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!

Xmas Mania, Toast and New Friends: A tale of London

I've never been to London, let alone Creature London.

There are a lot of shared similarities from the rain, to the long hours and dedication to good work and the Creature way, to camaraderie established over an abundance of pints (of lager. pints of lager. that's all there is here.)

2 things have stuck out since arriving; one being the full blown anticipation of Christmas. Every shopping square, every store window is dressed in the holiday cheer a good 7 weeks out. And that's just my confirmation from arriving in early November. I'm not convinced the spirit doesn't start bubbling up sometime in midAugust. But hey, they don't exactly have that certain day of thanks to bridge the holiday gap.

 

Toast! Toast in the morning, at meetings, in the afternoon. Wherever, whenever. I'm not convinced that a hand held toaster wouldn't be the hottest thing in London, since you know the slices they're eating. Slather that sucker with marmite for a savory punch (confession: I like marmite now). Or any of the thousands of other spreads and trust in the age old London motto of: When in doubt - eat MORE toast!

I'll be sad to say goodbye when the time comes to my new pals. But at least I'll have marmite for everyone's stockings back at home. 

-Nick Stoolman

Recognized as being recognized.

With so much to talk about here in Seattle, it would be a shame to not recognize London’s buzz. But rather than me paraphrase, why not read what Campaign magazine has to say about our office in the parallel universe of Shoreditch. 

Click here to read the article.

Fifty for Fifty

Today we received a fun challenge from Ben Middleton, a Creature Creative in London. He has proposed the following....

Hey guys,

Hope it's as sunny in Seattle as it is here in London.

Just wanted to fill you in on a stupid little idea we've had over here, and to see if you can help us get it some momentum.

So, what the hell are you banging on about Ben? I hear you ask.

Well here it goes:

On November 2nd, the Bank of England will be unveiling their new £50 note. It's going to have Boulton & Watt on it. (We need to check, but we think they were the ones in N*Sync that weren't Justin Timberlake or Joey ‘Fat One’.)

Like all agencies, over at Creature of London we know the importance of money; but unlike a distressingly large number of agencies, we also know the importance of really good design.

So we're launching a competition called 'Fifty for Fifty'.

It's a pretty straightforward concept: we're asking any up-and-coming designer that fancies it to show us what they think the new £50 note should look like.

It could be a evolution of the current £50 note, it could have Mr T on it instead of Boulton and Watt, it could be sculpted, it could be illustrative, it could be purely typographic, the skies the limit.

We'll host all of the entries (no matter how dire) here on our Tumblr site , and on November 2nd, I’ll pick a winner, and then give them one of the new, real £50 notes.

That's it. No other rules. You don't even have to be an up-and-coming designer - you could just be a punter with a pen.

There's no charity angle; it's just cold hard cash, for cold hard cash.

If we get lots of entries, we might do an exhibition of al the entries. And there might even be beer. truth be told we haven't thought that far ahead yet.

Send your entries or any you hear about to ben@creaturelondon.com, or tweet them at either @fiftyforfifty, @creature_ben or @creature_dan.

No purchase necessary, and all that.

Creature of London Hires Dan Shute & Danny Bush

Creature of London has hired the Glue Isobar group account director, Dan Shute, as partner, and the WCRS&Co director of delivery, Danny Bush, as director of delivery.

Shute has been at Glue Isobar for the past two years, running the Nokia global account. Before that, he was the director of engagement and participation at Delaney Lund Knox Warren. He is also behind the blog AdLand Suit.

Bush has been the director of delivery at WCRS&Co for the past four years. Before that, he was the delivery director at ODD London and has also held posts at Mother, Wieden & Kennedy and JWT London. Shute and Bush will work with Ivan Purdie, the managing director of Creature London.

Creature UK Wins Science Museum Pitch

Congratulations to our friends across the pond for capturing the Science Museum business after taking part in their first UK pitch since hiring Ben Middleton, Ed Warren and Stuart Outhwaite as Creative Directors in February.

Creature of London has been tasked with creating an integrated campaign for the museum encompassing print, digital, social media, experiential and PR activity. The campaign takes inspiration from the museum's forthcoming "space" exhibition.

Creature London: A View From The Bottom

This is a blog post by Marcus and Chris, the first ever creative team to placement at Creature London.

The birth of an agency is a great experience, especially for two advertising students about to finish university. My creative partner and I had the privilage of spending two weeks working at Creature's new London office. So new in fact, that when we turned up and rang the doorbell, no one answered the door because they thought it was an alarm, then we knocked on the door and got offered coffee, which was nice.

The office was fairly empty in terms of decor and furnishings because it was so new, but while we were there we saw the network set up and some cool hanging speakers installed above the tables. It'll be interesting to see what it looks like in a few weeks once everything is settled.

Looking back on the experience, we were treated like placement kings.

We had pizza and beer bought for us and even had tea made for us by the creative director.

The work we had to do was the work you'd expect from a young creative agency. It was all about great ideas and great strategies; and as we were working with everyone for a pitch we had the oppertunity for some of our ideas to get presented, which they did.

One time though we got cornered and were forced to fill up some jars with 'amazing stuff.' Honey. Sticky stuff.

The whole experience was great and everyone was really cool. We learnt a lot, and of course, were very grateful for the oppertunity, so we bought Krispy Kremes for everyone, which didn't initially go to plan. After buying the donuts we were going to burst through the door with donuts expecting everyone to be jumping and screaming waving flags and offering us jobs, but instead, we opened the door, and everyone was out for lunch.

They still went down well anyway.

I would definitely recommend people looking to placement to check out Creature. The creative directors are amazing people who you'll learn a lot from and as it isn't a huge corporation, it's still very personal and intimate.

That's all from us for now, if you want to know more or have questions for us, feel free to follow and talk to us on Twitter: Marcus/Chris

An ECD of Three in the UK

We’re no strangers to talent here at Creature, but we’d be lying if we said we weren’t incredibly excited about our new creative trio heading up our London office.
 
We’re proud to welcome Ed Warren, Ben Middleton and Stuart Outhwaite – three creative émigrés from Mother’s London shop – aboard Creature, as our new UK creative partners, working alongside the familiar and esteemed Ivan Purdie.

As you’d expect, they come from distinguished stock. At Mother, they were at the helm of the agency’s Unilever account, creating some of the UK’s best-known campaigns. Including a couple of Campaign magazine’s top ten for 2010.

Check out their Pot Noodle ‘Sticky Rib’ TV spot to give you a flavor: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74benH-G0oo

Collectively they’ve also worked across accounts as diverse as Beck’s, Powerade and Match.com. Notable work includes Four Feet from a Rat – a graphic novel series developed for listings magazine, Time Out, and the groundbreaking Pot Noodle the Musical, for Unilever, which debuted at the 2008 Edinburgh Arts Festival.

Ed started out as a planner at Lowe and DLKW before taking up the creative mantle at Mother. Ben and Stu are a well-established creative partnership after 8 solid years at Mother.

We anticipate big things from these three, so be sure to give them a warm welcome. We searched long and hard for our Creative Directors for London as we look to expand internationally, and I can’t imagine a bunch of guys that fit in better. We will have them visit as soon as we can so you can all meet them. They officially start in March. One last note; although Stu’s name is super hard to spell, he’s really easy to talk to. Ed speaks Mandarin fluently. And it is rumored that Ben invented steak.