C&IB

We have ideas and make them happen.

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A few more photos from A Town Called Publicis Media

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Having consolidated five brands under the Publicis Media umbrella, International super agency the Publicis Groupe approached C+IB to concept and produce a launch event for their 1500 UK staff. The brief asked that we celebrate the individual agencies whilst also presenting the new corporate structure to staff in a compelling and easily digestible way.

Our response imagined the group as a small town with each entity represented by a business around the central square. We titled it A Town Called Publicis Media.

Following a hectic schedule of creative workshops we developed shop concepts, branding, scripts and collateral for each agency. These wove the existing agency identities into the deign and narrative of an imagined ‘Mom and Pop’ retail store.  The Spark Microbrewhouse, Daily Starcom, Zenith Wellness, Form Mobile & Neon Dreams Arcade emerged from the creative process and Town Called Publicis Media started coming to life.

Keen to avoid breaking the immersive magic of our town square, we decided to subvert the usual powerpoint format for the informational section of the evening, choosing instead to imagine the town’s festivities being covered by a local news station. We commissioned an outside broadcast news crew and hired an actor who conducted live interviews with agency leads and group CEO Amanda Morrissey, which were relayed to big screens and televisions across the space.

A Town Called Publicis Media opened its doors for one night only on the 27th of April 2017. Featuring six unique branded shops, four bars, fifty actors, a completely bespoke bottled beer run, a juice bar, three food trucks and fifteen hundred guests, it was a pretty special place to be.

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Breweries get a lot of emails asking for free beer, and the pitch is generally the same - an influential guest list, branding on print collateral, social media love, photos of product in hand etc. etc.

Event sponsorship can offer good ROI for big brands with big budgets but a relatively small operation like Portobello Brewing Co. has to think carefully before handing out saleable stock - especially given that it’s often a bigger or more visible entity asking for their support. Instead of chasing every sponsored event for a photo round-up or that extra tweet-out that was promised, what if we asked them to apply some of their talents to our proposition.

This wonderful animation is the first example of that thinking in action and we’re really pleased with the result.

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Blood, Sweat & Marketing

C&IB were approached by ATAK Promotions to provide social media content and design support for Bellator 158 - a Viacom-owned Mixed Martial Arts event at London’s O2.

We weren’t particularly familiar with MMA before we started the project but we soon found out there’s more to the world’s fastest growing sport than its somewhat bloody reputation. It’s carefully run, well organised and the competitors are committed, serious athletes capable of entertaining massive audiences.

Our campaign, made up of print adverts, digital video and paid social had an eye on MMA’s move towards the mainstream, positioning the event an exciting alternative to your average Saturday night out. We produced video profiles & interview content with each of the title card fighters with cumulative views topping the 1M mark in a single week.

We’re continuing our relationship with Bellator, alongside some exiting projects with individual fighters, including Michael ‘Venom’ Page whose spectacular knockout finish on the night of the event saw him trending worldwide on Twitter.

Some behind the cage images from the night, shot by Andy Hall, along with a video wrap up below...

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We took Portobello Brewing Co back to the streets of Notting Hill for Carnival 2016.

We partied with a few West Friends and partnered with Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues to launch PBC’s new cans with a limited-edition run.

Thanks to all who worked, danced and drank with us over another unforgettable weekend.

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Our short film for the Glamorgan Brewing Company is now live.

Shot on location in South Wales with Graham Hughes in the director’s chair, Lifeblood explores the role of a brewery within a local area. It’s a little bit weird, full of heart and we’re really proud of it.

Our thanks go out to Vanya Barwell, MPC, PixiPixel, The Laundry Room & the good gentlemen of the Barry Male Voice Choir.

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A few more pictures from our devotional event with DigitasLBi

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We were approached by DigitasLBi to resurrect their infamous annual Rave, though the lens of a new brand promise to ‘Make It Count’

With their vast offices on Brick Lane, an adjacent Truman Brewery space & 1000 guests to play with; we conceived a pagan-inspired bacchanal set in the near future.

With the help of an incredible group of actors & directors from the National Theater, guests were inducted into the Cult of the Unicorn and bathed in lasers before dancing the night away to music from Swim Deep, Work It & Kode9.

We called it Devotion.

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Our Colour Aura creative for Alexis Bittar is now live across their site. Get gifting...

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In the grading suite today, working on a rather special film for a Welsh beer brand. Stay tuned...

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A Little Give & Take

Sharing a name with W10’s most iconic road has helped Portobello Brewing Company grow quickly and credibly. With a desire to give something back, how could they make meaningful local connections without accusations of postcode profiteering?

They tasked C&IB to help the brand give something back to local community, whilst driving sales; raising awareness and helping them reach new customers.

Suspecting the best solution would harness the power of beer (it’s one of our guiding principles!) we decided to create seasonal ale whose proceeds would be injected back into the wider community.

Having produced successful brand activations at Notting Hill Carnival for the last two years - in collaboration with London’s longest running club night: Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues - it felt natural to extend the connection.

We commissioned Portobello’s head brewer, Farooq, to create a one-off brew, channelling the spirit and tastes of the carnival. He dubbed it Carnival Pale.

With a rich, malty body, notes of mango, passion fruit, and a hint of grapefruit… it was bound to be a hit!

We also got in touch with the London Notting Hill Carnival Enterprise Trust, the organisational body behind the festivities, and asked for their help in nominating some worthy causes. With their full support we introduced the brew at the official Notting Hill Carnival launch event at the St Lucian High Commission.

The following day pre-orders & promotional materials were delivered to customers.

Landlords were incentivised to push product, with the highest grossing site being rewarded with a wrap party hosted and paid for by Portobello Brewing Co.

The winning site - The Union Tavern – was filled with press, brand fans & interested punters for our closing event.  A raffle with prizes including carnival costumes, signed prints, brewery tours & plenty of beer gave a final boost to our grand total.

At last count the project had raised over four thousand pounds for local Carnival charities, with Pale outselling previous Portobello seasonals by a factor of ten.

With press coverage in the Morning Advertiser, Metro, Time Out & a TV spot on London Live, this was by far the widest reaching activity Portobello Brewing Co. had ever been involved with.

As the 50th anniversary of Notting Hill Carnival fast approaches we’re looking forward to extending Portobello Brewing Co.’s partnership with the LNHCET, Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues and, most importantly, the fine people of W10.

Let the good times roll.

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A transformational round up of our work with DigitasLBi on UK New Front 2015

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UK New Front 2015

DigitasLBi gave C&IB the creative brief for their UK New Front 2015 event.

This high-profile gathering is a collaborative thought-leadership programme aimed at stimulating ideas within the burgeoning branded content marketplace.

With an exciting line-up of speakers confirmed, and a Transformation theme in place, C&IB were tasked with bringing concept and coherence to the event’s communications and production.

Transformation can take many forms – a personal change, a culture shifting innovation, a Pandora’s box.

Lots of fascinating research, and some long conversations in the pub, left us feeling that transformational occurrences are generally unforeseen; gradual, and cumulative. That it is the spaces between moments of innovation or inspiration in which transformation actually occurs. That - and this felt important - most of the time we can’t foresee where an idea will lead.

We found that we kept returning to Jeremy Deller’s History of the World, which winds an unlikely confluence between colliery brass bands and acid house, it’s center swirling with seemingly disparate transformational possibilities.

We decided to take the thinking behind Deller’s work and apply it to our industry, commissioning an art historian to delve into the history of communication, and holding a number of workshops with colleagues and thought leaders, to gather insights.

We handed the end result – our master document – to DigitasLBi’s Head of Innovation Lorenzo Wood and he programmed it up into something which represented the agency in it’s best light: innovative, tech savy & data driven.  

We also used the mind-map as a visual cue, creating a whimsical, hand-drawn graphic motif that provided all key signposting throughout the space, and represented transformational thinking in an accessible, inspiring, shareable light.

Our digital history of communication was programmed to pick out creative transformational routes which combined technological innovations with pop-culture references. Over-arching insights generated loads of social media chatter.

Our visual motif was projection mapped onto a giant silhouette of the Truman Brewery, a nod to the venue hosting the event, and the brewery’s role at the heart of the area during its transformation from London’s fabric capital to the center of the new Tech City. 

DigitasLBi’s UK New Front 2015 was top trending in the UK on Twitter, with a combined reach of over 6.7 million.

Job well done.

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C&IB partnered with UGG UK & Lost Boys on an experiential campaign designed to let consumers know there was more to the brand than their eponymous winter boots.

Here’s what we came up with...

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Drinks, License & the Lash at Europe’s Biggest Street Party

Notting Hill Carnival contains multitudes. Family friendly day out, debauched all-day party, safe haven for gang violence - it all seems to depend on which newspaper you take. The defining image in the press, however, remains the same. A policeman, shirt un-tucked and hat askew, combining lindy-hop, dutty wine and a woman half his age to instant viral effect.

One only needs to smell the thick, sticky air to understand that rules are relaxed, or thrown out completely, for one last blowout summer weekend.

While weed smoke hangs heavy and the police turn a blind eye, the people really letting it all hang out in August are the British licensing authorities, allowing Britain’s unlicensed alcohol sellers their moment in the sun, come rain or shine. For one weekend a single bottle of Wray & Nephew’s Overproof or a trolley full of lukewarm Red Stripe renders its holder bartender, landlord and banker combined. Tax, weights and measures be damned!

This direct and interference-free exchange of alcohol for sweaty coins or soggy notes can make Carnival a difficult place for brands. While Supermalt, Alize & others had bars with high production values and a proliferation of bells & (literal) whistles, the experience seems to leave most carnival goers cold. Perhaps it’s an instinctual reaction, local people and community groups continue to run Europe’s largest street party, and heavy-handed brand presence scans as lacking the human touch.

The undisputed king of carnival beers is Red Stripe, most popularly sold from a Tesco trolley full of ice or plywood fronted single purpose shop. Red Stripe’s rise to the carnival crown is an interesting study in a softly-softly approach – for years brand reps would flood the streets in the week leading up to festivities, distributing cases & cases of product at discount prices and providing banners and t-shirts to vibe up simple plywood bars and shopping trolleys. Already a firm favorite with the local Caribbean community the gentle approach to brand presence made the drink seem an organic, natural choice – whilst still bringing in sales and revenue. It continues to be their biggest selling weekend of the year by some large margin.

Despite having the most obvious brand presence, Red Stripe let the community do the work for them, undertaking no official branded activity until 2013. When they did dip their toe, it was to promote an authentic, respectable new sound-system in collaboration with independent radio station NTS, contributing to the culture and ethos of carnival, with no obvious commercial intentions.

We’ve been following a similar approach with favorite clients Portobello Brewing Co. for the last two years. In collaboration with Notting Hill institution Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues we provide free beer for all the artists & guests at his stage, and give him some stock to sell at Red Stripe matching rates to help support the production.  We’re providing an alternative to the mass-produced Jamaican lager - which is considered rather bland on most other weekends of the year - whilst staying true to the ethos of this weird, wonderful community celebration. Custom printed, recyclable paper cups mean that we leave local streets as we found them – and t-shirts championing the area and local people above the brand proved a cause for celebration. Have a look at some pictures below…

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One Reflection - C&IB’s review of 2014

On December 5th 2014 C&IB turned one.

As we lower our glasses and raise our expectations for 2015 we look back on a year that has gained us friends, airmiles, grey hairs and a set of founding clients we could only have dreamt of 12 months ago.

So how did we get here?

Like many great ideas and most bad jokes it all began in a pub.  

Supported by the British Arts Council we conceived and built ‘The Faithful Muse’, a pub that popped up in an art gallery. 

Despite the long established and sometimes productive relationship between the arts and alcohol, this fully functioning public house hidden within a white box (cube?) raised some eyebrows.  Alongside works by Jake and Dinos Chapman, Goshka Macuga and Raqib Shaw we constructed our homage to the grubby boozer of hazy art school memories.

We installed a cellar system, plumbed in the glass washer, nailed up optics and dartboard then manned the bar for two weeks straight. After countless pints, somewhat bemused press coverage and the occasional lock-in our efforts helped to raise over 200K to support emerging artists.  We’d also bagged our first client.

Portobello Brewing Company brew great beer and the two of us developed a close relationship with both their products and their founder Rob Jenkins during our term as art-pub landlords.

The day after last orders at The Muse, we had a phone call asking if we’d be their agency. 

C&IB was the answer to this unexpected question.

A rapidly expanding brief resulted in a new brand for Portobello and a partnership that has helped both our companies grow.

We launched the new brewery at Notting Hill Carnival, throwing a party with Gaz’s Rocking Blues – the first time in their 30-year history that the largest stage at carnival had accepted sponsorship.   Undaunted by rain or reggae we took our place again behind the bar and wondered how we might turn this damp triumph into a viable business.

Our rainbow turned out to be Nadya Powell, then Managing Director of MRY - part of Digitas LBi.  We met at their Brick Lane offices and despite the fact that we spoke of ‘integrated solutions’ more than once we both decided a partnership should be trialed.

Our first job was to launch ‘Lost Boys’, the new agency headed by Nadya under the DLBi umbrella.  

We conceived an event that immersed guests in the Lost Boys world, taking them on a journey from the mundane to the magical. Set in an abandoned office space staffed by deranged actors it featured GRPS activated LED wristbands, alcoholic water coolers and a giant laser rave dome (of course) and was crowned by The Drum ‘best party of the year’. 

As an initiation it was perfect.  Lost Boy’s brief and our answer convinced us both that we might be crazy enough to work together - and helped them announce their intention to do things differently. 

Their kindness, patience and incredible pool of talent cannot be overstated.  These qualities have allowed us to work with clients normally only dreamt of in year one – and to offer them the integrated solutions we threatened at our first meeting.  We are now based in DigtasLBi’s Brick Lane offices, enabling day to day collaboration and growing both of our offerings.

We hit the ground together running.  A couple of trips to New York with Lost Boys and some help from DigitasLBi NY saw us engaged by Brooklyn based jewelry brand Alexis Bittar.  This continuing relationship is serviced by all three agencies under the Lost Boys banner and has given us a template for combining skills and resources that is working well.

One of our most interesting projects came at the tail end of the year: DigitasLBi had been engaged by Burton to launch a new premium range online, and came to C&IB for some help with an experiential launch. The new brand was all about the gentleman who knows exactly what he wants, and how to dress while doing it. To that end we took ten talented, well turned-out men out for the ultimate London insider’s night out. From oysters with the head chef to a lock-in at a Fitzrovia pub populated by actors and Soho characters, the night was full of surprise (and some delight), and with Digitas LBi seeding the content gained almost two million impressions for the brand.

You get the picture, it’s going well. Trying to describe a year that has taken us from the streets of Juarez, Mexico to the valleys of South Wales is going to take more words than we have, or you want to read.

Come and be part of the story in 2015.  As a friend, client or interested observer at the very least it will mean you don’t have to plough through all of next year’s round-up.

Thanks,

Oli & Dan