Response, Kolkata, starts a new innings with a new fervour and a heritage of great work:
7 is a significant number. 7 days of the week, 7 colours to a rainbow, 7 musical notes . . . the list is endless. Not to miss, the 7 sacred rounds of an Indian bride and her groom. Calcutta’s parched advertising scene is struck by thunder, with Response unleashing a potent combine of 7 powerhouses. They are geared to take advertising to the next level.
Sidhartha Roy, CEO and Rashi Ray, Owner-Director decided to give wings to the deep roots of this quintessential Calcutta agency. In a short time, minds met and alliances happened, resulting in the onboarding of five of the citys top advertising heavyweights. Anurag Hira as Mentor, Joy Aichbhowmik as Executive Creative Director, Partha Chowdhury and Shibnath Sen as Creative Consultants, and Rohan Basu as Consultant Executive Producer. The combined horsepower of these 7 seasoned stalwarts is revving Response as it is poised to gallop nationally. Response India
Posters made with love. For the love for ideas and having fun.
A creative stimulus in 2013 from Ram Ray, Founder of Response, led to adorning our office elevator, with Lift Posters. Giving people something to ruminate over to uplift their mood while journeying up to their fifth floor office.
Enthusiastically taken up by the Response team, these posters are celebrating their 10th year. “Constantly inspiring others, even in an elevator ride, is our job. And we love it!”
Finland’s largest child welfare organization published an outdoor ad campaign to remind parents and adults of the content children see when browsing their phones, especially at night. The campaign consisted of billboards disguised as a child’s screen recording, a continuous stream of disturbing and violent images, including cyberbullying and war. Highlighting the harsh reality that children can face on their phones, the ads were displayed only at night in Helsinki, Finland, because that is when children are most likely to use their phones without adult supervision.
The aim of The Mannerheim League for Child Welfare’s campaign is to support parents in media education for children. According to a Pew Research Center survey (2020), a majority of parents of children aged 11 or younger are concerned that their child is being exposed to inappropriate content online. 59 percent of US parents were concerned about their child accessing violent content online, and 56 percent were concerned about their child being bullied or harassed online*.
“Digitalization has revolutionized our world, for better and for worse. Media is intertwined with children’s lives, where for example the internet, social media, and games are part of their environment. A child has the right to safety in digital environments as well“, says Paula Aalto, The Mannerheim League for Child Welfare’s Head of School Cooperation and Digital Youth Work.
TBWA\Helsinki, the creative partner in the campaign, discovered an approach that allowed drawing attention to the time of day, when children are most likely to use their phones without adult supervision or support. Thus, the outdoor ads are visible only at night.
“Children are at their most vulnerable during the night. We created billboards that are active from 12:00 am to 2:00 am, displaying a stream of images that depict cyberbullying, nudity, war, and violence. It effectively reminds us, adults, about the availability of illicit online content to our children. We purposely hid the content of the billboards from the public – this became the core of our message. These images were too frightening to show, yet they are the harsh reality our kids are exposed to when we aren’t watching”, says TBWA’s Creative Director Joni Furstenborg.
Adults are the solution
The association does not blame adults or technology, but supports parents in educating their children about media.
“It is understandable that parents cannot constantly monitor their child’s phone use. However, as adults, we are the solution to protecting our children from inappropriate content. By developing our own media literacy skills, we also know how to act if a child has seen something scary or inappropriate on their phone”, says Aalto.
The Mannerheim League emphasizes that providing support entails exploring media together, achieving joint successes, and being present and genuinely interested in our children’s lives . Constant communication with the child on and off screen is of the utmost importance.
“As a parent myself, I am concerned about my own children’s media use on their phones. Children are constantly exposed to harmful content, and parents must protect them from seeing things that they do not have the ability to process due to their young age.We, parents, are the solution”, Furstenborg ends.
he Mannerheim League is a Finnish NGO that promotes the wellbeing of children and of families with children, increases respect for childhood and seeks to make it more visible, and sees that children’s views are taken into account in public decision-making. The organization is the largest child welfare organization in Finland. It has 75 000 members and 541 local associations throughout the country. The work of these local associations is supported by the League’s 10 district organizations.
TBWA\Helsinki is the genuinely international and most award-winning agency in Finland. For four consecutive years clients have voted TBWA\Helsinki as the agency of the year in Finland and Eurobest Awards have named the company the Country Agency of the Year. TBWA\Helsinki employs 160 marcom professionals and is part of the leading global TBWA advertising agency network.
Credits Advertising agency – TBWA\Helsinki
Markus Nieminen – Vice President, Strategy & Content Joni Furstenborg -–Creative Director Paula Sonne – Head of Communications and PR Tuomas Perälä – Senior Copywriter Hanna Karlsson – Designer Tiia Rahkonen – PR Producer Emma Pettersson – PR and Insights Trainee Mikko Kuoppasalmi – Creative Niko Hatara – Executive Producer & Head of in-house productions SCREEN\
Client – The Mannerheim League for Child Welfare
Leena Poutanen – Director of Communication and Fundraising Paula Aalto – Head of School Cooperation and Digital Youth Work
Reema is a brand strategist with a rich experience in branding and business with three Masters Degrees as well as work experience across five countries. She recently graduated from the Master’s in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts, New York where she was awarded a Brand Masters Award for academic excellence. Her previous Masters Degrees were in Management and Strategy & Consulting at EDHEC Business School in France after which she did marketing internships with Bosch in Singapore and L’Oréal in Dubai. She then worked as a Brand Strategist and Business Development Manager for 4 years at Elephant Design, India where she played a pivotal role in being a brand partner to over 30 clients such as Nestlé, Uber, Colgate, Kellogg’s, among others. She was awarded the honor of being on India’s Top 30 under 30 list for talented individuals in the Media and Advertising ecosystem by Impact Magazine. She is passionate about DIY crafting which led to her founding a start-up ‘Cardit’ where she handcrafts cards & home décor products. She loves learning about different cultures through travel and media. Her personal project on Love Languages explores love in various cultures across the world. Why are you into Branding? A brand exists in the minds of people. It is an idea that people collectively believe in. Branding is the act of creating differentiation to help form a connection with people. It is creative storytelling and has the potential to inform human behavior. The power to affect social change through creativity is what draws me to the field of branding.
Tell us something about NYC’s School Of Visual Arts. New York City is a destination for several creative minds and SVA has been fostering such artists, designers, and creative professionals since its founding in 1947. I pursued the Master’s in Branding program at SVA, which is the first and longest-running program of its kind in the world. The accelerated one-year program offers students the opportunity to learn from industry experts, work on real-world client projects, and a chance to get mentored by successful professionals.
Advertising campaigns have reinforced and even promoted gender stereotypes throughout the years. Now the perspective is different; the industry is in the process of a change. The award winner advertiser and art director Maria Jose Diaz explained what is causing this transformation.
According to Maria, a few years ago, successful campaigns were created thinking specifically about selling products and highlighting the male point of view because of their financial role in the household, while women were only in charge of taking care of the home and the family.
Female stereotypes have existed in the advertisement of most products, from clothes, toys, and home appliances to cleaning products. They were majorly due to the perception of the role women must play in society and to the low participation of females in advertising campaigns and leadership roles in the industry.
The advertising expert mentioned that the best examples are cleaning brands because they always portray women in charge of the house duties as if these were exclusive to them. This reality has generated feminine stereotypes throughout the years, sexualizing the female body, and even though it is still happening, it is also losing its impact.
“Change of behavior is coming from outside of the industry, not from the inside” the advertiser highlighted.
Before, advertising used to create trends, but now we see audiences jumping in through social media, setting the tone and demanding change because now they can provide direct feedback.
“A brand can’t use a campaign that reinforces gender stereotypes and get away with it because social media will come in. Cancel culture does not only happen to people brands could also suffer from it.” the advertiser highlighted.
The advertiser has also worked on different campaigns that challenge gender stereotypes, one of them is the campaign “We won’t wait” a student campaign with Levi’s to diminish potty parity she worked with Art Director Aditi Sobti and Copywrite Molly Baraff.
Maria Diaz also reinforced that supporting and encouraging women in creative positions will generate radical transformation because female-to-female support in the industry plays a role in overthrowing gender stereotypes. Advertising is more than a marketing strategy it is an agent of change.
First competition for advertising film / TVC in Stuttgart
The 19th Indian Film Festival Stuttgart will be expanded this year to include the section of commercial films / TVC. For the first time, there will be a competition for the German Star of India in the TV Commercial category.
Producers and agencies can submit clips to the Film Festival in Stuttgart until July 6, 2022.
Standing up for plastic: Self-rising chair foretells a rise in the use of recycled plastic
Ever since the 1950’s plastic has been a key material in design. However, for the past decade the industry has been misdirected to discuss reducing the use of plastic – when focus should in fact go to increasing its recycling rate. Therefore Fortum, a forerunner in recycled plastic compounds, has developed a self-rising chair made of recycled plastic. By picking itself up without robotics, the chair represents plastic’s comeback as a sustainable material.
To demonstrate what recycled plastics can do, Fortum has developed a chair made from Fortum Circo® recycled plastic produced from post-consumer plastic waste. The self-rising Virén Chair is inspired by Lasse Virén, a Finnish long-distance runner who fell in the middle of the 10,000-metre final in the Munich Olympics. The odds were not in his favour, but he got up, won gold, and set a new world record.
“The story of Lasse Virén – and especially his legendary win in the Munich Olympics – is still inspiring for many of us. Our ambition was to honour comebacks, progression and resilience through the Virén Chair and to show what can be achieved with recycled plastics today. Furthermore, the Virén Chair pays respect to Finnish design with characteristics of plastic furniture developed in the 1960s by Finnish designers,” says Jussi Mälkiä, Brand Manager at Fortum.
The chair has been developed together with a variety of professionals from engineers to physicists and researchers. Fortum’s creative partner behind the idea is TBWA\Helsinki and the prototype has been 3D printed together with Maker3D.
“Honoring the running legend Lasse Virén was very present at all stages of our design process. We wanted the chair to reflect his legacy with a design that is both aerodynamic and organic and takes its inspiration from running motion. When taking a closer look at the chair and more specifically the legs, one can distinguish a form of a runner preparing to take off from the starting line”, explains Umberto Onza, Lead Designer of the chair from TBWA\Helsinki.
Fortum as a forerunner in creating recycled plastic compounds
By 2019 only 9% of the plastic waste ever generated had been recycled, and in 2019 only 14% was collected for recycling (source: UNEP). The real problem lies in the deficient waste management systems, not the plastic material itself.
“Plastic is in many ways a superior material that is hard to substitute. The consumption of plastic is growing globally all the time; the discussion around plastics should instead focus on how to increase recycling. We should make sure that the value of the material is preserved by recycling the plastic and converting the waste into reusable material whenever possible,” says Anniina Rasmus, Brand Sales Manager at Fortum Recycling and Waste.
Fortum wants to expand the use of recycled plastics by developing recycled plastic compounds. In this process the qualities of the recycled plastic are enhanced so that the compounds can be used for products that are more technical and challenging in terms of production, of which the Virén Chair is a good example.
“The Virén Chair is made from Fortum Circo® recycled plastic compound reinforced with cellulose fibre to strengthen the material and reduce its carbon footprint. The carbon footprint of Fortum Circo® recycled plastic is about half that of virgin plastics. The added cellulose fibre, originating from renewable sources, also absorbs carbon, further reducing the carbon footprint of the material,” Rasmus points out.
Goose droppings in beer brewing – this Finnish city takes sustainability communications to the next level
This summer Finns can drink beer brewed with wild herbs, food waste and even goose poop. The new beers by a local microbrewery Ant Brew celebrate their hometown’s turn as European Green Capital and promote an important message of a wasteless circular economy. The Wasted Potential beer series has already gained attention both in Finland and abroad.
The Finnish city of Lahti is known for their pioneering environmental action, and for their open-minded co-operation with locals. Now the European Green Capital 2021 joins forces with the local microbrewery Ant Brew by crafting a new beer series. The Wasted Potential beers are brewed with wild herbs, local food waste, like bread, berries, and fruits – and even goose droppings.
The poop is used in a food-safe way to smoke malt to create a unique stout beer. The goose droppings are gathered from local parks, where geese are causing a messy problem. Now, the local parks get cleaner and the special edition summer beverages are perfect for a picnic in the park – a true two birds with one stone type of solution.
