Thompson Brand Partners

Probably the final post of 2009

Well, it's been a busy old year.

If you're a regular visitor to our blog you'll have shared in the ups and downs of life in the branding world. On top of it being the end of the year, I'm sure it hasn't escaped your attention that it's also the end of the decade. I'm not a big one for retrospection, so I'll finish the year with some great images form our online Christmas greeting - lovingly crafted and relentlessly finessed by Adam and Hayley.

Here's to 2010 and all the exciting challenges I'm sure it will bring.

    

Festive frolics

And here's few more snapshots from the Christmas bash last week. As you'll see, the snow put paid to our plan to golf but it didn't scupper our plans to have a brilliant time. In fact, the snow rather made it.

     

Christmas Done

Well another year, another Christmas Do. Or so we thought - little did we know this would be the year when we would tick off the all-time-Christmas-Do checklist... anything we need to add on for next year's!!?

1. Snow
2. Ridiculous Christmas Jumpers (electrical risk of Hayley's human fairy lights adds extra points I think)
3. Competitive Activities (trivial pursuit, driving range, and extra points for FD vs MD vein-popping arm wrestling over dinner!)
4. Being complained about (for making too much noise, x2)
5. Gatecrashing a private party
6. 17 hours + of fun and festivities (read drinking)
7. Unspeakable secret santa pressie
8. Falling over (many instances: in the snow, on the dancefloor and off a chair)
9. Harsh regional banter (Essex girl Tshirt for Chloe, Geordie box for Lynn)
10. Team sandwich at the end of the night !!

And that to me, seems a good Christmas do, done

Merry Christmas everyone!

Chloe x

Few snowy phone pics, more to follow from cameras..

Presentation Meeting

It's not every day that when you're asked to take a seat prior to a meeting that you get to sit in on a contemporary dance rehearsal is it?

 

LCM FE Prospectus

Another batch of shots from our photography sesh... this time the LCM FE prospectus and inserts.

Paul

Metal Case Study

Adam and I have been busy sorting out some images for Metal (amongst others which I'll put up here soon)... some of the work you might have seen on here already but they're worth another look.

Also included are a couple of images of one of the launch events held at Chalkwell Hall in Southend.

No, that's not me... it's Jarvis.

Paul

East Coast Brand

It's taken me quite some time to come to terms with the fact that the new East Coast branding is a huge opportunity missed. Launched in November, the new company took over from the disastrous franchise that National Express delivered.

Apparently National Express were losing squillions of pounds every second and couldn't make it pay. Odd that, because every train we travelled on was always rammed solid and whenever we went to London we had to remortgage the office building to buy a peak time ticket. 

Anyway, the government took it off them (or they handed it back, I'm not sure) and it's now being run by a new company set up by the government with all the same staff and rolling stock. Everything at the moment is in the process of being rebranded so it's the predictable mess that happens in this changeover situation.

What I was looking for when the new brand appeared was a statement of intent: things are going to be different, just you wait and see. A confident brand that spoke of the rich heritage of the East Coast mainline that proudly carries the people of the North into London to do business and enjoy the big city. 

And then I saw it. A dull, hastily designed badge that spoke of a breathtaking lack of ambition. 'Does what it says on the tin' said one of my Twitter followers. I accept that this might be an angle to approach the brand - efficient, solid, no nonsense, gets on with the business of running trains - it's not even that. It's nothing.

There is talk that if East Coast make a success of the running of this line, then it might even provoke the government to review it's policy on rail line franchises. All the more reason then to get the branding right then. I understand that money might be an issue, but there are scores of branding companies in the North who are more than capable of making a much better fist of what currently adorns the train carriages.

It does raise the interesting question: does it really matter? As long as the trains run on time, ticket prices are right and the overall experience is a good one, then why bother? And I can see that side of the argument too. the last thing we need is a fabulously branded service that's rubbish. I would ask these people to look to the continent, where the rail organisations (admittedly mostly national) care about every aspect of the experience and the branding is simply part of that and taken very seriously indeed. Which is how it should be.

 

Camp Hill Awayday

Well it's been over a week since we had an outstanding day up in North Yorkshire at Camp Hill. 

We were amazingly lucky with the weather as it's been pretty much raining for fun lately. We had a beautiful, bright winter day to enjoy our outdoor pursuits of climbing scarily high in the treetops, skidding around on quad bikes and then scaring ourselves silly on the ridiculously high zip wire.

We'll put all of the shots from the day on Flickr, but in the meantime here's a few to keep you going.

The day started with much needed bacon rolls and hot cups of tea. Lovely.

After a morning of envisioning and imagining what the future might be like, we took lunch and then donned the ominously waterproof full body suits. "It's quite wet on the quad bike course" they said. Paul took it all in his stride of course.

Anna, Chloe and Josh prepare for the Chicken Run egg capturing challenge (we got 7 in case you're interested). Anna and Chloe get full marks for imaginative yet practical use of knitwear and matching sweatshirts.

Ian and his helmet.

As I'm sitting here now, I have no idea how i managed to climb the ladder of doom. Of course the photograph doesn't really do the height justice, suffice to say it was high and very frightening for complete wusses like me. Everyone else seemed to get on just fine, however. 

Prozone Returns

A few weeks ago, we took care of a small direct marketing campaign on behalf of our client Prozone. In terms of DM, it was a relatively modest campaign - we mailed the new printed literature to 15,000 football performace specialists around the world. 

We've just got a (miraculously) small number of returns and they really do look like they've been around the world. They wear their journey proudly on the outer boxes with stamps, stickers and scribbles all clearly signposting the countries they've been to and not found their recipients. 

They look lovely and I couldn't resist a quick shot of a few to tell their globe-trotting stories.

 

Sabotage from the future

I read something quite incredible this week. The giant atom smashing machine Large Hadron Collider is being tampered with by time travellimg meddlers and this is the reason why it broke down and they couldn't get it to work for months.

Seriously.

This bizaare sci fi theory got my fevered conspiracy theory brain doing overtime. The theory isn't being put forward by some crazed Fortean Times reader, oh no. It's only a highly respected Danish Physicist, Dr Holger Bech Nielson - and it's not just him either. Dr Maseo Maseo Ninomiya has weighed in with claims that the delayed start to find the 'God Particle' is all part of nature 'trying to prevent it being found'.

These eminent scientists have dared to float their out-there theories to worldwide incredulity.  Dannis Overbye in the New York Times said "While it is a paradox to go back in time and kill your grandfather, physicists agree there is no paradox if you go back in time and save him from being hit by a bus. In the case of the Higgs and the collider, it is as if something is going back in time to keep the universe from being hit by a bus."

I love it when the real world and the made up world collide. I think sometimes reality needs pepping up. Suffice it to say when we got talking about this in the studio last week, we had to break off the discussion to get on with some work!