel Group hails from Qatar and has a controlling interest in brands such as Qtel in Qatar, Indosat in Indonesia, Wataniya in Kuwait, Nawras in Oman, Tunisiana in Tunisia, and Nedjma in Algeria.

To leverage the power of its reach Qtel had to somehow pull all these brands together with a single new brand that clearly shows the strength of the company through visibility across the Middle East, North Africa and South-East Asia. Each of the Operating companies will shift over to the new Ooredoo brand by the end of 2014.

To stay competitive the company certainly needs a single, recognizable, global brand. A name such as Ooredoo will help them to get there. While it remains true to the company’s Arabic roots, it is still easily pronounced by a multitude of nationalities. It is also memorable.

What I’m not so sure about is the colour and design of the identity. Red is a very ubiquitous colour in the communication industry – most notably Vodafone. Another reference is the Neqaty rewards programme by powerful telco Mobily which already owns an almost exact “bubble” design.

One thing is clear though. Ooredoo has big plans. They’ve announced that legendary Barcelona football player Lionel Messi is their new global brand ambassador.

It will be interesting to see how Ooredoo differentiates itself clearly over the next two years to become a brand that every customer wants, as the new brand name suggests.

However at the event Facebook instead announced the launch of Facebook Home, a new app for Android phones, which inevitably caused quite a stir online. Hailed by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a means to convert your “Android phone into a great social device”, its main feature is called Cover Feed which embeds your Facebook newsfeed directly onto your Home & Lock screen. Once installed it appears to ‘take over’ the phone, creating a new layer on top of the Android experience, a layer which Facebook controls. This has led many to speculate a forthcoming battle between Google & Facebook.

But I don’t think it’s going hugely successful or something Google should be concerned about. Here are a few points to consider:

• Not everyone uses Facebook and even those that do don’t revolve their lives around it. As the much quoted Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research said, “Facebook thinks it’s more important to people than it actually is.”
• Facebook Home is Facebook centric, it doesn’t appear to play friendly with other messaging platforms but we use many other methods to communicate: Twitter, SMS, WhatsApp, email etc. Of these it appears that only SMS will appear in the feed.
• Do you really want your Facebook newsfeed appearing on your phone’s lock screen? Like many people when I sit down at a table I often place my phone on the table. With an eclectic group of Facebook friends do I really want all their postings appearing on my phone in public or in a business meeting?
• The reverse of that is of course, do you want your private postings appearing front and centre on other peoples phones? Privacy has never been Facebook’s strong point and there will be no way now to control where your content eventually appears.
• Lastly, how long before your phone becomes a walking billboard as Facebook start embedding adverts on your home screen? Worse, as many of these adverts are targeted on personal data some of these adverts may reveal more information than anticipated. For a taste of what effects this can have seen the trouble Google AdWords caused Gavin Barwell.

Facebook Home does appear to have some interesting features but I can’t help feeling that this application has been a little too aggressive in its implementation and reflects Facebook’s self-importance. Combine that with the concerns raised so far and I don’t think it will be as successful or as dangerous to Google as people are implying.

What is for certain is that smartphone users are increasingly using their phones to access online information and companies like Facebook and Google are struggling to monetise these platforms through adverts. The companies are battling for control of the content delivered to your smartphone and it will be interesting to see if and how Google reacts to this latest move from Facebook and whether it will stick to it’s motto “Don’t be evil”.

So in this post, in order of appearance, I’ll post 4 in one go. A wedding celebration, two birthdays and a new win. All of them we celebrated as we should.

First, Prasath’s Birthday

Which we also celebrated the same day as Rebecca’s newly announced wedding:

Then Khaled’s birthday celebration, just a couple of days later.

And finally, we ended the month on a high note celebrating a 3-month long pitch:

Kudos to the organising committee. I just don’t know how they find the time.