YAHOO! CHALLENGES AUSTRALIAN CREATIVE COMMUNITY - TEAMS LOCKED INTO YAHOO! THINK TANK

With media consumption habits undergoing their biggest shift in decades, Yahoo! Australia & NZ is mounting an innovative campaign which challenges the Australian advertising community to make online activity a major component of future campaigns.

The Yahoo! Think Tank (www.yahoothinktank.com.au), is a transparent acrylic box measuring just 3.6 metres by 4.8 metres and standing three metres high. It is furnished as a fully-functioning creative studio including a desk, PC and white boards.

A rotating team of creatives from hot-shop The Glue Society including Creative Director Jonathan Kneebone as well as Matt Devine & Luke Crethar, creators of the recent Virgin Mobile Jason Donovan campaign, will be joined by guests from Australia’s creative advertising agencies and live in the tank 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week for a fortnight (Thursday, November 3rd to Thursday, November 17th). Their task will be to prove the power of online creativity by generating responses to creative briefs submitted via the website.

Anybody can submit briefs for consideration and each agency or client will then be alerted via email so they can watch and listen (via webcams and microphones) as the creatives work on their response. Each idea will be turned around in five minutes and the ideas generated are then returned to the agency or client that submitted the original brief. It is expected that dozens of briefs will be worked through every day.

According to Brett Corrick, Marketing Director, Yahoo! Australia & NZ, the Yahoo! Think Tank is about championing creativity online. “Our aim is to help creative teams to overcome the perceived barriers of the online medium. In my experience many agencies are still treating online as a last minute extension to campaign rather than playing a central role in a campaign or idea. We feel that this does not reflect the central role that online plays in people’s lives today.

“An initiative like the Think Tank is Yahoo!’s way of showcasing a campaign built around a digital environment. It in itself – is a big idea online.”

At the core of the Yahoo! Think Tank will be the Big Idea Chair from Yahoo!. A well-established advertising honour in the US, this is the first time the huge purple chair has visited Australia and is being used to shine a spotlight on the companies and campaigns that demonstrate remarkable creativity. The first Big Idea Chair to be presented in Australia will be awarded to Agency Of The Year at the forthcoming AWARD night on November 11th. In an extension of the relationship with AWARD, students will be invited to cover shifts in the Yahoo! Think Tank with one team winning a placement with The Glue Society.

“The Yahoo! Big Idea chair gives Yahoo! Australia & NZ a platform to salute Australian creative work that stands out and makes us wish it was ours. We are seeing a growing number of outstanding creative ideas executed online, however, we hope that the creative output from the Think Tank sparks the imaginations of the Australian creative industry and inspires them to make online more central to their campaign ideas,” concluded Corrick.

Visitors to the specially-created website will be able to interact with the occupants of the Yahoo! Think Tank, suggesting themes for the day, following the blog and submitting messages which will appear on a LED ticker inside the Tank. Creative ideas will also be posted in an online gallery for web visitors to rate.

Special guest creatives include:

M&C SAATCHI
Chris Round
Laurie Ingram

THREE DRUNK MONKEYS
Justin Drape
Scott Nowell

12:20
Christian Finucane
Jon Skinner

THE CAMPAIGN PALACE RED CELL
David Johnson
Yanni Pounartzis

LEO BURNETT
Kieron Ots
Brent Tunney

CELL
BOBBY GASSEY

The Yahoo! Think Tank is the first work produced by Host since its appointment by Yahoo! Australia & NZ in August, 2005.

Agency: Host
Creative: The Glue Society
Digital: The Farm