What Inspires YOU?

John Paul Mitchell Systems just launched a broadcast campaign directed by Steven Lippman featuring three, very different artists to make a statement about the JPMS professional hair care, color and styling products. The campaign consists of four :30 spots and uses BBoy Junior, one of the world's top break dancers, Cory Duffel, a rule-breaking rebel pro skater, and Takashi Yamamoto, celebrity hair stylist, to align the brand with the inspirational feats of the talent. Besides directing the spots, Lippman shared CD/AD duties with Christianne Brooks, a long-time collaborator. Post production and FX by Radium.

Lippman is NO KOOK!!

Lots of folks, apparently a lot of them photographers, over-inflate their surfing abilities. Steven Lippman lets his surfing do the talking, as he did at a highly-secret-if-I-tell-you-I'll-have-to-kill-you location in North LA county during the recent storm surge. Yowser... Photo: Dean Hotch

Zack Scott's HP Work Finally Out of the Closet

One of the challenges we have as reps is trying to keep current on the launch dates for campaigns/assignments our artists work on, so that when they go public, we are ready to get out there with our PR guns blazing and spread the word about their connection to the work. Dates are either tough to get, or move, or everyone has moved on to other things by the time the images appear, and we consistently seem to be behind the eight ball as a result.

Zachary Scott's campaign for HP's One-Touch printers is a good example. We only recently managed to round up all of the ads, even though we shot it early in the Fall - and that's NOT the fault of anyone being uncooperative at the agency. It's the nature of the beast. The campaign was a global initiative, and required around 50 days of work internally to prepare all of the materials so they could be accessed from anywhere in HP's universe. At this point, the production is a distant memory, but I do remember it requiring a Herculean effort from everyone involved to pull it off and meet the deadlines. Kudos and hugs to our friends at Goodby Silverstein & Partners who came up with and sold the work, ACD Brian Gunderson and GD Ryan Meis; the tireless team of GSP Art Buyers who juggled the multiple teams, the budget and the schedule to bring the images to fruition, Dan Southwick and Katie Borzcik; and our very own propmeister, John Robinson, who always manages to pull rabbits out of his shorts...er, uh, hat. Finally, Megan Sluiter did her usual magnificent managing of the production, keeping the client's happy and me out of harm's way...and, oh yea - Zack kicked ass as usual.

The "Touch" campaign was followed immediately with a smaller, but no less cooler effort supporting HP's toners, which you can see below.

Lippman Helps Brand James Perse

Steven Lippman collaborated with AD Marc Atlan of Marc Atlan Design to create imagery for clothing designer James Perse's Resort Collection for men and women. Known for his clean-line casual designs, Perse was a natural fit for Lippman, and based on the results from the initial two shoots, everyone is looking forward to more collaborations in 2010 and beyond.

Redpath Shoots Burnaby Tourism

Anthony Redpath teamed up recently with Publicis Vancouver AD Tana Koslyabong and CD Bill Downie to put a humorous spin on Burnaby, British Columbia's appeal as a destination for convention planners. The five-ad campaign shows the lengths to which people will go to get out of their meetings so they can enjoy the city. In case you are wondering or want to plan a trip there, Burnaby is BC's third largest city by population and is located just east of Vancouver. If it's THAT close, it's got to be nice. Just don't be surprised if you see people sneaking out of buildings while posing as plants.

Off and Stumbling

It's a new year. We arrived January 5, ready to take the world by the tail and shake it. Little did we know that with Mercury in retrograde (whatever the hell that means), EVERYTHING having to do with the technology we depend on is so crawling with bugs we might as well have taken another couple of weeks off! For the first few days, I blamed it all on Kelly, our new Jr. Associate. But after a week and a half of one step forward, three back, I'm ready to chuck all of our computers and go back to clay tablets. Email? Yeah sure... Just try to get out to the cyberworld without having to re-boot three times a day. Website? Why not have ALL of the portfolio imagery just randomly rearrange itself? THAT would be great. Don't worry about our internal database. Who needs estimates, contacts, invoices or any info on stock imagery? Oh yeah, don't count on surfing any site that gets over 3 visitors a day, 'cause your browser(s) will just spin and spin. It's not the web hosting company's fault. It's not the phone company's. Apple's? The modem? Router? Nah... It's Mercury's. I'm sure of it now.

To Buy or Not to Buy

Every year it's the same: It's the first week in December when we realize we're behind the 8-ball again with regards to our annual gifts for our professional friends and need to figure something out. Fast. I've never been a big fan of buying gifts for clients who have bestowed business on us over the year, for a couple of reasons. If we give them anything, I want it to be something meaningful, and while I know most of them well on a professional level, I don't know enough about their personal lives to do justice to a gift intended for that part of their world. Plus, once you buy something significant (and if it's not significant, it's not worth doing), clients will certainly remember you for it... and also notice when you quit doing it. It's a conundrum. We certainly appreciate our client relationships, and certainly, the business that they send our way. Our solution has been to give a little homemade something to those on our list. Something that is hopefully still edible by the time it arrives. This year it was jalapeno jelly. Why? I think it was because we fell in love with how we would package it, and before we'd chopped the first pepper, we'd committed to the silk screening and enough boxes and Ball jars to start a jelly business. Definitely not the way to go at it, in retrospect. Actually, "retrospect" started to set in about midway through the first of many batches we concocted in the S+A kitchen, but by that time, we were swimming in pectin and out of other options so there was no going back. The results were mixed, so clients got the ones that looked most like jelly, and the rest of the recipients got jalapeno "sauce". So far, we've not got any complaints from the health department so for now are considering it another successful season. Maybe next year we'll resort to one of those "a donation has been made in your name to..." gifts. Naa.

New Year, New Addition

We are very pleased to announce that we've hired Kelly Olsterholt as a Jr. Associate. Kelly, whose first day with S+A was today, is a former photography student at Brooks Institute with an undergrad degree in Telecommunications from Indiana University. She's been working on the production/studio side of the business most recently and was in event planning prior to that. She's going to make a great addition to our team and we're excited to have her aboard.