180 Amsterdam is a Wieden+Kennedy break away, founded in 1998 by Alex Melvin (who’s still MD), Chris Mendola and Guy Hayward. The name 180 reflects the desire to see things from the opposite perspective and thus to give brands a unique image through unique advertising. With its 30 nationalities, the agency is one of the most international agencies in Amsterdam. Numerous international advertising awards have confirmed the quality of their work. The most famous and most awarded was a commercial in 2004 for its founding client Adidas; Laila and Muhammed Ali boxing each other. In 2007 180 opened a second office in Los Angeles.

www.180amsterdam.com

Herengracht 506
1017 CB Amsterdam
+31 (0)20 422 2180
amandal@180amsterdam.com

Quite spectacular this outdoor ad for the Adidas F50 Adizero. Not only did Adidas change the tram stop benches, the real boots were also incorporated in the outdoor furniture. Created by 180, TBWA\BEC and JC Decaux.

Talking about some slick advertising. Here it is. It starts like a movie trailer: “The first rocket to reach the moon had less computing power than today’s Sony VAIO notebook”. The trailer announces a branded documentary that shows how some whiz kids learn "rocket science" to launch a rocket with a Sony Vaio. The Hollywoodish tone of voice is no surprise when you realize it was created by 180LA (180 Amsterdam's sibling). And while the cynics among us might say that probably any other comparable laptop can launch a rocket, you got to admit this (literally) is a great piece of ad. We can easily imagine people getting goosebumps when seeing the trailer. And they might even be compelled to see the entire documentary on Science Channel “this fall”. It caries all the Hollywood tricks (“a weather setback!”) that will make compelling TV. And we're pretty sure that Sony Vaio will gain on the brand attributes "smart" and "powerful". Job well done - this goes for both kids and agency.

Adidas is moving its digital account from 180’s Riot to Sid Lee. A worrying move for 180, since it makes Sid Lee, already working for Adidas Originals,  own yet another piece of the advertising pie. Through the grapevine we also heard that Boston based Arnold will be opening an Amsterdam office at the end of this year to service its international client Volvo. This sounds like an efficient move since Volvo’s international digital agency EuroRSCG 4D is already based in Amsterdam.

On Saturday the last Cannes Lions were awarded to Amsterdam agencies in the categories Film and Film Craft. Silver went to the intelligent commercials made by TBWA\Neboko for IDFA - international documentary festival Amsterdam. Though we liked the previous concept a little better, the one showed in this post brings the message ‘You can’t make up reality’ in a similarly convincing way. 180 Amsterdam won silver in the 'Film Craft' category for their Adidas film ‘Every team needs the spark’. Indeed, a lot of craftsmanship. XXS and N=5 won bronze for their Dierenbescherming (animal protection) and Live Interactive Billboard ads respectively. The latter is an aggression awareness campaign that shows a billboard with ambulance personal being harassed. Bystanders that watch the billboard are being filmed and integrated in the film - so they watch their selves being inactive. Quite smart, though in our opinion this case would have been better of winning in Outdoor or Cyber. Like last year Philips won a Grand Prix (this time in ‘Film Craft’) for The Gift, "a sci-fi thriller in a dystopian future" that shows quite some skills being brought together. It was created by DDB London in assocation with RSA Films. We mention it, cause Tribal DDB Amsterdam was responsible for the overarching Parallel Lines campaign that included the 5 short films - of which The Gift was one. O.k., enough chest pounding already. Let's get back to work!

“And so this journey brings me here…”. The extensive journey started about a year ago with Messi as the Spark and the mysterious voice-over of Zidane explaining what was going on. To us the whole concept was a bit over-complicated. We never really understood what Zidane was trying to tell us – not only because of his poor English. But we forgave Adidas and its agency 180 Amsterdam easily, cause it was all so richly executed and therefore not a punishment to watch. Especially the previous commercial – “inspred by Sin City” – was a very pleasant orgy of special effects. So now the long journey has brought Zidane to South Africa. And to celebrate this, you can join the Adidas “Match-Up experience” on Facebook. Again, quite a bombastic ad. But if we understand correctly, you can pick a favourite player out of the 32 Adidas heroes from the different countries (Messi from Argentina, Gerard from England, Pienaar from South Africa, etc.) and then predict who will win when they're playing each other. The winners get free Adidas gear. So to put it banally, it’s betting on matches, sponsored by Adidas. And so the journey must end.

With this rich, Sin City inspired ad, it looks like 180 Amsterdam wanted to display how easily it integrates so many different creative disciplines into one single piece of advertising. But just like the previous ad with Leonal Messi as The Spark and Zinédine Zidane as the voice over, the commercial is made primarily to sell the Adidas F50 football boot - this time as the the lightest and fastest. What we didn't know yet, is that there's two kinds of fast; there's the spark and the blaze - the latter respresented by David Villa. While the spark needs a ball to be fast, the blaze simply is a consuming inferno of speed. To be honest, we don't really care, we simply love to watch it - over and over again.

What an inspiring event it was. Here are the insights we took home. The first key note speaker, Ed Ulbrich from Digital Domain, talked us through the process of getting the multi-platform remake of Tron to market. He showed what looked like a trailer of the movie ‘Tron Legacy’, but later revealed it was ‘just’ a teaser to get Disney excited; they could make a movie, a game and a theme park ride out of this single concept. He called this a 'transmedia content prototype'; a piece of content that mitigates the investor’s risk, because it provides a tangible window into the opportunities of the concept. Ulbrich founded a  company, Mothership, that single mindedly builds these kind of prototypes.

In a way Philips’s brand new commercial ‘Parallel Lines’, is also a content prototype, as Ed Ulbrich mentioned during the presentation by Gary Raucher - head of MarCom at Philips - and DDB’s Neil Dawson and Caspar Delaney. The parallel lines are 5 short films telling the same story about a unicorn. The pay-off: ‘There are millions of ways to tell a story. There’s only one way to watch one’. Why not test these short films and see which one can make it into a blockbuster, asked Ulbrich. By doing so Philips could seriously and convincingly enter the realm of branded content - a revolutionary thought. Though Raucher told the audience last year’s multi-prize-winning commercial Carousel had completely changed Philips’ attitude towards advertising, making blockbusters might be one bridge too far.

Our favourite speaker of the day was Cindy Gallop. With great enthusiasm she talked about the future of advertising, while at the same time promoting her new internet start up ‘If we ran the world’ – connecting people social-media-wise  with their actions rather than their conversations. As for the future advertising model, Gallop believes in total transparency and the power of the collaborative creative crowd. Victor & Spoils, combining these two elements, is therefore the perfect example of the agency of the future, she said. It is always difficult to say whether these absolute statements about the ‘future of …’ will proof right or wrong, but it is undeniably true that the creative industry shouldn’t neglect the power of collaborative creativity. Gallop ended her energetic talk with a website we all should check out: Textfromlastnight.com. Why? It’s hilarious, it’s contemporary poetry – with a maximum of 140 characters – and it’s a social cultural snapshot of our time. Amen!

Richard Gorodecky of Amsterdam Worldwide (AW) also talked about the perfect agency model – in our opinion a more realistic one. It was his own model; AW consists of a team of generalists and whenever needed it hires the required specialists. As a generalist, Gorodecky explained, you are ignorant. But the advantage of being ignorant is venturing into areas where specialized agencies don't go. In other words; ‘ignorance gives you a license to experiment’.

Seyoan Vela provoked the crowd in a funny way by stating that positivity sucked. People like to complain ("social media are a threat rather than an opportunity!"),  so why not approach them accordingly. Take W+K's Grrrr for Honda, ("Can hate be good?") one of the best commercials ever made. Vela ended his entertaining talk with the statement that  'brands don't t need to be your friends'.

The day ended with Andy Fackrell (180), Gustav Martner (CP+B), Sean Boyle (JWT), Karen Corrigen (Hapiness), Nick Baley (AKQA), John Weich (Lemon Scented Tea) and Jeff Kling (W+K) answering the question ‘How can advertising improve the world’ in a Pecha Kucha style. Though after a long day if felt a bit as an information overload, it proved to be a great format to get the most out of these brilliant minds – this is probably how the creative briefing was invented.

Andy Fackrell kicked off showing many different famous people who could do a 180 turn with their brain. Karen Corrigan (“In Belgium I am known as a very stubborn woman”) ignored the Pecha Kucha briefing and talked (for too long) about the Belgium agencies jointly stepping up to clients not respecting the local pitch code – a familiar problem – by organizing a successful website strike. Gustav Martner had a less practical idea to handle difficult clients; he fantasized about ways to have advertisers pitch for agencies and charge them for a bigger logo in the ad. Sean Boyle made a brilliant point about the culture within big networking agencies (“except JWT” - tone of voice: ironic); everyone listens to the brainless arse lickers, instead of the independent minds with genuinely creative ideas. Nick Baley showed female art to substantiate his sympathetic plead for more women in advertising. John Weich’ presentation was so smart that we couldn’t keep up with him. And, finally, Jeff Kling ended the way he started the day, with his somewhat cynical, but smart sense of humour. How can advertising improve the world? “Know when to shut the fuck up."

We were invited by the VEA (Association of Ad Agencies) to attend the second edition of Creative Lounge on Monday in Pakhuis de Zwijger. The night was hosted by Jelani Isaacs (Brenninkmeijer and Isaacs) and Claire Finn (U-Turn). Guests of the evening were Matthew Atkatz (Riot, digital arm 180), Romke Oortwijn (N=5), Raphael Mazoyer (Asics) and – Skyping in from London - Florian Schmitt (Hi-Res). And this night's topic was the controversy between digital agencies and non-digital agencies; is digital part of the idea or is digital the idea itself? A promising question, though it did take a while before the discussion stopped to bounce all over the place.  We do understand why it did though; there's no unambiguous  answer to the question what the exact role of digital is in advertising. Some big ideas can only exist thanks to the technology behind it, while some ideas merely use existing digital tools to execute it.

Romke Oortwijn (Copywriter and partner at N=5)  showed Stanislav, a short video made by N=5’s digital agency Kong. It tells the story about criminals abusing profile photos from social website Hyves (Dutch Facebook). It was spread through the members of the platform and showed every user a custom made video featuring his/her own personal data. The big idea was not making a web film about the 'cyber mafia' abusing a social network platform, but the big idea was smartly (and digitally) integrating social profile data in  the video.

As opposed to Oortwijn, Matthew Atkatz (ECD Riot) clearly represents the digital generation. Atkatz showed another very strong online case for Adidas featuring Dwight Howard – playing basketball in the NBA. During All Star Weekend he was documented with modern communication tools (like vodcasts, Twitter, etc.) and could thus be followed by his fans. Again, you could ask whether ‘digital’ was the big idea here. Or was it closely following Howard for three days with existing communication tools? Probably the latter, but maybe a bit of both.

Another topic of the evening was - as Raphael Mazoyer, digital communications manager at Asics, put it - the difference between seeing and doing (or as Oortwijn put it: one-way vs two-way communication, or as Atkatz put it: bottom up vs top down). Asics wants to engage its consumers by letting them do something that is useful for them. Ironically he considered Nike+ as the benchmark, while at the same time showing an Asics website that did not support his point - the website clearly conveyed a message about Asics, but it didn't seem useful to the consumer at all. The distinction Mazoyer made between seeing and doing did make sense though. As we would put it; digital helps brands to create brand utilities; digital tools that render brand related services.

Florian Schmitt (Hi-Res) dialed in to tell us something about the alternate reality game 'The Lost Experience' he built for Channel 4 and the hit TV program Lost. Creatively a brilliant case, but Schmitt always advised his clients not to try to do the same thing - keep it simple. The reason might be that clients will always be clients; they want return on investment. And the question is how many new viewers this ARG generated for Channel 4/Lost. Or as the marketer in Mazoyer put it typically: the success of a campaign can only be measured by the “KPI’s” (key performance indicators).

Finally the discussion went into the direction of production value. The hypothesis was that advertisers expect online film productions to be cheap. And this surprised us a little. If you only talk about 'virals' it is probably true. But we’ve seen so many good examples of long form content with big production budgets recently. To name a few; Martini, Ararat and McDonald’s. Therefore we would like to state the opposite; in the future advertisers will have more budget available for big productions, because they can create their own (online) channel and don’t need big media budgets to be wasted on (traditional) TV channels.

We still don't know when exactly digital is part of the big idea and when it merely facilitates it, but it was an inspiring night and we look forward to the next one.

Holland won 18 Epica awards - four times gold - last week in Belgrade. It ended fifth after Germany, France, Sweden and the UK.  Our favourite gold went to Kit Kat Jesus. Kit Kat pretended as if Jesus had been spotted in a Kit Kat bar and this news spread as quick as only internet can spread news. We didn’t just like it because we are atheists (or at least agnostic), but more so because we love simple (but great) ideas that generate tons of free publicity. We found it a little odd that this was in the category ‘technique’, but apparently their was no better category available - the category 'big idea' would have been more to the point. It was done by UbachsWisbrun/JWT. Heineken's Walk-in fridge also won gold in ‘film’ – it was submitted by TBWA’s production company CZAR. 180 won gold for Adidas with ‘Every team needs the spark’. And Grey won gold in print for Pink Ribbon.

Source: Adformatie

Al Moseley, partner and executive creative director at Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer (HMDG), has quit to join 180 Amsterdam. Though Mosley is responsible for the 'M' in HMDG, the agency won't be changing it's name. He will become part of the management of 180 together with Kevin Dundas, who’ll become managing partner. Before HMDG, Moseley worked at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam and before that he worked for Mother. Dundas (ex Saatchi & Saatchi) was president and chief executive at Sapient Nitro and only joined the agency last January. Moseley and Dundas will work alongside 180 chief executive, Chris Mendola, and the chief creative officer, Andy Fackrell. Alex Melvin continues in his role as Chairman focusing on key clients and agency expansion.