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So if you don’t know the story, here it is:

26th April. FIBA announced that, unlike the rest of Team GB, the British Basketball team had to win a series of games to earn their spot at the 2012 Olympics. Even though we’re the host nation!

We’ve got the best team in years. So with Sam Neter of Hoopsfix and Sillky Slim, hype-man, Albion are on a mission to fill those games with the biggest, loudest crowds ever. To inspire and give GB the boost they need to qualify for the Olympics.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks with British basketball. Sam and Sillky are running around the country. Meeting people, charming the public and going to games. Whatever they can. And people are starting to get behind the campaign. Including Lenny Henry, Keith Lemon and Jamelia!

Crowds at the game are growing steadily and are getting louder. People are joining the Facebook group. We’ve sold out of T-shirts – but are ordering more. The website backbritishbasketball.com is going strong, There are loads of interviews and videos and more importantly people are buying tickets.

And it’s working.

GB are 5 wins for 5! And it really feels like the fans are the one’s giving them that extra boost to win, what are very close games. The pride, energy and GB love is electric. Especially from Sam and Sillky. We have one final home game left in Liverpool. Thurs 26th August. Not long to go. But GB are playing better than they ever have. They’re the underdog team and they’re showing their worth.

We’ve created a film about the exploits leading up to the first game. And to introduce you to the players – they are top blokes, who clearly love representing the country. For anyone out there with a cinema we’d love for you to screen it.

We’ve started our own noise-makers with the Balldogs. People who receive free tickets to home games in return for creating an atmosphere. Something GB games have always sorely lacked. They even reside in the Dog Pound. And you can clearly hear them during the highlights, led by Sillky on his trusty megaphone.

Channel 4 even interviewed Sam and Sillky and it was broadcast on Sunday. Against the backdrop of a great win by GB against the Ukraine. With Deng pulling out all the stops during the final quarter. You can clearly hear the Dog Pound shouting the “Deng” chant, created during our campaign. And for eagle eyed amongst you, this handsome writer even pops up in the crowd. Skip to 25:48 for the BBB interview and 43:50 for Luol Deng’s clutch performance.

Also, Sam and Albion’s Creative Director Andre Moreira even got a mention in the Wall St Journal. Exciting. In an interesting article about the state of the British game. “British stink at basketball”? Well, we’ll show you. You big American journal of Wall. “Balls St” to that! Ha ha hum.

What we are seeing is that there are very passionate fans out there for British basketball. And people that are simply passionate about our nation and want British sports people to do well. Even President Obama is a fan of Britain’s Deng. Why isn’t our Prime Minister getting behind our team? Or the Olympic committee? Or even the UK press? Basketball could be the next rowing or cycling if we get into the Olympics.

So if you still have time after reading all that. Watch the film or buy some tickets. Or just click “like” on the Facebook page. After all, with our football teams cocking it up over the summer we should at least show some respect for the underdog GB team who are battling their way to an Olympics they should by rights already be in.

Our Team. In our Olympics. By any means necessary.

After the thrills and spills of a highly entertaining production, tomorrow sees the launch of our fantastic new ‘Middleman’ campaign for Betfair.

It’s Betfair’s biggest ever marketing campaign to date (see this article on Brand Republic)  and we’ve been really lucky to work with a cracking international client team in Hammersmith and Malta in our bid to position the brand as ‘The World’s Biggest Betting Community’ (yes, we’ve even got that claim through those lovely people at Clearcast).

The idea’s a simple one: on Betfair, you cut out the middleman which means you bet direct against 3 million other people. And that of course means better odds and much bigger wins (than all those traditional high street bookmakers).

As you’d expect for a brand like Betfair, it’s a fully integrated campaign with a massive online push that kicks off this weekend with the first ever YouTube takeover by a betting brand. A massive coup for all of us involved and a nice little cameo from Andy Gray of Sky Sports, so watch out for that from midnight on Saturday…

We’re also going to be on TV throughout the season’s live sport coverage (football, horse racing, golf, cricket, you name it…) with a couple of hilarious ads showing how middlemen (yes, it’s those traditional bookies again) get in the way of people trying to betting and add no value.

A big well done and a massive thank you to everyone involved at Betfair, all our partners and of course here at Albion (too many to mention in this post, but you know who you are).

Look out for it over the weekend.

Here’s a sneak preview for you:

Since its launch two months ago Draw and Fold Over is still going strong and yesterday we were contacted by Mark Sinclair at Creative Review who had just stumbled across it. In his words ‘I love it, lots of fun‘ – read more on his blog post here and if you still haven’t had a go yourself, you really should. www.drawandfoldover.com

The much anticipated Matt’s House video content we produced for BE Broadband is now live! (You might still remember the pictures of our very own Mark and Gav from the shoot….)
It stars BE Broadband’s very own Forum Manager Matt’s genius is usually locked safely away in his brain. But we take a step not only through Matt’s front door, but into his mind’s eye, to see your internet connection the way he does. See if you can pick up some tips to make your connection faster in ‘Matt’s House’. See it at www.bethere.co.uk/mattshouse
This is the first content piece to come out of BE’s ongoing Real World Speed creative platform, which is an introduction to the world of hacking together the future of access – A ‘top-tips’ video series to educate BE Members (and everyone else) on how to seek out that extra performance from their copper wire.
It is the fact that many internet users don’t get the speed that their ISP has promised through their advertising that has led BE to adopt the Real World Speed proposition. Most people struggle with their broadband speed. They get much less than they were quoted for and they don’t have an active community within their ISP to get help. With these very creative online videos, we not only showed how enthusiastic BE Broadband is about, well, broadband, but also how people can maximise their speed with these simple 2-minute videos, even non-geeky types can optimise their speed.

This week some of the Albion team are out in Auckland shooting a campaign for Air New Zealand’s new long haul product. The shoot is happening at “Hangar 9″, a place that for 3 years previous, had been a secret to the world and even most of the company itself. Inside this Auckland warehouse is a full scale replica of a 777-300 – the only one in existence outside of Boeing.

The hangar is now a pretty sophisticated media briefing center. More akin to a museum than a development facility. The walls are lined with the development story and there are mock ups of all the new seating plus some versions of the ones that didn’t quite make it along the way.

In every way the site has the ability to function like a plane on the ground. There are onboard ovens, in-flight entertainment units and even aviation power generators. Although Air New Zealand take delivery of the new planes at the end of the year, every detail of the product is still being tweaked inside Hangar 9 – food menus, cutlery design, carpets, curtains. Nothing is being left unscrutinised.

What’s evident is the commitment (and – ouch! – the investment) the company has put into the project. What we love most about working with Air New Zealand is the way they approach everything they do with a sense that anything can be achieved. And for the first time the customer has been put first in the flying experience. The new long haul planes fly LON-LAX from April 2011. In the mean time we’ve posted a couple of interesting vids below about the design process and a walk through of the product in Hangar 9.

We in the middle of shooting a bunch of online banners for Air New Zealand. One placement is quite tricky as it uses a video overlay between two banner spaces which needs to be shot in camera without any forgiving flash animation.

After many different attempts to map out the action to fit the space, we cracked the solution: two holes in a bit of paper pasted to the preview monitor. Proof that when going digital, sometimes the best approach is analogue.

We’ve just finished making the promos for Channel five’s Don’t Stop Believing. If you are a Glee fan you’re in luck. If not, you may well dig this show too. It plays out live, starting late July and is five’s biggest investment ever in creating an entertainment program. Unlike most talent shows, the interest wont hinge on the cruelty of putting down the rejects. Each week 6 groups of auditioned people go through heats. The groups will be made up all different ages, shapes and sizes of at least five people, but some will contain over 100 individuals.

Our promo aims to capture to capture the upbeat, uncynical nature of the show. We cast over 1000 people for the spot. The real challenge was that we couldn’t feature any of the groups competing in the show as we didn’t want to show favoritism! Some of the groups we have put together ourselves(Simon Cowell eat your heart out), and some of the groups came to us as a team. The yellow group is actually a gospel choir – keep an ear out for Cathy’s voice who is the blonde girl who leads the group – absolutely stunning. The blue team are a barber shop quartet; eh, well actually we ended up making them a triplet. Within the main group at the end is The Choir With No Name made up of homeless people.

You’ll notice a pianola at the beginning of the spot that Emma Bunton activates. We managed to find the only living person in the UK who is able to program pianolas with the original paper-style script. He told us that suitable paper is becoming increasingly hard to find. The scrolls are hand-perforated although he does now use a computer to map out the notes. The 80 year old who owns the pianola doesn’t know that his keys were carefully rainbow-ified with colored film. Looks pretty cool though.

The spot was beautifully crafted by Kim Gehrig (and her ever patient producer Dom) at Academy. With music by the audio wizards Nick and Ollie at Soundtree.

Earlier in the week you might have heard that we won the Jose Cuervo account, one of the oldest most recognised and awarded Tequila brands – worldwide.

To celebrate we thought what better place than a Mexican bar along the road where (guided by a knowledgeable barman) we tested out a number of Cuervo cocktails. The girls had some rather large pink ones (very SATC) and the boys went more macho with shorts followed by an odd looking green chaser (which the barman claimed to be good for you).

We think our night out has put us in good stead to work on the Cuervo portfolio of products and has given us an insight into the product to help us deliver an international brand positioning and creative platform.

One thing we learnt during the night is that Tequila definitely makes you happy!

Work will roll out later this year.

…a question pondered by many and only answered by a few brave souls. It could be anything – a piece of film or animation, an image or photograph, even a story or piece of juicy gossip.  But how do you recognise when something has the potential to be shared by hundreds, even thousands of people?

In true Blue Peter style, here’s one we made earlier. Yesterday in fact – and it’s a great case study on how things explode at the speed of light with the power of online word-of-mouth.

Before we start – it’s worth noting that we (Albion) did not create this image. It was sent to us. All we did was help it on its way to thousands of people via the interwebs. If YOU created this image, then give us a call and come in for a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive. You deserve it.

So, our ‘go viral’ mantra (case study of the ‘England Muppets’ image):

• Launch at exactly the right time. For the tiny percentage of the country that didn’t know, the England football team were playing yesterday and every man and his dog were acting like true football pundits on the social networks. We posted the image just at the right time when people were truly engaged in all things England and all things football.

• Make people want to share it. We laughed out loud at the irony in this work of art. To many, the England football team are a bunch of Muppets – so sticking their heads on to a team photo was perfect comedy value. It got our attention, made us smile and made us want to send this on.

• Make it simple to share it. Twitter is great for blasting out 140 characters quickly and easily, so we posted it via TwitPic with a shortend URL and tagged on the appropriate football hash tags that were trending at that time.

And finally…

• Hit the influencers – this is often easier said than done, especially if it’s branded content, but in this case, our picture was picked up organically by some heavy hitters on the key social networks. You need to know who you’re targeting; or just know that where you’re promoting the viral content, people will be interested in it.

In our minds, the ‘England Muppets’ image ticked all of the above criteria, so when it achieved over 300 views in 9 minutes, we knew this was viral gold. And it’s still going strong, achieving way over 2000+ views in less than 24 hours – and you can check out the original link here.

Perhaps one of the most thought provoking books published over the last couple of years has to have been Nudge: Improving decisions about health ,wealth and happiness. Last night, some of us were lucky enough to hear its author, economics god Professor Richard Thaler speak as part of the IPA’s Writers Unblocked series of talks.

With his co author Cass Sunstein, Thaler coined the phrase ‘choice architecture’, to explain how we, as humans, are all susceptible to the influence of a variety of environmental conditions that in turn, can cause positive and negative effects on our behaviour. He describes these factors as nudges. As he does in his book, Thaler took us through a number of examples of how ‘nudging’ can help to bring about changes in our actions. These ranged from the practical – such as the inclusion of smiley faces on some American households’ electricity bills when they used less power than comparable houses in their neighbourhoods – through to the hilarious – such as how the engraving of a fly, or insertion of goal posts in the drain of a urinal, could help the more careless males amongst us improve our aim in the bathroom.

For Thaler, it can be these little, relatively low cost initiatives that bring about some of the biggest changes in our lives, and in the case of global warming, potentially prove to be a solution.

Regardless of context however, Thaler cited 3 qualities that would automatically help to ‘nudge’ people. Firstly, as in the case of the urinals, Thaler argued that simply by making the more mundane tasks fun, it can be possible to both change behaviour and bring a smile to people’s faces. Secondly, again playing to human nature, he also argued that just making things easier to do was one of the most obvious and successful catalysts for change. Thirdly and perhaps most far reaching however was his support of sharing data and information – essentially enforced disclosure. That way, Thaler argued, it would be possible to regulate organisations based on what they revealed, rather than what they chose to keep private. Given the pace of change in life and both the public and private sector’s inability to keep pace with it, he maintained that through this sharing of data, we as humans would have been better equipped to cope and adapt our behaviour accordingly to one in a million chance events, from the credit crunch to the recent oil spill.

But what does this mean for adland? After such thought provoking stuff, it was hard not to agree with Rory Sutherland’s summation that Thaler’s thesis provided an “Uplifting view of our skills”. Despite the wealth of tools and advancements in the ways we communicate, so many campaigns today still focus on outright cajolement rather than the art of intelligent persuasion. Key to changing this behaviour is the genuine appreciation that it’s not always he who shouts loudest that wins the day – rather it’s human insights and psychological rationale that are the key to effective communication.