Our planner, Georgia Challis, has just returned from a trip to Canada for the annual 'Ads Worth Spreading' event at the TED 2014 conference, where she was representing our Honda 'Hands' spot. She fills us in on what she saw, did and ate out there:

As we mentioned last week on this very blog, our Honda ‘Hands’ spot was named one of TED’s ‘Ads worth spreading’. The prize was a trip out to the TED mothership -  or at least to the Whistler sister of the BIG TED Vancouver extravaganza. 

[Georgia living the Canadian dream]

It was a pretty incredible, pretty full on couple of days. A LOT of stuff to take in. 

The Vancouver conference itself is live streamed over hundreds of megascreens in several different conference halls, all lit like blue and red hued laser domes and scattered with the modern conference’s seating of choice – bean bags, recliners, the occasional sofa… and a couple of beds from which you could watch talks beamed on to the ceiling (for when the bean bags got a bit tiresome).

So, from my LED lit bean bag, a few of my highlights from the week’s sessions:

Ed Yong: a mind bending introduction to the manipulative world of parasites. Proper sci fi sounding stuff, except it it’s not only NOT fiction (just sci then), it’s pretty common stuff out there in the big, nasty natural world. It turns out nature’s a bit of a fucker. From the wasp that turns its caterpillar host into a “head-banging zombie bodyguard defending the offspring of the creature that killed it” to the virus toxoplama gondii, a virus which can live in most mammals but can only reproduce in cats. Hosts to the virus, rats and mice, become inexplicably drawn towards cats –the virus compels them to get eaten in order to reproduce . About one third of humans carry it with no observable side effects but I reckon it explains a LOT of the internet.

David Epstein: Over the last century we’ve gotten faster, jumped higher and thrown further. In 1954, Sir Roger Bannister became the first man in the world to run the mile under four minutes, and last year 1,314 runners did that. But it turns out we haven’t miraculously evolved over an improbably short timeframe. Most of it is down to better technology (thank you Nike), a better understanding of specialised body types and a bit of mind over matter. Oh, and the bum. The bum hasn’t actually changed but it IS what makes humans so well placed for athletics, the not-so-hidden power that lets us run upright.

Randall Munroe: The former NASA roboticist turned cartoonist took us through the ‘simple’ calculation he made to estimate the physical size Google’s data would represent if it was all held on punch cards (the whole of New England, to a depth of 6 kilometers), plus Google’s encoded punch card response.

Amputee and bionic limb designer Hugh Herr gave us a glimpse of the future of bionics, from prosthetic limbs that are controlled by the nerve endings of the limb they attach to, to exoskeletons that remove the pressure on the joints of able-bodied runners. The ultimate ‘can do’ philosopher, he argued that “there is no such thing as a disabled person, no such thing as a broken person, just broken technology and an inadequate environment”. His talk ended with a dance performance from a dancer who lost a leg in the Boston Marathon terror attack. “It took 3.5 seconds to destroy her leg, it took us 200 days to build it back”. Even the four cynics in the audience were moved.

Rob Knight: Turns out microbes are a pretty big deal. We share 99.9% of our DNA with the next guy, but microbes? Apparently only about 10% of our microbes are similar to anyone else. You can link a computer mouse to a user just by their microbe profile. Microbes on our skin are the things that determine how appetising we are to mosquitos, microbes in the gut determine whether painkillers are toxic to our liver, microbes transplanted from the guts of obese mice into the guts of svelte mice make svelte mice decidedly less svelte.

And then there was Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden  – beamed in from the Russian hinterlands and encased in a robot screen. Definitely a bit of an “I was there” moment for the crowd, not a redundant smartphone in the house. 

And some stuff that you can’t watch from home:

1. Never before have I encountered quite so many functional foods. Water that smells of berries, chocolate flavoured quinoa and spirulina bars, freeze dried seaweed (NOT as “strangely addictive” as the pack suggests), almonds flavoured with cranberry. Pretty much nothing in its original form.

2. The general vibe is not unlike how I’d imagine the first heady ‘getting to know you’ days of some sort of freshers fair for the unusually gifted. 

4. GINORMOUS name tabards. All the better to meet you with. It is genuinely nice to step out of the European ‘too cool for school’ ad world into one where people from the American Mid West to Bangladesh will happily walk up with no introduction and tell you how much they love, love, love your ad, before insisting on a selfie.

5. TED has tech hitches just like the rest of us. The next time you’re about to roll your eyes at a conference call gone haywire, just know that even when it’s the NSA in front of an auditorium filled to the rafters with everyone from the inventor of the internet to the queen of the romcom, that shit happens to everyone.

6. TED speakers have hitches just like the rest of us. Yup. They get edited out in the final videos, but I witnessed superstar DJ’s and brain meltingly clever physicists stalling up there on that stage. A glimmer of hope for the rest of us.

It's 'School Report' time at Campaign, when the advertising industry mag rates the top 100 or so agencies on their performance in the previous year.

They gave us a score of 8 out of 9, for the second year in a row (don't ask me why they score it out of 9) which equates to a rating of 'excellent'. Can't really complain about that. 

Here's what they said about us:

A lot of creative agencies like to say they are all about the work. But with Wieden & Kennedy London this year, there is very little else to talk about – except perhaps the shop hiring more people to do the work.

Staff numbers were up 34 per cent to 190 in 2013. That’s two more than Wieden & Kennedy had in 2010 before Nokia – then its largest client – took its custom elsewhere, and the agency was forced to axe more than a third of its employees.

The creative duo Paul Knott and Tim Vance joined from Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO in August, while the creative directors Dave Day and Larry Seftel joined from Mother in November. Later that same month, Christen Brestrup and Bertie Scrase joined from Crispin Porter & Bogusky, where they had been responsible for some of the best Paddy Power ads. The agency must have felt a certain delight in nicking Brestrup and Scrase, given that the CP&B creative directors were former Wieden & Kennedy stars who jumped ship.

Wieden & Kennedy set the bar high early on in terms of work. Its "the pony" spot for Three, released in February, was a genuine viral smash and easily the 2013 highlight. That said, its spots for Honda and Lurpak would make anyone’s highlight reel for the year too.

The horsemeat scandal that engulfed Tesco gave Wieden & Kennedy the chance to flex a different set of muscles: drafting the supermarket’s apology. The newspaper ads made headlines in their own right, but were later banned by the Advertising Standards Authority for stating that meat standards were an issue for the entire food industry. It seems that the agency has yet to fully stretch itself on the Tesco account.

In addition to wheeling out ancient long-copy skills, Wieden & Kennedy showed off its tech credentials, creating an app for Stride gum that was controlled by chewing motions – it won an award from the Internet Advertising Bureau.

In short, 2013 was a good year for an agency that seemed to be enjoying itself once again.

Well, one or two remarks from teacher there to encourage us to try harder, but mostly a good report. We deserve sweets!

Elsewhere in the same issue, Campaign published their latest 'top 100' league table of agencies by billings. Billings (media spend by an agency's clients) are a pretty meaningless way of measuring an agency's performance as they're wholly unrelated these days to a creative agency's income. Having said that – in this instance BILLINGS ROCK because we have smashed our way up the top 20 table, up seven places from number 20 to number 13, with a reported rise of 25%, which according to Campaign makes us the fastest growing agency in the UK top 20 last year.