Category Archives: baby creative

THE White Pencil

Posted on April 13, 2011 | Leave a comment

D&AD (Design & Art Direction) turns 50 next year.To mark its birthday, the D&AD Awards will now distribute a White Pencil, in addition to its two coveted Black and Yellow Pencils. The D&AD is an institution that exists to encourage, inspire, and celebrate creativity in the design and communications world, and winning at their annual awards ceremony is quite the achievement for anyone in our world.

The White Pencil will be bestowed upon those behind a creative idea that “changes the world for the better,” and 2012 will mark its debut. We’re very excited about this one because we covet ideas that inspire change, and can only imagine the competition that this award will stir up amongst all creative minds.

Essentially, each year D&AD will partner with a charitable organisation and challenge the creative world to develop a communications strategy for them. The accolade will then be awarded to the creators of the idea that D&AD members feel will inspire positive behavioural change in the world.

From our many dealings with charitable organisations, we have come to realise that truly inspiring campaigns require the most creative thinking if they plan to do more than just raise awareness — they have to get people talking and acting. Hence, we are very excited to see what amazing creativity will come of this award each year. The 2012 partner organisation will be Peace One Day (read the brief from D&AD here), who aim to promote the acknowledgment of World Peace Day on 21 September.

Let the games begin!

(Sources: Creative Review and D&AD)

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F is for Font (and Friday)

Posted on March 25, 2011 | Leave a comment

Sometimes a font can make or break an advertisement, so here at Baby we love a good font. Artist Chris Labrooy clearly shares the same appreciation, and has executed some well-known fonts in a clever architectural way:

In the same collection, Labrooy paid homage to some legendary architects:

Frank Gehry

Zaha Hadid

Oscar Niemeyer

Ettore Sottsass

We love how Labrooy made these fonts come to life, offering a 3D image of them in an unprecedented way. We also like how he incorporated household objects into a place where they seemingly wouldn’t belong, but do not appear out of place in any way.

Our ad this week isn’t an image or video, but a humourous job posting for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune:

We do a mix of quick hit investigative work when events call for it and mini-projects that might run for a few days. But every year we like to put together a project way too ambitious for a paper our size because we dream that one day Walt Bogdanich will have to say: “I can’t believe the Sarasota Whatever-Tribune cost me my 20th Pulitzer.” As many of you already know, those kinds of projects can be hellish, soul-sucking, doubt-inducing affairs. But if you’re the type of sicko who likes holing up in a tiny, closed office with reporters of questionable hygiene to build databases from scratch by hand-entering thousands of pages of documents to take on powerful people and institutions that wish you were dead, all for the glorious reward of having readers pick up the paper and glance at your potential prize-winning epic as they flip their way to the Jumble… well, if that sounds like journalism Heaven, then you’re our kind of sicko.For those unaware of Florida’s reputation, it’s arguably the best news state in the country and not just because of the great public records laws.

We have all kinds of corruption, violence and scumbaggery. The 9/11 terrorists trained here. Bush read My Pet Goat here. Our elections are colossal clusterfucks. Our new governor once ran a health care company that got hit with a record fine because of rampant Medicare fraud. We have hurricanes, wildfires, tar balls, bedbugs, diseased citrus trees and an entire town overrun by giant roaches (only one of those things is made up). And we have Disney World and beaches, so bring the whole family.

We love the brutal honesty of the post especially in light of the dwindling newspaper market. We also appreciate its poking fun of infamous Floridian mishaps – what journalist would want to go anywhere else?

Happy Friday!

(Sources: My Modern Met and Boing Boing)

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Nature’s Music

Posted on March 16, 2011 | 1 Comment

You know those albums featuring the sound of rain falling, or waves crashing, that are meant to be calming and meditative? Well this is much more interesting. We came across this video today of sound designer/composer Diego Stocco playing a tree. By tuning the branches of a tree in his backyard with a pencil and plucking, bowing, or stethoscope-ing them, Stocco created a full song:

We were so intrigued that we sought out some more Diego Stocco productions, and this is what we found:

The most awesome part of the video above? Diego invented the instrument he is playing in it! It’s called the Experibass, and Diego was inspired to create it in order “to hear the sound of violin, viola and cello strings amplified through the body of a double bass.”

We love that Diego combines his artistically toned ear and appreciation for nature to create such beautiful music. He has an admirable ability to hear the beauty in things that  others hear without a second thought everyday.

(Sources: Boing Boing and DSSessionVideos)

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Posted in art, baby creative, creative, design, environment, green, Plants, video

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Good Friday

Posted on March 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

We love Fridays. We especially love this Friday because we saw the sun for more than 20 seconds! We also fancy good news, and we’ve heard some today. WPP, the world’s largest advertising company and owner of ad powerhouses JWT and Ogilvy & Mather among others, announced its profits were up 28.5% for 2010. This suggests that there is a light at the end of the recession tunnel, and that we in Ad World are slowly making our way there. Clients are seriously investing in advertising again after the disheartening years that were 2008 and 2009. Happy Friday!

And here is an ad campaign we enjoyed coming across today for the Corinthia Hotel in London.

At Baby Creative, we believe that simple sells. We thought the minimalistic, simplified element of the campaign made the ads really eye-catching. It was a nice break from typical hotel ads that feature room and building shots, and the ads, done by WCRS&Co., urged us to go check out the hotel to see if it reflected the modernity of the campaign. Well done.

(Sources: Yahoo! Finance and Ads of the World)

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CIM Marketing Excellence Award: Not-For-Profit

Posted on February 23, 2011 | 1 Comment

On 15 February, the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) held its 100th annual Marketing Excellence Awards ceremony. Judges determined finalists based on “outstanding demonstration of marketing strategy, planning and implementation.”

Amongst the impressive and accomplished winners across the seventeen award categories was us, Baby Creative, for a not-for-profit campaign done for the Motor Neurone Disease Association.The campaign featured a theme of “incurable optimism,” as shown through the incurable optimism of MND patient Patrick.

We were so thrilled with this major achievement and with the success of our campaign! To find more about motor neurone disease visit www.mndassociation.org, or to view Patrick’s site please visit www.patricktheoptimist.org.

 

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Five trends for non-profit sector

Posted on January 18, 2011 | Leave a comment

We are now 3 weeks in the New Year. It isthe perfect time to start looking at what’s ahead of us for 2011 as we’ve had time to look back on 2011, and ponder what the new year holds for us, based on the first 3 weeks of the year.

We have a special interest for the non-profit sector, we don’t work with them for nothing! That’s why we decided to look more closely at trends of 2011 relating to charities.

Here’s our top 5:

  • The Rise of Enviro-Creation. It is the utilisation of co-creation techniques, where stakeholders are put at the heart of the decision making process. Services and marketing are thus being created by stakeholders.
  • The Rise of movements. It’s all about people power, more active engagement and people willing to change the world through protest. Think the recent student protests, but hopefully without the violence.
  • The New Philanthropy. As the state roles back new philanthropists from the UK and BRIC Countries will take a more active role in providing services for non profit organisations.
  • The Rise of Social Enlightenment Brands. In the early 20th century when Government was weak, brands such as Kellogg’s and Cadbury became social innovators. In 2011 watch out for other brands doing the same.
  • Core-isation.  When charities amplify their raison d’etre across all forms of communications and fundraising

 

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Merry Christmas from Baby!

Posted on December 23, 2010 | Leave a comment

Two days to go to Christmas! Unfortunately this means we shall be off enjoying the holidays, and will only be reporting back in the new year, probably a few pounds heavier after all the over-eating that goes with Christmas.

The whole team is wishing everyone a very happy Christmas and new year.We are very much looking forward to 2011, as it looks like it will be filled with a lot of excitement and opportunities, and we are wishing everyone out there the same.

Here is a little something we found online we thought was very clever and amusing: the Santa Brand Book by the Quietroom.

Enjoy and see you all in 2011!

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Emily’s story

Posted on October 11, 2010 | 2 Comments

We are proud to announce that our Emily ad is back on TV. The Action for Children ad, which narrates Emily’s story, originally ran across some key programming this Spring, raising awareness of child neglect. The storyline is the same, but we tweaked the end frame a little, inviting people to text 70099 to get more information on Neglect and how to take action.

The good thing? The text is charged at standard network rate. An easy way to help a good cause without inflating your phone bill. Have a look at the film here, or keep an eye out when watching your favourite programmes on C4. And maybe pick up your phone and spread the word afterwards?

And to find out more about Action for Children, and their neglect appeal, visit their website.

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Nike goes vampire

Posted on October 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

Buffy the Vampire Slayer might have been a hit, but the vampire fever really took off with Twilight and True Blood. Following the success of both franchises, many industries saw the opportunity to make money, and vampire related products started appearing everywhere. And now, advertising is jumping on the craze too.

There’s Nike snowboarding Dunks’ recent video, which we assume is probably a viral. It’s quite shocking, very graphic, and definitely left us a bit disturbed. Not for the light hearted.

There’s also this advert for Sin, a Malaysian fashion line. Their campaign is based on references to fairytales and other fantasy stories. So it was only legitimate that one of them would feature a ‘blood sucker’.

We’re not big fans of either advert. The first one is far too creepy, which is obviously what Nike intended, playing the shock factor. But we’re sure it will do fine in terms of circulation. The second one is pretty boring: the whole vampire-glamorous combo isn’t really a fresh approach, especially now that vampires have infiltrated all industries.

(Source: Ads of the World and Nike)

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Hijabism: a guerilla against advertising

Posted on September 17, 2010 | 1 Comment

Here at Baby Creative, we like a bit of street art, and we’ve just stumbled upon Princess Hijab’s work.

She is a complete mystery, as pretty much nothing is known of her apart from her work. She has started the Hijabist movement: a guerrilla against advertising, she describes it as ‘visual terrorism’.

Contrary to what we initially thought, it has nothing to do with Islam or the veil controversy. She is not even Muslim. But by drawing veils over models on billboards, she denounces the effect of commodification and consumerism on representations of the human body:

My work explores how something as intimate as the human body has become as distant as a message from your corporate sponsor.

We can’t really say too much about that, we’re an advertising agency after all. But we find her work very interesting, and it looks pretty cool.

Here’s a very short documentary about her, where you can see her drawing on billboards and roaming through the tunnels of the Parisian metro. And not only is it interesting, but also very well filmed. The shots are seriously beautiful.

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