Extra Salt & Sauce

There’s a little logo on the current Cadbury Dairy Milk outdoor campaign (more of the same purple and white M&S style creamily slurpily delicious chocolate messages) that reads “glass and a half full productions”. Squinting at it from the bus the other day, it struck me that this was a brilliant opportunity to do more than a bunch of rather functional posters.

But it seems that they’ve got there already. A quick google this morning flung up this website featuring of all things, a drumming gorilla. Seeking a rationale gives you the following justification:

Well it just seemed like the right thing to do. There's no clever science behind it - it's just an effort to make you smile, in exactly the same way Cadbury Dairy Milk does. And that's what we aim to continue to do; simply make you smile. So if a drumming gorilla's not enough, wait until you see what else we have up our sleeves.

This apparently is the first step that Fallon have taken on behalf of Cadbury to being a branded entertainment provider. The website mentions Phil Collins at one point. Not one of the first men that spring to mind when I think of things that make me smile. But perhaps I’ll be surprised.

And oh my god now the drumming gorilla is on TV. And is he actually Phil Collins..??!

The gorilla is not Phil Collins. It is an actor called Garon Michael. Clearly he was able to draw on method acting experience when playing his drumming part as he has previously featured in films "Congo", "Instinct" and a "Planet of the Apes" remake.

The campaign cost £6.2million to make and is intended to dramatise the moment of "pure joy" that you feel when you guzzle down a piece or two of precious Cadbury Dairy Milk.

It was put together by the Fallon creative director, Juan Cabral, who worked on the Bravia 'balls' ad.

The ad was viewed more than 500,000 times on YouTube in the first week of its release. Largely I'm sure due to the traffic that was directed there by posts on this here blog...

And it has now given birth to its own facebook group: "we love the cadbury's drumming gorilla". You saw it here first, gentle readers.

We're running a series of workshops at the moment for one of our clients, taking them through the process of developing an ad campaign from start to finish. So kicking off with developing a brand positioning, conducting mini focus groups to validate that positioning, establishing business and communications objectives, writing a creative brief and so forth.

The whole process is proving to be really interesting. Another of those moments when you realise that now and again, there is a bit of a skill to what we do. And I think I'm learning as much from the workshopees as I hope they're getting back from us.

Most recent session saw them - shock horror - writing an ad campaign against their creative briefs. Gerry had thoughtfully supplied them all with poster paints so we got some really impressive - and really colourful - scamps at the end of it. I was about to upload one of them for all of the world to see but the file is apparently too large.

So if you'd like to come see, the genius is lying on my desk as we speak. We should auction them off on ebay. Pop art.

As part of the 2007 London Design Festival, 26 Posters set a challenge to twenty-six pairs of writers and designers. To create a six-word poster that somehow comments on or reflects its immediate location. The writer John Ormston and myself created one such poster for our site in the Gorbals, we wanted to reflect the Gorbals' ongoing tansformation and get people talking. The first line comes from the novel by Alexander McArthur, No Mean City.

When these posters are removed from their context, I think it's true to say that they become a bit obscure or lose their depth and meaning. So see if you can see them where they live, they can be found across the UK. Glasgow, London, Birmingham and Manchester with the sites kindly donated by JC Decaux.

http://www.creativereview.co.uk/crblog/short-stories/

http://www.26.org.uk/books.asp?id=6

Margaret Oscar & Michael Wolff
Waterloo has many famous features – The Eye, the Festival Hall etc. Less well known is the plight of the homeless. That’s still a battle to be won.

Blonde is "one to watch" according to NMA in their 2007 Top 100 Agency survey.

Here's the full Blonde entry in thumbnail format.