These posters advertise the theme of this year’s Boekenweek (‘book week’, organised by the foundation ‘Collective Propaganda for the Dutch Book’, CPNB) – to be held from 16 till 26 March. The theme, “Written Portraits”, is communicated quite literally in these striking pieces, created by Etcetera. They are inspired by Nicholas Galanin, who makes these kind of portraits physically. Since it was too complicated and time consuming to make them for real, Etcetera solely used CG. The people in the portraits all have a biography (left to right); Louis van Gaal (Bayern München football coach), Kader Abdolah (writer of the special Boekenweek gift, De Kraai), and Anne Frank.

We don’t get to see many great print ads in the Netherlands. Fortunately there are exceptions every now and then. Like this one for Predictor. The copy says (more or less) “When you want to be sure”. Good advertising doesn’t need much explanation. Created by Etcetera.

Last week the Esprix awards were divided between the Dutch campaigns that were most persuasive in changing the consumer’s behaviour. Originally the Esprix was a direct marketing and sales promotion award, but since these terms sounds old school nowadays, the institute changed its proposition – already a few times in the past years. In any case, there were 31 winners. Etcetera and Red Urban (sister agencies, both owned by the DDB network), performed best. They won 5 awards each! Jointly Etcetera and Red Urban won gold for Bol.com – recently awarded advertiser of the year. The Dutch Amazon advertised its study books in outdoor (see picture). Subsequently, a fictional student hijacked the campaign by slapping his own, personal print ads on top of them (“50% cheaper!”), selling his second hand study books on Bol.com. A smart idea, with impact; Bol.com saw its study book sales increase with 15%, and its second hand study book sales with 29%. The other golden award went to N=5 – recently awarded agency of the year – and Kong (N=5’s online sister) for the Ministry of Justice. The message; be careful in sharing your personal details online. Very smartly the agencies created two pieces of content; one ‘traditional’ TV commercial for the parents and one personalized online video, called Stanislav – going viral through social network site Hyves – for the digital generation. Though it seems hard to measure the success of this campaign on behavioral parameters, it surely must have had impact in terms of awareness. Our favourite (read: most original) campaign was ‘Alex, who follows?’ (silver) created by Dawn. Alex is an online broker that facilitates ‘do it yourself’ trading. To persuade potential customers to try it out, it asked its existing customers to share their experiences online – both positive and negative – through a webcam. Talking about transparency of financial services! Here you can find all the winners.

Source: Adformatie

This commercial by Amsterdam agency N=5 for LOI – a commercial education institute – was awarded a Dutch ‘SAN Accent’ last week. The SAN Awards is the only award festival organized by advertisers. With the pay-off “Holland gets smarter and smarter”, the commercial tells the story of a family visiting an Italian restaurant. The waiters are talking not very respectfully (in Italian) about the ‘blond’ daughter, her mother and the ‘ugly’ dad. Then the dad says in fluent Italian ‘Hey, pasta face, if you’re finished talking with your girlfriends, can you please give us some of your time?’ Three other N=5 campaigns were also awarded, but the most important award for N=5 was ‘Agency of the year’. An understandable choice. The agency is known for keeping a strong balance between esthetic and strategic advertising – though in the past years they’ve somewhat neglected this unique positioning. Bol.com (the Dutch Amazon) was elected advertiser of the year. Its catchy campaigns, created by Etcetera, all communicate the message ‘Another reason to buy at Bol.com’. Albert Heijn – the biggest supermarket chain in the Netherlands – was awarded the ‘Consitency award’ – the smartly integrated and very succesful campaigns are created by TBWA. Among all the winners, our favourite campaign was created by Brand New Telly for LG. The LG Renoir, the first mobile phone with a 8 megapixel camera, was hyped by shooting the entire campaign with the camera itself. The agency asked renowned photographer Carli Hermès to follow and photograph world famous DJ Armin van Buuren during a 24 hour long stay in Jakarta. The beautiful black and white pictures were used in print, for Van Buuren’s new album cover and for an exclusive photo book for LG dealers. Some short films of the project were spread online. With this truly original approach the LG Renoir became both the medium and the message.

Bol.com is one of the biggest and most successful online stores in the Netherlands. The brand is more or less the Dutch Amazon, specializing in books, DVD’s and games. The online retailer’s key proposition is as simple as strong, it shows tons of reasons why you should buy online, instead of offline. This YouTube video, developed by Etcetera, is yet another reason to buy at Bol.com. Execution could have been done better, but a very insightful and convincing clip it is! And a nice opportunity to advertise in an ‘umfeld’ where most advertisers don’t dare to show their selves; the online red light district – although that probably won’t happen.

Telfort this week announced N=5 will be its new agency after having pitched the account between Etcetera, Selmore and N=5. The telco worked with Etcetera since 2005, but wanted to change its positioning – at AAB we don’t know what the positioning was, so maybe a wise decision. Taxi Europe will do the ‘below the line’ work. We were surprised to hear this, since we thought Taxi was a full service agency. O’kennedy, former MD Wieden+Kennedy and at the moment non-executive director at Indie and Perfect Fools Stockholm, will become CEO of D&AD. Sounds like O’Kennedy is living the life! Finally some sad news; Cayenne has not been able to overcome the loss of Canon Europe – the Japanese consumer electronic producer left Amsterdam suburb Amstelveen. Unless Japanese agency Dentsu - owning the majority of the stocks – decides Amsterdam is an important hub for Cayenne, the agency will disappear.