If famous ad agencies were ice cream brands, what flavors would they be?
Aditya Hariharan and Joshua Namdar, a pair of students at the Miami Ad School in New York, took a swing at visualizing the answer with Agency Scoops, a Tumblr that features mockups of ice cream names and package designs for well-known agencies, themed around their more famous campaigns.
That means scary but tempting mashups like "Cookies 'N Bacon" for 360i (for its well-known clients Oreo and Oscar Meyer). Other fun visuals include one of McCann's "Dumb Ways to Die" blobs, who's very plausibly eaten himself into an early grave by way of chocolate ice cream (the only flavor that really matters, in the end).
It's a nice, simple job-hunting gimmick from Hariharan and Namdar, who are looking for summer internships. The front of the cartons also feature taglines that trend toward ingratiating, with some of them perhaps less flattering than intended. (DDB Lemon Sorbet, "a slow-churned classic agency with a hint of forward thinking," might take exception to the idea that it's only slightly innovative, like a 55-year-old VW Beetle with a new paint job, squeaking toward the future.)
Where real ice-cream might list ingredients, these cartons feature past creative highlights for each agency, as well as recent awards. There's even a timely nod to the Mad Men craze, with a 10th design featuring fictional agency Sterling Cooper & Partners.
Ogilvy & Mather, represented as Coca-Cola, is maybe the only one that seems a bit off the mark, in spirit. Yes, the smash hit personalized bottle campaign originally came out of Ogilvy's Sydney offices. And the "2nd Lives" campaign from China was a head-turner. But everyone and their mother has worked for Coke, somewhere in the world, and the agency's brand might be more strongly associated IBM or Dove.
Then again, nobody wants to eat mint chocolate microchip or soap flavored ice cream.
