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Tickets are now available for Gen Y – Activists & Entrepreneurs and the death of teen rebellion, the next Albion Society breakfast taking place on the 23rd September 2010.

This Albion Society brings together a panel of gen Y gamechangers – a group of very special 16-25 year olds; Eliza Robeiro a young campaigner and Emi Gal an entrepreneur. Both demonstrate that this generation understand how to take on big challenges, that they are opportunists, positive and hopeful for the future.

Robin Klein Venture Partner at Index Ventures and founding partner of The Accelerator Group joins to give his expert advice on Entrepreneurism and how Gen Y are shaping the future. And Sam Ashken, Albion’s Planning Director will wrap up the event by presenting some fundamental research that determines that this generation are already making a big difference. These are the people that will shape ‘The Big Society’ and they are using every possible modern marketing technique to negotiate their ambition.

Places are strictly limited and will run out fast. Reserve yours by entering your details here

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

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.

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.

A few months ago it was realized that the walls here at Albion were a tad bare, so the management saw fit to get the team to design and paint a mural on the kitchen wall… It’s a bloody mess!

At approximately 5.41pm on Wednesday afternoon, we made history… Well, Albion history at least. We created our first trending topic on Twitter, from a single photograph taken on Shoreditch High Street, by one of our Account Directors Matt Roskill.

The photo in question, a rather dubious scene of a hearse being towed, sparked serious rage amongst the Twitterverse with cries of ‘Have they no shame?’ and ‘No Way?!’. At least until our frenzied followers took a second look to spot a sound crew’s boom sneaking into the shot.

Within a couple of hours, we had hundreds of replies and ReTweets and thousands of views of our original photo, catapulting the phrase ‘Shoreditch High Street’ to the number 1 Trending Topic in the UK.  Rumour has it even Loraine Kelly and Chris Evans jumped aboard our band wagon.

The outcome of a sophisticated viral seeding strategy…maybe not. Proof that the unpredictable beast known as Twitter can grab hold of a photo, news story or piece of gossip and make it famous almost instantly…definitely. It even made the Dalston People.

For those of you who want to spoil the illusion that we set this up – click here.

The art walk returned after a long hiatus, with a 3-in-1 itinerary. Mike R found genuine need for the art walk walking stick having sprained his ankle playing Albion football the day before.

First stop was a new venue for the art walk: Ferreira Projects on Charlotte Street. Resident artist James R Ford presented a show titled “Only boring people get bored”. The pieces ranged from one color jigsaw puzzles to videos of guitar hero being played. In the back room was an installation “33 things to do before you are 10″. Albion left the exhibit far from bored, but the show lacked the polish of something very special and felt more like an aspiring artist’s exhibit.

Next we headed to an art walk staple; White Cube in Hoxton Square, for a show by Marcus Harvey. Harvey is best known for his portrait of portrait of Myra Hindley. His new work Maggie seeks to be no less controversial. A 3D relief of Thatcher made from 25% painted dildos, 10% painted cauliflours and 65% other painted stuff. Both simultaneously stunning and predictable. Rachel Kneebone had a piece upstairs called The Descent that nearly upstaged the main show. A circular, white porcelain form of human creation, excess, gluttony, eroticism, birth and demise.

The third leg of the art walk was going to be Andres Serrano at Yvon Lambert. Unfortunately Nick screwed up as the show had already packed up. So the art walk triumverate turned into a… thing with only two parts… bi…. dual…. Let’s call it an anticlimax.

After an excellent kick off meeting with STA Travel, the team grabbed a late lunch at Pret A Manger in Kensington tube station. It turns out that Sam, one of our planners, used to work at Pret “when he was 18 or 19″. He said it was an excellent place to work until he got fired. Apparently whilst preparing sandwiches in a hungover state, Sam would kip in a quiet corner instead. Nice work if you can get it. Sadly, Sam couldn’t, and was given his P45 to take out. He wasn’t even offered a napkin to go with it.

Our conversation then turned to why Pret gets you in the door even when right next to an (arguably better) EAT. We decided that Prets are much nicer places now the acres of stainless steel are gone, and that you just can’t out Pret, Pret. The stories are deeper, better communicated and more believable. Whereas unlike Leon, EAT is just another sandwich chain, neither the underdog or more natural. But maybe it’s just Pret’s secret ingredient: sandwich chef’s sleep dribble.