The W+K way with Ideas
By Hugh Jordan. Big little. Ideas often considered too risky, abstract or unworkable by most ad agencies, have often found a home at the east London offices of Wieden+Kennedy.
Goldfish bin bags, musical rulers, window displays and living logos are not the traditional output of an international creative agency that can count the likes of Nokia and Coke among its clients. So what, exactly, is going on?
“Rather than just going digital because that’s what everyone else is doing, we create communications in a different way for our clients,” says Bella Laine, marketing manager at W+K.
The multidisciplinary creative team of David Bruno and Tom Seymour have been at the heart of several of the agency’s more diverse projects. It is they who came up with the bespoke bin bags – one looking like a goldfish in a bowl, the other resembling a rather festive Christmas pud.
“The rubbish sacks idea evolved out of an internal project W+K held each year to design the Christmas cards for clients,” says Seymour. “We came up with the idea of Christmas pudding bin bags to go out with the cards.”
The bags went on to win a Silver Pencil at the DNAD awards and are now part of W+K’s ‘Big Little Ideas’. Other products in the range include a mobile salt pot and a musical ruler designed by agency co-founder Dan Wieden.
“Big Little Ideas is for anyone who’s got a sweet, simple idea that they’ve been sitting on,” says Bruno. “It’s about getting that product made and getting it out there on the shelves.”
Urban Outfitters, Paperchase and Selfridges are providing that shelf space. And Selfridges also commissioned Bruno and Seymour to help celebrate its centenary by designing a window installation. The duo, both from product and brand backgrounds, pitched for the gig against four other creative teams and came out on top.
Rather than reminisce over the century past, however, Selfridges wanted ideas of what they might be selling in 100 years’ time.
The result was a bizarre A-to-Z of innovations.
“The letter ‘G’ focused on genetic transplants and the idea of designer organs,” explains Seymour. “We designed a heart and sent it on to Vivienne Westwood to embellish. You can now go into Selfridges and actually buy a replacement heart off the shelf.”
And until the end of the month, the window display contains many more strokes of genius.
‘J’ is a jellyfish generator, ‘O’ an Oramatotal – which is a device that translates dog woofs into human speech, of course – and ‘W’ is what every retail therapist needs in the form of a walking shopping bag.
The savvy pair tasked the public with coming up with ideas for the letter X. And ‘X-tra hours in the day’ – an alarm clock with 48 calibrations as opposed to 24 – was eventually chosen as the winner.
A more hi-tech project involved developing a brand identity for Onedotzero, the company that runs the Adventures in Motion film festival at the BFI Southbank. To fit in with this year’s festival theme – convergence and collaboration – Bruno and Seymour designed a logo formed from online conversations people were having about Onedotzero.
Software developed by computer whiz Karsten Schmidt enables an invisible Onedotzero motif to act like a black hole in cyberspace, pulling in snippets of discussions about the brand on Twitter and on various blogs, with those titbits gravitating towards and gradually illuminating the logo.
“The strands of communication create the message,” explains Bruno. “[The logo] is a living, breathing organism pulling in real-time information to create an image that represents and enhances the brand’s identity.”
Those wishing to see the logo live can head to the Southbank on 9 September where a 50-metre version will be projected onto the wall of the National Theatre. And a Nokia device means people will be able to interact with and alter the logo before their very eyes.
And there’s more happening. Much more. Offbeat ideas are taking over at W+K’s Shoreditch offices, straining at the walls, creeping out of cracks and spilling out onto the unsuspecting streets. (In fact, there’s so much we’ve run out of space – but we’ll be back).
Laine is in no doubt as to what it is that gives W+K’s creative minds licence to run riot.
“It’s because we’re an independent,” she says. “Dan Wieden and David Kennedy were offbeat from the very beginning, starting an agency in Portland when everyone else was opening them in New York or California… A lot of other agencies would probably like to do the type of work we’re doing, but their clients have to want that too. We’re lucky that all of our clients are very forward-thinking.”
