Inferno

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 their arrival. And what a picture of them enjoying their last supper. Let’s look forward to the sound of many popping corks during 2012.

Be sure to click the image to see the team (and champagne) in their full glory.

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 BUG veers more to the left of video production but last night’s show was slightly more commercial than normal. However this should not distract from the high standard of video pickings. M.I.A – Bad Girls by Director Romain Gavras (known for Stress by Justice & I Believe by Simian Mobile Disco) was one video of particular merit challenging viewers with a different perspective of Arab life.

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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 the team, who are joining the agency after talks with its managing director, Andy Cairns.

Farm’s other clients will move to Leith when it opens, while the remaining Farm staff will be absorbed into the Cello agencies Tangible, Leith and Blonde Digital.

The Edinburgh-based Leith launched a London agency in 2000 when it was independent, but it closed six years later following Cello’s decision to merge it into Farm.

At Inferno, Robinson and Lee will report to the chief creative officer, Al Young.

John Rowley, the group managing director of Cello, said: “Owen and Gary have been outstanding for us over the past couple of years and we’ll be sorry to see them go. We wish them the best of luck for the future.”

Lee commented: “We have been looking for a way to offer our clients and our people a deeper and richer level of service, and the chemistry with Inferno was irresistible. Culturally, our clients and our people are in exactly the same place as theirs.”

This week I headed down to the rather stately Like Minds Club for an event as part of Social Media Week. The aim of the session to “discuss the changes that are happening in how brands communicate with their audiences and communities”.

The panel was diverse in age, geography and background, with ‘Social’ the thread linking them together.

Chris Moss of Famoss who has spent the last 25 years working on brands like Virgin Airways, Orange and now 118 118. Alastair Duncan of Spark 44, a global brand business. Jonathan Bean of MyNewsDesk, providing brands the opportunity to become content publishers. Steve Cobelli of Jaguar/Land Rover. Tom Messett, Head of Social at Nokia.

Each of the guys had differing opinions on the state of brand communications today. “Communications have been around for a long time in a different form, technology is enabling us more each day.” Al added “My child who is 5 is already a brand in her character. Individuals are brands in their own right.” Nothing new in that insight. However it is important to note the new power possessed by socially enabled and liberated customers of brands though. Today “it’s more about customer service and how to get your ‘people’ social. Your people are your brand. Treat your employees like customers and treat your customers like employees.”

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I started my Tuesday morning at the delightfully swanky Charlotte Street Hotel trying to find out the best practices for brands in different social media channels. The panel was called “Not Just Another Facebook Page” and it was hosted by Addiction London. I arrived four minutes late and there was standing room only (a plenty of juicy pastries though).

The hour-long panel didn’t exactly blow the roof off, but was a nice reminder of a few basic things: don’t do social media just because your competitors do it, but only if it’s actually relevant for you. So always ask yourself why. And don’t get caught in the hype or cool or trendy stuff if that’s not what your brand is about. It makes more sense for a bank to expose their angry customer feedback (and responses to it) in social media than offer the latest trend reports (happened in real life to one of the panelists). It’s a god damn bank after all, not Italian Vogue.

Another point that got the panelists excited was how to utilize your existing communities more bravely… MORE

Brussels may not be the home of culinary excellence (although a year-long food festival titled Brusselicious may prove me wrong), but it is the home of our Electrolux clients and their Electrolux and AEG showrooms.

While visiting the Electrolux team for an annual wash-up session, we were treated to a cooking workshop to give us a taste of AEG’s appliances and do a little team bonding along the way.

We were greeted by the ebullient “my-AEG-oven-is-so-great-it’s-orgasmic” Gabi, who put us to work chopping and dicing like professionals.

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On Friday night a record number of our staff turned out to take part in ‘Big Bowls’, an evening of drinking and bowling at All Star Lanes, Bloomsbury. Everyone in attendance to prove beyond all doubt who was the king (or queen) of the pins.

We split out into 9 teams, each with 6 people. Taking to the lanes two by two, our objective was to aim for the highest cumulative team score. Another award was to be handed out to the highest individual scorer.

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Fans rather than users or customers? Rovio’s Mikael Hed hit the nail on the head in his speech a few days ago at Midem (music industry get-together). He was talking about Angry Birds’ attitude towards piracy, and how the enormously popular game ‘has learned from music industry’s mistakes’and tends to be quite relaxed about pirate merch and apps and such.

We all know what happened to music industry when illegal file sharing became the national sport; it crashed. People still, obviously, wanted to listen to music, but found a way to do it for free. The only problem with free and delicious lunches and free and quality chart pop hits that they don’t exist (the latter rarely exists even at a high, high price).  Were music fans being too greedy, or was music industry being too greedy?

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Some fantastic news for the beginning of February. You can read about the story on the Campaign website too.

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 to new countries, where freedom of speech is yet an unknown pleasure. Plus this means that certain controversial tweets don’t have to be blocked globally.

Twitter’s decision is obviously good for their business. Or is it? Their whole business is based on freedom of expression, giving voice to the people. To people whose voice would otherwise not get heard (or listened to. Hi, Peaches G.). And now this idea is being cruelly axed. What does the brand stand for now? Why does it exist? It maybe growing on the outside, but it has lost something on the inside.

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