WMH hosts ‘An Evening with Luke Johnson’

WMH: An Evening with Luke Johnson

Thursday 4th February, Williams Murray Hamm hosted an intimate dinner with esteemed guest speaker, Luke Johnson, for friends of the business at the Haymarket Hotel, London.


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Luke Johnson is one of Britain’s most interesting serial investors.  He’s probably best known as the former chairman of Channel 4 and the man who grew Pizza Express into a household name.

He’s an author, philanthropist and hugely popular Sunday Times columnist, as well as being chairman of Risk Capital Partners LLP, the business behind Gail’s Bakeries and Patisseries Valerie.

With his wealth of entrepreneurial knowledge and maverick views, this was an evening not to be missed.

Williams Murray Hamm: Barclays, Syngenta, Way to Blue, Castrol, Fortnum & Mason, Brummells of London
For press queries, contact info@wmhagency.com 

Be My Valentine…

valentine love letter, richard reed, richard williams, innocent smoothies, packaging

 

Dear Richard

In answer to your Brand Republic article

I feel a bromance coming on.

On this day of all, I’d like to tell you how much I love you.

You are the first significant business person, since marketing became besotted with social media, to say

“It is crazy how significant packaging is”.

OMG!

What’s more, you went on to say “I think, realistically, for most FMCG products the packaging is more important than the product, it is how you get noticed and create desire, and impute what it is you are and stand for.”

Thank you for restoring this old man’s faith in the discipline he’s followed since 1974.

Yours in admiration.

 

Richard Williams

Founder

Williams Murray Hamm

Into the Future

Showcasing the talents of the future.

As a recovering awards addict, I’ve judged, chaired and entered most creative shows around the globe, but the one closest and dearest to my heart is the D&AD Student Awards.

I was thrilled to be asked back to judge this year’s category ‘Make Your Mark’ and was so impressed with the work that I decided to give up our window space (usually reserved for talking about ourselves) to showcase this year’s nominations. We’ve called it ‘Tuned in to the Future’.

In many ways the Student Awards are more important than those for the professionals. The Pro awards are ‘post’ the event, a pat on the back from your peers. The Student Awards are about the future.

They remind us how to look at life in a different and original way, with a smile, tons of enthusiasm and a spirit that only bright young things can bring.

With more students graduating this year than ever, they need our support and we’re proud to be ‘Tuned into the Future’.

Check out more about the work from this talented bunch on our Facebook page.

Set to Burst

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We’ve always had a strong portfolio of ambitious small brands that can’t afford large ad budgets. They tend to see their packaging as media they own and come to us because we create campaignable ideas that they can make noise with.

Purity Soft Drinks is typical of this kind of client. They have huge ambitions for their JuiceBurst brand, which is loved by newsagents across the land, but so completely anonymous that few consumers would recognise it.

We were hired, initially, to develop the brand strategy and packaging, but the work has taken us much further and into the realms of film-making, SFX and augmented reality.

JuiceBurst looked like an own label product in a clunky bottle. The only way we could make it behave like a brand was create an identity based on the one thing it could own – the best juice on the shelf having a bit of an outburst. The idea’s in the name.

Because we’re such an ideas driven business, people don’t realise that we love designing pack structures. In this case we created a big fat, juicy shape that glugs effortlessly – JuiceBurst is a big drink.

All along, it was clear that we could do so much more with the brand than redesign it. Squeezing the pips of the marketing budget (we just had to get that in) we worked with Artem, the firm behind many of the special effects of the Olympics ceremonies. They became expert at detonating fruit while Matt Broad caught it all on high speed, HD film. Lisa Desforges wrote the witty outbursts and Frank Pescod did his magic on the musical front.

The result is a range of films with beautiful, real fruit bursting in all their glory. A still of the film is used on each label and you can watch a short documentary film of how we did it, a must see. How could you resist watching grown men blow up fruit? It’ll be as big as ‘Buttrocket’, only messier. See the making-of film here.

Blippar™ is a phone app that recognises features of a label, or newspaper and brings it to life. In the case of JuiceBurst, you point your smartphone at the label and you’re presented with interactive graphics that turn with the bottle and offer you games, win prizes or let you watch the ‘How We Made JuiceBurst’ short film.

Working closely with the guys at Blippar, we’re proud to present the first ever augmented-reality enabled soft drinks packaging. See all the fruit bursting films here.

Eng day

This is the gallery of Exploding fruit.

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