The rise of the ADvent.

Ad-vents

The TV world has gone a bit bonkers of late, as agencies are looking for newer and seemingly bigger ways to catch Joe Public’s attention. In the current ad landscape where content is king, brands are looking to adopt a more fanfare approach to their TV creative, making the ads themselves the stars of Saturday night television.

Ad breaks themselves are beginning to be assigned big ‘ad-vent’ ads, designed to drum up column inches and publicity through their innovative content, and paradoxically, these ads are being…er… well… advertised and their air dates and media slots revealed to the public. Is this the beginning of people turning on the box to see the latest Cadbury ads?

Strangely, this trend is nothing new in Japan, where Airside’s follow up to their first Sagawa ad caused such a stir, that the public were calling the TV stations to find out where and when the next execution was going to air. In the UK (and majority of the rest of the world) this is not something that the general public get too excited over, yet the current trend of new ‘ad-vent’ ads suggests otherwise.

The British Heart foundation has been hawking the somber message that your heart attack is on its way (along with channel, air dates and times) on the box, in pub toilets and other DM spots for sometime now. Finally this week we were treated to Berkoff smacking us in the chest and telling us to phone an ambulance in a bout of overdone thespian zeal.




Honda have also joined in the ad-vent jamboree, and treated the nation to one of the first ever ‘live TV ads’ as a bunch of adrenaline junkies hopped into the great blue expanse and linked together to form the brand’s name during their hasty plummet.




So does this current spurt of ad-vents mark the blurring of content / idea / ad and entertainment? Where does the advert start and the idea finish? Like the recent branded film from Eurostar ‘Sommerstown’ by super-director Shaun Meadows has left many people refreshed and invigorated as well as leaving a slew of many scratching their heads, and asking themselves was that a feature? Or was it an advert? feature? advert? Fortunately, in this case, regardless of what it was, it doesn’t really matter, as the ‘Sommerstown’ fadvert (whatever we call the finished hybrid article) really was very, very good.

Which leads us nicely on to ITV’s latest ruse during the up and coming Brit awards 2009 as seven agencies are being pitted against one another (almost like a bizarre agency x-factor) as they attempt to pitch for one of four ‘live ad breaks’ that are to be littered throughout the ceremony.

Which means that for this year and next year at least, the Ad-vent is here to stay. At least until the Brits are over that is.

...and we can only pray that none of them involve Sharon bloody Osbourne.

NewsReel 08.08.08

Velocity and Ogilvy dominate in Margate
The definitive advertising awards festival for the Middle East and Africa took place between the 25th and 28th July in Margate, SA.

The big winner of the night was Velocity and Ogilvy’s ‘Beautiful’ spot for Allan Gray. The Grand Prix win at the 30th annual Loerie Awards follows a well-deserved Silver at Cannes for the touching and humorous monochrome spot. Velocity went home with a clutch of awards, including five golds, five silvers, three bronzes and five craft certificates. Executive Producer Peter Carr, who must have been ruing the fact that he left the wheel barrow at home, had this to say, ‘This past year we've succeeded in getting our hands on the best work in South Africa and turning the scripts into award-winning pieces. It's a good feeling to have won eighteen awards and a great feeling to again win the Grand Prix at South Africa's biggest ad festival.’

Ogilvy went home happy too - announced overall winner with a total of 47 awards. That massive haul of awards for both companies deserves some plaudits and what better way than to show off their finest piece below. For a full list of winners click here.

Don't have a heart attack
Following on from the undoubted success of Honda’s recent ad-vent, 4Creative are working with the British Heart Foundation to give the whole of the UK a heart attack – or at least a sense of what it’s like to have one. Quite how Grey London and director Brett Foraker are going to achieve this feat is unclear as the project is shrouded in secrecy. However Jon Williams, Chief Creative Officer at Grey, did have this to say of the project, ‘We did a lot of research and halfway through one of the sessions, someone said what we need is to give everyone in England a heart attack. It was as simple as that.’ Trailers have been running throughout the week, supported by public figures including Chris Tarrant and David Cameron.

The ad will only be aired on TV once – at 9.17pm this Sunday 10th August during ‘The Midsomer Murders’. There can be no doubting the suitability of the spot given your typical ‘Midsomer’ viewer, and it’ll be interesting to see if there’s a spike in 999 calls as hypochondriacs everywhere take their inspiration from the ad.

Addictive are addictive
Reel favourites Addictive TV will be performing a huge outdoor show by the Thames on 22nd August, the weekend of the official Olympics hand-over ceremony from Beijing to London. Their set will open with Sportive, the video they created for adidas that’s been touring Chinese cities with the ‘Sport in Art’ exhibition.

Addictive has also secured a major coup undertaking a project with the Austrian state broadcaster ORF. They will remix the channel’s coverage of the Olympics live in their studios as part of their interactive services on 16th and 17th August.

In honour of this innovative event, we managed to catch up with those clever folk at Addictive and get a few words straight from the horses mouth:

Can you explain the ORF television project and how you became involved? Where will it take place?

It’s an interactive experiment in live broadcast and image manipulation - it's simply boldly going where no live TV has gone before! We became involved through a German professor of technology at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences, who’s heading up the project. He came to one of gigs in Germany about 3 years ago, and approached us afterwards asking for our involvement. He loved our work and subsequently came to all our gigs in Germany!! It takes place at in Vienna, in the studios and transmission suites at broadcaster ORF.


What elements of the Olympics will you be remixing?

The intention is to be remixing different sports that we know will be sent down the feeds on the two days that we're doing it - this includes weightlifting, boxing, beach volleyball, sailing, athletics, tennis and table-tennis. We have an idea of what’s scheduled for specific times, but it’s flexible in terms of what we’ll choose and we’ll focus on the live sports coverage itself, capturing it, cutting live loops, scratching it, mixing it with archive footage we’ve cut into audio/visual rhythmic bedding tracks of those sports - e.g. breakbeat loops made from table tennis, and so on. I guess if the feeds include crowd shots and all the usual incidental cut-aways involved in live coverage we'll be using that too. That's the plan, but it's an experiment and it's live - so things might change a bit on the day!


Mixing footage and music live is obviously what you guys are best known for - but how are you feeling about doing it live for TV?

Live performing is only part of what we do - equally we produce remixes for virals, broadcast commercials and so on. Actually, in the last couple of years we've become quite well known for remixing movies for a number of the Hollywood studios, we recently remixed Iron Man for Paramount for use as a viral, reaching blogs, feeds and general parts of the web traditional trailers can't reach. And with this live Olympics remix, I think it's a ground-breaking project to be part of and we're keen to entertain and push the envelope, whatever the medium. There’ll hopefully be audience feedback via interactive messages, so we won't be totally isolated, but obviously it's a long way from working with a live crowd, and the kind of instantaneous response we're used to. In some respects TV gallery directors already do live mixing, but we're taking that one step further and remixing, being more experimental and playing with the images in ways they wouldn't normally.