Achtung! was founded in 2005 by ex Lostboys Dick Buschman and Mervyn ten Dam. Within no time it has become the hottest online agency in town. Achtung! is specialized in building intuitive online experiences, built with state of the art technologies. The agency works for many different big (and loyal) clients, like Volkswagen, O’Neill and Bavaria (beer). The multiple FWA’s, a Webby award in 2007 (I spy with my little eye) and the Dutch Spin Award for interactive agency of the year 2007 easily confirm the agency's online qualities.

www.achtung.nl

Prins Hendrikkade 20-II
1012 TL Amsterdam
+31 (0)20 623 2696
office@achtung.nl

On September 13th the World’s youngest Fomula 1 racer, Lewis Hamilton, will compete against a virtual racecar, built up from 28.800 Facebook profile photos – we’ve also uploaded our own. The question is, who will finish first; Hamilton in a racecar, on a 2.7 Km track, or the 288 MB Facebook car that will be downloaded with Vodafone’s mobile network. It wouldn’t surprise us if the Facebook car wins, since the campaign is there to display the speed of Vodafone’s new, upgraded network. According to Vodafone, it is as fast as the average computer connection. That is quite a claim. And if true, how about communicating; “Vodafone's new network; as fast as a landline”. Anyway, if you would like to see the actual race, it will be shown live on Facebook. Created by Achtung!.

Last night Amsterdam won 2 golden design Lions. Amsterdam Worldwide for its Onitsuka Tiger Tansu sneaker (picture) and FHV/BBDO for its black Mars packaging (almost) without the iconic Mars logo. Consumers received a sheet of letter stickers to create their own text on the Mars bar. The jury was charmed by the fact that Mars dared to change its world famous packaging so radically. In Cyber Amsterdam won 2 bronze Lions. Achtung! with 'Public Polo' for Volkswagen and Kong (again) with Stanislav for the Ministry of Justice. The day before yesterday we got 2 silver outdoor Lions. Again, one for MINI Christmas box by UbachsWisbrun/JWT and one for Interbest, created by Y&R Not just film. Indie won bronze in radio for Dance4Life.

Source: Adformatie

Last night at the SpinAwards - the awards for digital advertising - Achtung! regained the title ‘interactive agency of the year’ - in 2008 the online agency also won the prestigious title. A logical choice, since Achtung! was the most nominated and awarded agency around. It won 3 silver ‘rings’ for Catch the Polo (cross media), Chocomel snowball fight (best game) and Skoda Octavia introduction (best interactive video concept) respectively. For the first time this year Belgium agencies could also send in their cases. So we found it a little rude that the organization strongly branded the event ‘Made in Holland’ – were the Belgiums really welcome, or was it just their money? Fortunately Boondoggle  Antwerp Leuven went home with one golden ‘Made in Belgium’ ring for a blog that closely followed the birth of a baby elephant in the Antwerp Zoo. An online campaign that generated 200.000 extra ‘physical’ Zoo visitors - which is 2% of the entire Belgium population. The Albert Heijn supermarket Appie, by Muse (recently launching a 1.5 version), also won a golden ring (mobile). Stanislav (made by Kong), the viral web video that uses social network content to show the dangers of cyber criminality, went home with two (silver) awards. The only other agency that won two (silver) awards was the through-the-line agency 2010 with Zonneradar (sun radar) for Wieckse Witte and Amstel teamlink for Amstel beer - both Heineken brands. 2010 very inconveniently changes its name every year to show that it’s always up to date, but with these two ‘brand utilities’ (concepts that go beyond entertainment by being useful in a brand related way) 2010 lives up to its choice of name. We saliently have to mention though that one of the founders of 2010, and big brain behind these concepts, Jeroen de Bakker, left 2010 this year to found Lab 1111, taking Heineken with him. Guess which agency will be winning some awards next year...

Here's the complete list of winners.

Two weeks ago we already mentioned that augmented reality (AR) is picking up in the world of advertising. But as far as we know this is the first time it’s being used for an online game. In this game for surf brand O’Neill – created by Achtung! and built by IceMedia - you can virtually ride the waves. The longer you stay on your board the higher your score and the bigger the chance you win a trip to the World Cup of Surfing in Hawaii. To play the game you need to have a copy of the print ad of the new HyperFreak, which is - according to O’Neill - the most technical boardshort in the world. The funny thing is that we saw the HyperFreak print ad earlier this week, but didn’t know at all what we were looking at – would that be a waste of budget? Anyway, apart from playing the game, you can also see what the HyperFreak looks like in AR and on the website you can find out more about its special features; stretch fabric, super strong and light, no inseam, etc. What a nice campaign! It made us realize that AR is going to be the biggest revolution in advertising since the invention of YouTube.

Vodafone, with a seemingly unlimited budget for cross-media communication, has launched yet another online thingy. Last year Vodafone introduced Vodafone 360; the answer to how the hyper-connected consumer can manage its different online social tools, like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Vodafone 360 integrates these different platforms – making itself a one-stop shop - and asked Achtung! and THEY to explain this service in a digestible and engaging way. The agencies created Madame TreSesti (phonetic: 360), a virtual crystal gazer who knows things about your love life, your ‘online health’ and your work/life balance by ‘reading’ your different social networks – with a specially designed API. The intro, with Madame TreSesti in a mystical room, promises an interesting experience. However, when the website asked us whether we allowed Vodafone to leave branded messages on our Facebook page, we had to answer ‘no’ – we don’t want to be used as advertising dummies. So unfortunately for us it ended there and then. And that’s a pity, cause we would have loved to see how Madame TreSesti was going to visually show us our online personality by sourcing from a database of 600 different audio and video snippets - especially recorded for this campaign.

Update: Achtung! changed the settings - Vodafone won't ask if they can use your profile for spam anymore. So we gave it a go and it's a pretty insightful experience.

What a catchy name for an activation campaign. And what a simple and strong idea from online agency Achtung! to engage prepaid callers – regardless their provider! It doesn’t need much more explanation than the name suggests. If you register yourself as a prepaid caller on the website, you can participate in the contest and receive one text message per day with a difficult question. The person that answers the quickest and closest to the answer, wins – voila! – 1 million text signs or mobile minutes. Questions are asked like, ‘How long can a cockroach survive without his head’ and ‘How many kilo’s of lipstick does a woman eat in her whole life’. And guess what, at the end of the day Vodafone has its database filled with fresh and eager consumers that very homogeneously fit within their prepaid target group!

We ended our last post about Vodafone with ‘to be continued’. Why? Because we were surprised that Vodafone’s new, distinctive characters (the ‘mutated guinea pigs’) weren’t used at all in Achtung!’s brand activation, ‘Upgrade a stranger’. And while Vodafone internally is still being divided over the new ad property – created by THEY - Achtung! was asked to create yet another activation campaign for the (young) consumer. The principle is quite similar to the previous activation; through two different micro-sites Vodafone gives away more mobile phones. The first campaign is called BlackBerryHideout; phones (BlackBerry Curves) are hidden around universities, video clues are given by two students  (in English) on the website and anyone can search for it - in real life. The other activation, is called TheYouFlickInMyHyveFaceChase; an online treasure hunt through social networks and blogs. This time the prize is a Samsung H1 (and some other prizes). We are not sure how many consumers are involved in these activations, but it definitely sounds like something that will cause a lot of rumour around the brand - this time mainly positive rumour...

This commercial by THEY for Vodafone, is the talk of the (advertising) town at the moment. No wonder, the mutated guinea pigs are kind of odd. But we think it’s very brave of Vodafone to adopt such a distinctive ad property and respect THEY for being able to sell it. And since it is always hard to judge a completely new concept, we can only say we didn't expect it from Vodafone. It is actually a campaign we would expect from a completely new player in the market – that needs to build up awareness in a short time - or one with a niche target. The brand proposition ‘Power to you’ sounds a bit like marketing talk. On the other hand, it should give a creative agency enough inspiration to come up with an ‘empowering’ campaign. And the phrase ‘life is too short for hasty calls’ seems illogical (we always keep our calls short for the same reason), but makes sense when used in different ways - ‘Life is too short to search for Wifi’ etc. The campaign is accompanied by a set of banners, made by Achtung! And there’s also a ‘Power to you’ website (also made by Achtung!) dubbed ‘Upgrade a stranger’. Complete strangers, filmed with a hidden camera, can win different gadgets (a mini laptop, a mobile phone, etc.) when the visitors of the website vote for them. We wonder why the mutated guinea pigs don’t play a role in this. You want to push your ad property through different channels, right? And didn’t Vodafone choose for the partnership THEY/Achtung! to enrich the market with truly integrated advertising? To be continued...

Marketing Tribune just published its yearly Dutch ad agency survey,  conducted by Intormart GFK. And because 180 Amsterdam scored so well, co-founder Chris Mendola (right) and Andy Fackrell were asked a few questions about the success of their agency. The results of the survey came from 865 advertisers, who answered questions about the awareness, preference and image of the Dutch agencies.

We were happy to learn that the respondents judged ‘coming up with original ideas’ as the most important feature of an ad agency. This basically means that if creativity is not leading in your agency, you have to change your proposition or your job. On this characteristic 180 Amsterdam scored best with 52% - which proofs that having 32 nationalities on board does induce creativity. The agency strongly climbed on the image ladder; last year it scored only 14% on this characteristic. On ‘enthusiasm’ (would that be hugging the client before selling your ideas?) 180 also scored best. Wieden+Kennedy, another very cosmopolitan agency, is the most trustworthy agency – The People’s Valley and McCann were second and third.

Advertisers with a one-million-plus budget, put DDB, N=5 and TBWA, respectively, on their shortlist for an above the line campaign. Not a preferable position when you realize that the interactive agencies (LBi Lost Boys, Clockwork, Achtung! and The People’s Valley) are gaining territory fast – this of course was already announced by the strongly shifting media budgets. And ironically Saatchi & Saatchi and Ogilvy have a very strong brain position – amazingly still profiting from the brand position they built up in the 90’s.

To us the most striking conclusion of the survey is the image leap made by 180 and Wieden+Kennedy among Dutch advertisers. Hopefully it means they will finally become an integrated part of the Amsterdam ad community. We know from the interview that 180 is working hard on it; the agency is looking for a Dutch new business director, who can build its local business.

Finally UbachsWisbrun/JWT seems to have taken the big turn. Through Adformatie we learned that the agency has won the prestigious Belastingdienst (National Tax Collectors Office); a several-million-account. DDB, Publicis,  Roorda and Imagine were also involved in the pitch. Through the grapevine we learned that at JWT the champagne has been flowing abundantly. In the last two years the office has only been loosing (important) accounts. After having been ditched by Vodafone (went to They/Achtung!) and Rabobank (went to N=5) the agency shrank from 188 employees to 50. Belastingdienst came from Indie, who owned the account for five years and produced some very smart advertising. Indie literally gave the tax collectors a sympathetic face, which is - if you look at the nature of their 'business' - not an easy task. 15 employees were made redundand, because of the loss. Anyway, congrats JWT.