This weeks branding news digest

Design Week Benchmark Award Winners

See all the brand award winners in Design Weeks Benchmark Awards. A great resource to get some really creative ideas for 2010.

Winners include the BBC News graphics, which we probably all now and recognise, as well as the overall winner Coca-Cola.

Avatar Ad for Car

Honda launched a brand-new, special effects packed, 60-second ad in cinemas yesterday to play before showings of James Cameron’s new blockbuster Avatar.

The ad, which is called ‘Everything’, uses 972 edits and was designed to showcase all aspects of the work that goes on at Honda and how it’s eventually all utilised in cars.

It’s a pretty impressive advert and the music and sound effects complement the film beautifully.  For me, the whole thing’s got a great feeling of simplicity in the message, despite all of the complexity of the process.

The other interesting point about this is that Honda have decided to run this exclusively alongside showings of Avatar for six weeks.   Loads of big brands like Coca Cola and McDonalds are doing similar things with their campaigns too.  Contra deals like this one between brands and film studios have become quite a trend over recent years and more increasingly films are promoting themselves for free on the back of a brands marketing spend; helpful when you’ve spent $500million producing the film!

Check out the Honda ad here before it hits TV channels on 18^th Jan.

WANTED: New Representation for EU Organisation

A competition has been launched this week inviting designers to submit ideas of how a new European flag could look.

The current EU emblem is the 12 gold stars on the royal blue background, which bares little representation of a modern Europe.  The idea of the competition is that designers will come up with flags that reflect more of an identity of Europe, highlighting the diversity in cultures, languages, traditions and beliefs.

It’s quite a thought provoking idea really.  Whilst it’s true that the 12 identical stars on the EU emblem don’t reflect much of the true character of Europe, that’s the case with the majority of flags!

Participants are urged to think about what symbols they should use on the flag, encouraging individual and interesting designs, rather than the usual combination of stripes and/or stars that adorn most flags.

There has been an incentive like this before.  In 2002 a Dutch architect called Rem Koolhaas came up with a new design to rebrand the Union in a way that represents Europe’s diversity and unity.  His design used thin stripes to represent every country in the EU, using the colours of each country’s individual flag.  The result was…interesting, and very bright!  Some people described it as looking like wallpaper, whilst others preferred to compare it to a TV test card!  Either way, it was never adopted as the new EU emblem!

For me, the best flag in the world is definitely the Argentinean one with the sunshine face on it, so I would probably go down a similar ‘feel good emblem’ type route.

What would you do?.