Didn’t even know I’d picked this one up until someone congratulated me on it earlier – An ICAD Gold in the Made for Online Campaign category for the HSE Quit Smoking commercials. It was a great one to work on. And a scary one too. With a scary fact: 1 in 2 people who smoke will die of a tobacco-related disease.

Talk about a challenging brief. AIB has a ton of initiatives and programmes in place for small business customers, and they are actually lending money to viable businesses – but the thing is no one believes them. Why? Well research basically says the Irish people despise them.

As a brand and as a corporate entity anyway.

The story on the ground is a little bit different. It’s business as usual in the branches, where staff on the whole are seen as people who care about and listen their customers, rather than the “bankers who got us in this mess in the first place”.

So when it came to coming up with a campaign idea to package all these business initiatives and services for AIB business customers, it seemed the best people to tell the story and set out the stall were the ones in the branches, the ones who had the trusting, believing ear of the customer in the first place.

Given the amount of time spent in the media criticising the banks and the lack of credit facilities, we knew our idea was going to have to shout loud and be able to cash the cheques it was writing (as it were), and that’s where the name “The Big Drive for Small Business” came from.

The print positions the programme as a national movement while the TV was shot in a documentary style around the country in an effort to depict what is actually happening on the ground right now, rather than making (what could be interpreted as) empty promises of what was coming down the road.

Nice little campaign I worked on for Ladbrooks (as a taxi driver we took a ride with said it) for Cheltenham. The brief was to inject a bit of fun into the Ladbrokes personality, while still communicating that they’re the bookies who know what they’re talking about – hence the thought “Get it from the horse’s mouth”.

It’s saying something when a cutdown of your commercial isn’t possible because there won’t be enough time for the terms and conditions to appear.

Here’s the TV commercial and two sweet little radio ads I wrote for the home of the Happy Meal. Family time being a special place is a nice little idea we struck upon, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t steal more than a little bit from my own experiences of downing McNuggets with my own kids to come up the bones of the idea.

“When I Grow Up”

“Happy”

“Rocket”

‘Excuses’ was great while it lasted. But all good things, as they say, must come to an end as a result of research finding out that although well liked by all, the campaign wasn’t actually making people get a TV licence.

This time around so, the brief was all about alerting people to the perils of forgetting those little things that seem insignificant at the time. Like, for example, where you parked the jaysus car.

“Car Park”

Well it’s well and truly on air by now, but sure here it is; the new spot showing off the new (and some of the old reliable) line-up of presenters for 2fm. When we were coming up with concepts, we had this notion of a Wacky Races type of affair, all of the guys making their way to the studio in the spirit of the linen ‘Come together’. But when all was said and done the script weighed about a half a million quid.

We did float the idea of going greenscreen, but dismissed it initially as it might look, well, shite. And then after a couple of moments of silence there it was: the “You know what?” moment. What if we made a virtue out of the greenscreen, and harked back to the days of rear projection? That could be fun.

And you know what? It was.

“Journey”

of reaching a level of creativity such as this. Or maybe dream is the wrong word.

Or so I like to think anyways. This may well be the last of the Excuses campaign for RTÉ and TV Licence. We’re in pre-production on something completely new and improved. Which is nice.

“Papyrophobia”

Let’s face it, for members of the creative department, sitting through a media presentation is pretty much the definition of death by a thousand cuts (or a thousand spreadsheets anyway). But in an era when even the cleaners are being told to think creatively, media presentations are starting to become entertaining. I of course refer to the spicing up of practically every slide with a stock image, that more often than not bears no relation to the words (which the media ninja will have squeezed 500 or so of onto the slide) around it. Nothing is too cliché for our media friends when it comes to stock image selection. NOTHING. Even our friend below gets a look-in in our “cash-rich, time-poor” society, complete with the watermark of the stock library the image belongs to.

Who would have thought? There is such a thing as a bad idea after all.