ICM - Leeds Design Agency

Today is World AIDS Day.

The statistics are still shocking.

In the UK alone
• More than 80,000 people living with HIV
• One in three people with HIV are undiagnosed
• One in every 360 pregnant women in the UK is HIV positive

Worldwide, 2 million people died from HIV-related causes last year. That’s more than the entire population of Leeds, Manchester and Birmingham put together. It’s more than the entire popluation of several African countries.

This weekend I went to see the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It was fantastic, and worthy of it’s own blog, which it will get in a bit. The icing on the cake was the bonus exhibition showing for this week only – a little room at the bottom of the gallery, showcasing the covers she took for Vanity Fair, about “the challenge, the promise, and the future of Africa”. They’re well worth a look…

The exhibition was hosted by (RED), who so far have helped purchase antiretroviral treatments for nearly 80,000 people in Rwansa, Swaziland, Ghana and Lesotho.

Do what you can. Get involved. Buy RED. Save live…

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can now be used (if you have an iphone) to do searches on them. Google has come up with the free application which can be downloaded to your iphone. It uses voice recognition technology to allow the user to search for contacts in their phonebook and to find where the nearest italian restaurant is, all they need to do is talk to their iphone. Amazing all I need now is an ipho…

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You might think that we’ve had way too much time on our hands and so have cunningly photoshopped an ad into the Xbox game, Burnout. Nay, we would say, this is real live footage from the game.

In order to reach the 18 – 25 market his team have already explored many of the tools that are becoming an everyday of digital marketing. Obama has pages on Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. These tools are becoming fundamental to many marketing campaigns, but what is surprising about the US Presidential candidate’s use of these tools is that he’s a politician. Can you imagine Gordon Brown recording his everyday thoughts on Twitter and listing his favourite books on Facebook? These tools will help to capture the imagination of the youth of America, while strengthening the Obama brand.

The highlight of the campaign for me is the Yes We Can Obama Song. The Obama campaign had no involvement in the making of this video and I bet there are brand managers across the world wondering how to replicate this kind of publici…

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