Artists in Residence…

My colleague Jen Maher and I joined Colin Doyle and Amanda Moran in the Residence Bar for the Eclipse Media Christmas bash back in December. It was great to celebrate with the guys and see our work for Coca Cola given such prominence on the night.

We have run several high profile outdoor campaigns with Eclipse on behalf of Three Mobile, Nescafe and Coca Cola and are always blown away at how they turn every challenge into an opportunity.

And it’s not just our clients they do superb work for – I especially liked the ‘industry first’ work they did for Philadelphia last year, where we saw touch screens embedded into 6 sheets. Consumers could navigate their way around the recipes and ingredients with an option to email the recipes to themselves. This allowed the client the ability to capture data as the software had a built in tracker for the most popular sites, days, recipes and amount of time spent on each page.

Here’s to another great year of innovation guys!

December 2011, Coca Cola, Open Happiness can dispenser

December 2011, Coca Cola, Open Happiness can dispenser

April 2011, Three Mobile, i-phone campaign

April 2011, Three Mobile, i-phone campaign

November 2011, Philadelphia ‘Love it’ campaign

November 2011, Philadelphia ‘Love it’ campaign

Shaking up the Happiness with Coke.

In the spirit of Christmas, and Coca Cola, our creative team at McCanns came up with a very generous way of “Sharing the Happiness” this festive season. Enlisting the help of our friends at Eclipse Media, we installed a six sheet mini-can dispenser in several Shopping Centers around Ireland to the delight of the general public. With a simple wave of the hand, the six sheet dispenses a free can of either Coke, Diet Coke, or Coke Zero, with a total of 50,000 of them being given away over Christmas. We went out to one of the locations, the Ilac Shopping Centre, to film this mechanical gift giver in action and to see the reaction of its users.

Take a look….

I’ll be your blog

david-bowen-blogIn the 80’s as a boy, one ad always grabbed my attention and as far as I can gather has stuck in the minds of a generation. The iconic Kia-Ora animation of a boy and his dog being harassed by a bunch of crows who sing “I’ll be your dawg” to a calypso beat in an effort get some of his juice.

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Above: Kia-Ora 6 Sheet.

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We had the pleasure of reviving our childhood favourite by using the classic Kia-Ora crows to launch their new double strength dilutable. We tracked down the original animator Oscar Grillo, an amazing Argentinian Illustrator who worked on the 1983 ad and he was delighted to draw us up some new characters. A big thank you to composer John McPhillips for our radio, which was an expert homage to the caribbean calpso sound of the original – all together now – We all adore-a Kia-Ora!

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Coca-Cola still number one

orlaith-blaney-blogwhteTop 100 Brands list (Nielsen) has just been published by Checkout. A freshly printed copy arrived on my desk this morning. A massive well done to Coca-Cola who have held the number one position for the last five years. A superb achievement and a business we have been extremely proud to partner. And Tayto, rising from number 10 in 2008, to number 5 in 2010. A tremendous achievement too. Well done to DDFHB for boosting Brennan’s position from number 4 to number 3, to Irish International BBDO for their work in moving Avonmore’s position and to QMP Publicis for shooting Cadbury up the league from number 9 to number 6. I know it isn’t marketing alone that helps to boost these positions, but clearly it is a contributing factor.

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Above: Coca-Cola ‘Open Happiness’ eBoy campaign by McCann Erickson Dublin. See original post here.
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Above: Tayto autobiography of Mr. Tayto ‘The Man Inside the Jacket’ – The book concept was developed by McCann Erickson Dublin. The book has sold over 60,000 copies and was a Christmas number 1. See original post here.

Record breaking X-Factor

sylvia-cawley-blogwhiteSaturday night’s opening X-Factor saw massive viewership figures, the highest ever – with 730,000 people tuning into the show. This made TV3 the most watched channel for 15-44 year olds in Ireland for that time period. In Universal McCann, we always pride ourselves on the strength of our client’s programme access. The ‘Coca-Cola with Food’ campaign had prime position in the first centre break with ‘first-in-break’ access.

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Certainly one of the highlights of the Saturday’s show was Shirlena Johnson with ‘Mercy’. This year’s X-Factor is set to be bigger and better than ever… tune in this Saturday at 19.30 and 20.45 for the Xtra-Factor!

Stealing your attention

ross-hardiman-heistThe task was to bring this beautifully shot Coke TV advert to life in outdoor. This was a great chance to do something different and Coca-Cola were really excited with the idea of producing outdoor specials. With the help of our special builds hero Colin Doyle from Eclipse Lighting, we created 48 sheets where the characters from the TV ad are literally stealing the Coke bottles off the 48 sheet.

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We created 3D models of our adorable yet mischievous bugs plus a huge 3D Coke bottle to maximize impact. When these elements were added to the vibrant spring look and feel of the TV ad, we were left with really colourful, eye catching and memorable outdoor ads that literally ‘steal’ your attention (no pun intended). A big thanks to everyone involved.

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Inspired reading…

galliganwhitbyblogWe’re delighted to learn that not only has our eboy Coca-Cola ‘Open Happiness’ campaign been featured in Computer Arts Magazine Issue 132 –  ’A Decade of Design’, but the campaign has also been selected for inclusion in their ‘Book of Inspiration’ – a collection of the world’s foremost digital art, design and illustration.

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‘The Book of Inspiration’ by Computer Arts.

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There is still a high level of interest in the ‘Open Happiness’ campaign and an ongoing fascination with eboy’s illustration around the globe. You can read the Computer Arts interview with eboy here. View our original blog post on the Coca-Cola ‘Open Happiness’ campaign with eboy here, and watch our ‘Making of’ video here.

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Our Galway execution appears in the magazine.

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Checkout Top 100 Brands 2009 – Why does Coca-Cola consistently dominate?

Coca-Cola Bottle Red

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A fantastic review of brands that are performing in Ireland is covered by the Checkout Top 100 brands issue out this week. I grabbed a copy with the first thing I checked – how were the brands we work on, doing, in this latest round up. Coca-Cola continue to dominate and have held the number one position for the last five years. Having worked, as an agency, with Coca-Cola for the last fifteen years at McCann, I thought about what makes them this successful, and so consistently.

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Building happiness

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We’ve been getting a great response to our Coca-Cola ‘Open Happiness’ eboy campaign with a lot of people curious as to how it was created, here’s a short video that shows the development from initial pencil sketch to final artwork which we hope you’ll enjoy!

 

 

Our Belfast and Dublin cities will also be featured in a book on illustration by publisher’s Laurence King, so watch this space!

Eboy makes you happy

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We have just posted Coke’s ‘Open Happiness’ eboy outdoor campaign and we are more than happy about it!

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Eboy Dublin outdoor ran last year and was loved by teens – in fact the response was so strong Coke posted hundreds of posters to die-hard Coke fans. Teens connected with the fact that their city was given such local relevance especially by a big global brand like Coca Cola; so with this in mind we commissioned eboy Galway, Cork and Belfast illustrations.

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…and the award goes to… Sprite

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Fantastic news! Last Thursday night, McCann Erickson and Coca-Cola Ireland won the best Advertising Campaign of the year for 2008 at the Marketing Institute AIM awards.

 

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That’s Aengus (our Sprite client) in the background picking up the award. That’s Jono (from our Media department) in the foreground giving the rarely seen ‘double thumbs-up’ sign.

 

This is our second win for CCI at the AIM awards in two years – some achievement.

 

Sprite ‘JD Quench’ beat competition from Premier Foods (Erin), Diageo (Guinness and Carlsberg) and Hibernian Aviva (Launch Campaign) to win the award for best Ad Campaign.

JD Quench (and Sprite) step outside

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This has been such a fun project to work on from start to finish – beginning with the Thirst Never Wins Online / TV work last summer and now with this print campaign.

 

Creating an imaginary back catalogue for J.D. Quench just makes me laugh. I love the idea that this forgotten giant of D-Movies appears to have spent his entire career in a series of Sprite Film Productions with entirely similar plots.

 

‘Mouth of Fire’ takes J.D. to the Orient. In my mind the film was shot in Chinatown, L.A. in 1973; they never would have had the budget to travel. No doubt J.D. himself would have put in at least two days martial arts training in advance of filming (he was never a great believer in ‘method’ acting). The plot would have revolved around J.D. overcoming a nasty Chinese ‘T.H.I.R.S.T.’ gang with his specially adapted Sprite nunchuck – all accompanied by very, very loud; very, very badly synched sound effects.

 

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‘The Elemonator’ would have been much maligned on release but then go on to be considered a hugely influential Sci-Fi classic when re-assessed years later. Here J.D. is sent back, from the future, to 1974 (conveniently!). His mission would have been to prevent an alternative global future where people would have been denied the thirst quenching qualities of Sprite forever: something just not worth thinking about.

 

I would guess there might have been some groundbreaking (read: really dodgy) special effects throughout.

 
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Movie credits where they are due – these posters were illustrated by Bruce Emmett through the Folio Illustration Agency in London.

 

Read the full story here.


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