Here's what Fast Company Create has to say about our recent work developing a new milkshake brand for our clients Arla Foods.

The London agency has demonstrated a way with food advertising. Recently
it was charged with creating a whole brand identity for a frothy new
product.

Childlike but not childish was the challenge Wieden + Kennedy London
set itself when presented with a brief from Arla Foods to create a
brand, packaging, and tone of voice for Gulp–a new milkshake launched
in the U.K. last week.

The agency has previously created standout ad campaigns for the food company’s Cravendale and Lurpak
brands. It was given the chance to create the Gulp brand from scratch
after developing packaging as part of its "Be Wonderful and Wise"
campaign for the launch of Lurpak Lightest in January 2012.

"It was a dream job for us really," says W+K London Creative Director
Ray Shaughnessy of the Gulp assignment. "While we’ve worked previously
to put campaign assets onto existing packaging, this was a chance to
create something from scratch in a totally holistic way."

Though it has no dedicated packaging design department, W+K London
does have an in-house design function overseen by Guy Featherstone, the
agency’s head of craft which, in recent months, has attracted a growing
number of design assignments.

The Gulp brand was developed through close collaboration between W+K
London designer Michael Bow and copywriter Caroline Riis. "All we had to
work on was the name, the style of bottle, and the target market," Riis
says.

The design, the words, and the overall brand tone were developed
simultaneously with each informing the other. Inspiration came from the
comical language and poetic meter of Roald Dahl and Dr. Seuss, she adds.

"The key was to create an attitude rather than just a piece of
packaging which would power the brand," Bow explains. "Because of the
name, we wanted a fun style and tone that would play on the product
being something people would gulp down."

Shaughnessy adds: "Gulp is a milkshake launching into a category
over-exhausted with products featuring big gloopy bubble writing on the
pack. To disrupt this, what we needed was an ownable idea. With the
style and tone of what we’ve ended up with, we hope Gulp can do just
that."

Whatever you think about climate change,
its clear the battle to save the world (or our finances, depending on how you
view it) isn’t a clean one. Recently, the fight has gone online. According to environmentalist
Al Gore and his people, lobbyists (mainly for fossil fuels) have started to
foul public perception through a massive online campaign of disinformation: posting
evidence that climate change isn’t happening, seeding doubt about global
warming, and so on. Trolling, in other words.

Enter ‘Reality Drop’ – Al Gore enlists
supporters to challenge deniers across the web. What’s more, he’s made fighting climate
change deniers into a game. For those of you that don’t know, gamification
is basically an idea that’s steadily gained traction over the last few years – you can
change people’s behaviour by offering small incentives, like points, that can
be accrued over time to achieve greater rewards; you get them to compete with each other with things like a progress bar and via rankings or leaderboards; all in the name of whatever cause you choose.

In the context of Reality Drop, you get
points for fighting off the cronies of Big Oil online, on blogs and articles, leaving accurate information and challenging erroneous beliefs. Your
rank rises the more you do; the better you are, the more you can do, until you form part of the elite cadre finding and judging articles
that need to have reality ‘dropped’ on them.

This isn’t just about
arguing over whether climate change is happening or not – the muddy ground where the deniers are fighting. Reality Drop ups the stakes. Gaming behaviour is enlisted to save the world (and it leads to an interesting bit of mental gymnastics: people play reality as if it were a video game via a game that aims to reassert reality as a real thing). 

Whether it works or not, it’s a great idea: change might be brought through story-telling, fighting off evil minions and setting up a Big Bad. In other words, by treating the world a bit more like an episode of Buffy. 

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(Thoughts courtesy of Planning Placement newbie James.)