Inferno

Toys, toys, toys. This week’s most brilliant finding goes to one of our creatives, Dave M. The idea of this website, called Child’s Own, is simple and overwhelmingly endearing (even to someone who only likes kids when they are clean, calm and mute): take your child’s drawing, send it to these guys and they make a toy out [...]

I listen to music all the time. Whilst I am at work, in the gym, in the car, at home, wherever, but I don’t buy music, I don’t own music, and nor do I intend to own music ever again. I do this all legally and contribute to the artists on a regular basis. I, [...]

I like this advert. I know I am not allowed to say I ‘like’ this advert, because it is both appalling and embarrassing, according to Sir Martin Sorrell. Given that it comes from one of his agencies in New York, I imagine there will be a slightly longer unemployment line there by the end of [...]

We might be based in Covent Garden (and now in San Francisco as well…hello sun!) but have our Inferno troops spread around the world. Our Captology network has been busy scooping growing trends and all things interesting and in their respective neighbourhoods. Let’s start in Brazil, where the lovely Bruna is reporting about a sonic [...]

Beastie Benz. This week’s controversial brand stunt comes from the posh car manufacturer Mercedez Benz. The brand have given an iconic punk-rapper Mike D, of Beastie Boys, the power to curate an art show, Transmission LA: AV Club, for them at the Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art. Hmm, this is either the right kind [...]

On a gloriously depressing and wet April afternoon, Manny and I decided to head down to the Hayward gallery to have a look at the David Shrigley and Jeremy Deller exhibitions. Here are my thoughts on the all too subtle and fantastically absurd. It’s fair to say that Deller is not your conventional artist, and [...]

For the record. If you do one thing this weekend, go out and buy a physical music product from your local record store. Even just a badge or a magazine.You should do it because it’s Record Store Day this Saturday, and while music is obviously mostly digital these days, record stores are invaluable places to [...]

On Tuesday we were lucky enough to be invited down to opening night of the Secret 7″ exhibition at The Idea Generation Gallery in Shoreditch. and rather busy it was too. The idea: “700 unique seven-inch sleeves inspired by tracks from The Cure, Florence + The Machine, Bombay Bicycle Club, CSS, DJ Shadow, Noah & [...]

Long live vinyl. The iconic British independent record label/shop Rough Trade has confirmed new store openings in New York and Paris. Best news of the week, and just in time for the Record Store Day next weekend (more on this to come). Whoever thought that flipping through actual, physical albums is so last season, eat [...]

We’ve been rather busy here at Inferno. Alongside producing recent work out for Nokia & NSPCC we’ve been busy injecting more interesting ideas into our internal activities too. Inferno Intros is something that debuted last week that will be continuing through 2012 and beyond. In short we host intimate gigs inside the agency. We work with record labels to showcase [...]

“Sometimes, advertising is just art’s slush fund” stated Fast Company Magazine last week. After watching Samsung’s new advert Explore Your Dual World with human projection mapping, one cannot help but be intrigued by the relationship between art and ads and whether advertising can or should ever be considered as art. Or vice versa. When does [...]

Last night a few of us headed to the ICA for a talk provocatively titled  ‘Advertising isn’t funny’ by the guys from Hoot. Hoot are a team of three marvelously experienced comedy writers who help agencies and brands make their ads or web content a damn sight funnier. Twas a fairly informative evening, and there [...]

Our football team is back in action with a new badge, a new kit and a fresh line-up. We’re training and playing weekly in a 5-a-side league. Then we learned about ‘The Pitch‘. The advertising students from UCA Farnham are preparing for their grad exhibition and in their words: “Our university isn’t helping with funding, so [...]

(In)visible children. You have surely come across the short film Kony2012 in the past few days; it’s taken over social media like a tsunami. Telling a story of a child soldier army in Central Africa, it presents a powerful idea: identify a prime candidate for global public enemy, get his name out through Facebook and [...]

After proving that we like to party in Company Magazine during the Christmas 2011 party season, some of our staffers are gracing the pages once again. The Spring/Summer ‘High-Street Edit’ which is on shelves now, features an all female line-up from our various intern schemes. Here are Lucy K, Lucy B, Elisabeth & Liyana doing us [...]

On Thursday I popped along to The Book Club in Shoreditch for my first #printout experience. Run by Stack & Magculture this was the second event of 2012. In a nutshell the event involves influential people from the independent print, magazine and design sector to share their influences and stories. There was also another very cool feature where guests were asked to [...]

WE, THE WEB KIDS. We came across this rather beautiful generation manifesto a few days ago, written by a Polish kid called Piotr Czerski. If you are, let’s say, closer to your 50th birthday than your birth, this might be quite an insightful glimpse into the mindset of today’s web kids, who do not use [...]

Like all advertising agencies we’re no strangers to welcoming photographers though our doors. Almost weekly they arrive, portfolio under arm to show off their latest collections and imagery. But last week was a little different. Simon Thorpe is a friend of Dave Martin one of our creatives here. Simon asked Dave if it would be alright to call past [...]

As they prepare to join the good ship Inferno, the staff at Farm have been popping the champagne celebrating. Here’s to the past and new, bright futures. They’ll be taking up residence from 1st March here at our home on Great Queen Street. The word excited doesn’t come close to our elation in anticipation of [...]

Last night was the chimerical BUG, show number 29, and for the uninitiated BUG is a show dedicated to the screening of equally low brow budget & glossy money soaked video productions. It’s a bit like watching random music videos on Youtube with your mates except your mates are really funny and/or Adam Buxton. Usually [...]

On top of our successes already this year we’re excited to welcome, Gary, Owen and another 14 of Farm’s 23 staff. The founders and executive creative directors, Gary Robinson and Owen Lee, have joined us here at Inferno. Campaign reports: Several Farm clients, such as Purina, Merlin Entertainments and Nestlé, will also move to Inferno with [...]

Last week SOPA tried to stifle the ‘free speech’ of the internet, but failed, and now it’s Twitter’s turn. Is the internet shutting its own mouth? The micro-blogging service is enabling country-specific censorship. They claim it’s for the greater good, since without this possibility it would be impossible or at least very hard to expand [...]

We’re back! And most of us have thoroughly enjoyed a full week (and a bit) off. Oh how relaxing. Now that we are back, here’s what some of us have been up to whilst out-of-office. Here’s (head of strategy) Bambos sitting in a seafood restaurant in Padstow preparing to tuck into the rather large ‘Fruits De Mer’ special. Here’s [...]

Last week, the lovely Lea Galmiche, who is a wonderful new talent here on our planning team, took to the mic and braved the stage in front of some of adlands major bigwigs at the Campaign War of the Words 2011. Not only is Lea less than a year into her career but only started [...]

All of the Formula 1 racing fans in the office were rushing out the doors of the office yesterday when (assistant producer) Ed spotted a Red Bull F1 car parked on Great Queen Street. At lunch (senior technical producer) John went down with his camera and got shots of the car from every angle imaginable. [...]

There’s certainly a Christmas buzz as our tree went up today and the agency is alive with chatter as to why there is a Vespa scooter underneath it. Here’s (producer) Georgina testing it out in the meantime.

December has arrived and that means only one thing (besides Christmas of course). Movember is officially over for another year. 2010 was a big Mo year for our agency but we’re committed to the cause and a smaller team ‘tached-it-up’ once again this year, the upper-lip growths have been equally impressive. Everything from themed efforts including WW2 flight commander styling [...]

This man is Aaron Draplin owner of Draplin Design Company. He’s 38 years old and he’s a no-nonsense kinda guy based in Portland, Oregon. Rather ignorantly I didn’t know too much about the guy we were going to see last night. However  I had seen this video and was mighty impressed by Aaron’s passion, personality and swearing. We [...]

Last time around we didn’t make it into Campaign’s top 100 ad agencies. This time around we’ve gone straight in at Number 44 and that’s to year end 31/03/10. Not only that we’re also the fifth fastest-growing agency in the top 50 with a 393.39% increase. Click on the image to see the table in full.

Marketing Week’s cover story on Nokia, including an interview with our ECD Al Young on the creative strategy behind Amazing Everyday. Read more about the ‘New growth at Nokia‘ at Marketing Week’s website.

As of October 28th 2011 we’re happy to report that we’re holding steady at number 11 in Campaign’s new business rankings.

Last week, Jani Cortesini (a member of our planning department) took to the stage down at ‘Extra Life: A Gaming Event For Brands‘ A few of us were lucky enough to go down and enjoy Jani’s presentation. The subject of his talk: ‘Understanding the psychology behind game play’. Here’s a downloadable copy of the deck for [...]

Whilst skipping through some sites yesterday I loved this article on Mashable. A nicely presented Infographic showing off the credentials for employees within ‘tech’ companies like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google and more. We thought it would be interesting to see how we matched up. So here’s how the Inferno benefits would look within the same Infographic [...]

Last week our ECD Al Young was asked to give his opinions on some of Campaign mag’s hand-picked highlights from adland. The six selected works included Bupa, Natwest, Kodak, Toyota, Foster’s and Dior. Click on the image to read Al’s review in full.

Inspirational, legendary and above all a master of the creative world, Sir John Hegarty, delighted six very enthusiastic Infernoistas at the Institute of Contemporary Arts last week. He shared his experiences, insights, opinions, and advice on all things advertising. The event, organised by the IPA, kicked off with a few drinks followed by a Q&A [...]

This week we’ve welcomed intern Christopher Cronson. Fresh off the plane from NYC we wanted him to give us a little insight on what it’s like growing up across the pond in 2011. Here’s what he had to share with us. Skinny jeans, logo shirts and colourful sneakers are seen all over New York City, [...]

Since we moved into our new digs last week we’ve been exploring what Covent Garden has to offer (I must say, it’s no easy feat being positioned in such proximity to the shops of Long Acre). And when the sun comes out (it has at least twice), the view from our roof terrace reminds us [...]

We’ve recently been working with our clients at Unilever to create a promotional campaign for Bertolli. We were briefed to come up with a promotional campaign with the brand theme of “the finest foods” to help drive sales. We came up with a really compelling prize and ran it on-pack in press and in-store to get tubs flying [...]

It was nice to arrive into the office this morning and find out that we’ve risen to 7th place in Campaign’s new business rankings. As reported two weeks back we’d made it up to 14th then. Thanks to our lovely new clients for helping make this our best year yet. Most pleasing of all is that [...]

…they’d probably be called Stanley’s Post. As we’re sure you already know we moved into our new home on Monday. Well, we’ve just had a visit from one our new neighbours and they brought us a gift, and what a gift it is! The guys from Stanley’s dropped by with the mother of all hampers [...]

It’s been a long time coming, but we’ve made it. We’ve finally arrived. This morning at around 8:30am our entire team arrived at our brand new home. The first sight that made our presence sink in was the flag, now hanging above the door of 31 Great Queen Street. Once inside 90% of us were [...]

Some great news may have come to your attention in the last few days: It was really nice to see word spread. Not only did the news make the front page of Campaign magazine but it featured online at Brand Republic, Campaign, Media Week and More About Advertising as well as overseas in Spain, Germany, Italy and Latin America. Oh and if that wasn’t enough [...]

Last week, as we approached 1000 followers on Twitter we wanted to do something a bit special to celebrate. We created #inferno1000 and asked our followers to tweet at us including their shoe size. Over the course of 48 hours we received over 100 entries – which blew us away. We drew the lucky winner [...]

LinkedIn met the Auntie Carols at Christmas, and they thought that they needed something that got their audience talking too. They came to see us with a brief to get media agencies immersed in the LinkedIn product. We created ‘This Guy’. He was a extraordinary man of the world, who has had so much success [...]

Last week a few of us headed along to Logan hall for the latest D&AD President’s Lecture, as ever hosted by the current president Sanky. There was a healthy sized gang of us (and what looked like the rest of the London Advertising scene there too). We were looking forward to finding out more about the [...]