For several years internet provider Het Net ran an advertising campaign with a very distinctive colour (purple) and character. Fred (‘Fred from Het Net’ rhymes!) was a bit of an odd character. But together with Het Net’s proposition, transparency, he became a strong ad property and the brand built up a fair amount of clients since 2004. However, since a few years mother company KPN (formerly the only national telco provider) is consolidating its brand portfolio and decided to kill Het Net – earlier it already gulped down the brand ‘Planet’. KPN asked Lowe/Draftfcb to kill Het Net in style though. The agency built a dedicated website (don’t go there, if you don’t have broadband) where Fred gives away all the props that were used in 5 years of advertising. He even takes off his wig and moustache! On the website you can click on the different props and leave your name and contact details – aha, quid pro quo! – if you want to have one. Although it might be inspired by agency 2009 giving away its inventory at the end 2008 (when its name changed into 2009), it is a sympathetic move of KPN and might be a smart way to prevent Het Net clients from reevaluating their internet contract in the extremely competitive market of internet providers.

While new year’s is getting closer and we can already hear the fireworks building up to a climax tomorrow night, this print ad is being spread by health insurer Delta Lloyd. Two weeks ago, we wrote about the ‘official’ fireworks campaign. It tells the story of a guy who’s face is partly replaced by his bum, after getting injured by fireworks. We were wondering then how much useful impact this will have among the target. This is an example of a campaign that actually makes a point. It is created by Lowe/Draftfcb. It reads ‘Nothing is’, followed by braille. If you know the Delta Lloyd campaigns – and we estimate that 90% of the Dutch do – you can easily complete the phrase: Nothing is for sure… (tagline: …for sure Delta Lloyd). And at the bottom left: “Be careful when lighting fireworks”. This will definitely make people aware of the dangers of fireworks. We’re not sure if it’ll sell much Delta Lloyd insurances, but image-wise it’ll do good and we love it especially for communicating so much, while saying very little.

Yesterday we were talking about the Golden Loeki. Today we are talking about the opposite prize, the raspberry for advertising; the Lead Lion. It is awarded once a year straight after the Golden Loeki, by Dutch consumer awareness program Radar. The first prize was won by KPN’s mobile phone brand Hi. It’s about a girl that looses her ‘pokkie’ (the Surinam word for mobile phone) and goes nuts – luckily though she saved all her numbers on her Hi-account. In the commercial she screams so loud that it irritated the crap out of the consumer. According to Hi, the commercial did well among the target: 18 to 24 year olds. We believe that, but still concur with the award. An adapted Axe (Lynx) commercial, with a guy that can role his eyes to look at his own sweaty armpits, ended second. This surprised us, it is a pretty mellow ad. Maybe it was the annoying voice-over that didn’t fit with the commercial very well. The Vodafone commercial by THEY that we discussed earlier ended third. Mutated guinea pigs try to imitate normal people and talk a language that no one understands. Interesting detail; in the most recent commercial, Vodafone kept the characters, but changed the voices. So what can we learn from the Lead Lion? Don’t use loud, annoying or unintelligible voices or strange, unattractive characters in your advertising.

At the IMC Awards the Heineken ‘Trompet’ (a drum disguised as a hat for football fans, which was a follow-up of the speaker hat – a hat disguised as a speaker) by TBWA\Neboko won a golden IMC Award. Upload Cinema for De Uitkijk by Lowe/Draftfcb, also won gold. The Heineken Trompet was distributed around the European Championships 2008 as a premium – together with 8 cans of Heineken. We earlier wrote about Upload Cinema – creating long form content for a cinema, by making a compilation of long tale, short form content from the internet. All in all Amsterdam scored very well. And with 16 prizes in total, the Netherlands was the best awarded country in Europe.

Draftfcb won a Silver Promo Lion for Upload Cinema yesterday. We talked about it before, since it already won a Dutch Spin Award and Silver Lamp. The concept is simple; it takes YouTube films to the big screen. The idea came from the desire to promote one of the smallest Amsterdam cinema’s (De Uitkijk), because it was on the verge of being closed down. Through a monthly theme a selection of ‘User Sent In’ web films is shown in De Uitkijk. Agency 2009 – changing its name every single year – won a Bronze Direct Lion for a fantastic employment campaign that was to find a designer for their studio. The agency made an Adobe CS4 (that was not on the market yet) look-alike packaging, dubbed Abode CS4 (Ad for most Brilliant and Outstanding DTP’er Ever). 2009 delivered the desirable, but fake sofware through an Abode delivery guy at the doorstep of the best agencies in town. There it would of course end up in the Studio, thus giving it Trojan horse power. The software in the box enabled designers to design their own resume and with a simple click they could send it to 2009. Brilliant campaign that generated lots of free publicity and – not to forget – made them find their new DTP’er.

From a creative perspective, the ADCN Lamps are the most desirable awards; they represent the BIG ideas – nothing else. So it makes you wonder why this year only 2 Silver Lamps went to the category ‘interactive’ (Selmore/Achtung! and Skipintro); mainly traditional advertising gets awarded! And when you compare the Lamps with the (interactive) Spin Awards, it is striking that only two creative concepts won both awards; Upload Cinema (Lowe/Draftfcb) and Fortheloveofgod.nl (Skipintro). Does this mean that most big-idea creatives don’t have a digital mind? Or does it mean that digital creatives don’t come up with big ideas?