“On The Cutting Edge”

If you saw the types of adverts the national tv is putting out at the moment, you’d understand why when we all heard that we’d get to expose some of our own concepts through a set of adverts for Airtel( a telecom company releasing 3g this year) we were all pretty hyped!

With Jon and Mr.K, a group of us, between 16-18 years, sat and began brainstorming how we’d do it all.

Basically, we had to make several “teaser” ads which will eventually lead up to the main thirty second ad. The ideas didn’t come immediately but taking a look at the suggested ideas from the Airtel Marketing team made us realise that we had to NOT draw inspiration from anything we’d ever seen been advertised over here.

We decided that it would be best to keep phones out of the ads completely, also, a black and white asthetic was suggested and accepted and after seeing the recent editing, we all agree it was a really good call.

Right now we have five teaser clips ready which have already been taken in for viewing by the CEO of Airtel Seychelles…and he’s asking for more now :)

Each teaser basically explores, in an abstract kind of way, a feature which 3g and 3g phones will allow Seychellois to use.

For example, rather than showing that you can download music and ringtones via 3g by showing some guy downloading and listening to a tune (seriously…that’s the kind of thing that’s been shown before), we decided to go down to the night market and we got some great footage of these guys singing some sweet acoustic songs.

We’ve kept the original music from the night and simply black and whited it, and of course some that professional video cutting and compiling and we’ve got a teaser. Each 3g feature’s portrayal varies; for horoscope there’s a cool shot of a Cancer tattoo, with the waves crashing and the wind blowing…something that has to be seen to appreciate!

And I can just remember when, just last week, we sat and started thinking about it all and the ideas came out and Jon looked up and said “But, has anything like…this abstract been shown before?”, “erm…no?”.

His answer to that was “you’ve got to keep it on the cutting edge then, that’s real good!”.

I’ve seen these clips and it looks like advertising just got stepped up boys!