Durex Campaign - Love is Blind

My last blog post was about Durex advertising and I found this but I thought it deserved it's own blog. Typographic solutions similar to this have been done to death but in this case I think the image is extremely powerful and shocking. The art direction makes the most of the idea and the pay off line is simple but effective. It's one of the best campaigns I have seen in a long time.

Durex Advertising

During my time at Mccann Erickson we were looking at the advertising for Durex Play, which led me to look at past advertising by Durex. One thing I noticed was the high quality of ads throughout. The art direction was always excellent complimenting superb ideas. Durex must put a lot of money into their advertising. Here are a few examples of the ads I looked at.

Marketing Strategy

Something I have been closely looking at recently in my recent projects is marketing strategies. I decided to take a look into it myself as it isn't traditionally part of my course but I was interested in not just creating designs but implementing them into the market via lots of different channels.

A marketing strategy defines objectives and describes the way you're going to satisfy customers in your chosen markets. It does not have to be written down but it is easier to communicate to outsiders, like your bank manager or other investors, when it is.

You can find out more about it here : http://www.is4profit.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=131&Itemid=66

Skoda Cake Advert

One of my favourite TV adverts of the last year has to be the Skoda Fabia ad. Turning the car into a cake echoed the attention to detail that the engineers had put into the actual car and it showed how everyone works as a team to put the car together. It is also a fun, warm advert compared to the cold technological style of most car adverts these days.

Shocking Branding

Whilst researching branding I came across some extremely bad logo designs that you would not believe got passed off for production. However, they did and here they are to see.

Critical Journal

Today we are handing in a 5000 word draft for the written part of our critical journals that we have to complete during the final degree year. We also have to complete a 20 minute presentation. The critical journal focuses on your own work and you can write about any issue you want as long as it involves your own and other people's work.

The aim of my critical journal is to explore, in depth, the journey from an initial idea through design and advertising into a fully focused marketing strategy. This will centre around an industry set brief that will also be used as a college project. The contrast between education’s idea of creativity being everything and the politics of industry will be interesting to see. This will be done in relation to the self initiated project myself and my creative partner are currently working on. We were given a choice of eight projects, with one being self set, and I decided along with my partner to take the opportunity to contact a leading advertising agency with the proposal of us using a live brief set by them to be used in conjunction with the briefs set by college. This will help us as it is well known that experience is vital within this industry.

The Wheel of Doom

Coming across this funny poster has made me think of my views of this tiny symbol. I don't know its official term but we call it 'the wheel of doom'. When this appears on your mac screen everything stops and you hope to God that it stops spinning and gets off your screen quickly. More often than not the 'wheel of doom' is followed by a message saying the application has unexpectedly quit. This is not good as all unsaved work is lost. This emphasises the need to save work regularly or risk losing it forever.