Review of the Year - Part 2 - Awards!

Not quite the Cannes Lions... but it's been a great year in many senses for advertising, lots of exciting and engaging campaigns worthy of merit. Here are The Ad Pit Awards 2010!

Best Campaign

Nike - Write the Future - Talk about catching the moment and running with it. A brilliant, if sadly prophetic piece of work. Making big superstar spokespeople utterly relevant and endearing instead of shoe-horned.

Runners Up: E4 Flashmob (Utterly brilliant), John Lewis - Always a Woman, Nike Grid, Old Spice, Skoda - Meaner stuff, Match - Music shop

Best Surprise

Ikea - Kitchen at Parties - Jona Lewie brought back to popular culture and a magnificent use of music to demonstrate product.

Runner Up: Gillette - Federer video

Most Improved Advertising

Virgin Media - Speedy Gonzales - Welcome back Speedy. This is how to use existing characters to sell a product. Hits the nail right on the head in a way that manages to sell whilst still being funny.

Worst Advert

Go Compare - Opera Twat - Somehow, somehow they made this even worse than last year. A campaign surviving solely on media budget, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It's not funny, it's not engaging, it's not entertaining, it makes me want to have nothing to do with the brand in a way I haven't felt since Jamster.

Runner Up: Argos - Xmas (Nice ad, now why not wait til Christmas to show it?)

Most Disappointing Work

Cadbury's Dairy Milk - Charmer - Product product product nice soundtrack product product product product product. Not what we expected from one of the most engaging campaigns of recent years.

Agency of the Year

Wieden + Kennedy - Nike write the future, Nike Grid, Old Spice Man... I think there could only be one winner this year. Some agencies have made great work, but this year W+K have been consistently outstanding.

Arriba Arriba! ...........................

Disclosure: My brother worked on this ad, but that is in no way any reason for the below post.

I love the old Warner Brothers cartoons, they are briliant examples of when cartoons were treated with respect instead of being mass farmed out to Asia while all aspects of creativity are slowly chisled out.

That said, they were also good at creating characters; and the new Virgin Media ad is a great example of how to take an existing character and make it relevant to a brand strategy (as opposed to just shoehorning in a famous character for creative). If you want to suggest fast broadband, then who better than the fastest mouse in all of Mexico?

I also love the use of the anti-ad; the acknowledgement that Speedy is whoring himself out for the advertising industry. The writing is mainly setting up the story but leaves room for a couple of good sight gags and a magnificent cheese pun.

Speedy is on Facebook too, bringing an already vibrant character to life even more. If they get the writing right of course... but they have so far.

My only real criticisms are really more about the cartooning industry in general than this ad, so I'll leave that for another post.

This is great work by DDB. The campaign and strategy have the potential to run and run until they make Speedy Gonzales look like Regular Gonzales (as my brother would say).

Bring Out The Branson!

The new Virgin Trains ad is great because it knows exactly how much Branson to use. Whereas the Virgin Media ads have him revealed from a freaky doctor woman, and credit card ads have him revealed from a surgeon; this ad just slips him into the characters without a fanfare, and is all the better for it.

That tale of working on a train (impossible on Virgin Pendolino's in standard I might add, I've sat in bigger shoeboxes) to get something done before you arrive; mixed with some silly but humourous encouragement.

The soundtrack is just about spot on and the appearance of the keyboardist is a great twist.

I also think the line 'Where Do You Want to Be?' is simple but gives the feel of a big brand looking for the customer against random mixing of places (London Midland anyone?). It looks and feels like a Virgin brand, and for an industry like train travel there are few better things.

Virgin Media Update, Sky, BT

Frankly this just gets more and more ridiculous. Though I should do this in stages.
Not sure how interested anyone is in customer service, but I need to rant so I can finish my lunch and work...

Virgin Media

I was impressed by how someone was scanning blogs to pick up complaints like mine, and took action to get my query moving. The actual front end appeared to be the problem, with the head office staff all to willing to help, but engineers taking their time meant it still took far too long really.

Is it not possible to get a national map of where the cable is and add it to Google Maps? (They sent me a small map of where it was near me?) That would solve half this trouble easily.

No cable for me though. *sigh* Which leads me to:


Sky

Previously disappointing with internet support, but on moving tv across they were quick, polite, extremely helpful and sorted everything perfectly. 3 days later I have Sky again. Well done.


BT

Bastards.
Because someone 'allegedly' changed the phone line to another provider and it got disconnected... I now have to pay £125 to get it reconnected. A figure which can handily be discounted if I take BT's services.
Bastards.
Bastards.
Bastards.

Right... back to work.

Virgin Media Part One (possibly of many)

"Lunchtime is Rant-time!"

Me. Just Now

Long ago, in the dark days before iPlayer, when the internet was the preserve of geeks and just a few normal people, when non-cable broadband connections of over 512k were extortionate and limited to London and a few other selected dignitaries; there was a company called NTL.

Despite its great product, it apppeared that their customer service was managed by a brain damaged chimp with no arms and legs. They made BT look good.

Then they became Virgin Media, and suddenly (you hoped) that things would get better. Richard Branson would VA the company, take on SKY and win better media service for us, the cheering loving public.

Sadly not quite.

Having just moved I need internet, phone and tv services. Looking at SKY and VM, it appears that VM have the best deal. Then I notice the little * that says "When you take a phone line for £11 a month". Luckily it was still cheaper.

So I called them up, and got a few bits of info from a helpful guy named Dan.

Then...

I called again to ask about installation and found:

1) Though my street is cabled, its not on their database so I need to get an engineer out to look at it.

2) Get given a phone number for the engineers that doesnt wrk

3) Call back, person seems unable to comprehend what I want

4) Call again, get given an alternative number which works

5) Leave a message asking for them to look at it, having been told only that "should be done within days". Clearly VM don't realise that most people are lost without the internet, I dont wish to spend weeks waiting!

6) Waited

That was Thursday, still no reply. Asked someone yesterday to look into it, and nothing...

I shall keep you posted. You'd think Virgin Media would like to help new customers... they have about a week before I go back to Sky.