Indeed, the talent of giving an interesting advertising dimension to a comparatively dull product needs to be appreciated. This print campaign is a good example for that. Well, there may not be more interesting ways to cleverly advertise a fabric dyer than this campaign.

The equally humorous (situational) copy reads- Give clothes a second chance

The ads feature how the same clothes can be used for more than one occasion using Dylon fabric dye, in a funny way. One ad shows a couple in which the man presents the same dress to his wife in two occasions- for Valentines Day and the anniversary.

The other ad features an young lady gives present to her grandmother (or mother-in-law) the same dress on her birthday and Christmas.

CREDITS

Advertising Agency: Grey, Paris, France

Executive Creative Director: Andrea Stillacci

Creative Directors: Luissandro Del Gobbo, Giovanni Settesoldi

Art Director: Giovanni Settesoldi, Sebastian Burghardt

Copywriter: Luissandro Del Gobbo, Gordian Frank

Photographer: Tony D’Orio

Retouching: Scott Giannini

Via: I believe in advertising

Effen Vodka has had some fun with its name in the past, like a print ad for its black-cherry flavor that used the label to spell out the headline, “Effen in the dark.” A new campaign from Euro RSCG attempts to spice up the double entendre. Check out three ads here. In one, a flight attendant is pictured in a gleaming white cabin, holding a martini glass in one hand and a bottle of the vodka, alongside the quote, “There’s nothing more satisfying than Effen on a plane.” In another, a skier shares, “Nothing warms me up like Effen by the fire.” The series is titled “Provocatively Premium.” The ads feel a bit more sterile than sexy, though, and don’t do much to refresh the well-trodden path of liquor and libido.

—Posted by Eleftheria Parpis

…

Magazine: Beverage – Alcohol Campaign
Energy BBDO, Chiciago
Creative Directors: Marty Orzio, Derek Sherman, Jason Stanfield
Art Director: Jason Stanfield
Writer: Derek Sherman
Account Manager: Doug Ryan, Marzena Grecki
Photographer: Robert Whitman
Agency Producer: Linda Dos Santos
Designers: Steve Denekas, Jason Hardy
Retouchers: Hugh Milstein, Scott Giannini, Keith Handley

Let’s all do the hop

by John Courtmanche

A touch of class to create the campaign of origami artwork made from Stolichnaya Russian Vodka labels, BBDO Chicago contracted Giannini Creative Imaging, headed by creative director, Scott Giannini. BBDO art director Megan Sheehan presented Giannini with marker comps and the challenge of figuring out how to virtually create a realistic origami frog from a Stoli label in a way that would display the brand and key words from the label.

Photographer Jonathan Kantor supplied the source images, BBDO supplied the illustrator file of the Stoli label, and Scott Giannini and partner Dave Bialek set to work. An overarching challenge was retaining the look of the texture of the paper that the actual frog was made of. Giannini and Bialek increased contrast where they needed it without blowing out sections to create the look of origami art made from the printed label. They used distortion to achieve warping and perspective, at the same time keeping words readable.

Knowing their clients would want to modify the image, Giannini and Bialek created the Photoshop file using layers and masking. “We were designing where everything was going,” Giannini explained, “and we knew those pieces of label may have to change position.” So they made every separate piece of the frog changeable. In even the smallest sections of the frog, the whole label was kept on the layer, but most of it was masked out. So wherever the client wanted to jog the image a bit, Giannini was able to accommodate. On the frog’s left foot, where it says “Genuine Russian,” originally the word “genuine” was only half visible, but the client wanted viewers to see the whole word — so Giannini unlinked the mask and slid the label.

The client also said they wanted a View-Master-like image, so Giannini and Bialek interpreted that suggestion into art. They decided not to build the image in a 3-D program. Instead, they created perspective from their personal knowledge of perspective and lighting. “We were afraid if we used a 3-d program, we’d lose some organic feel, it’d take away from the photography,” Bialek said. “We didn’t want it to get harsh.”

To emulate a View-Master scene, the duo diffused the edges, enhanced the “crisp” look of the frog itself, and diffused the edges of the image to make it look dimensional. They also created thick shadows to separate elements, like a ring light shadow, e.g., to pop the lily pads out of the water. They picked up ripples and droplets from the source images and illustrated others in Photoshop.

Color was another issue. Giannini and Bialek worked to retain the brightness and vibrancy of the colors. “It was a fine line between calling more interest to the background or to the label,” Giannini says. “We did a softening, an out-of-focus around the edges.” They also used Photoshop to enhance the contrast and execute selective sharpening of the image.

Giannini also created origami Stoli butterflies, a polar bear, eagle and elephant for the 2002 campaign.

A new liquor campaign uses both old cameras and digital technology to recreate a retro look of a time when men were men.

by Kristina Feliciano

Advertising often taps into the viscerally familiar, but Energy BBDO’s recently launched campaign for Canadian Club whiskey takes this approach a step further, trying to reach 20- and 30- something men by appealing to their romantic notions of their fathers when they were their age, in the Sixties and Seventies. For the target demographic in question, a generation that has seen gender roles—and genders in general—blur, this is a primal pitch if ever there was one.

“Your dad wasn’t a metrosexual,” chides a headline underneath a retro photo of a group of guys on a fishing trip. “Your mom wasn’t your dad’s first,” assures an ad that features a confident-looking young man lounging in a classic bachelor pad with a fetching woman on his lap.

And the aged, snapshot-like quality of the campaign’s photos only builds on the ads’ familiarity—the pictures are imprecisely composed, faded, scratched, creased. They could have been borrowed from someone’s photo album. Indeed, Energy BBDO’s original plan was to use authentic vintage pictures. In the early stages of the project, Jason Stanfield, art director and creative director at the Chicago-based ad agency, scoured web sites like Flickr, searching under terms such as “60s dad” and “Dad partying” and finding a plethora of images ideally suited to their concept.

“And then the lawyers got involved,” recalls Stanfield. The attorneys were nervous that someone would claim to be the original owner of an old photo that they’d actually picked up at a thrift store, and the real owner could file suit. So Stanfield decided to hire a photographer to shoot photos that could pass for vintage, a task that was both daunting and exciting. “A lot of these old photographs have a lot of information that’s hard to recreate,” Stanfield notes.

Ultimately, while all of the main photos in the campaign are original, Stanfield was able to weave in some actual 1960s and 1970s snapshots to enhance the range of feeling in the campaign. Appearing along the bottom of the ads, these pictures were okay-ed by the lawyers because they were supplied by employees of Energy BBDO and Beam Global Wine & Spirits, which owns Canadian Club. “They were considered family,” explains Stanfield, “and much less likely to put forth a lawsuit against their employer.”

Stanfield and fellow creative director Derek Sharman chose New York based Robert Whitman for the job because he had presented them with with numerous portfolios containing a mixture of photos he’d made in varied locations—Cuba, Russia, and Uruguay— as well as editorial work (including for Departures), and each book had its own sensibility. “They really feel like they’re authored by different people,” says Stanfield, “which is what we were looking for.”

Whitman also offered the most compelling photographic approach: He would shoot film, on retro cameras, and have it processed the old-fashioned way so that the photos would have vintage underpinnings. He found Rocky Mountain Film lab in Aurora, Colorado, which specializes in what it calls “old film developing,” including the C-22 film used in the Brownies. “I am kind of old school, and I really wanted to make this as real as possible,” says Whitman.

Working with Beverly Hills production company Team Halprin, Whitman, the Energy BBDO crew and stylists such as Adrianne Phillips (nominated for an Oscar for costume design for the decades-traversing Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line) shot for four days in and around L.A., including on a replica Manhattan street at Paramount Studios and in a house that has probably not been redecorated since JFK was president. Whitman photographed with abandon, using a combination of Brownie Hawkeyes and Holgas, while also covering himself by shooting digital, film (with a Nikon F6) and point-and-shoot (with a Contax).

By the end, he and Stanfield were faced with editing down 8,643 images for use in three executions, and they had just a couple of weeks to go from those raw images to ads ready to be shipped to magazines such as Playboy and Rolling Stone. Fortunately, Dan Halprin, of Team Halprin, had put them in touch with Digital Fusion in L.A., which had developed proprietary software—called DF Studio— that enables multiple people to log in and edit images simultaneously from anywhere in the world.

“It’s a simple thing where you just press a button and it either marks it or kills it, and you just move to the next one,” says Stanfield, who holed up in a hotel room with Whitman for two days to do the edit. “We just flew through this stuff.”

Digital Fusion got to work on aging the photos for the first execution (Your mom wasn’t your dad’s first”) while another lab, Schawk/Giannini Creative Imaging in Chicago, treated executions two and three (“Your dad had groupies” and “Your dad wasn’t a metrosexual”). The key was to ensure that the images all appeared similarly old but not in too similar a way. The Digital Fusion team, for example studied the various ways in which layers of color in a print decay, then came up with roughly 30 antiquing effects, ranging from contrasty and saturated to almost black and white. They also devoted a week to devising a baseline Photoshop palette of color and brushes, such as scratches, coffee stains, fingerprints and folds, and sampled several different kinds of grain that they used to create transparent layers to add on top of the images.

The key was to ensure that the images all appeared similarly old but not in too similar a way.

“Our job was to take each image and run it through these filter sets first, to see what kind of interplay the image would have with the filtration,” explains Hugh Milstein, co-founder of Digital Fusion. “We worked with Jason to dial those in to make them feel the right way.” For the shot of the guy in the green chair with a woman on his lap, “we went about 70 percent of the way down the decay route.”

Milstein aptly summarizes the challenge of the Canadian Club project this way: “How do you get something so incredibly high tech to look so incredibly low tech?” But at least the retouchers could see the results of their work as they went along, where as Whitman had to keep remembering not to be too professional as he shot. “Jason always said, ‘Don’t make it too good.’ I mean, the whole point of this is its really gotta look like an amateur [shot-it],” says the photographer, adding with a laugh, “That’s probably why they hired me.”

Giannini Creative Group

by Terry Kattleman

Unlike the old days of retouching directly on the film or the print, digital retouching has not only “extended the possibilities of image manipulation, it’s where talent and technology meet,” says Scott Giannini of Chicago-based Giannini Creative Group, a division of graphics company Schawk Inc. “While we’re able to composite many elements together seamlessly and convincingly, digital imaging starts with a photographic image that captures as much information as possible. Lighting is key in order to maintain the integrity of a photograph and consolidate it into its environment; and keeping a realistic approach to an image to prevent over manipulating it enhances a much more believable product.” As for the American state of the art, “I think there tends to be a specific Euro style in some cases that mimics a more painterly look,” Giannini allows, “but overall, I believe you could do a taste test and not many people could identify one geographical style from the other.” In fact, the Allstate “Feel Lucky” image seen here “was shot by a London photographer, Andy Glass, and retouched by Midwestern me–and it has that painterly look. It’s all a matter of vision, art direction and a collaboration of talent.”

Pfizer: The object on this Martin Williams job “was to make this hairless pup look like a Chinese Crested dog,” says Giannini. “The concept for this image was to ensure this pup, although not the prettiest dog on the block, certainly became the proudest. While the shoot was taking place, we began testing on a lo-res comp. This not only ensured that photographer Tony D’Orio and the creative team were getting what they wanted, it also helped the client fully understand the team’s vision, especially since this relied heavily on post.”

Altoids: “The challenge here was four days to shoot, retouch, key-line and ship. Before a single frame of film was shot, we met with Leo Burnett and photographer Tony D’Orio and agreed to a strategy. There is certainly plenty of retouching going into this image, including compositing several elements and color correction. After discussing the main retouching involved, we talked about the look, which is the single most important ingredient for this visual. While the look was taking place, we began retouching digital hero shots. This not only ensured that the photographer and creative team were getting what they wanted but it also helped the client fully understand the team’s vision, cutting days off the approval process.” Tracy Dyke was the digital artist on this job.

Allstate: “I attended the Leo Burnett prepro meeting for this production,” says Giannini, “and completed comp retouching on location in a Paramount Studios backlot during the photo shoot to facilitate the complicated shot and tight deadline. This shoot involved over 20 images to composite into one final dramatic visual. Back in Chicago, working on the final high-resolution retouching, it was great to be able to concentrate on just putting elements together and not be concerned with how things would fit — I had worked all those details out in building the low-res comp on location.” Photography by Andy Glass.

Powerful new campaign makes agency look “good.”

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Client: Oakley

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Client: Bayer