Giving product – W+K, Fallon and BooneOakley
By Steve Mullins. Good goods? Wieden + Kennedy London is now into making things. Not ad spots – though the agency still does those – but objects. And what better stuff to produce than plastic sacks, salt pots and musical rulers?
There are two types of sacks. One totes a Christmas pudding design that can be used as, say, a Noel present receptacle. The other boasts swimming goldfish and is actually a bin bag.
The salt pots look like something you might pick up in a pound shop. But wait. It has a pull-back-and-go motor which allows it to travel along to table seasoning dishes as it moves. W+K tells us it goes ‘quite fast’.
And now to the musical ruler, the brainchild of agency co-founder Dan Wieden. And no need to worry. It comes with a ‘play in a day’ guide book penned by Dan himself. We haven’t tried it out yet so don’t have its measure…
So, what’ s this ‘thing’ thing all about?
‘We liked the idea of focusing on those ordinary objects that might be overlooked and giving them a new lease of life – re-look, reinvent, re-jig them,” say Tom Seymour and David Bruno from the W+K creative team.
‘Ideas are everywhere,” says Tony Davidson, executive creative director. “To have Wieden + Kennedy products in the market place is one of the exciting areas we are looking at.”
Other agencies do goods too. Earlier this year, Fallon in the US rolled out Skimmer. It’s an app that sits on your desktop and it aggregates feeds from the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and has a rich-media bent. It looks cool too. And you can get it for free right here.
And BooneOakley, the US agency of YouTube-video website fame, does product. There are Tee shirts featuring Billy, the hapless protagonist of the BooneOakley home page clip, and one with the caption ‘This short costs more than BooneOakley’s website’. There’s a mug with the mug of the sour Boss. And a skateboard featuring that ‘Buy candy’ shark hitching a lift on a flying bike.
brand-e.biz: If you have no idea what we’re talking about, you really do need to go to BooneOakley.com.
