Write the future did what most of us expected, it won big last night at the Dutch Art Director’s Club (ADCN) Awards: the Standing bulb (read: Grand Prix) and three golden bulbs (Integrated, Film, and Print/Magazine). Massive Music also won an award for the music in this commercial. Overall, TBWA\Neboko won most awards, taking home 2 golden (in Film for Pearle and in Print for Heineken’s Social Networks) and 4 silver bulbs. Live Interactive billboard (n=5) won gold in Outdoor. Bavaria’s DutchDress (Selmore) – causing such a big stir at the World Championship football last summer – also received a very deserved golden bulb in Activation. Christian Borstlap’s posters for the overview exhibition of Dutch advertising classics won gold in Graphic Design. In Interactive there was no gold. This could mean that digital creatives are still mostly tech driven, rather than aiming for the big idea. It could also mean that the ‘traditional’ creatives (the largest part of the Jury) are not able to fully appreciate digital innovations. Or it might be a bit of both. In any case, there were three silver bulbs in Interactive for Philips ‘Wake up the town‘ (Tribal DDB), Live Interactive Billboard (see above – a big digital idea, created by a ‘traditional’ agency), and Vodafone’s Madame TreSesti (Achtung!). Our very favourite film ‘Drama Queen‘ for the Young Director Award (TBWA Helsinki, directed by Rogier Hesp) got a bulb in the category Young Directors, but unfortunately not gold.

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.

Achtung! enters the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA), a network of the leading digital agency’s, like B-Reel, Profero and Perfect Fools. The society conducts research, shares knowledge, and exchanges professionals in order to professionalize the digital marketing and communications industry. Achtung! was invited to join SoDA because of its innovative work over the past years for clients like Volkswagen, O’Neill and Vodafone.

“Online gaming with mobile broadband, Vodafone is ready for it” is what the voice-over tells us. We like it. Finally. In June 2009 agency THEY won the Vodafone account together with Achtung! – the latter agency was primarily responsible for the digital work. Since then Vodafone has been all over the place with its advertising – as if they were drunk during office hours. But fortunately Vodafone didn’t (only) blame their agency – after all, a client always gets the advertising it deserves. And we’re also glad to see that the brand finally found a proposition that is both relevant and executed in an attractive way.  There are also two other commercials that show that if you like partying or yoga, fast internet can be handy. The commercials were directed by Wouter Stoter – whose production agency Comrad (sharing offices with CZAR) lent its building for the ‘OZAR’ party in one of the commercials. Let’s hope Vodafone stays off the booze and follows a steady course for a while.

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!.

Update: Sept. 13th: Lewis Hamilton won!

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  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!