A new campaign for Toronto fitness club AREA. They are holding a series of military style bootcamps
to kick start one’s training regimen.

Stay tuned for the t-shirts.

As an added treat, we also gave our guests a sneak peek at the work we have done for the Appleton Estate Global Website.

Thanks to everybody who attended, we hope you had a great time. Thanks also to our friends at Appleton Estate, The Martini Club, and The Real Jerk.

Here are the details of the Rum Stimulus Package:

THE RESERVE STIMULUS
Appleton Estate Reserve topped with fresh lime, cranberry- pomegranate juice and a splash of ginger ale, garnished with lime.  Fill a rocks glass with ice. Add 1 ½ oz. Appleton Estate Reserve, the juice of 1/8 lime, 2 oz. cran-pomegranate juice and 2oz. ginger ale. Garnish with lime.

THE EXCEPTIONAL MOJITO
Muddle fresh mint with brown sugar, lime wedges and 1 1/2oz. Appleton Estate V/X. Then topped with a splash of soda and garnished with a mint sprig.

THE APPLETON ESTATE CAESAR
Rim a high ball glass with lime juice and celery salt, fill with ice, 1 1/2 oz. Appleton Estate V/X, a dash of Worcesterhire sauce, a dash of Tabasco sauce, a dollop of horseradish and top with Clamato.  Garnish with a lime wedge and celery stick.

Click on the images below to see the good times.

What it this year? It’s a touque adorning the colours and emblem of the Jamaican Bobsled Team that he picked up when HQvB was  shootng in Jamaica.

Chris will wear the touque proudly until he leaves it at somebody’s house or a bar or something.

And of course, he’ll be cheering the Jamaican Bobsled Team at the Vancouver Olympics.

We went to the Nassau Valley, home of the Appleton Estate, where the unique combination of terrior and passionate craftspeople come together to create the finest rum in the world. We discovered the serenity of the cane fields in the weeks just before the harvest and felt the honour and history of more than 250 years of rum production.

We also uncovered  a jazz club in the centre of Kingston where the exceptional electiricity and spirit equalled that of any of your typical jazz locales in New Orleans or Paris.

Then we went up the Blue Mountain and spent time at Strawberry Hill, former home to Chris Blackwell founder of Island records who brought the world Bob Marley and U2.

Now a boutique hotel, you can channel the aura of creativity that surrounds the place. There’s a piano that quietly sits in the corner of the main house that you could only guess the songs that might have been written on it.

There’s much more that we saw and did, and you will see it in the next few weeks as we launch the new Appleton Estate website.

Check back here for more news.

So we don’t just make ads. We don’t just produce TV spots or web sites. We don’t just plan and book media.

We create larger ideas that move people to get involved. We create ideas that move seamlessly across media. In doing so, we are beyond being what many agencies call “media neutral”.We embrace new technology, new media and more importantly new thinking. We do so in a lean-mean-fighting-machine structure that has not only done away with the departmental turf wars still raging in traditional agencies,
we have also done away with the bloated structure that leads to outrageous bills.

The new world is about speed to market, creativity, efficiency of resources and engaging people at every touch point.

Luckily, that’s what we’re all about.

Thanks to the music company MOPHONICS and the band TELESCOPE for providing the music on this Film

The NABS Ambassadors Committee, a sub-committee of the National Advertisers Benevolent Society, has chosen Toronto agency Huxley Quayle von Bismark as its first agency of record following a competitive review with three other unnamed agencies.

Andy Shortt, a partner at HQvB, said the agency presented ideas on how the committee can connect with advertising professionals under 35 during an RFP earlier this month.

The agency is in the planning stages of a rebranding effort that will launch next year. Shortt said NABS is traditionally seen as a charitable organization that the industry can rely on when times are tough.

“Our job is get people to know that [NABS] will help you with your resume, help with interview techniques…a bunch of different things,” Shortt said. “We think it should be a cool exclusive club that people in advertising can belong to, that just happens to have some good stuff for people when they need it.”

The agency has also discussed moving its Just One Project to NABS, said Shortt. The program asks major advertisers in Canada to set aside “just one” marketing project to be handled by laid-off workers on a freelance basis.

Despite orchestrating projects for Connect in Private and the Canadian Newspaper Association, Shortt said the program hasn’t garnered response from large advertisers.

“A lot of people are still out of work,” he said.  “We thought if one of the hurdles they need to get over was doing something through an agency, then perhaps doing it through NABS would be a little more palatable for them.”

HQvB is currently working with the NABS Ambassadors Committee to create support materials for next month’s prom-themed fundraising event.

“We are confident HQvB will be a strong partner to help us achieve our communication strategy,” said Julie Howlett, NABS Ambassadors Committee Chair and director of sales at Astral iMedia. “In our very first meeting they had lots of interesting ideas and seemed to have a great handle on our challenge.”

Vincor Canada is encouraging online nudity for the latest addition to its “nudist campaign” that launched earlier this summer in support of the Growers Cider brand.

Consumers can add their choice of nudist (man or woman, sitting or standing) to their own photo, share them with friends and enter to win one of three $500 prizes at GrowersCider.com.

Growers’ marketing team will select the winners, said Andy Shortt, founder of HQvB, the agency behind the effort.

“You can take any bland, boring holiday or family photo and you put a nudist into it, it makes it kind of funny,” said Shortt. Nudists have so far been added to events like family camping trips and wedding pictures.

The effort joins billboards and transit shelter ads that first launched in B.C. and Alberta earlier this summer.

The ads feature images of nudists enjoying Growers in various outdoor settings with headlines like, “Being All Natural is Quite Refreshing. And Chilly.”

Shortt says Growers is a natural and unassuming brand, and “who’s more unpretentious than people who don’t wear clothes?”

He added the campaign has done well, and taken brand awareness numbers from “very low to quite strong.” Growers may extend the campaign into the Ontario market next season.

“Every time we create campaigns, we create mechanisms that actually get people involved in doing stuff,” Shortt said, of the new site. “Because people that are involved with the brand are much more apt to buy it than people that just see it in ads.”

http://www.marketingmag.ca/english/news/marketer/article.jsp?content=20090914_145125_2348