MAKE OVER FOR AD DEPOT

Brisbane agency Ad Depot has changed its name to Make, the last in a series of changes for the fast moving shop. Since October, they lured Brisbane's top Creative Director, Rem Bruijn from McCann, added 4 new accounts, moved premises, created one of Australia’s most talked about viral campaigns and helped to bring the co-founder of the internet to the Australian business community.
“It has certainly been an exciting time”, enthused Managing Partner, Murray Berghan. “The Brisbane advertising landscape has seen quite a deal of change in the last few months, at a time when the entire industry is scrambling to get up to speed with the influx of new technology-enabled possibilities. The re-brand is about positioning ourselves as a unique offering within this marketplace.”
The agency relaunched yesterday by unveiling itself as the major sponsor of a business luncheon with the co-founder of the internet and Google Senior Vice President, Dr Vinton Cerf. Dr Cerf addressed an audience of 700 business and community leaders on the topic of ‘The internet, infinity and beyond”.
"The Vinton Cerf Seminar sponsorship was very much us making a strategic statement to our marketplace”, explains CD, Rem Bruijn, who moved across from McCann Brisbane last October. “The internet is now the second most engaged medium behind television and catching fast. You’d be mad not to consider it in your channel planning. But that’s not the reason for the sponsorship. It’s more about recognising the influence that this increase in time spent on the internet has had on what people will or won’t engage with. It’s also about understanding that if you do engage your market in a rewarding way, regardless of medium, the wired word-of-mouth network that is the internet can become your unpaid sales force. Now more than ever, engagement is king.”
Bruijn, who has authored some of Queensland’s most revered and awarded mainstream work, is careful not to be misrepresented,” We are definitely not positioning ourselves as a digital agency. But we have most definitely thrown ourselves into the online social networking space as part of offering our clients a complete arsenal of expertise”.
Evidence of this is make’s ‘Believe in Destiny’ campaign for client rare|wear. The internet hoax released to coincide with Valentine’s Day received over 2 million views in the first week of launch.
“The strategy behind “Believe in Destiny” campaign was to create relevant, targeted content for our client”, explains Berghan. “Rare|wear is a limited edition clothing company. The opposite of mass-produced, rare|wear is about expressing your individuality. Plus it means there’s not a whole lot of clothes to go around.”
The viral video released as ‘Streakers Love Story’ featured a news report about two nudist, streaker, sausage dog lovers who on opposite sides of the globe were introduced and subsequently fell in love online. The story culminated with them streaking from opposite sides of the field at a Hungarian Soccer Match and running into each others arms in front of a full stadium of people. The news report then promised viewers the opportunity to see their nude wedding at rare|wear’s www.believeindestiny.com website.
Which, as Bruijn puts it, ”was a big fat lie. We wanted to explore the ethics of the whole internet hoax thing – where does entertainment stop and manipulation begin? So we gave our market the opportunity to interact and have their say on the issue. The website came clean about being a hoax. But we upped the ante by misleading them there to begin with.”
So what message did the voters send to the advertisers of the world? Bruijn says that the results of the ethics poll are quite surprising and - presumably to get even more of us to engage his client’s brand - will be released on the believeindestiny site on March 15.
Make has also been busy on the new business front with Natural Gas, Bond University, Hear and Say and Youngcare all coming on board. With everything going so well, why the name change?
Says Berghan: “Ad Depot had been creating quite a good name for itself, despite it not really being a good name. At last count there were 61 agencies with the word Ad in front of their name. Now there’s one less. The philosopical change in direction that we took four years ago meant that we’d kind of outgrown it a while back. Now that we’ve moved premises, brought Rem across and got our offering right, the stars are in alignment.”

Pictured: ‘make’ directors, Rem Bruijn and Murray Berghan with the co-founder of the internet, Dr Vinton Cerf [centre], at the ‘Internet, infinity and beyond’ luncheon in Brisbane yesterday [Thursday, March 8].