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Bad Chicken has enlisted restaurant and hospitality branding agency Vigor to cook up a new look for the brand’s first standalone location and reintroduce “the baddest wings in town” to Dallas diners.  The work includes brand strategy and positioning, brand refresh and identity, exterior and interior interior consultation, design signage, wayfinding, packaging, menu, merch and uniforms.  “As a…

A very stylish reminder of all you get with the Times

There’s a lot I like about this 60-second video. 

I like how energetic and stylish the footage, music, SFX, and edit are.

I like how the Times’ font is so distinct that the on-screen graphics brand every second of the video.

I like how the linked path of subject matter emulates the way we all surf now. One thing leads to another and another. 

It reminds subscribers all they get with the New York Times. And maybe, just maybe, entices someone to pay for this content behind the paywall when there’s enough free information and entertainment to keep us busy for several lifetimes.

Watch a second :60 here. 

After winning Agency of the Year at AD STARS 2018, Little Black Book’s Laura Swinton caught up with Ali Rez, Regional Creative Director at BBDO Dubai and Pakistan, to talk about the incredible rise of BBDO Pakistan, which opened its doors in 2012. Rez started his career in San Francisco, but now splits his time between Lahore and Dubai. Here’s an excerpt from their fascinating interview…

LBB> BBDO Pakistan has been doing phenomenally well with the Bridal Uniform this year. What’s the story behind that momentum?

Ali> It’s been a really good year, actually. We’ve won at every festival that we’ve entered. AD STARS Agency of the Year was pretty amazing, but also Dubai Lynx to get into the top three – that was a huge thing for us. We were relatively much, much smaller than some of the bigger cats in the region, so to be up there amongst them was pretty amazing.

It’s part of a trend that started off a few years ago. We just started off with a mission. Nothing from Pakistan even made the shortlist at Cannes Lions and we set out to change that, and we have, to a large degree. And we’ve started to have that impact on other agencies in Pakistan, so we were delighted at Spikes that another agency won a bronze, Leo Burnett Pakistan. It was really great to see another agency step up to enter work. Now they’re thinking about it and it pushes all the work.

LBB> When you and the team came up with this mission, had there been a lot of changes within the agency to achieve that?

Ali> No, it was a new office that started in Pakistan. BBDO decided to open an office in Lahore just specifically to service PepsiCo. The first couple of years were slow going, but we got a few projects that gained recognition and there was no stopping us. Once we got recognised for the first big project, the network started backing us. The snowball just became bigger and bigger.

LBB> This year the UN Women Child Bride project was a really big one for you, winning two Lions at Cannes and three Golds in the PSA, PR and Promo categories at Ad Stars. How did the project come about?

Ali> UN Women are somebody that we have an open partnership with. They have a list of things that they do address; there are a lot of tension points in the country that they want to address. Last year we did something for domestic violence. This year we wanted to take a different approach and go for the child marriages situation, which is also pretty rough in Pakistan. Next year, we’re doing another item on another tension point for women in Pakistan. Every year we change track a little bit but it is within that area of empowering women in Pakistan and raising awareness of the issues.

LBB> So you split time between Dubai and Pakistan, how does that work?

Ali> It’s mostly Pakistan but I’m based out of Dubai and I travel back and forth. It’s mostly Pakistan – I enjoy that, it’s a crazy little office that’s doing its own thing big style.

It’s more challenging and it’s more fun. Plus I think there’s more to work with. There’s more freedom to pick the projects that we want to.

LBB> And what is it about the market in Pakistan that makes it different from any other market you’ve covered in your career?

Ali> Pakistan is an interesting market because it’s developing very rapidly, both in terms of its population growth and the expansion of the middle class and the income coming in – and with technology coming in as well. It’s behind the rest of the world but it’s growing exponentially within. It’s cool to see that it’s happening.  I’ll give you one example: consumer spending is phenomenal in Pakistan, it rises every year. It’s one of the few populations that spends half its income on food.

We use those learnings much to the benefit of the brands we work on. Pakistan, for example, has become one of the largest markets for 7Up in the world. It’s a massive population that’s almost 190 million people so it’s a lot to work with. But it’s challenging.

The other side of it is that traditionally Pakistan has had more conservative forms of advertising and it’s still very heavily reliant on broadcast media. Clients are very risk-averse, but it’s slowly changing because they’re seeing that things are evolving and that means that the power is transferring to the viewer, and that means the content needs to get better. It’s starting to happen now; they’re giving more freedom to the advertiser to do more stuff.

If you don’t know much about South Korea’s advertising industry, but you’re curious to learn, this article is a must-read!

Written by Little Black Book’s global editor Laura Swinton, the article uncovers a few of the factors that make Korea’s advertising sector unlike any other in the world. It also features insights from Professor Sangsoo Chong, creativity expert and Chairman of the Judging Committee at AD STARS.

Professor Chong would like to see more excitement, entertainment and emotion return to Korean advertising. The local industry is still dominated by the big four chaebol agencies, although there are now over 10,000 companies competing in the market.

As Swinton explains: “Chaebol are huge, family-owned conglomerates and the most well-known Korean agency brands are own by chaebol. So Cheil is affiliated with Samsung, Innocean with Hyundai, HSAd with LG and Daehon with Lotte.”

Another fascinating thing to note about South Korea is its work ethic. As Swinton writes: “South Korea’s ‘economic miracle’, which has seen it go from being one of the world’s poorest countries in the 1960s to a technological powerhouse, has been driven by lots of hard work. Lots. In fact, of all the countries in the OECD, South Korea is second only to Mexico when it comes to the average number of hours worked in a year, coming in at 2,069.”

She concludes: “So if all those regimented hierarchies that have long provided the scaffolding for South Korea’s business culture are slowly – very slowly – being chipped away, perhaps Korea’s creative souls will find more space to spread their wings.

“Change does not happen overnight, but on the other hand South Korea is a country with a track record of forcing through massive social and economic change if it really wants to. If these aforementioned changes do come to fruition we could see a very different advertising industry.”