Credits as per previous post

To make this commercial, we travelled around Ireland filming some of the winning groups who benefited from funding from the 2009 Better Ireland Programme.

Credits:
Client: Fiona Curtin, AIB
Creative Director: Damian Hanley
Art Director: Austin Richards
Copywriter: Paddy Treacy
Agency Producer: Barbara-Ann Chaney
Agency Executives: Miriam Hendrick, Cynthia Shinners

Director: Richard Chaney
Production Company: The Pool
Executive Producer: Jake Walshe
DOP: Simon Walsh

Music: Peter Slankster – Creamy Sonic Studios
Sound: Mutiny Studios

Don’t forget to visit www.betterireland.ie to ‘Vote for the Children’ in your local area.

We’re looking for a Consumer Planner.
Curious by nature.
Better still, downright nosey.
Candidates must be willing to talk to strangers,
then be capable of making sense of what they say.

They should be able to stand up and explain it all to colleagues and clients alike, without blushing.
Experience is important, but it will be energy and passion for the role that wins the day.

Apply in confidence to Patrick Ronaldson, Director Strategic Planning – patrickr@rothco.ie

Lyons Tea – Footie Talk

It’s Rothco’s first work to launch for Lyons since we started working with this iconic Unilever brand in late 2009. The coming weeks and months will see the campaign continue to roll out, with further TV executions, outdoor and online elements working together to highlight the many topics Irish people talk about over a cup of Lyons tea!

The Rothco team were creatives Rob Murray and Jude Healy; creative director Damian Hanley; client service team Zara Flynn & Richard Carr, and agency producer Margaret Levingstone. The TV ad was directed by Stephen St Leger and produced by Jack Armstrong at H2 Films, with post-production by Windmill Lane and sound by Reelgood.

A huge thanks to our clients Claire Blackadder, Emma Reynolds and Liz Finlay in Unilever.

This month we launched our latest campaign for Aviva, heralding the final stage of the name change process the company have been communicating to customers since January 2009. Including TV, outdoor and radio, the campaign reassures people that whatever’s around the corner in 2010 and beyond, Aviva will be here in Ireland looking out for you.

To coincide with this official launch of the Aviva name, a brand new animation style was developed in conjunction with production company Screenscene to be used across all our 2010 Aviva advertising. Although you’re only seeing them now, months of work went in to creating this new Aviva world.

Here’s the technical part for anyone interested:

The animation was created entirely using 3ds Max 3D software.  The characters were first designed on paper, then realised in 3D. One of the most complex parts of the process was developing the look of the characters’ hair, using 3ds Max’s Hair and Fur plug-in. Each hairdo for a character could take three or four days to style.  The hair, once styled, had to be rendered separately to the characters and composited afterwards. The environments and props for each scene were then designed and built in 3D, and the render look was created using Chaos Groups’ V-ray, which has a really great global illumination render quality. 3ds Max was used to create a series of passes for each shot, a background layer, a fog pass, a depth pass and a dirt pass, then the main character render and the hair renders. These were combined in After Effects with a number of softening and diffuse effects to create the soft, warm feel of the finished animation.

The TV is supported by a heavyweight outdoor campaign that uses different calendar months to talk about the times in life you may need Aviva’s different categories of insurance. Radio ads highlighting some of the benefits available with Aviva’s motor and life assurance products complete the campaign, bringing home the brand promise of ‘looking out for you’ with some real offers for Aviva customers.

Yesterday saw the first of Nokia’s new developer days, focused around generating content for the ovi store.

The event was held in the Radisson Blu Hotel in Dublin yesterday evening, the event was specifically targeting Irish developers and localised Irish content for the Nokia app store ovi launched in early 2009. A focused digital campaign has been driving traffic and sign-ups to the store and Nokia boast that the ovi is just shy of 1 million downloads a day.

The event featured speakers from Nokia Ireland including Shane O’Brien and Sian Gray. Nokia Finland speakers were Benjamin Roszczewski and Sammi.

The Nokia offering is excellent for developers wishing to widen their reach and generate a secondary or primary income from apps sold on the Nokia store.

Apps sold on ovi can be purchased via Premium SMS rather than the credit card payment model of the Apple App store. Allowing SMS and non credit card payments opens up an entirely separate market of otherwise untapped app purchasers. For a developer this opens a huge market of clients to sell and tailor apps to.

In comparison to the iPhone development platform and cycle, ovi has an offering for developers with skill sets ranging from traditional Java for mobile, Symbian, and other more html centric developers using web kit, java script and css.

Form my own point of view I felt there would be huge scope for any level developer to wet their feet in app development, either for their own personal skill set development or as a revenue stream.

For more details on development info head on over to forum.nokia.com.

For any of you not yet on ovi, head on over to ovi.com, where you can back your contacts online and get some really great apps for your phone, regardless of how new or shiny it is.

Here at Rothco we are ‘wrapping’ up for Christmas and looking forward to a well earned rest.

We would like to take this opportunity to wish our clients, staff and friends a Merry Christmas, and a prosperous 2010.

Pembroke and I will be back in January with more to keep you entertained.

We blogged back in June about the social network reaching 250 million users and the shift in the age groups of it audience from its original college based audience.

It is staggering to imagine that 100 million users have signed up in just under 6 months and that the audience is still growing.

Today a community wide announcement was made by Founder Mark Zuckerberg outlining the changes to come.

In the main Facebook are acknowledging the fact that privacy is a key grumble from most of its users.

“We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload.”

Another major change is removal of regional networks.

“The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.”

Personally I welcome these changes as privacy online is a huge concern.

As social networks become more embedded in our off-line lives, the ability to retain privacy in both spaces is paramount .

An excellent piece of digital creative, from Sony Ericsson,featuring the finest of retro icons, the space hopper.

The original TV campaign features crowds of people on Space Hoppers.

The digital execution combines a really great twitter link up to a live environment, you guessed it filled with Space Hoppers.

By tweeting the hash tag #pumpt, Chief Hopper will respond in real time by pumping up a Space Hopper just for you.

Check out the video above or visit the Hopper Invasion site.

Please leave your comments below and we will hand deliver them to Thierry Henry.

**UPDATE 10:40 GMT**
The videos are being pulled from YouTube and we are scrambling to get more copies, link to viewable videos in the comments.

**UPDATE 11:10 GMT**
New video now added, HD so you can see the hand in action.

**UPDATE 15:00 GMT**
Andrew our Argentinian Flash Developer was featured on Cadena3 FM to discuss the impact of the event on the Irish people.

For all our Spanish listeners out there you can check it out on Cadena3 FM