Yuletide Seasonal Thingamajigs From Sell! Sell!


The holiday season is upon us, so we’re signing off until after new year. Thanks for reading, and sharing your thoughts and opinions on the blog this year - we hope you'll join us again in 2012. It's fair to say that 2011 was particularly kind to us here at Sell! Towers, due in no small part to a lot of hard work. Looking back, it has probably been our best year in terms of creative work (which is, after all, why we do it in the first place) which sets a bar for us to try to exceed next year, at least. A huge thanks to everyone who has helped us and worked with us this year to make it all happen. Have a cracking Christmas, and all the best for 2012. Cheers!

[Thanks to Delicious Industries for the Christmas image]

Thierry Le Gouès

Photographer Thierry Le Gouès has a great collection of work.

We particularly like the high contract, dark & moody 'Soul' set below.



George Fucking Lois At Offset

George Lois is fucking great isn't he? He makes me want to fucking swear in every fucking sentence for a fucking start. If the ad business had more fucking people like George in it these fucking days, rather than being run by fucking suits and accountants, it would be in less of a fucking state. This is a fucking brilliant lecture he gave at fucking Offset. Normally I fucking hate these conference/festival/talk-a-thon bullshit things. But. George is fucking great. Have a fucking great fucking Friday. George, we fucking love you.

Water Water Everywhere

Ben Kay has made this ad for his campaign against bottle water, with help from various talented and generous-spirited people. It's a great example of proper advertising craft putting across a simple message. The kind of work that's under-celebrated and underrated, in favour of the look at me creadivvidee that is popular these days. Anyway, watch it, then go to the website. I makes me need to pee though. Just saying.

A Taste Of The Extraordinary: Our First Work For Drambuie


A couple of months ago we started working with Drambuie. The aim - to introduce a new generation of people to this unique drink. For a lot of people, Drambuie is a vague memory that lives at the back of their parents' (or grandparents') drinks cabinet, brought out once a year at Christmas. Or worse still, they haven't heard of it at all.

The new campaign will be rolling out across Drambuie's markets around the world next year, but London is getting a bit of a sneak preview over the next few weeks with this new print work.


The idea behind A Taste Of The Extraordinary is to bring to life the thing that makes Drambuie unique - its taste. It's still made to a secret recipe, taking a selection of malt whiskies from Speyside and the Highlands and blending them with spices, heather honey and herbs. But obviously with this being the world of premium alcoholic drinks, it's about much more than pure tangible product points - imbuing it with a sense of mystery and desirability is vital to get people to even consider it.


There are so many pragmatic and logical campaigns out there these days, so we wanted to make A Taste Of The Extraordinary a little more esoteric, explain a little less and intrigue a little more. Inspired by the vast history of surreal art, photography and film, we set out to create images that reflect Drambuie's taste.


To bring the ideas to life, we went to photographer John Ross, famous for his iconic record covers for Spiritualized, The Pet Shop Boys and Manic Street Preachers (among others) and known for his technical skill and creativity.

To achieve the timeless quality we wanted in the images, we decided to shoot on large format film rather than digital. It was quite difficult for John's team to even locate enough film for the shoot - it's amazing to think of the extent to which the world has completely moved over to digital, especially over the last couple of years. 


The sets for the shots were built by model-maker. The black and white parquet floor alone took seven days to build from 6000 pieces hardwood. The walls were cast in white concrete, deliberately left with an imperfect finish.


To create the atmospheric feel, and the amazing shadows with the light cast of the liquid running through, each shot was taken four different ways. Once for the bottle itself, once for the black part of the shadow, then to create the light cast, and finally set up for the right effect on the white wall and floor.


The man in the images was shot (again on film) with lighting to match the sets, in John's second studio. Then the bottles and glasses were shot separately on matching film, with the same light effects, but with added light from the behind them, to create the perfect, luminous colour of the liquid.


The work was painstaking, but necessary to create the right effect. We also shot everything digitally as we went along, for reference to check that the film elements would combine in the right way when printed. The different versions of the images were expertly scanned and blended together by very clever post guys. Again, it required a lot of expert and time-consuming work to pull though the right parts of each shot to create the finished effect.


A huge thanks to Helen, John, Tony, Shin, Yumi, Juliet and Lesley for all their help and hard work and for going the extra mile to make it happen, and to the guys at Drambuie for seeing the potential in the idea in the first place, and for matching our ambition for the realisation of it.

RGB Transition

A video image consists of three primary components - red, green and blue. For this work each component channel was fed a differently timed sequence of 50 common video transitions. As the three components recombine to create a video image; constantly changing forms and colours are revealed.

Made by Timothy Evans in collaboration with Daniel Eatock



Swiped via Rubbishcorp.

New Work For Fentimans

Things have been pretty busy around here for the past few months, so we haven't kept the blog updated with new work as much as we'd like. Over the next few days we're going to post up some of the things that have been keeping us busy. Starting with Fentimans.

If you're our regular reader, you've probably seen most of our previous work for Fentimans, the smashing, family-owned botanical brewers (and our longest standing client). Over the last few months we've been doing a series of small space print advertisements for them, in the signature irreverent Fentimans style. As always, trying to make a little go a long way in terms of bang for their buck. Here are a couple of examples:










We also produced this ad specifically to go the back page of The Chap:


And this new Furtling beer mat for Fentimans Dandelion & Burdock, illustrated by Steve Noble:

Bill Bernbach Said #46

Number 46 in our Bernbach series...

“Word of mouth is the best medium of all.”

Read all of the previous Bernbach Said posts here.

Possibly The Most Dense Email We’ve Ever Received

It's up against some stiff competition, but this email makes the "I'm an African Prince looking to deposit 5m US Dollars into your account" type emails look like small gems of genius.

Bill Bernbach Said #45

Number 45 in our Bernbach series...

“It took millions of years for man’s instincts to develop. It will take millions more for them to even vary. It is fashionable to talk about changing man. A communicator must be concerned with unchanging man, with his obsessive drive to survive, to be admired, to succeed, to love, to take care of his own.”

Read all of the previous Bernbach Said posts here.