Here’s the second (and my favourite) TV ad from our new “Lyons Puts the Talk into Tea” campaign.
It’s called “All Talk” – you’ll see why

Credits as per previous post

Rothco is hiring.

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

We’re delighted to unveil the first TV ad from the new “Lyons puts the Talk into Tea” campaign, called “Footie Talk.”

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.