Since spring is known as the season of new beginnings, we decided to incorporate some baby vegetables into the Calgary Farmers’ Market spring campaign. Yes, we know they’re cute, but please keep your voices down; they need their sleep.
We aren’t really known for our individual musical talents over here at WAX, but when we combine forces, watch out. The other day we started an agency wide band without the use of any instruments. Some of us stomped our feet, some clapped, a few snapped, one or two made really annoying throat noises. We put them altogether in a magical music stew and came up with something pretty cool. Tour dates to be posted soon.
We’re going to widen the doorways and raise the ceilings to make room for our giant heads. The results are back from the Advertising and Design Club of Canada and we won silver for the Canadian Society of Persons with Disabilities 2008 annual report, along with three merit certificates: one for CSPD, one for SAIT ‘Girls’ radio, and one for the Victoria Symphony. Now we’re going to put tiny swimsuits on our pale bodies and stand next to life size cutouts of tanned supermodels. Nothing puts an ego in check like good old-fashioned shame.
Isn’t it so nice to get invited somewhere? Out of the 6,790,062,216 people in the world, they chose you – YOU – how flattering. Well, this phenomenon just happened to our lovely design director, Monique Gamache, when she was invited to speak at DesignThinkers ’09, Canada’s largest creative conference held in Toronto.
On November 3, she warmed up the audience with some partial nudity, a panda, two women making out, and other unexpected scenes that Monique doesn’t appear in. It was WAX’s self-promotion video and the audience showed their appreciation by making loud sounds with their vocal cords … um … yeah … laughter is what it is called.
After that, Monique talked about finding “The Quirk Behind the Brand” and showed some recent work. Basically, she believes that every brand has an amazing, unique story to tell, through ads, design and whatnot. She believes that creative thinking can make anything super interesting: paper clips, rocks, maybe even dust.
She also bought some new shoes while she was there.
We helped hundreds of very grateful people going through some tough times, and we also did some jobs that ad agencies don’t normally do.
Some of us put on plastic gloves, reached into giant tubs of butter and spread our delicious findings on buns. Some of us wore unflattering hair nets. And we all got to either dish the food onto plates or run it to the tables. One of the regular volunteers could carry six plates at a time, which made us look pretty amateur, but our hearts were in the right place so that made up for our lack of serving skills.
Word got around that it was a delicious meal and after it was over we all received a very genuine applause (not the phony kind that you hear everywhere else). It sure does feel nice to be nice.
Actually, that’s a lie. It was a cloudy Wednesday afternoon when WAX decided to throw a pumpkin-carving contest in celebration of All Hallows Eve. Stakes were high, the best pumpkin got a hundred bucks. We all went home with pumpkins under arm Tuesday night and brainstormed. Some of these storms didn’t pack much of a punch while others were a level five hurricane of pumpkin awesomeness. Take a look at the winner and some of the honorable mentions. Pumpkins may not make for good eatin’, but they sure do make for good times.
U.S. Firm to Rebrand Calgary
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WAX is pleased to announce some new members to the creative team. So far, all seem very nice and smell relatively good… for creatives at least. Steph Bialik is a new writer and comes from San Francisco’s Venables, Bell & Partners. Tim Anderson is another new writer and joins us from Vancouver’s Rethink. Andrew Payne, yet another new writer (someone better pick-up some pens), is originally from Calgary and back in the ‘hood after going back to school in Ottawa last year. Brad Connell, a writer, just kidding, psych! He’s an art director, comes from Taxi Calgary and is awesome. And Brian Allen is another art director whose basically done the round of all the shops in town and luckily for us, has settled down with WAX. And last, but certainly not least, is our new Designer Mike Rinaldi. He’s fresh out of Toronto’s York University and basically kills it with all things “designy”. He would’ve designed the “swoosh” if it hadn’t already been designed back in 1971.
So there you have it, the new members of WAX. One, two, three and break!
