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By Mark Gretton

After a few weeks’ rest, Ford and Channel 4′s trend-hunting online TV show “bite” is back!

With over 2.8 million cumulative views, the first season of the show was a phenomenal success.  Averaging around 150,000 viewers per week, each show had higher ratings than any single show on MTV, The Discovery Channel or Sky News.  70% of viewers came back week after week spending an average 5.57 minutes on the site.

This week the girls go to St. John restaurant in London’s Clerkenwell to sample “nose to tail” dining, have a hot tub party and learn to walk like models.  Look out for new girl Gemma too.

Watch it NOW at www.channel4.com/bite

“bite”, created by Ogilvy, Mindshare and Channel 4 for Ford, is the definitive guide to emerging trends – BEFORE they become mainstream.  The concept of the show was born out of an Ogilvy/Mindshare project brief of how to engage more with 20-something girls.  Channel 4 were briefed and in conjunction with the production company World of Wonder, came up with a proposal that Ford bought in to. 

Each show comes in at around six minutes, which makes it really easy to watch at your PC in “bite”-size portions.  It can be downloaded as a podcast or watched online and there are bookmarking, Facebook and RSS tagging capabilities on the home page.

Uniquely, the show is actually shot by the presenters, not a production team.  These girls aren’t actors, but hand-picked real-life mavens, specifically chosen for their knowledge of all things cool in the world of music, fashion and fun things to do. 

In addition to the actual show content, there are interviews with the girls in Heat magazine, banner activity all over channel4.com, a ‘bite’ page on Yahoo.com, Facebook communities, a WAP site on Yahoo’s mobile portal, teaser clips on YouTube, Boreme, Metacafe, Daily Motion, Google Video etc… 

The media deal was put together by Mindshare and the project is creatively directed and project-managed by Ogilvy Advertising.
 

By Kevin Whitlock

Andy Bird, one of Ogilvy Advertising’s top creatives and the agency’s most devoted Newcastle fan, has this week been promoted to the new role of Head of Art.

Andy joined Ogilvy in February 2007 as Associate Creative Partner on Dove.  Previously he was a founding partner and Head of Art at Nitro London, responsible for clients such as Coca Cola and Nike. 

His brief in his new role will be to oversee creative output - print work especially.  He will be working with all the teams in our creative department as well as the design, graphic and studio functions that work with us.   

“In Andy, we have a world-class talent with an all-seeing eye.  We’re lucky to have him and want to encourage his powerful influence in building our creative reputation,” says creative partner Will Awdry.

Fellow creative partner Alasdair Graham adds: “Andy is one of the signature  art directors. We’re delighted to be able to offer him the opportunity to spread his wings creatively and work on some of the great briefs piling up here.”

Andy himself says he’s looking forward to working across the broad spread of our client base.

 “If you look at the DNA of the creative people here, the creativity in the team at Ogilvy is fantastic.  I’m really looking forward to contributing to the visual strength of the agency’s work.”

Before his stint at Nitro, Andy was a founding creative partner of Soul Advertising from 2000 to 2005. The early part of his career was spent at Bartle Bogle Hegarty (1993-2000) as board director, art director and head of design, winning awards for his work on Audi, Levi’s, Boddingtons, Murphy’s and Lynx/Axe.

By Kevin Whitlock

This weekend (Saturday 12th April) sees the start of much-anticipated romantic drama series Pushing Daisies on ITV1. Starring Anna Friel, it’s been described as a “heart-warming modern fairytale” (perhaps one more for the ladies than us boys, methinks).

Our client Toblerone is sponsor of the show and Ogilvy Advertising has created the sonsorship idents (click on the links below to view to view), which will run until October. We’ve also created Toblerone ads for the show’s microsite, which can be found at www.itv.com/pushingdaisies

By Kevin Whitlock 

Here’s a neat bit of new work our team has done for Trekinetic Wheelchairs, a UK-based maker of hi-tech all-terrain wheelchairs.

Trekinetic has already won plaudits in the disability press as well as more mainstream mags like Stuff for its super-light, ingeniously designed wheelchairs but needs a higher profile – on the smallest of marketing budgets, of course!

Given these limited resources, the creatives (art director Ben Callis and copywriter Justin Barnes) decided to target potential customers in a new and fresh way – by advertising on disabled toilet doors in bars, restaurants and motorway service stations around the country.

The visual narratives (click on the thumbnails above for a larger view)  incorporate the familiar “disabled toilet” signs and emphasise the products’ unique strengths in a simple but very effective way. And, in typically innovative Ogilvy fashion, we may have created a whole new media channel in the shape of toilet doors!

A new global ad campaign for DHL from Ogilvy Advertising debuted at the end of March. Kicking off with two press ads, the campaign aims to bring to life the “can-do” attitude of DHL and most importantly the people who work there.

Most people know that DHL can deliver a package but they don’t know that DHL can seamlessly partner with any type of business and manage all elements of distribution and logisitics from delivering direct mail to managing and streamlining complex supply chains.

DHL fashion week (PDF)

DHL Hard Rock (PDF)

Tetra Pak became the latest addition to Ogilvy Advertising’s client list when it picked the agency for its global advertising account this month.

OgilvyAdvertising will produce a multi-media campaign promoting the packaging giant, initially in the B-2-B arena, where Tetra Pak competes largely with unbranded competitors.

It’s been a while since Tetra Pak advertised and a challenging assignment at a time when the environmental impact of packaging is under increasing scrutiny.