While new year’s is getting closer and we can already hear the fireworks building up to a climax tomorrow night, this print ad is being spread by health insurer Delta Lloyd. Two weeks ago, we wrote about the ‘official’ fireworks campaign. It tells the story of a guy who’s face is partly replaced by his bum, after getting injured by fireworks. We were wondering then how much useful impact this will have among the target. This is an example of a campaign that actually makes a point. It is created by Lowe/Draftfcb. It reads ‘Nothing is’, followed by braille. If you know the Delta Lloyd campaigns – and we estimate that 90% of the Dutch do – you can easily complete the phrase: Nothing is for sure… (tagline: …for sure Delta Lloyd). And at the bottom left: “Be careful when lighting fireworks”. This will definitely make people aware of the dangers of fireworks. We’re not sure if it’ll sell much Delta Lloyd insurances, but image-wise it’ll do good and we love it especially for communicating so much, while saying very little.

For several years internet provider Het Net ran an advertising campaign with a very distinctive colour (purple) and character. Fred (‘Fred from Het Net’ rhymes!) was a bit of an odd character. But together with Het Net’s proposition, transparency, he became a strong ad property and the brand built up a fair amount of clients since 2004. However, since a few years mother company KPN (formerly the only national telco provider) is consolidating its brand portfolio and decided to kill Het Net – earlier it already gulped down the brand ‘Planet’. KPN asked Lowe/Draftfcb to kill Het Net in style though. The agency built a dedicated website (don’t go there, if you don’t have broadband) where Fred gives away all the props that were used in 5 years of advertising. He even takes off his wig and moustache! On the website you can click on the different props and leave your name and contact details – aha, quid pro quo! – if you want to have one. Although it might be inspired by agency 2009 giving away its inventory at the end 2008 (when its name changed into 2009), it is a sympathetic move of KPN and might be a smart way to prevent Het Net clients from reevaluating their internet contract in the extremely competitive market of internet providers.

At the IMC Awards the Heineken ‘Trompet’ (a drum disguised as a hat for football fans, which was a follow-up of the speaker hat – a hat disguised as a speaker) by TBWA\Neboko won a golden IMC Award. Upload Cinema for De Uitkijk by Lowe/Draftfcb, also won gold. The Heineken Trompet was distributed around the European Championships 2008 as a premium – together with 8 cans of Heineken. We earlier wrote about Upload Cinema – creating long form content for a cinema, by making a compilation of long tale, short form content from the internet. All in all Amsterdam scored very well. And with 16 prizes in total, the Netherlands was the best awarded country in Europe.

Draftfcb won a Silver Promo Lion for Upload Cinema yesterday. We talked about it before, since it already won a Dutch Spin Award and Silver Lamp. The concept is simple; it takes YouTube films to the big screen. The idea came from the desire to promote one of the smallest Amsterdam cinema’s (De Uitkijk), because it was on the verge of being closed down. Through a monthly theme a selection of ‘User Sent In’ web films is shown in De Uitkijk. Agency 2009 – changing its name every single year – won a Bronze Direct Lion for a fantastic employment campaign that was to find a designer for their studio. The agency made an Adobe CS4 (that was not on the market yet) look-alike packaging, dubbed Abode CS4 (Ad for most Brilliant and Outstanding DTP’er Ever). 2009 delivered the desirable, but fake sofware through an Abode delivery guy at the doorstep of the best agencies in town. There it would of course end up in the Studio, thus giving it Trojan horse power. The software in the box enabled designers to design their own resume and with a simple click they could send it to 2009. Brilliant campaign that generated lots of free publicity and – not to forget – made them find their new DTP’er.

From a creative perspective, the ADCN Lamps are the most desirable awards; they represent the BIG ideas – nothing else. So it makes you wonder why this year only 2 Silver Lamps went to the category ‘interactive’ (Selmore/Achtung! and Skipintro); mainly traditional advertising gets awarded! And when you compare the Lamps with the (interactive) Spin Awards, it is striking that only two creative concepts won both awards; Upload Cinema (Lowe/Draftfcb) and Fortheloveofgod.nl (Skipintro). Does this mean that most big-idea creatives don’t have a digital mind? Or does it mean that digital creatives don’t come up with big ideas?

Thursday night the Golden and Silver Spin Awards were divided between the best Dutch digital and cross media agencies. For the first time the winners weren’t kept in suspense until the official award night in the Gashouder, because Adformatie (the Dutch ad magazine) by mistake distributed its magazine with the results too early. Of course, the winners couldn’t care less. Lemz was the big winner this year, with two golden awards and the title ‘interactive agency of the year’. The other two golden Spins went to Achtung! (last year elected agency of the year) for Sultana and Red Urban & FHV/BBDO for Hi. Check entire list here. More…

This is what happens when you take your pet with you on safari in Africa. Better leave it at home. Nice ad for a pet pension, made by Lowe Amsterdam.

Adformatie reported last week that according to research conducted by Synovate 63% of the Dutch advertisers believe that the added value of advertising agencies will diminish. The reason is that more and more advertisers obtain agency expertise in-house. The same research clearly shows that agencies are pessimistic about the future – no news really, when you look at the worldwide stock markets. For TBWA it is business as usual though; this week it announced a new online agency: \Neboko Flow. Floris Hülsmann and Stephan Gonnissen (previously working as a team at JWT) will form the creative management. Another new agency, Nothing, was recently founded by Bas Korsten and Michael Jansen (ex Selmore, ex DDB). Although the agency’s name is not very promising, the team itself is ranked within the top 10 most (Dutch, not international) awarded creatives. At the same time Lowe Amsterdam is struggling; MD Ed Stibbe is leaving the agency. He is the fourth and last member of the management to leave the agency within one year. It wouldn’t surprise us if the agency merges with Draftfcb (also part of Interpublic) in the near future.