Wish Tree @thewishfulfillingtree - Tumblr Blog

Brandalism hijackeds over 600 outdoor ads in Paris

During the ongoing COP21 Climate Conference, an organization called Brandalism has hijacked over 600 outdoor ad spaces in the city, replacing them with climate change-related art.

helloyoucreatives

ForeverMark - It’s a long journey…

Agency: J. Walter Thompson Italy Chief Creative Officer: Enrico Dorizza Direttore creativo Associato: Nicoletta Cernuto Art director: Francesco Basile Copywriter: Cristiano Nardò Tv Producer: Marijana Vukomanovic Account Dept: Giulia Profili/Valentina Salice/Dania Bianuni Production Company: Mercurio Cinematografica Executive Producer: Francesco Pistorio Producer: Alessandro Cavriani/Beatrice Pepe Director: Rob Chiu Director of Photography: Matyas Erdely Original Music: Sizzer Amsterdam, EJ Grob Song Title: Compressed Carbon Published/Released: November 2015

thewishfulfillingtree

What a steaming pile of nothing...

devopsreactions

Successful failover

by sparkkeh

adteachings-deactivated20220125

Great video from the Thames Valley Police on the issue of sex and consent.

#creative #creativity #content

nevver

Take one

theadcollection

TESCO goes spooky! Scares the crap out of their customers.

Love the moving trolly. Can I please get one to follow me around while I’m shopping?

By BBH London

Finally, a commercial reason to be kind.

Here's a great opinion piece from our Director of Brand Expression, Mike Edmonds that ran in our local industry mag Campaign Brief: In an industry that celebrates a sort of delightful ruthlessness when portrayed in movies like Crazy People and What Women Want and TV shows like Mad Men, it's been hard in the past for softies like me to rationalise the benefits of kindness. Don't you think it was a little cruel to ask that account manager you just made redundant to leave straight away? Like, after five years of service? You know that art director that everyone's complaining about behind her back? Don't you think it would be kinder if we actually told her why? Do we really need to make that group of humans down the road feel bad because a client selected our group of humans instead? It seems that the desire for ambitious individuals to prove their business worth often overrides that deeper, more primitive human desire to feel empathy for others and do nice things for them. Is it the allure of obtaining business success and industry profile or the fear of not obtaining them that keeps us from bringing more compassion into our workplace? Either way, I'm delighted to report that being nice is rapidly becoming an important business asset in our industry right alongside strategic smarts, digital savvy and creativity. Paradoxically, it's thanks to the increasing role of technology in our lives. Futurists and economic analysts are now seeing that in a world where machines are taking on almost every role previously filled by humans, empathy is becoming an increasingly powerful business tool. Vital, in fact, to establish authentic trust between companies and consumers in a cynical world. Robots can't do it. And nobody seems to be able to write an algorithm for it. And so emotional literacy suddenly has an elevated role in commerce. Seemingly overnight, words like compassion and empathy have tiptoed into business circles and are now sitting in the C-suite right alongside the internet of things, data mining and robotics. In the past 12 months respected publications like Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Fast Company and The Economist have all featured major studies that demonstrate the commercial value of empathy. And for brands, that means engaging creative thinkers to not just say to consumers "we get you", but to prove it with new transactional platforms, tools, products and services that are authentically creative and helpful. That's actually good news for ad agencies. Because despite the fact that our industry is renowned for being brazenly self-serving and unsympathetic, we are actually the best in the business world at empathy. After all, it's always been our job to emotionally connect with humans. To understand not just their behaviours, but the fears and hopes that drive them. The channel planner working on a youth hygiene product must understand how sensitive young girls feel about their body in order to make contact with them in an effective way. A copywriter needs to tap into the sincere emotions of aging when writing press copy for retirement homes. A UX designer working for a telco client needs to sympathise with our fear of looking naive when choosing complex internet plans. A planner, the emperors of empathising, must put themselves into the shoes - and hearts - of every human they seek to connect with. Their whole career is based on "Do unto others". The truth is, we're the best professional empathisers working in business today. But if agencies want to own empathy as a business tool, we have some work to do on ourselves first. Because in this always-on super-connected world where ordinary citizens own the flow of truth, we have to empathise for real this time. We can't fake it anymore. Exhibit A: "Just because you're a mother doesn't mean you've stopped being a woman" says the oh-so-caring Voice Over from the global corporation run by a male CEO on a $20m bonus if he achieves the share price objective. Studies show that to achieve "true empathy" (what a shame we need that distinction), we can't settle for merely understanding our audience's motivations, we must find a way to agree with them. Just as DeNiro and Streep say they must find a way to empathise with even the most unlikeable characters in order to deliver a truly believable performance, we must see the world through another human's eyes and say "It's understandable to feel that way. I get it. I feel what you feel." In order to do that we have to treat consumers as equals, to give them the benefit of the doubt, to presume the best of their motivations not the worst. In other words, we need to be kinder towards them. Because if we don't it will show in our work. It will be exposed as, at best, simulated empathy. Now for the hard bit: in order to be authentically kinder on the outside (to consumers in the marketplace), we must be kinder on the inside (to ourselves within our agencies and within our industry). Put simply, we need to adopt the mantras of Ghandi and Mandela and "be the change we want to see". Our agency culture must change from a simulation of kindness ("maaaaaate!") to a genuinely honest and selfless experience. Two weeks ago in Google's New York offices, the Firestarters event brought together 230 advertising people, mostly planners and strategists, to answer the question "How can agencies evolve so that we succeed in an ever-more-digital world?" Their conclusion was that humans must come first, that agencies must not only empathise with consumers but that it must come from a culture of empathy within the agency. The era of saying "we have a caring family atmosphere" at the interview but then reverting to survival-of-the-fittest type behaviours on the workfloor will not wash with the new generation of talent. The next David Droga or Alex Bogusky - the people who will help your agency reap the rewards of applied business empathy - will demand that your agency walks its cultural talk. The bottom line is whether you see compassion for your fellow human as a way to live a happier, more fulfilling life, or a new strategy to ensure future income streams for your agency, it's okay by me. I'd prefer the former of course, but the outcome will still make me happy. Because both will result in a more mature industry that just might start dragging itself up from the bottom of those job trust surveys and being seen as an honourable profession and a positive contributor to society.

#advertising #creativity #creative #empathy #trust #purpose #Mike Edmonds #meerkats #perth #campaign brief

helloyoucreatives

Super cool.

Meerkats’ Young Men’s Project Takes Brand-led Approach to Mental Health

In early October, our Head of Planning - Mel Wiese travelled to Montreal to launch The Young Men’s project. here’s her story:

The Young Men’s Project was unveiled to acclaim at the International Youth Mental Health (IAYMH) conference in Montreal earlier this month. The Project is a collaboration between not-for-profit organisation YouthFocus, Meerkats and 110 young men. It is designed to create potentially life saving conversations around mental health.

The Project came about in response to the alarming increase in the rate of suicide amongst young men in Australia. Existing campaigns, services and education aimed at this demographic had limited success and we realized an alternative approach to the whole issue was needed, not just a creative brief. We needed to get to young men before they reached crisis point, and traditional approaches just weren’t working.

Behavioural change campaigns generally find creative ways of telling people to do things differently. These existed: campaigns telling men to talk more, or share more. Telling them to be soft, be brave, be patient. Telling them help was available, if only they’d go and get it.

Instead, we began with the things we knew young men are already good at: things being like authentic voices for causes they feel strongly about; coming together to create practical things; and helping their friends. We also knew that when it comes to their mental health young men turn to those around them to ask for help, before they contact a health service or even Google it.

The issue was not a lack of services, or even an absence of requests for help. Rather, it was that those requests were not being recognised for what they were, not being heard, and not being acted upon. Young men didn’t know how to talk to their parents, partners or peers, and didn’t know how to listen if someone wanted to talk to them.

The missing piece was what young men wanted done about it. The objective of the Young Men’s Project became to facilitate a process where young men could create their own solutions to save each others’ lives.

The inaugural Young Men’s Project brought together 110 WA-based men aged between 18 and 21 in a six-hour co-creation session to create better conversation about mental health. The initial results were awesome: 10 teams of young men pitched ideas ranging from music festivals and TV spots and social media apps to a panel of experts.

To bring the leading idea to life, we invited 30 guys from the original session back to Meerkats for a day and a half ‘ProAm’, teaming them up with developers, strategists, social experts and creatives to rapid prototype the ideas created at the first session.

The leading idea – “The Lighthouse Project” – has been brought to life by Meerkats. The Project uses tattoos to make it easy to identify young men that are willing to have conversations with those who might need them. It aims to amplify and share the Lighthouse tattoo through music festivals and a peer-led online community.

Using participatory design in the sessions created another positive outcome. Simply by participating, we saw the kinds of engagement and conversations we had always hoped to create between young men. In designing their idea young men began display their willingness to talk and listen to each other about their mental helath.

By empowering them, supporting them and trusting them to solve this by themselves, their attitude to the whole issue shifted from communications they didn’t want to hear to solutions they were determined to create. There was general outrage that suicide claimed more young lives than car accidents. There was empathy for those who suffered or had lost a mate or a brother. There was a real understanding that, given the wrong circumstances, this could be any one of them.

Most of all there was a determination to take responsibility for the mental health of themselves and their mates, and the knowledge of what each of them could do today to improve it.

It was obvious that we needed to run more workshops like these ones. Meerkats created a Young Men’s Project brand, driven by the purpose of helping young men save each other’s lives. We created strategy, visual identity, a website and an open-source workshop toolkit that allowed any organisation wanting to engage young men to run their own Young Men’s Project workshop anywhere in the world.

Meerkats set about spreading the concept further. We created a brand for the Young Men’s Project, along with strategy, visual identity, a website and an open-source workshop toolkit that allows any organisation to run their own Young Men’s Project workshop, anywhere in the world. The results were officially unveiled on October 9 at the IAYMH.

“Hearing about the Young Men’s Project was one of the highlights for me from IAYMH 2015,” says Taylor Linseman, MHA Program Manager at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. “Our team at YouthNet has already started thinking critically about what we can do and change with regards to reaching out to young men.”

Professor Patrick McGorry, OA, echoed the importance of our experience in using advertising and branding to mobilize a whole peer group, rather than just advertise

services. He reminded the conference they needed to ‘get stuff done’ in reaching the broader community and not resting on the purity of academic research if we are to affect real change in Australia’s mental health.

In 2016 YouthFocus’ aim is to see three more Young Men’s Project workshops run in WA. We’d love to hear from sporting clubs, local councils or schools interested in running one for their community. Find out more at youngmensproject.com.au.

If you or someone you know needs to talk about their mental health, call Lifeline on 1311 14, www.lifeline.org.au or Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800 www.kidshelp.com.au