One of my favourite places to meet a friend early in the week for an evening cuppa and piece of cake has to be Drink Shop Do. It’s a shopfront in Kings Cross with a sprawling den of tea and cake out the back. As the name suggests there are all things to drink, buy and do. They will teach you how to knit and how to create pin-up hair-dos. They host lego nights, lunchtime discos, book club and mould your face out of clay nights. It’s always a laugh, get down there and show them your wares….
I was in Cannes last week for the festival and in support of Higher Pitch/Art Sells – an art exhibition showcasing a slice of the best personal artworks by people who work in advertising. Given no limitations, nominated by their colleagues and judged by leaders in art and advertising.
We nominated a few artists and two made the cut. Check out Artist/Designer Robi Walters and Photographer Mike Whelan.
Here at B&S we house a rare species called a ‘SuperKirsty’. A SuperKirsty is a creature that possesses great strength, endless stamina and is also ever so slightly crazy (in a good way). Our SuperKirsty moonlights as our HR Manager during the day, but it’s the out of hours stuff that makes SuperKirsty really, well, super.
Over the last 6 months she has been training endlessly and ferociously for her second Etape. For those not in the know, the Etape is an event held every year by the organisers of the Tour De France. It allows people to do a stage of the Tour De France a few days before the actual Tour comes through. It is not for the faint-hearted and requires some epic training if you have a hope of hell in finishing.
If you don’t believe us, this is what her average week of training looks like:
6 spin classes at 45 mins each
2 mid week cycle rides at around 50KM
1 longer cycle ride at 80+ KM
2 strength training sessions at 45 mins
Adhoc turbo training sessions at 60 mins
Adhoc simulated alp rides on turbo trainer at 60 mins
To put this in context, just one of her mid-week rides involves doing 11 laps of Regents Park, she has a permanent cycle short tan and she only allows herself to watch TV if she’s pedalling at the same time.
So, if you’re as impressed as we are with SuperKirsty you can make her day by sponsoring her. Do it now!
And here’s the craziness in a handy course profile.
Rejoice! Two of our menfolk have become fathers on the same day!
Jason became a dad for the second time with a lovely boy called Benjamin and Kevin became a first time dad to gorgeous Georgia-Rose. They were born only a few hours apart on Sunday and both are proclaimed to be the most beautiful baby in the world. Which, of course, they are.
Andy and Juliet were out in Cannes last week attending the Cannes Lions festival. They not only picked up the bronze award for our Street Tag work, but also spent lots of time attending lectures and talks from a whole bunch of inspirational creative people. Yeah, ok, they also came back sporting some seriously nice tans…
Asking Andy to narrow down his festival highlights to a mere Top 5 was a pretty hard challenge, but below are the ones that won through.
1. The Alain de Botton talk – very insightful and inspirational.
2. Excellent talk from Nike/RGA about the journey they’ve gone on with Nike. Going ‘from a company that aims to make better shoes to a company that aims to make a better you’ through products such as Nike+. It really resonates with our ambitions as an agency to make products and tools that help make peoples’ dream come true.
3. Hanging about on a lovely private beach thanks to the sweet people of Superglue.
4. Seeing most of Soho packed onto the balcony of the Carlton terrace at 3am.
5. Spending quality time with an old friend in the form of Barry Skolnick, CD of BskyB.
Last night, we won a bronze Mobile Lion for our Street Tag app. This is amazing news, considering the incredibly stiff worldwide competition. Well done team B&S! You can read a little more about the news at Brand Republic
We made the Street Tag app for Channel 4 last summer and it features the world’s first augmented reality spray can (you really need to try it). Looking back it’s probably been one of our favourite bits of work of the past year, so we’re doubly pleased.
Are you someone who texts during dinner, checks Facebook at church and emails on the loo? Perhaps you’ve even mastered the ability to text whilst maintaining eye contact with the person you’re sitting across from. Sherry Turkle’s talk at TED questions whether we really are connecting more, or if we’re actually more lonely than ever.
Monday mornings can be a bit hard sometimes. Not this Monday morning though. We found out that we’ve been nominated for not one but TWO Cannes Lions awards!
Street Tag has been nominated in the Entertainment, Lifestyle and Leisure category and Dickens: Dark London picked up a nomination in the Tablets category. This is pretty big stuff as only eight nominations went to London agencies.
The awards take place tomorrow evening, so keep your fingers crossed for us!
p.s. you can check out Street Tag and Dickens: Dark London on the ‘Work’ section of our website.
For those of you who love The Space – home to the John Peel record collection – then you may like this.
It’s a film called From The Sea To The Land Beyond, and is a really moving documentary charting the UK coastline from 1900 to the 21st century.
Directed by Penny Woolcock, collated from BFI archive and soundtracked by British Sea Power, the film was debuted on Tuesday evening at Sheffield Doc/Fest with a live performance by the band at The Crucible Theatre.
It’s strangely moving. So one for the weekend when you want to lose yourself for a bit.
Our campaign for Resident Evil 6 continued last week with our gang on the ground at the massive E3 gaming convention in LA. As well as unveiling a sneak preview of our live footage promo for the game – more of that soon – we took the No Hope Left campaign to the masses with some real-life, post-Apocalyptic doom-mongers who were so convincing, security tried to remove them at one point. Have a look at our method acting madness in the video below.
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