Our Logbook

Steve Henry, our non exec advisor picked up the Chairman’s award at the BTAA awards the other week. He calls it “one of those lifetime achievement awards which make you feel like your career is all over”. You can read all about his experience of the night on his blog.

Steve showed us some of his favorite HHCL work in a company meeting recently. It was interesting to look at the diversity of work from the subversive Tango stuff, to the category-breaking First Direct launch and then the more serious Fourth Emergency service work for AA. Nearly all of the work still stood up today. Sure it didn’t have an associated augmented reality, social-networked embeddable widget, but the rules of cut through in advertising haven’t changed. Engaging, relevant brand thoughts expressed in a way that is surprising and entertaining still get momentum. And you know that if any of these campaigns were executed today they would have the legs to span digital media.

When people hear that we have Steve Henry in at the agency their first question is usually “What does he do?”. So let’s paint the picture. Steve is in 3 days a month, which works out as once a week for 3/4 of the month! He usually begins the day by spending time with the agency partners talking about the briefs with the most potential for creative greatness. These briefs could be big or small or they could be pitches. He then helps us interrogate the briefs before they go into creative development. For the rest of the day he is looking at live stuff going through the agency with a fresh pair of eyes. He can be heard to be saying constantly “Great work always has a something about it that feels like it can’t be done.” And occasionally someone gets a serve in a way that only Steve can pull off – where they are held accountable for screwing up, yet feel motivated to fight another day.

Steve is basically a ball of energy who questions what we are doing. Steve still has more to give than most people who are just starting out. His enthusiasm for the business is infectious and we feel lucky to have him. For him every day is just another day with opportunity to change the world.

Finally, here are a few pieces of HHCL work that we admire (and could find on Youtube).

You can see the interview with Scott Heiferman below. We liked him, and his big idea, very much. Below is what was on his t-shirt.

moar funny pictures

With Cafedirect being one of our clients and at the forefront of the fairtrade initiative, we were delighted to be approached by Chacewater School in Cornwall to judge some adverts that the children in Class 5 had created for the new fair-trade KitKat bar. Class 5’s teacher, Julia Bruce, had arranged all sorts of lessons and activities for Fairtrade Fortnight, including coffee mornings and lots of exciting homework projects  all centred around fair-trade.

Our judging panel here at Albion, consisted of Simon Gotschalk – The Business Director on Cafedirect, Tim Bateman – Senior Creative (who’s work includes Cafedirect ‘We are the growers’) and Hannah Yelin – Senior Planner on everything from Gumtree to Tickler Cheese and me Nick Curnow (and my Mum is Govenor of Chacewater School)

After hours of wrangling and debate we finally agreed on a winner. So congratulations to Curt and Ellie from Class 5 on a great job, an ad that got the message across simply and effectively. Maybe you’ll decide that advertising is something you will pursue in the future. We certainly hope so!

Albion rebranded Virgin Radio to  Absolute Radio over 18 months ago. We’ve been really proud to see them continue to innovate and challenge the future of radio with a bunch of new things like dabbl the user controlled web station, Compare My Radio and Absolute 80s (the last of which Albion also branded).

Our latest assignment for Absolute Radio has been to promote their breakfast offering. You will now find Christian O’Connell, Frank Skinner and Dave Gorman spear-heading a 7 day line up. So we thought it only fair to make a virtue of their best assets – their faces. On a chilly Winter’s day in a warehouse studio in nearby Shoreditch we had the privilege of seeing Christian, Frank and Dave in their PJ’s… or in Frank’s case, his nightie. You can hear what the guys made of the shoot in some clips from their shows below.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The campaign is running on posters and digital across London. And you can upload your own morning face on the Christian O’Connell Facebook Group.

It’s a DirectTV ad, but more than that, it’s a start. We present the first Albion in-house TV production, a brand new 30sec ad for a brand new product from the Betfair stables. The casino end, actually.

And we’re very proud of the final result. As far as Casino DirectTV ads go, I can confidently say it’s one of the best I’ve ever seen! (I guess I’d always be saying that). And it was all done in-house, from concept, to storyboards, to animation, etc. (except for sound, done by the lovely guys at 750mph). It was a great learning process and a great overall process, both internally and with Betfair. So congratulations to everyone involved, namely Tom, Liz, Stevo, Petrina, Matt, Sam and Neil.

Now, we’re not going to become a TV production company, but it’s a real plus knowing that we have these kind of capabilities, it opens up very interesting opportunities and will definitely help us help our clients better. And we got to say ‘Action’ a couple of times, even if it was just to a monitor.’

See it on Sky from Monday after 11pm.