Far from child's play.

Another campaign for the much-scammed Land Rover brand, but nothing complicated or tenuous, just super-efficient, clear-as-day dramatization of the thought – truly powerful as a piece of communication as the execution is so startlingly close to the insight.

All in all, deadly simple – but far from easy to pull off.

Powerful print.

Admittedly I'm out of sync chronologically with the real world here, but when this copy of the Evening Standard fell on my lap last summer while on the London Underground I didn't feel that my day had been interrupted I had been negatively distracted; I was very pleasantly surprised. And as I didn't have a blog then I'm forced into telling you all about it now. 

Media strategy too often comes as a pre-requisite on a client brief and media purchasing decisions are too often made by media buyers who have no idea what the campaign actually demands. Free airtime and the lure of barter cloud the vision of advertisers, who tend to make hasty (but seemingly efficacious) business decisions rather than thinking what type of media would serve the message best. 

I'm all for strategy that minimizes effort and maximizes impact, but reserving media before the creative has been sold is putting the cart before the horse. If the message, for instance, doesn't need motion images to carry it then then why waste money doing a big budget TV commercial? Why not establish a longer term relationship via two-way discourse through blogs and forums instead – or at least split the media budget and funnel some funds into a real online presence as well? Communications here (if authentic and crafted well) will be seen as a contribution rather than an interruption.

Perhaps this work for Ecotricity is a fluke (admittedly though the ad is strong also because it appears genuine and personal, being signed off by the company's CEO) but for a pseudo-public announcement tied to a particular date (the day Brown went into office) press is clearly the most apt format for this message – a message that's resonated in my mind for nearly 12 months now – and that's what gives this ad its real power.

Wonderful stuff.

Although I'm finding print advertising increasingly more and more offensive as it trudges ungainly through the Noughties, interrupting and obstructing the lives of citizens – for whom many control, choice and contribution are the norm, powers that are exercised freely in their digital cosmos – this Wonderbra work from last year reappeared on my radar recently and I felt it deserved a nod, if only for its audacity.

When the work that global planners demand you must produce will surely be doctored by local censors, self-censorship is hard to avoid. And so actually building this obstacle into your strategy, basing your creative mechanism around it – while taking a jab at the censors themselves – is an approach truly worthy of note and must be applauded. What's more, as this type of local tailoring is often executed off-brand, it's wonderful to see some stuff that's so Wonderbra.

Via Adblogarabia.