News and blog

Happy new year, party animals and culture vultures!

Now that January is done, along with those pesky resolutions (probably) and rotten detox diets (definitely!), your thoughts, like ours, are no doubt turning once more to the most fruitful, enriching and downright entertaining ways to make the most of life in the city.

As all ad aficionados know, this weekend’s Superbowl (that’s a bit like the FA Cup final of american football, non-sports fans) is eagerly anticipated, and not just as an epic clash of gridiron titans. There’s the heartfelt singing of the star-spanled banner, the national celebration of american exceptionalism… and there’s the half time ads.

We were in Brussels yesterday visiting our valued clients – and good friends – at Toyota Europe. The city was looking as festive as you would expect, given that it gave its name to one of the key Christmas vegetables, and Toyota itself was channeling the spirit of the season with its traditional illuminated tree, and slightly less traditional illuminated car.

Well, we knew it would be “all olympics, all the time”, and so it goes…

For all the font fans out there, might we heartily recommend the new paperback by journo Simon Garfield, entitled Just My Type. Can you guess what it’s about?

On a recent lunchtime wander, I experienced a bizarre brand-based flashback to my school days, which I will share with you now.

The new occupant of Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall was revealed the other day when the latest in the gallery’s series of spectacular Unilever commissions took up residence at Bankside. Tacita Dean is the artist in question: she has plunged the enormous space into darkness, up-ended a gigantic cinema screen at one end of the chasm and is projecting her 11-minute film – the less-than-mysteriously-named ‘Film’ – in glorious Tate-O-Rama until March next year.

A select team of Madhousers brave enough to be photographed in hard hats and safety shoes was recently dispatched to the Burnaston Toyota manufacturing plant to witness the genuinely fascinating spectacle of a car being built from (cough) scratch. We were present as machines as large as some city centre flats pounded (in the most precise sense of the word), rolled and trimmed vast coils of steel into instantly recognisable Toyota body panels. We oohed and aahed as Jurassic-like robots set about welding panels together to become cars. We were even let into the secret of how the Indiana Jones theme is helping Toyota build cars more efficiently.

We know that millions people now have a Facebook account – an average of one million new users sign up each month in the UK. We know too that there are 175 million registered Twitter accounts, and that Google+ has already become the fastest growing social network. But if you’re not quite sure where on earth this is all heading, then you need our new Grab-a-Byte series.

We experienced a nice bit of experiential marketing recently when we entertained our good friends and clients from Toyota at a swanky new restaurant called Australasia based in Spinningfields, Manchester.