We've been invited to the annual ANNA awards. That’s the Awards for National Newspaper Advertising. We were nominated for a prize back in April when our work for the Communication Workers Union started running in every broadsheet and tabloid in the land. And on Wednesday the 27th of January we’ll be hobnobbing it in London with the other nominees for a cool £65,000 in prize money. Let’s hope that out host for the evening Rob Brydon will have a cheque with our name on it. If not well, never mind we’ll still be in the Annual and Brian will have done his best to drink the equivalent of his flight down, in free champagne.

Wow. A retail and leisure destination launches in Aberdeen and attracts 1 million customers in one month. Amazing when you consider that the population of Aberdeen is only 209,260 (last time anyone counted). Whoever did the launch campaign for Union Square, owned by Hammerson the footsie 100 property developers, which included TV, radio, 96 and 48 sheets, must have done an amazing job. Congratulations to them.

When we saw this ambient idea in Edinburgh’s St Andrew square gardens, Tamsin’s first reaction was “Wow, an actual real ambient idea from London placed in Edinburgh” because in truth we very rarely see this kind of stuff. (It usually runs in, well, London and that’s it). So big respect to both agency and client for taking the idea on tour. However we have a couple of gripes. Firstly the thought is very familiar. It seems every time a zoom camera is launched this “giant object” route is brought out of the bag. Secondly the model of the conker is absolutely beautiful. So why after going to so much trouble to make it perfect in every detail did they allow the model maker to scratch in a production reference code in huge type, to the stalk of the model? It’s a bit like producing very realistic moon landing pictures then leaving a reference code on one of the prop rocks. (At least that’s what our conspiracy theorist Art Director will tell you). So, are we suspending disbelief here or not?
Unfortunately despite our initial enthusiasm we decided that this conker is a bit of a chestnut.

We recently met up with the founders of Sherwood films to discuss mutual business opportunities.
They kindly invited us to join them at the Sherwood film club, held at the voodoo rooms in Edinburgh.
And what a great event it was. It’s a new venture and the idea is to bring together like-minded artists, musicians, film makers (and the odd ad agency) to showcase talents and share skills to help each other bring their ideas to life.
Sherwood for instance are shooting the second in their trilogy of horror movies (the first winning awards, despite a total production budget of twenty quid). And at the end of the evening they had a musician who’d offered to write an original score for the film. So clearly the idea works.
They even filmed a singer songwriter live on stage as part of a series they produce called “one song gigs.”
And the evening was made all the better spent in the company of our good friend, Darcie Tanner Condie. We discovered that she’s now joined Civic as their social marketing guru. So we’re looking forward to working with them in the very near future.