Review of the week
Brenda Atkinson
The worldly cynicism of student advertising work is wonderful for its predictability and passion, depressing for the inevitable brevity of its life-span. As such, this year’s AAA School of Advertising/Oxygen Award exhibition was a vaguely poignant affair that made me wonder just what happens to youthful irony when it encounters market forces.
Unfettered by client briefs or branding objectives, students who produced work in the “Individual Creative Expression” category came up with the kind of angsty innovation more usually found in fine art departments.
Lawrence Stevenson, aka cupid’scrashtestdummy, came up with this poetic offering, titled The Fucking Daffodil: “They’re so fucking sweet/so fucking yellow/so fucking neat/so fucking green”. And that was only the first verse. It’s not Wordsworth, but it does give an innovative spin to the pained metaphors that pass for love.
An impressive team effort, which defined “Target Market” as “any unsuspecting member of the community”, savaged adworld expediency with a walk-through installation that finally pulled the viewer into a large box to face the question: “How does it feel to be the product of the brand?”
As I stood in the atmospheric cardboard booth, I imagined myself as the contents of a direct mailer about to be roughly dismantled and then discarded by the harassed PA of some ad exec. I felt deeply sorry for myself, not to mention very angry at the brand.
It’s this kind of high-camp social criticism that makes student work so much fun to encounter. Except that somehow, in the translation to briefed marketing and branding exercises, the gutsy humour tends to cringe into derivative indifference.
There were acres of print campaigns that distilled some of the most offensive trends in contemporary advertising and design: digital typefaces in 10 sizes competed for attention with digitised images that screamed, to borrow one student’s phrase, premillennial pretension. Often, as with a campaign to relaunch Radio Metro’s visual identity, it was difficult to find the brand.
Interactive work – which is admittedly fairly new to AAA course content – veered from cheesy to cheesy- disguised-as-avant-garde-until-the-
voiceover-blows-your-cover. Again it seemed that a touch of self-awareness might have rescued these works from earnest over-crafting.
Radio had a good moment: a spot for Two Dogs beer had Noah carefully counting animal pairs for his ocean adventure, only to be chastised by God for, you guessed it, forgetting the Two Dogs.
Embarrassingly, another team who did a radio spot thought they’d get away with what was practically a word-for- word rip of a Hunt-Lascaris ad for Tranquillit that won gold at this year’s Loeries.
Television spots were naughty, amusing, but not amazing. My favourite was an Immac ad in which a cheesy Seventies black dude in gold lam and a ‘fro was transformed, with the aid of an Immac “shampoo”, into a sleekly bald Nineties number.
If there was one campaign that kicked ass it was a through-the-line revamp for Valpr mineral water. Clean design, classical fonts and consistent branding from T-shirts to trucks made this team effort the most conceptually evolved and mature presentation.
And the wicked copy clinched it: one innovative touch was to brand the product through restaurant table cards (those things you don’t read while waiting for your linguine pesto). Only the team came up with cards you’d actually want to read.
Useful tips on “Ways to end a date quickly and effectively” included such indispensable wisdom as “Sing `I said I loved you but I lied'”, and “Tell your tales from Nam … Namibia.”
Congratulations also go to O2 Communications, the “virtual agency” that initiated the Oxygen Awards three years ago to encourage students and acknowledge the AAA School’s contribution to the development of the ad industry. Students, fortunately, do not stop developing when they enter ad agencies, and awards like these breathe new life into an industry that must encourage creative debate and criticism.