welcome to optimism

ad or art?

There's a piece here on Digit magazine's blog about the 'under construction' symbols currently displayed on the hoarding on our building. (Above.)

They write that after spending a while trying to work out what it was advertising they realised, "It's not an ad as such. The building behind is actually the agency's London offices and the symbols are just there to cover up the chipboard, turning every studio's nightmare when trying to pitch to clients - the noise and ugliness of building work - into a showcase for the company... Ignoring the fact that it's commissioned by W+K as essentially an promo for itself, this is a piece of art not advertising -- though after years of guerrilla advertising and viral marketing, your first instinct is to wonder what it's selling. How long before we start regarding all street art from graffiti to pavement chalk paintings in this way?"

Brilliant - so we may have inadvertently created a whole new sub-genre of urban spam.

gwen

Gwen Yip was freelancing with us recently on yakult. Her charming illustrative blog documents the experience here. I've taken the liberty of reproducing a couple of her drawings. Hope that's Ok, Gwen.

Scarily accurate picture of Michael Russoff. Although it does make him look a little like Tobey McGuire, the actor who plays Spiderman.

what makes wieden + kennedy work?

... is a question we have often asked ourselves. Someone else (a chap called Sam Karp) has tried to answer it for us here.

international symbol of the vagina

Discovered a site, adverbatim. It collects (allegedly) real and terrible things that people in the industry have said. I don't know whether to laugh or puke.

Examples:

#079- “We’re a serious company. You can’t use the international symbol of the vagina on the cover.”
(Client, Area Manager, looking at the image of two hands framing a photo)

#064- “It lacks branding but we can solve that with a voice over saying the name of the brand.”
(Agency, Account Director, commenting on a jingle whose lyrics consist entirely of the name of the brand, sung 7 times, and the word “grapefruit” sung 4 times.)

let us take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London

We've launched a new blog called 'Streets of London'. The idea is that it will be a record of street art and culture around our office in the east end and across London. It's brand new so there's not a huge amount of content on there. Hopefully it will grow. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Honda has a cow

Above: the flaccid Strategy Cow. Below: the erect Strategy Cow.

Richard Huntington's blog Adliterate introduced us to the Strategy Cow. He wrote:

My eldest son has this toy. It is a cow (I think) which normally stands erect but when you push the base upwards it collapses. It perfectly describes how I feel when I come across lacklustre or cliched thinking - flacid, deflated and lacking in the strength to perform simple tasks like standing up properly. From now on I will submit the strategies of the moment to the Strategy Cow for her to pass judgement.

Richard has started a thing called The Advocate in which people debate the merits of current strategic thinking and first up for consideration was our Honda campaign. (This was last month so I'm a bit late in linking to it.

Anyway, the debate is interesting to read. (Or at least it is if you work on the campaign.) Some people see the work as a triumph of execution over strategy, some question whether the impact of the campaign can be isolated from other factors in such a way as to demonstrate effectiveness conclusively. But in the end we were awarded a strategy cow, complete with authenticity certificate. Stuart's got it somewhere but I'm not sure what he's done with it.

corporate blogging and us

Aaron Savage's blog 'The Gypsy Mission' has an article on corporate blogging and cites Welcome to Optimism as an example. He says:

"The second type of blogging company has an official blog in the company name, which designated members of staff can contribute to on a daily basis. Typically this is how smaller companies handle blogging. Some set this for senior management and department heads whilst others encourage the entire organisation to contribute. Wieden Kennedy’s blog “Welcome to Optimism” is a good example of this. They keep write-ups of pitches they have done, new work just released, company night’s out, late nights at work, new hires, and really show what it's like to work with this extremely talented group of advertising people. It therefore serves as a recruitment tool but also showcases work to clients and prospects alike. A new prospective client gets an extremely good view of the agency and gains valuable information as to whether this is a team that they want to work with. The question though in these circumstances is whether clients really want to know what it is really like to work inside an agency or whether this is more truth than they can handle. Wieden Kennedy’s growth for the year seems to indicate that this isn’t the case and the rest of the personality of the agency is clear for all to see whilst the industry reads their blog hoping to pick up some tips on how they produce the excellent work they do."

Which is a nice write-up of what we try to do. I know that some people in 'the industry' look at this blog but I'm not sure that prospective clients do. Though they definitely look at the 'official' site over at http://www.wklondon.com/ . In fact, I suspect that browsing of agency websites has to a certain extent replaced the part of the new business process known as the 'creds meeting'. It used to be that the new business director of a large agency would be expected to arrange two or three creds (credentials) meetings a week, at which the agency would present examples of its work and approach to potential clients, whether or not they were actually reviewing their business at the time. These speculative meetings just don't happen any more. Clients don't visit agencies unless they're actually putting a pitch list together. Partly because they're too busy and partly because the competitiveness of today's new biz environment would mean they're liable to be torn apart by desperate agencies if they started just 'popping in for a chat.' It's easier for them just to have a look at the agencies' websites - no commitment and no feeding frenzy.

So, are there any propsective clients out there reading this? And have we put you off by revealing too much of what it's like on the inside?

our blog doesn't suck: official

We don't really think of this blog as 'corporate'. As corporations go, wieden + kennedy is pretty uncorporate. And the idea that anyone could learn how to do anything corporate from watching us is pretty scary. But Welcome to Optimism has been cited as an example of how to do a company blog by SixApart, the people who host this site.  Blimey.

Anil Dash writes:

There’s a lot of healthy and well-justified skepticism about the idea of a corporate blogs, even though many of us take the idea for granted. So we spend a lot of time trying to show people how this Business Blogging thing should be done.

One of the best recent examples is at Wieden + Kennedy London. The communications agency has a fantastic business blog that’s candid, human, and shows a great sense of humor.

The piece highlights the fact that we posted our objectives for the year here and then posted a mid year review of how we were doing here. They reckon this is a good way of sharing the info with staff, clients and community.

Aw, shucks. If you want to find out what you can learn about blogging from the way we do this site you can read the full article here.

One update on those objectives is that since winning Lurpak and the Guardian last week we've achieved our new business goal of winning two new like-minded and profitable UK clients.

embracing failure

Interesting to see that the post below on 'pitch disappointment' has generated some positive and flattering feedback.

PSFK cites this as an example of a great corporate blog (cheers) because we know how the W+K brand 'feels' and aren't afraid to present it, warts and all.

Polka Dot Holes says 'I love agencies with the confidence to be honest.'

I think we're pretty comfortable with admitting that we're not perfect. We make mistakes. We lose pitches. We make bad decisions.

We have the words 'embrace failure' written on a big illuminated sign in one of our meeting rooms. (Aptly, the illumination doesn't work.) We recognise that if you're going to test the boundaries then sometimes you'll fail. But that's OK. It's not trying that's not OK. You don't achieve extraordinary results through ordinary efforts.

In the case of this story it wasn't such a big admission because we knew it was going to be reported in the trade press.

And here are some other W+K failures:

- Today it feels like aircon in the offices might have been a worthwhile investment.

- We didn't manage to get a single decent ad out in the year we worked with Sky One.

- We're lousy at making the time to do the non-client related projects that we always talk about doing.

BTW, you can buy Wieden + Kennedy 'Embrace Failure' T shirts in the shop section of our main site here.

let battle commence

Adland has announced a competition that invites people to vote for what they think are the best ad industry blogs. You can vote here.

Your very own Welcome to Optimism has been nominated in the 'best ad agency blog' section, up against such hot competition as TBWA Portugal, Partners and Simons, and why advertising sucks.

Vote for us, if you like.