Further to our last post on making the Style Birmingham Christmas TV commercial we wanted to post the final version up here on the blog and give a little more information about the campaign as a whole. Hopefully, you may by now have seen the spot which airs on ITV and Channel 4 throughout December. If not, there’s still a few days to catch it (or of course you can just click play on the video above!).

The campaign as a whole this year was developed to try and encourage shoppers to explore more of what Birmingham has to offer at Christmas. We recognised that many shoppers miss some of the highlights in the city, either due to time constraints, or not knowing where to look. As such, the ‘One Mile of Style’ campaign was developed to encourage visitors not only to ’shop’, but also to explore and experience other Christmas highlights in the city.

The concept behind the ad was developed in conjunction with the lovely guys at Fullrange and aimed to promote the mile and drive people through to stylebirmingham.com (which it’s been doing very well!). On the site, potential visitors can then explore an interactive ‘One Mile’ map and print off a synopsis of information about travel, independent retail, in-store promotions and festive fun, to take with them when they visit.

In addition, a number of users have been using the new dayplanner feature to generate personalised shopping routes and recommendations based on their age, brand habits and wish lists.

If you’re watching Dick Tracy, The Bill, Big Bang Theory or Deal or no Deal today then you may just catch it!

Over the last month we’ve been working with Fullrange to deliver a creative concept  which will run across TV and overlap online with a new area added to the Style Birmingham site. Working with Fullrange has been an absolute pleasure and we hope there’ll be more opportunities to collaborate on projects for other clients in the coming months.

Once the ad airs we’ll post some more information about the Christmas campaign as a whole, and of course, post the ad itself.

In the meantime, here’s a few teaser shots from the shoot – as you can see, it was a fair old setup, so hopefully the final product will be well received!

I watched the first episode of a programme on BBC2 this week- ‘Design for life” with Phillipe Starck. As with any ‘reality’ TV series there were elements which grated and had clearly been fluffed up by the producers in order to make a good TV show. If you cut through the chaff however, one theme which seemed to come through was the idea that product design shouldn’t just consider ‘the product’, but should also think around the issue of why the product exists – factoring in a social, sustainable or ecological benefit. Starck’s eccentricities aside, this for me was the most interesting issue raised in the show.

This morning, something popped up in my Google reader which again got me thinking about the theme that good design should have both a tangible benefit to the end user and ‘exist’ for a reason beyond just the core product. Studio Mama, based in London, is run by product designer Nina Tolstrup. The studio have developed a great piece of design which repurposes an average pallet in to a pretty cool looking chair. Instead of just selling the chairs online, Studio Mama are instead selling the instructions so people can build the chair themselves for just £10. This has been a catalyst for The ‘Pallet Chair’ charity project in Buenos Aires where unemployed locals make the chairs to sell and raise money to help improve their lives. In addition, a number of high profile artists are now customising pallette chairs which will be auctioned off online in order to help raise money for the area.

For me, this is the type of design which ticks all the right boxes. As well as allowing the designer to still rightly make a profit from the original idea, it facilitates something far bigger in terms of teaching people to make something new from materials which are readily available. Sharing the instructions rather than just producing the chairs is for me the most exciting part of the project. I suspect this would have shot Nina to the top of the class on Starck’s ‘Design for life’, and rightly so.