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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.

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.

As a digitally-minded agency, of course we love the Internet, and we do cool stuff on it whenever we get the chance. We love it so much that when it was time to produce and shoot online video content for our client that brought a router, the Internet and a master socket to life as people, we got very excited. So excited in fact that, before we knew it Albion’s very own Client Service Director and Technology Director (known to us as Mark T and Gav), were scheduled to be starring in these films. One as router and the other as the Internet.

Well, we realised on the day of the shoot that nothing could have prepared us for when Mark would be to wear Silver latex pants with Y-fronts and Gav would be dressed as a gold genie with a Haribo sweet glued to his forehead. .. Not even having read the scripts that our brilliant Creative Jon wrote, having seen them as storyboards and even having discussed the costumes with the Film Production agency beforehand…

The shoot was on a sunny Thursday, and as the clock hit 8am a film crew of 20 barged in armed with really cool filming equipment. But as we curiously looked over to the changing rooms, we saw that the Costume and Make-up artists were unpacking some really interesting stuff – from Aladdin-alike gold pants to silver body paint, from silver boots to shiny electronic hair… Our Mark & Gav stayed brave in the face of having to be the lucky ones who got to wear this lot, never knowing the Internet and a router could look this shiny and bright. Only at this point Gav realised what he got himself into, but it was too late.

However, it was a slightly different story with Mark. He got into the spirit of turning himself into a Router so much that he didn’t even flinch at the sight of one brave make-up artist coming at his nipples with sellotape.

Even more amazing is that once Mark and Gav (known to us now as our Albion actors) were pampered and dressed to go in front of the camera, they couldn’t have loved it more. Gav actually finished his scenes the quickest, giving a very convincing performance as the Internet. As he left the stage, he got a big round of applause for pulling off being a grumpy Internet-Genie Oh-So-Well!

This was definitely no ordinary shoot. The laughter was non-stop even after 12 hours. We’re really excited for the final edits on these videos, scheduled to go live and wild on the net at the beginning of July. In the meantime we are keeping the pictures of Mark and Gav, and congratulating them on their excellent performance, enthusiasm, and for giving us a lot to laugh about.

Watch out for these videos, you will never look at your router the same way again….

Nes

If you haven’t heard yet – Albion are going to be working with FIVE to help them launch a new TV show ‘Don’t Stop Believing’, with an integrated advertising campaign.

The show is due to air later this summer and will see FIVE scan the UK for groups that can sing and dance who will then be choreographed and judged by a team of industry experts, with Emma Bunton hosting along the way.

If you’re a Glee fan (or Journey) you’ll already be familiar with the title and this could be an opportunity for you to achieve fame as the show also offers the chance for the public to join a specially created DSB Supergroup who will represent the UK in the international Glee club circuit in the U.S.

We’re all very excited in the office about the show (and the competition).  Some of us have already been warming up our vocal chords, stocked up on honey and lemon and are even thinking of turning one of our meeting rooms into a studio so we can practise our singing and dance moves – we’re ready to pop, lock and drop – are you?…

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