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Yesterday (Monday 24^th May) a few of us popped along to the Big Draw event being held at the British Museum.

The Big Draw this year celebrates its 10^th year and is an event that runs for the whole month of October which encourages communities to come together to do simply that – draw.  The event yesterday awarded artists and communities for their contributions in 2009 and was truly inspiring. There were lots of activities going on around the venue including people making paper flowers, calligraphy writing, bug drawing which we each got the chance to add our contributions to on a display of ladybirds, though Nick’s turned out to be more of a ‘manbird’.

Albion heard about The Big Draw when Jon (one of our creatives) explained what they do. Inspired, we wanted to create something that helped fulfil the Campaign for Drawing’s mission of getting more people to draw. So Jon created ‘Draw and Fold Over’, an online adaptation of the traditional parlour game ‘picture consequences’. The idea is to combine the feeling of drawing by hand with the social benefits of the internet. Families and friends can draw together from countries around the world. The game naturally encourages you to send it to your friends, meaning more and more people enjoy the rewards of drawing.

The game was launched by The Big draw yesterday who got 4 artists onboard including Posy Simmonds to give it a go with a live on stage demo – thankfully the wifi worked!  And this was the outcome:

Following on from this www.drawandfoldover.com is now live.  You should have a go and pass it onto your friends – it’s great fun and will take you back to your childhood we promise!

If you haven’t already read about it in the news – Albion has won the business of two iconic British brands Airmiles and Visit Britain.

Some of you may already know that Airmiles, is one of the UK’s leading travel reward scheme. They have over two million active members collecting miles from their  everyday spending – yes that’s right you can get miles from the simplest things like cat food, petrol or a bottle of wine. They partner with Tesco, Shell and Lloyds TSB allowing members to use miles for free flights, hotels, holidays and days out to name but a few. If you’re not a member already I bet by the end of this blog post you will be…

I’m sure you will have all at some time visited the Visit Britain website whether it was for yourself, a friend or a member of your family to find out interesting or fun things you could do.  They are Britain’s national tourism agency, responsible for marketing Britain overseas as well as working with thousands of organisations in the UK to market Britain to visitors from the UK and around the world.

For both brands we’ll be developing fully integrated campaigns across all advertising platforms as well as using social networking sites.

Thanks to everyone that worked on the pitch (you know who you are) and helped us win these two great clients.

We’re looking forward to working with them both later on this year.

Here’s the news in case you missed it:

http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/1002952/Albion-develop-Airmiles-creative/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH

http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/1001445/Albion-becomes-digital-lead-Visit-Britain/?DCMP=ILC-SEARCH

As the domestic football season draws to a close for 2009/2010, the final whistle has been blown on our highly acclaimed integrated marketing campaign for Betfair – The Betfair Front Room.

It’s been a rollercoaster of emotions with plenty of laugh or cry moments, but what we’ve managed to pull off has been nothing short of incredible. We’ve created and aired over 60 TV commercials and over 80 pieces of online content…in 8 months. Yes that’s right, just 8 months.

When we kicked off the campaign we raised plenty of eyebrows.‘You’re going to shoot a new TV commercial every 2 weeks…and you’re going to use real football fans… and the whole thing is going to be unscripted from start to finish?’ they asked. We smiled in the face of our critics who said it couldn’t be done as we tore up the TV advertising rule book.

The campaign hasn’t just got people talking in advertising circles. We smashed the business objectives set out by Betfair with overall acquisitions up by 50% and the highest number of new sign-ups ever outside of a major football tournament. We’re still smiling. But, the icing on the cake had to be the bonus of Betfair topping 3 million customers during the campaign, becoming the World’s Biggest Betting Community. Our faces are beginning to ache.

So as we throw our proverbial football strips back in the kit bag for this season, we’re super excited for the World Cup activity with Betfair, and with lots more thought inspiring creative briefs in circulation – we’re already well into our pre-season regime.

A massive thank you to all involved: a brave client, an extremely hard working production team in Hotspur & Argyle, a fabulous football-nut Director in Theo Delaney and of course, the team here at Albion – A special mention to Matt, Petrina, Andre, Sam and Neil.

Last night (Thursday 29^th April) was the final live debate where Cameron still took quite a hammering gaining a total of 1,205,542 (56%) slaps during the 90 minute programme. Brown was lower than we expected after his ‘bigot’ lady comment earlier in the week, he gained a lot more slaps throughout the day but during the live debate he had 697, 546 slaps (32%). Clegg with 254,876 (12%) slaps still reigned in as the nations favourite.

The new colour recognised slap (where waving red, blue or yellow objects in front of your webcam would slap the corresponding leader) was a favourite, “I am waving a pair of blue tights at the Slapometer – CallMeDave keeps grabbing his b*****ks. If he had any. http://bit.ly/dm0aOH”

Yesterday also saw Slapometer reach a total of 62 million slaps, that’s a reflection of one slap for every man, woman and child in the UK.

You can read more on our Slaptistics page

A 20 second demo of Slapometer is currently being shown on large digital screens situated in Manchester and Glasgow today ahead of the final live debate on BBC 1, 8.30pm.  The site has already pulled in over 60 million slaps and we’re hoping tonight to reach an all time peak.

The site has also got a new experimental option where you can slap by colour; recognised by a webcam. If you’ve got a  a coloured glove or baton you’ll be able to dispose of your mouse and virtually slap in the air instead. We’ve got a tracking device that will show us exactly how many people have slapped by colour.

We’re hoping tonight will be a mass slap-up, our biggest yet!

As of this morning, (13th April)  Gordon Brown had received 47.8 per cent of the slaps, David Cameron had received 37.9 per cent of slaps, while Nick Clegg had endured just 14.3 per cent of slaps, our stats that both Campaign and Media Week News Bulletin have picked up on.

Feeling frustrated? Not quite made your mind up yet on who to vote for? Maybe you haven’t visited Slapometer as yet?

Speigel Online, a German news source has picked up on the Slapometer, titling their article ‘Powerless against the slapping machine’.

We’ve also grabbed a spot on ITN Yahoo News today where Jason Goodman (our CEO) went over in person and met with Roshni Amin one of their Broadcast Journalists. More to come on this later today……

Just when we thought our press coverage this week for Slapometer couldn’t get any better Emma Thelwell from Channel 4 News contacted Glyn our Strategy Director to find out more about why we created the tool.  Emma describes it as one of the ‘more whacky tools for the new media election of 2010‘.  And Glyn amplifies the notion behind the tool with Albion being ‘keen for the electorate to use the Slapometer during the leader debates – as a way to keep a real-time score of the leaders‘ performances’. The article also takes a look at other interesting and quirky tools based around the election.

Nick Gardner is leaving us to go to work at Wolf Olins :-/

He’s been famous at Albion for replying to ‘everyone’ emails with photos of primates. So, when it was announced he was off, it triggered a torrent of sad monkey photos. Preserved here for posterity.

The Slapometer phenomena continues globally as it gains a space in The Wall Street Journal: The Source they describe it as ‘live, up-to-the-minute and enthusing the electorate in a manner the country’s politicians can only dream of’. Take a read for yourself