Young Kev asked me to show you my new baby on The Crossed Cow, so here he is, bless him…
When I say Young Kev, he’s actually a Senior Designer now with flecks of grey hair, seven solid years service at The Partners and the first, early indication of man-boobs. However, when I first started at TP, Kev was only 12 years old, wore no shoes and was an enthusiastic puppy that never went home and even came into the studio on his rare days off.
The Magic photocopier video from Pub Quiz 2007
Nowadays, he’s older and wiser and even occasionally wears shoes, but he’s still an
enthusiastic chap who stays far too long and comes in on his days off now and then. Call it dedication? Call it sad? He assures me that he has lots of friends and a life outside of work –
at least on Facebook anyway…
So, enough about Kev, what about my baby Dad Club who popped out of my bulging brain, all sticky with mucky goo, seven years ago over a very long and boozy lunch at Bagatti’s Italian Bistro in Kingston-upon-Thames. At first, I had to constantly remind the others that we were called ‘Dad Club’, not Dad’s Club. One is a brand name; the other is merely a generic description. Pretentious I know, but then again, one does work in branding you know. Think of it as Fight Club but with projectile-vomiting and burping rather than punch-ups and bruising. There were seven of us at first (spooky) and now, in real life anyway, there are only four. What about the three missing daddies? Well, one went to Oz, after landing a super job in Sydney, one went to Hong Kong with HP and one went ‘wee wee wee wee wee’, all the way home – to Holland.
And just why, you might ask, is this relevant to TP and branding? Well, I always used to tell my chums that one fine day we’d have our very own Dad Club logo to plonk on a t-shirt, just to make myself look interesting (they still think I’m a Creative Director at TP, they’ll never know the truth, and really don’t need to). Nothing happened for ages of course as we’re dads and lead very busy lives, and multi-tasking has never been a specialty – and, after all, why do something today that can be put off until next week? Or next month even. Sorry dear. Tomorrow? OK, this afternoon. No problem… However, we kept meeting up every now and then until one day we thought, why not develop our own social networking site for dads? If you think about it, there’s not much out there for us bunch of sad losers, caught between office and orifice, instead of hunting and humping like our forebears. Also, socially, whereas mums meet other mums quite naturally through nursery drop-offs, school runs and lesbian orgies at coffee mornings, dads typically do not have a strong support network. Also, let’s face it; mums are just a more sociable bunch than us dads. Our aims at the outset were very simple and modest in both scale and ambition – we just wanted to sneak out to the pub occasionally and thought that by branding our night out ‘Dad Club’ we would legitimise it in some way and this would help keep our lovely wives at bay.
Things really took off, creatively at least, when all the dads at The Partners (Jim, Nick C, Martin, Nick E, Alex, Greg B and old dad Greg Q) got involved, more by accident than design. Whenever we had a placement in I would slip them a fiver in a brown paper envelope and ask them to have a pop at a logo, but only in down time of course. One youngster, Luke Taylor, now a Partner at Us, came up with something pretty good, which was a spoof on the Playmobil mark. We didn’t progress it but it was enough to whet Mr Q’s appetite when he chanced upon it while roaming the studio in the wee early hours pretending he had work to do so he didn’t have to go home and bathe his own kids.
We gradually learned how to walk and talk and Alex produced some gorgeous illustration, and developed the Rogues Gallery. I got to write some words in between pressing client flesh and totting up budgets, Greg directed via inspired post-it notes and Jay Lock was our hungry, keen design bitch. When things got real we drafted in Mike Reed for copy duties including rewriting the dodgy bits and contributing The Front Line column. Mike was great, not only because he was a Dad himself but he also put us in touch with David Hughes who brought everything to life online.
So, what’s it all about? I used to describe it as the ‘world’s only online social club for dads’, but then Mrs H said that sounded too common (and she’s from Plymouth). So it morphed into ‘the online pub for dads’, and now it’s ‘facebook for dads’, depending on what day of the week it is and who we’re talking to – now that’s what I call brand consistency! Personality wise, we don’t take ourselves too seriously and we’re not necessarily going to help anyone with insightful advice or handy tips on fatherhood, but we will know someone who can and will point victims in the right direction. We appreciate though that men are not that good at asking directions and will rather get lost for hours than ask for help in finding the Tampon section in Tesco. For the time being though, we still like Nob Gags. (Knob or Nob – I’m never quite sure, please let me know via our comments page). In time though, who knows, we might just get bigger, more serious and maybe even useful, but for the time being we’re happy just to be let out occasionally for good behaviour.
So, everybody’s happy, Dad Club got a world-class identity to be proud of and The Partners deservedly won a whole raft of awards for the creative work: Silver for Identity at New York Festivals in Jan 2007, Best Identity in Not-for-Profit category Design Week Benchmarks in 2007 and, best of all, Best Identity at the Chip Shop Awards up in Edinburgh in the same year. It even attracted a little bit of controversy as some doubters thought it wasn’t a real jobby at all; that it was just conveniently made up for an awards entry – well, I can assure them that it’s real as the baby vom adorning my shoes.
OK, so it’s not exactly a brand new baby, it’s been around for a while, but it’s still learning to crawl, does awful smelly poos and spews and hasn’t made too many friends yet (50 and counting).
So why not pop on over for half an online shandy and a pack of virtual pork scratchings to www.dadclub.co.uk – or, if you just want to dip your toe in our dirty bath water and go for a taster to DIY oh why.
And, if you know any dads, friends who want to be dads or just people who have dads, please let them know too and help us get to 65 so we can all retire and live happily ever after.
The end.
Or is it just the beginning?
My new baby: Dad Club
Young Kev asked me to show you my new baby on The Crossed Cow, so here he is, bless him…
When I say Young Kev, he’s actually a Senior Designer now with flecks of grey hair, seven solid years service at The Partners and the first, early indication of man-boobs. However, when I first started at TP, Kev was only 12 years old, wore no shoes and was an enthusiastic puppy that never went home and even came into the studio on his rare days off.
The Magic photocopier video from Pub Quiz 2007
Nowadays, he’s older and wiser and even occasionally wears shoes, but he’s still an enthusiastic chap who stays far too long and comes in on his days off now and then. Call it dedication? Call it sad? He assures me that he has lots of friends and a life outside of work – at least on Facebook anyway…
So, enough about Kev, what about my baby Dad Club who popped out of my bulging brain, all sticky with mucky goo, seven years ago over a very long and boozy lunch at Bagatti’s Italian Bistro in Kingston-upon-Thames. At first, I had to constantly remind the others that we were called ‘Dad Club’, not Dad’s Club. One is a brand name; the other is merely a generic description. Pretentious I know, but then again, one does work in branding you know. Think of it as Fight Club but with projectile-vomiting and burping rather than punch-ups and bruising. There were seven of us at first (spooky) and now, in real life anyway, there are only four. What about the three missing daddies? Well, one went to Oz, after landing a super job in Sydney, one went to Hong Kong with HP and one went ‘wee wee wee wee wee’, all the way home – to Holland.
And just why, you might ask, is this relevant to TP and branding? Well, I always used to tell my chums that one fine day we’d have our very own Dad Club logo to plonk on a t-shirt, just to make myself look interesting (they still think I’m a Creative Director at TP, they’ll never know the truth, and really don’t need to). Nothing happened for ages of course as we’re dads and lead very busy lives, and multi-tasking has never been a specialty – and, after all, why do something today that can be put off until next week? Or next month even. Sorry dear. Tomorrow? OK, this afternoon. No problem… However, we kept meeting up every now and then until one day we thought, why not develop our own social networking site for dads? If you think about it, there’s not much out there for us bunch of sad losers, caught between office and orifice, instead of hunting and humping like our forebears. Also, socially, whereas mums meet other mums quite naturally through nursery drop-offs, school runs and lesbian orgies at coffee mornings, dads typically do not have a strong support network. Also, let’s face it; mums are just a more sociable bunch than us dads. Our aims at the outset were very simple and modest in both scale and ambition – we just wanted to sneak out to the pub occasionally and thought that by branding our night out ‘Dad Club’ we would legitimise it in some way and this would help keep our lovely wives at bay.
Things really took off, creatively at least, when all the dads at The Partners (Jim, Nick C, Martin, Nick E, Alex, Greg B and old dad Greg Q) got involved, more by accident than design. Whenever we had a placement in I would slip them a fiver in a brown paper envelope and ask them to have a pop at a logo, but only in down time of course. One youngster, Luke Taylor, now a Partner at Us, came up with something pretty good, which was a spoof on the Playmobil mark. We didn’t progress it but it was enough to whet Mr Q’s appetite when he chanced upon it while roaming the studio in the wee early hours pretending he had work to do so he didn’t have to go home and bathe his own kids.
We gradually learned how to walk and talk and Alex produced some gorgeous illustration, and developed the Rogues Gallery. I got to write some words in between pressing client flesh and totting up budgets, Greg directed via inspired post-it notes and Jay Lock was our hungry, keen design bitch. When things got real we drafted in Mike Reed for copy duties including rewriting the dodgy bits and contributing The Front Line column. Mike was great, not only because he was a Dad himself but he also put us in touch with David Hughes who brought everything to life online.
OK, so it’s not exactly a brand new baby, it’s been around for a while, but it’s still learning to crawl, does awful smelly poos and spews and hasn’t made too many friends yet (50 and counting).
So why not pop on over for half an online shandy and a pack of virtual pork scratchings to www.dadclub.co.uk – or, if you just want to dip your toe in our dirty bath water and go for a taster to DIY oh why.
And, if you know any dads, friends who want to be dads or just people who have dads, please let them know too and help us get to 65 so we can all retire and live happily ever after.
The end.
Or is it just the beginning?