Awards update: Adweek’s Project Isaac, One Show, Addys

Jim Haven - COO/Founder

Award show season is upon us, and so far, it’s been a good year for Creature. Yesterday, we had some recognition in Adweek as they announced the winners of the Project Isaac Awards celebrating invention in media, advertising marketing and technology. This award was for Cheapstaprint, which continues to generate buzz and sometimes Instagrams. To me, this is a great award to win because we take a lot of pride in coming up with strange, wonderful and smart ideas.

Beyond that, last week we learned that we had four pieces in The One Show in both design and advertising. They were merits, but that’s good enough to get in the book. Kudos to the design team and creatives who made it possible.

Not to be left behind, we are up for a couple national Addys for the Creature Windows, and The Creature Window Shop charity campaign. We won’t know the flavor until the ceremony, but wanted to put it out there because these windows are a labor of love, and deserve to be recognized for all of the late nights and passion that are put into them.

All and all, there’s a lot of diversity in the work that’s winning right now. It’s good to be contributing from a far away corner of the world.

The Mayor at Creature

Jim Haven - COO/Founder

Last Friday, we were honored to host Mayor Mike McGinn at Creature as part of our role helping Seattle’s Office of Film & Music and Washington Filmworks. We hosted a sort of roundtable to bring the Mayor up to speed with the program and campaign we’ve been working on. Joining us were individuals from local production companies and advertising agencies.  

The event went well, and it’s all-systems-go in terms of moving forward. The Mayor also took the time to have his photo snapped by the ‘You Were Here’ mirror. Always thinking, he made sure and posed with his bike, which is his running mate.

Everyone did a fantastic job in terms of putting together such a cool event and dealing with the disruption.  It’s good to put ourselves on the map more locally and we are going to continue to find new opportunities to make a difference here, solving problems with creativity and being weird. 

AIGA Studio Tours

Creature is excited to be a part of the AIGA Studio Tour! Doors open tonight at 5:30pm for a chance to see what is behind our doors, and to tour our studio. If that is not incentive enough, we will be serving hot dogs and beer!

Tickets can be purchased here, http://www.aigaseattle-studiotours.com/.

You Were Here: Vanity Meets Voyeurism

As long as we've had these windows, pedestrians have wondered what on earth it is that we do. We wanted to play that up but still interact with the community. Store front windows are usually a one way experience. You look in. You see the display. You walk on. We wanted to make our windows a two way conversation. When you check yourself out in the mirror, could the mirror check you out as well?

You Were Here uses two cameras controlled by a laptop. The first camera uses a motion sensing program to know when someone's in front of the window that has been treated with a two way mirror material. This in turn triggers a flash and DSLR camera. Every morning we comb through the previous day's crop of photos, and select the most interesting to post here. And some we print out to display in the opposite window. We’re adding to it every day.

It feels sort of like going fishing. We never know what we’re going to get every time we pull up the line. We invite you to come by and show us what you got. 

Fun with technology in Amsterdam (a belated post)

Jim Haven - COO/Founder

Some of you may have noticed I wasn’t running around the office the other week interrupting people with occasionally irrelevant thoughts. That’s because I was invited to do that in front of an audience in Amsterdam last week.

Who would be crazy enough to fly me over to Amsterdam? Well, an online Dutch magazine called Emerce sponsored a conference called Digital Marketing Live. And for my part they asked me to run through a transformational case study (SBC). And then do a group of round table sessions followed by a quick presentation at invitational digital dinner with 6 other speakers. For that I presented Brandon and Mike’s Cheapstaprint.

Speaking in front of audiences in other countries can be a bit unpredictable. When I spoke on behalf of The One Club in Shanghai a few years ago I learned that sometimes things get lost in translation. And I should not try to be a Chinese comedian, or in any country for that matter.  Amanda and Tom pretty much made sure that my tongue was my only obstacle here.

So, why am I an expert on digital? Well, because I’m not. And that’s the point. Through natural selection and other metaphorical parallels to Darwinism, digital, in terms of communication is no different than an allen wrench in your communications toolbox. If I or Creature could aspire to any genre expertise, I would hope it would be akin to innovation. That perspective is pretty mainstream now. As an agency we believed in that philosophy from day one.  Which was, if you can imagine, sort of radical ten years ago. I know, people were stupid back then. You can tell by looking at those old fat TVs. And that gay marriage was illegal. And smoking in public places was not.

So that’s why I was amidst the canals, oddly shaped electrical outlets and deep-fried globes of gravy called biterbalen. The cool thing was that this was where Matt and I first worked together. It’s where the inspiration came from.

By the way, next to some pretty powerful forces in the interactive world, Cheapstaprint held its own. And for SBC, no one can understand how one company was able to do so much. Let’s make more and better.

Tot ziens. 

Creature Windows: Valentine's Edition

This window installation was created as we approached Valentines day and is

dedicated to people finding their one in million perfect love. Let’s hope

they have cool butts.

Creature London Wins Carling

Guest post by Dan Shute, managing partner at our London office: 

Hello, Internet! And American Internet at that. Gosh, this is exciting. (NB I only ever say 'gosh' when I'm writing for the US.)

 So, as you may or may not be aware, the last couple of weeks have been rather exciting for those of us in the Creature office based out in achingly cool London, England. After several months of hard graft, late nights and extensive product sampling, we have FINALLY been able to excitingly and excitedly announce that Molson Coors has picked us to handle the advertising for Carling lager, and for their soon-to-be-launched-but-already-award-winning Carling British Cider. We're going to be making TV, posters, print, radio, digital, social and a whole bunch of other internetty stuff. It's going to be awesome.

This is exciting for a whole bunch of reasons:

1. It's huge. Like, HUGE. Big Client, big work, big opportunity.

2. Carling is one of the most iconic brands in the UK: their advertising in the ‘80s is one of the main reasons most of us got into advertising. Now we get to MAKE it. That's pretty f____ing*  cool.

3. Beer advertising used to be awesome. Now, not so much. We want to make it awesome again.

4. We love lager. It's brilliant. It's a relatively inexpensive, yet delicious way of making everything seem a little bit shinier. What's not to love?

5. We love making stuff, and Carling is going to give us an opportunity to make LOADS of stuff.

6. We beat a bunch of agencies that are several times bigger than us. It would be churlish to name names; instead, I'll just say, a propos of nothing, that you're unlikely to see similar blog posts from Saatchi & Saatchi, VCCP, BMB or McCann any time soon.

7. Molson Coors doesn't just exist in the UK. Let's go global, people.

So, that's where we are. We're tired, we're drained, and we're stupidly over-excited, and we need to make a load of things really quickly. This is where the fun starts.

PS Anyone want to come and help out?

* NOTE – the American editor had to scrub the British profanity from this blog post. That sort of stuff might be well and good over there, but we’ve got rules over here!

Children's Film Festival

Kids get to do the coolest stuff: recess, shamelessly wearing bright pink backpacks, and now, a film festival. The Northwest Film Forum just finished up hosting the eighth annual Children’s Film Festival, screening over 100 films from 35 countries. Creature has joined the fun by producing five original trailers, designing posters, creating an interactive app, and helping articulate the festival’s honorable mission, “Inspiring joyful neurons.”

The festival went above-and-beyond with special events like a junior film critics workshop for aspiring Eberts, a pancake breakfast movie party, and for the budding Surrealists, a viewing of the Chinese version of Fantasia. Check out the trailers we made below…

Children's Film Festival - NWFF - Paint from Creature on Vimeo.

Children's Film Festival - NWFF - Color from Creature on Vimeo.

Children's Film Festival - NWFF - Light from Creature on Vimeo.

Children's Film Festival - NWFF - Levitation from Creature on Vimeo.

Private screening party for The Time Being film

Last Friday evening, Creature partnered with our neighbors at the Northwest Film Forum for a private screening of The Time Being. The night kicked off sensibly with pizza and multiple glasses of wine at our office.  

In attendance was a winning battalion of film enthusiasts, including local independent filmmaker Johan Liedgren and James Keblas, director of Seattle’s Office of Film + Music.

The guest of honor was the producer of the film, Richard Gladstein, a Hollywood force of nature and longtime friend of the agency. His impressive production credits include Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and The Bourne Identity.

He generously allowed us to show the film, exhibited enviable mingling skills, and gave an entertaining post-screening Q&A. Gladstein’s biggest excitement around the project was the opportunity to work with up-and-coming director Nenad Cicin-Sain, a Tahitian pearl farmer turned filmmaker.

The Time Being tells the story of a struggling painter named Daniel (Wes Bentley), trying to balance being a dad with his artistic dedication. He makes black-and-white paintings that rarely find a buyer, but everything changes when he meets an eccentric millionaire (Frank Langella). The reclusive, aging benefactor lives in a creepy mansion and tasks Daniel with a string of bizarre commissions. Their relationship depicts the struggle of being devoted to an artistic craft, yet living in a world of family commitments and as Destiny’s Child once said, “Bills bills bills.”

The Time Being circles larger themes of the all-consuming nature of art and its toll on the artist. The dying millionaire gives the audience a perspective on whether creativity might be worth the struggle.

As any film focused on visual art should be, it’s an aesthetic marvel. The Time Being is beautifully shot and features original oil paintings by Stephen Wright and Eric Zener throughout the film. 

Be sure to check it out as it hits theatres and festival circuits later this year. Our investigative research shows it pairs well with wine and creative friends.

Hamomi

By Bekah Grim

Last month, the Window Shop team asked Creature to suggest nonprofits we’d like to support with the donations. Initially, my mind went to the far away and exotic (rural orphanage in India? refugee relief by Oxfam?) — it reflects how we often think about humanitarian aid as something removed and distant. Yet, we have an amazing nonprofit using office space right here at Creature: Hamomi Children’s Centre. If Oprah gets to have “a-ha!” moments, this was our “duh” moment. We have enthusiastically selected Hamomi to receive all proceeds from the gift shop experiment.

Hamomi provides comprehensive care to orphaned and vulnerable children in the slums of Nairobi. “Comprehensive” means providing primary and secondary education to 140 students, along with medical care, meals, higher education scholarships, and even micro loans to help graduating students start their own small businesses.

I love the philosophy of the founder Raphael Etenyi, who wrote, “These are not children who face one simple problem, so we do not offer one simple solution.” Hamomi understands these children need more than a deposit of algebra textbooks. Students also need a place to do their homework, accessible medical care to stay healthy, mentoring relationships with teachers, and options for what happens after graduation. It’s an incredibly well-considered and sustainable approach to empowering students toward a better future.

We were drawn to the organization for their grassroots creativity and efficiency. Hamomi is headquartered in a two-desk operation, right next to our design studio. It’s managed by dedicated, unpaid volunteers. Susie Marks, executive director, nannies full-time in addition to running the organization and spending part of the year in Africa. Their scrappiness and ingenuity means funding goes directly to Nairobi, not administrative overhead. The feeding program costs just 14 cents per meal and the medical program is $1.60 per month for each child. On Hamomi’s website, they have a transparent breakdown of their budget and costs. All of this to say, a small donation goes a long way.

We’re jazzed about Hamomi and the work they do. We’d love for you to buy our weird trinkets to benefit their cause, or you can donate directly to them.