Stupid Sheilas

What the hell? I read possibly the stupidest article in the paper this morning. Word has it that having attempted to sign up for Swiftcover insurance, musicians are being told they're ineligible for it due to Iggy Pop being their frontman. WHA?!?! How on earth does being a musician make you a liability to an insurance firm?

Also revealed was that Esure (you know the ones - "Calm down dear, I'm just punching Michael Winner in the face!") does not insure film directors, and Sheilas' Wheels refuse to insure people who drive pink cadillacs.

Australian? Own a garishly pink dress? You're out!

Whatever next? MoreThan not covering anyone who owns a dog named Lucky (yes yes, old ads I know, but it appears insurers are crazy!), Norwich Union/Aviva not insuring anyone who has ever changed their name?

Perhaps I'm well behind the times and this has been going on with all manner of products and services for years, but I just don't understand why the ASA have allowed these instances to occur, discrimination being the buzzword these days.


On a brief note whilst I continue to fathom this out, me and Sarah received the first visuals of our ads for Warrington Borough Transport today and they're looking pretty good! No matter how big or small this achievement seems to anyone else, we can't wait to see our first printed ads out there and be able to say "We made that!"

Feel free to make sick noises!

Ze book

A new link has been added to the sidebar now, which is an online showcase of mine & Sarah's book. Feel free to take a look and leave comments or contact us via email (also in the sidebar).

Ta!

Back to the day job

That's your lot folks, our fortnight at TBWA is up! Never the best feeling leaving placements behind, but having been given a chance to prove ourselves at the church, we're more certain than ever that we want to work there. Two weeks ago it was just an idealistic view that it'd be pretty freakin' cool to be part of such a team, but having seen it from the inside, it's become a goal for us.

We had a great end to our stint there with some more good feedback from Paul, and he sent us on our way with another brief for us to tackle and some certificates of our time there which was pretty funny. I personally have had the best time there, and feel like I'm learning more and more as I go along my little copywriting journey, particularly with Paul's encouragement with has helped my confidence no end. Needless to say, that man is set for a whole load of pestering from us in the months to come, and we hope to be taken back into the church some time in the near future.

My record of achievement!

For the time being it's back to the grind for me come Monday when I'll be returning to my "day job", though only for a few more weeks before heading to the life of limbo once more! We're just going to take things as they come, keep working on the book and pushing to get it out there, and we shall see what the next few months bring for us. We've left a little mark or two behind at TBWA, so we'll see whether they're discovered (though Fergus did catch us in our suspicious act - d'oh!). Thanks for having us, and hopefully we'll see you soon for more Cheese Pub action!

Our Bex flying the UCLan flag for us at TBWA!

I'm a PC

Sarah showed me this little Mac piss-take yesterday which I nearly peed myself over (true story). As a blatant Mac-basher, I loved it!

"I'll buy almost anything if it's shiny and made by Apple" - genius!

Trott on

No word of a lie, I saw Dave Trott this morning! Striding purposefully towards me, I was in no doubt that it was the silver-haired Trotter.


Except I'm not quite sure why he was getting off a Magic Bus in East Didsbury. Sarah thinks I'm crazy. Or that it could possibly have been Dave's long-lost twin, Fox.

Discuss.

KISS

So, Sarah has now returned to the land of the living (well, the land of advertising anyway) - turns out it was the dreaded Norovirus that struck her down last week, the dodgy pizza was purely coincidental! We've been cracking on with GHD again and have just seen Paul for his input on our ideas. Some more good feedback from him, with a solid route for us to progress with until he sees us again on Friday.

I also took the opportunity to show him the copy I was working on for Nissan last Friday to see if it was as crap as I thought! Turns out it wasn't, but he gave me some useful writer-to-writer tips that have been duly noted and will be implemented the next time pen meets paper! Basically, I have to KISS more - Keep It Simple, Stupid! Another of those great little gems to take with you and pass around to others, just like our ex-tutor's epic advice to JFDI - Just F**cking Do It! Maybe there's a gap in the market to write a book of advertising abbreviations. I'll let you know if I decide to write it.

Right, back to the pad now, people!

A week of firsts

This week has seen us experiencing quite a few things for the first time - working in a church (never thought I'd say that!), attending our first photoshoot, and yesterday we were invited up into the Ark to sit in on an all-agency meeting. Of course we're not at liberty to divulge anything that went on in there (ruddy privacy agreements spoiling everyone's fun!), but it was lovely to see all of the creative teams in one room, a tight squeeze though it was! Even for those coming over from Parklands, there's clearly a good unity between everyone despite working from different locations, and it just served to strengthen our opinion that TBWA is a great big happy family to work for.

Today is another first for me as I'm working alone because Sarah ate some dodgy pizza last night (hope you get well soon dude!), so I'm working on some copy for our Nissan concepts from earlier in the week (and clearly having a bit of a mental break from it!) Better crack on I guess, but I'm sure there'll be more updates to come next week.

*Buries head in thesaurus*

Busy day!

A little bit of agency two-timing went on today, but in the nice, dirty, smutty "I like it!" kind of way.

Around early December we'd caught up with Stephen at AND Partners who was handling their account with Warrington Borough Transport, as we'd been told before we left our placement there in October that the client was putting through some of the work we'd done, so we checked in to see how it was going. We were assured it was all still going ahead and that more would be happening come the New Year. So, like the persistent rottweilers we are, we continued to pester Ste every so often to see where it was all up to, and were very happy when last month he suggested we join them for the shoot once it'd been arranged. As you can imagine, the weather somewhat hampered the plans for a good few weeks, but around lunchtime yesterday, Ste emailed us to ask if we'd be free at very short notice to join them on the shoot today. Cue excitement! We checked with Paul at TBWA first, and gave Ste our big "Yay!" verdict.

So this morning we headed to Warrington to meet with Ste and Lee from AND Partners, as well as the photographer and his assistant, and set out in our very own bus (designated driver and all!)

The bus in question

We won't say too much right now, as the shots are currently with the photographer for retouching before AND Partners can set about their ad-producing magic, but we were really pleased to find that in the 4 months since we last set eyes on our concepts, not one thing had been altered. Of course we won't be at AND Partners to oversee the final stage, but it's been great to go on our first shoot and to see how the photographer had to set about interpretating and accomodating the idea as much as possible into the images he took, not to mention finding the perfect setting for the shots in the first place! Admittedly it's not as flashy and showbiz as you imagine it to be before you ever go on a shoot, but we certainly had a laugh and just plain enjoyed being able to see another stage of the whole process. No doubt the ads will be appearing on here just as soon as is possible!

Lee taking in the view

A change of location

Sarah getting her hands dirty

After randomly ending up as models for some additional shots being taken (yes, me and Sarah may even be FEATURING in an ad too, albeit rather out of focus!), we went to feed ourselves up at Pizza Hut, after which me and Sarah hopped in the car and headed back to TBWA as we were due to see Paul with some of our ideas for Nissan at 4pm. With an hour or so to spare, we went back over everything we rushed out yesterday (as we had to get our ads drawn up pronto once the photoshoot was arranged) and added a few more scamps to the mix before heading over to Parklands to see the man himself. We'd been a little worried that we were perhaps sacrificing vital time on the brief in favour of the photoshoot, but as I'm sure anyone could understand, we didn't want to pass up the opportunity to go along this morning. As it turned out, our worrying had been in vain as a nice amount of our work was well received. Having had something of a love/hate relationship with headlines ever since I decided to embark on the life of an aspiring copywriter, it was really good to hear that I'd done something right this time around as Paul really liked some of the lines. We came away with ideas to work on as well as a new fictional GHD brief which me and Sarah can't wait to get stuck into.

So overall it was a busy day for us, and a great one at that. Really enjoying the experience at TBWA so far, and dreading next Friday coming around too quickly (or at all!) but we're just going to get our heads down and bash out some stonking work and make the best impression we can whilst we're there!

Audio abuse

Why? Why would you subject anybody to this, lovely Kelloggs people? Why did you think that Snap's "I've Got The Power" and the Coco Pops jingle went together? And who on earth cast that dude for the voiceover? WHY?

...blast off?

Well the start to today didn't quite go as planned, with me slip sliding away this morning on the ice, which was presumably the reason behind my tres early start being thwarted when I reached Piccadilly. Plenty of time, I thought, to leisurely catch a train to East Didsbury. And so it seemed when I got to Piccadilly, with the departure boards all flashing brightly and gloriously at me that the trains were running on time. So I headed to my platform and settled down to finish reading my Metro. I finished my Metro. And my train was already 5 minutes late. Battling back "the fear" (something I experience a lot whilst waiting for trains, particularly when they fail to arrive on time), I headed back to the boards, only to discover that the two imminent trains to East Didsbury had disappeared. Cue panic. Eventually discovered that the next one would be arriving at 8:58 (bearing in mind I'd already been waiting half an hour), and hurried along to greet it with open arms, only to find it was delayed. Cue uber panic. Finally it arrived at 9:07, at which I hastily boarded and drummed my fingers in an irritated fashion until it began to move, my sigh of relief as it departed at 9:09 quickly turning to a gasp of horror as it stopped again just 500 yards out of the station at 9:10. After an agonising 2 minute wait (yes, agonising indeed) it continued on with its journey, stopping only once more on the way, but not stopping quite long enough for me to express my rage in a physical manner. At 9:25 it pulled into the station, and I hurtled off it straight to Sarah's car, at which point we sped like bats out of hell round the corner to TBWA, even making aggravated hand gestures and cursing old women crossing in our path, such was our urgency to be on time. Gathering our composure, our road rage abated, in we walked through the sturdy oak door of the church...

And here our TBWA story starts! We were instantly given the grand tour by Paul Burns before settling down to be briefed. We then headed off to our home for the next two weeks, a neat little cubby hole within the church walls, and set ourselves down to get cracking. We've just been given a simple Nissan brief to begin with, but we're looking forward to the other briefs we'll be thrown during our two weeks there, and hopefully working on some GHD just like the good old uni days. Today we were more getting our bearings than anything, as being at TBWA is a whole different ball game to our previous placements, particularly in terms of the size of the workforce. Unfortunately we haven't had much chance to get acquainted with everybody yet (and I'm sure we still won't have by the time we leave!), but luckily there was already a familiar face there - our Bex from UCLan. It's been really nice catching up with her and getting to see some of what her and her partner Adam have been working on since they settled there last July, their most recent success having been to grace the pages of Campaign with their new Tiger Balm idents just this week, so a big congratulations to them for that!

Our cubby hole

Hard at work of course

Can't wait to head in tomorrow (regardless of any train trouble!) and I'm sure there'll be more blogging to come over the next fortnight, so stay tuned folks!

T minus 1 day and...

This last week has gone oddly fast in the run-up to TBWA - no sooner had I thought "Ooh, only one week to go!" than it was Saturday and I was heading to Manchester for a pre-placement teamtalk with Sarah. Admittedly I was a little worried we'd have lost something of our sparkle since our stint at AND Partners was such a long time ago, but we set down to think on some new ways to make ourselves memorable and to get our branding out there, and I think it's safe to say that Team Sparkley is back with a vengeance!

Be afraid, be very afraid!

As it's a new year, we have a whole new gameplan, with plans to give the book an overhaul (our work is sacred no longer!) and to set up a site to showcase our work, as well as getting our name out to all and sundry in an attempt to kick the recession's ass!

Whilst discussing our plans for global advertising domination, we headed to our favourite place in Manchester - the Urbis. Lucky for us, the D&AD Annuals showcase was on, with every annual on display from 45 years ago when it all began. Was great to see how it had all progressed from 1963 to present day, managing to maintain the same degree of effortless savvy and coolness each and every year. Yes, we are advertising geeks and we love it!

1986 - Year of the Sarah

1987 - Year of the Hayley

Heggers, we love you!

As the earlier noted candyfloss suggests, we were rather excited yesterday! Bring on the advertising!

T minus 1 week and counting...

In a week's time me and Sarah will already have completed our first day of placement at TBWA and have only 9 more to go *sob* but the excitement starts now! Our friends Carly and Niomi from good ol' UCLan are currently there on placement and loving every minute of it, and we can't wait to get stuck in there come next Monday, having been waiting for an opportunity like this since we first set foot in the church last year at uni. This week I'm just an office girl, but next week I shall magically transform into an advertising extravaganza (hopefully)! And then back to office girl for me. It's like being Clark Kent by day and Superman... well, whenever anyone's in trouble really! Hopefully someday soon me and Sarah will be well and truly unleashed from the oppression of the advertising closet once and for all, to wreak creative chaos on all MWAHAHAHA!! *cough*

In other news - freak snowstorms hit us today, leaving much of London's public transport services crippled. As a commuter, one often questions the existence of God, particularly when forced to ride in the filth of others, or surrounded only by gibbering businessmen and chavs galore, or when your train home is cancelled 2 minutes before it's due into the station. Thousands of commuters forced to walk to work upon discovering that all bus services had been suspended in central London were no doubt cursing "the man upstairs" this morning. Which makes me think that after all the furore surrounding the athiest bus ads, they couldn't possibly have picked a better medium! Genius!