Posts Tagged: Julian Ribeiro

Message in a Cannes – You don’t need to be here to be here

In Cannes 2012, Message in a Cannes on

Our first letter from Ogilvy Joburg MD, Julian Ribeiro:

As always, I feel privileged and grateful to be here. It’s incredibly inspiring and energizing, and deepens my love affair with this beautiful business.

But you can get as much out of the week as any one of the thousands of delegates. Seriously.

You can see all the work we can see. And ultimately, that’s the greatest source of inspiration and learning.You can also get a taste of all the workshops, seminars, forums and master classes. The synopses will tell you all you need to know about the conversations that are taking place.

You just can’t join me at the Gutter Bar. (You’ll be grateful!)

It’s pretty frantic – there is so much going on all at the same time. (Tseliso’s just arrived, and those were his first words.) So you’ve got to be adept at planning your time carefully.

You need time to see all the work, and go to workshops, seminars, forums, master classes, and film and titanium screenings. And get back to the apartment to change for the award show. And then go for dinner. And then a party. And then the Gutter Bar. And before you know it, it’s 05:00, and you remember you want to get there early for the first workshop.

On Tuesday there was work which literally took my breath away. I am particularly in awe of the Ogilvy China poster for Coke which won a Grand Prix Outdoor Lion.

And it’s a great story of talent liberation. Graham Fink, the ECD for the region, saw a piece of work he did, searched all over China for this guy, offered him his fist job in advertising, and he did this during his first two weeks. He’s 20. And my hero!

Gotta go. About to start a master class session with Jeff Goodby, founder of Goodby, Silverstein and Partners. The session is called ‘Why aren’t they buying my brilliant fucking idea?’. Selling work that changes the way people look at the world often starts by changing the way a client looks at the world. To accomplish this, who will you be?  And what will you bring with you?

He’s the guy who convinced someone to buy ‘got milk?’, the Budweiser Lizards, Nike ‘Skateboarding’, the Häagen-Dazs ‘Save the Honey Bees’, Audubon’s ‘Birding the Net’, and some even stranger stuff you’ve never heard of and probably with good reason.

I’m sitting with Mariana and Tseliso. They say ‘hi’.

Holding thumbs for some metal tonight.

Julian

 

Friendship is a team sport

In Trending topics on

SAB and Ogilvy, like all great friends, have quite a few stories to tell about each other. Amongst the stories of late-nights and getting the impossible done, there’s also tales of celebration. Like in the mid-1990’s when former Ogilvy chairman, Robyn Putter, took a dip in the pond at the Joburg offices to celebrate the return of the coveted Castle Lager account….sans clothes…

It has since become a bit of a tradition – when Castle Lager moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg, Julian Ribeiro was made to swim the fish pond as well!

David Ogilvy was a good friend to SAB – once writing that he had “never known any company in any industry in any country that had built so many top brands.”

SAB’s brands have become an integral part of South African history and our culture. A lot of the slogans that still resonate with young and old are thanks to Nick Tredoux – copy writer extraordinaire. He coined such phrases as “The taste that stood the test of time” and, of course, “Somewhat dry, somewhat bitter, never sweet.”

All these memories were combined for a special commercial celebrating this enduring friendship. Ogilvy’s gift to SAB. It features favourite moments from the past 50 years, condensed into one beer-fuelled tour de force…. Read more