While in the 70’s and 80’s Pony was one of the hipper brands, today it is vintage at best. And like many fashion brands that have been covered in dust over the years, Pony wants to win back its popularity. To do so Pony hired brand new Amsterdam agency Cloudfactory to introduce its new collection in Europe. Cloudfactory was founded by Jessica Kersten en Olivier Teepe. Its proposition fits the modern collaborative agency model that works with different creative teams for different clients. We guess this should prevent the agency from becoming a *tada* one trick Pony. The first Cloudfactory concept will be an experiential display presenting Pony’s new collection at the Bread & Butter festival in Berlin, next July.
As from June 180 has a new MD: Stephen Corlett. He worked both on agency and client side, starting his career at Saatchi & Saatchi London with Kevin Dundas, who is now CEO at 180. After Saatchi’s, Corlett moved to Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam where he worked alongside 180 ECD Al Moseley on Vodafone. He then led the team that won and created the global Coca-Cola marketing platform the ‘Coke Side of Life’, including the iconic ‘Happiness Factory’ campaign. His itchy feet then brought him to Anomaly, New York, where he worked as ‘Brand Director’ to lead the pitch-winning team that refocused the Converse brand following its Nike buyout. The sports brand experience then led him to Umbro, on the client side. About joining 180 Corlett says: “I felt a desire to go back into the type of creatively led, highly motivated agency I have always loved; where the power of ideas is paramount and valued. 180 is a perfect fit, the team here has a relentless commitment to world class, transformational creativity.” An impressive mouthful. We wish him all the best at 180.
Laurence Parkes has been appointed as Strategy Director at AKQA Amsterdam. Previously he was head of digital strategy for WCRS in London. Parkes initial focus will be the Heineken account. Prior to WCRS, Parkes worked at DDB and BBH in London. He’s been awarded with IPA Effectiveness Award for the successful Marmite Love/Hate campaign in 2002, helped to launch the Audi TV channel in 2005, and persuaded Google to allow a Weetabix spoof website that implied Google was powered by an elderly librarian in 2009. About his move Parkes says: “AKQA is obsessed with the detail, which shows in their work. I believe brilliance in digital is all about the detail. AKQA has ambitious plans for the Amsterdam office and I want to help turn it into the jewel in the crown of the AKQA network.” If that means we get to see more work from AKQA Amsterdam, we’ll keep our fingers crossed!
The Digital Podge is a get together of ECD’s and MD’s that work in digital. It was founded in 1994 by Phil Jones. The idea is to get the creative digital leaders together in an informal way to talk about their business. When Achtung! visited Podge last year in Stockholm, the agency successfully picked up the idea to take the event to Amsterdam. The theme of this year’s podge is ‘Kopstoot. The wrong side of Amsterdam’. A ‘kopstoot’ is a traditional Dutch drink: a beer with a jenever (Dutch gin) on the side. The attendants will also visit some other Dutch classics, like the Red Light District (no shit?), FEBO (eating out of a wall), and *tada* a coffeeshop. Sounds like things are going to be very informal. The Amsterdam Podge will be held on June 10th. If you would like to attend, you can visit the website to register – make sure to turn off your sound when you do so.
Two weeks ago agency We Are Pi threw a heavily sponsored fund raising party for Japan where 350,000 people lost their homes due to the tsunami; “AI NIPPON ♥ 日本” – meaning ‘love Japan’. All the artist friends of We Are Pi were asked to create some artwork for the silent auction held at the party. The auction featured original artwork from Olivia Bee (Portland), Christian Weber (NYC), Genevieve Gaukler (Paris), Alvaro Sotomayor (Amsterdam), Superdeux (San Francisco), Akinori Oishii (Tokyo), Pierre Janneau (Amsterdam), Jeff Kling (NYC) and many more. So far the auction raised over $20,000. If you couldn’t make the party, the auction is still going on Marktplaats. The brand new agency We Are Pi was founded by Jamie Kim and Alex Bennett Grant who met at W+K Amsterdam. The agency’s model is based on creating ‘shared value’. With this auction the agency clearly practices what it preaches.
Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam hired Adrien Bindi and Rick Herrera, two top creatives coming from San Francisco. Bindi previously spent three years as art director at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, producing the award-winning ‘Battle for Milkquarious’, a bizar 70’s inspired and over-the-top 20-minute rock opera for Got Milk? Before GS&P Bindi worked at Taxi, Fallon and Leo Burnett. Herrera, copywriter, joins W+K Amsterdam from twofifteen – formerly known as TAG/San Francisco. One of the latest projects he worked on was Xbox ‘The Life’, according to the press release, one of the “most awarded pieces of TV work of 2010”. He also worked on the famous Halo 3 ‘Believe’ campaign – winning two (!) Cannes Grand Prix in 2008. Clearly a strong reinforcement for W+K. Make our city shine, guys.
Grey bought – or “integrated”, if you will – digital agency Blutarsky. Blutarsky is following its former MD Patrick Joore in the slipstream. Joore, previously MD at Blutarsky, started at Grey last month. Blutarsky’s eight-strong team will move to the Grey Amsterdam office. According to Wikipedia ‘Blutarsky’ is slang for a 0.0 quarterback rating in American Football, the lowest possible rating – it was derived from the movie National Lampoon’s Animal House in which John ‘Bluto’ Blutarsky (picture), played by John Belushi, scored 0.0. We’re not sure why the agency was inspired by this character, but hope the two agencies will ‘kick some ass’ – to stay in the verbal realm of football.
We received a press release from THEY telling us that the agency just won the assignment to roll-out the Polish vodka Sobieski in India. Sobieski is (in quantity) the sixth-largest vodka brand in the world, but we never heard of it. After doing some Googling we came across this Bruce Willis commercial. Apparently he’s not only Sobieski’s advertising property, like George Clooney for Nespresso, but also a partner in the company. The commercial made us laugh out loud. Having seen this, we’re sure THEY will do a better job in India. Though selling vodka in India still feels like selling Vindaloo curry’s on the Northpole – fortunately India is a little denser populated.
180 created a new font, called EcoDIN. The font is designed to use less toner when printed – which gives the impression that ‘Eco’ stands for ‘Economical’. The font was inspired by the Ecofont by Spranq (an ad agency in Utrecht) – using 20% less toner. 180’s font, based on DIN Mittleschrift, goes one step further. While in Spranq’s font holes are punched through the glyphs, 180 did the opposite (a nice case of 180 thinking); it just shows the holes. We would love to recommend 180’s EcoDIN, but instead we’re going to bring this yet another step further; we recommend you to start a paperless office, like ourselves; it uses no ink at all. And what’s really eco about it; it doesn’t require any dead trees.
Last week Hans Brouwer (right) from MassiveMusic won the Amsterdam Business Award 2011. Brouwer was nominated together with Duncan Stutterheim (middle) from ID&T (a music and entertainment company that among other things has franchised the Sensation White dance event in 17 different countries), and CEO Bert van der Leden (left) from IQCreative (a company that exploits the international Supperclub restaurant formula, as well as several other restaurants in Amsterdam, like Envy, Vyne, Nevy and Nomads). Brouwer and his MassiveMusic received the highest ratings in categories like strategy, innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability. This photo was taken during a special award ceremony dinner at Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam. MassiveMusic is one of the world leaders in music composition and production, with offices in New York, Shanghai, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam. According to the company it publishes more than fifty music composers for commercials, Idents, TV promo’s, and console games, on a daily basis. But Brouwer gives Amsterdam more than digestible advertising tunes; he’s also the founder of the ‘Club of 12′, a group of creative ambassadors that aim to make the Amsterdam creative industry thrive and internationally visible. So we’re pretty sure Brouwer will use his prize money, €25,000, in a creative way.
