DECIDE THE COVER FOR VOL. 4/2012

It's your chance to decide what will grace the cover of the next issue of Lürzer’s Archive. Michael Weinzettl talks us through the five candidates. 'Like' your favourite on our Facebook page for the chance to win a year's free subscription and digital access. 

Image: You can vote for your favourite cover on our Facebook page from Friday 6 July 9am CEST.

I’m happy to report that the final election and layout for Vol. 4/2012 of Lürzer’s Archive has been completed now and it will be published on 16 August. So it’s high time for us to choose a cover for that issue.

As most of you will know, the cover image is always taken from one of the print campaigns featured in the magazine. It doesn’t have to be the whole ad, it can just as well be a detail. At any rate, our covers are supposed to get people interested in what the story behind the image might be. 

As we’ve now passed the 24,500 mark of Facebook Likes I thought it might be a good idea to ask our fans there which of the five cover alternatives that I selected they might prefer. We’ve done this once before, for our 200 Best Food & Drink Ads Special, which came out in mid-June. Luckily, the one that got the most votes was also the one I had secretly favoured. We will see how it turns out this time. 

And no, we won’t be asking our FB fans to vote on the cover on a regular basis,  so if you want to have a say, here’s your chance.

The choice is between five cover alternatives:

The first one comes from KesselsKramer, Amsterdam, and is one of several posters promoting the Dutch city of Eindhoven in its bid to become the European Capital of Culture in 2018.

Eindhoven is in the province of Brabant and other cities in this province will take part in this as well - such as s’-Hertogenbosch, the capital of North Brabant and birthplace of Hieronymus Bosch (the 500th  anniversary of his death will be in 2016). Bosch’s paintings are of course known for their fantastic and bizarre imagery which explains the giant lice-like creatures in the ad.

The second cover candidate is from a campaign by Ogilvy & Mather, Tokyo, for Helianthus, a Japanese baby wear retailer. The headline reads: “Obsessed with baby fashion since 1983.” The cute factor here is of course obvious but there is something about the placement of the baby in the image (as well as in the other ads in the campaign) that makes this quite striking and unusual.

For the third alternative, I have selected an ad from JWT, Barcelona for the city tours organised by Century Travel Agency. The headline of this motif reads “Which is your Amsterdam?” and you will no doubt recognize the famous Dutch painter depicted here.

Cover number four is a by now quite famous poster for Axe from their Lynx “Unleash the Chaos” campaign created by BBH, London. It’s classic BBH advertising and, in my opinion, would have deserved more than the Bronze Lion it got at Cannes. If chosen by our Facebook fans, it would also be – in many ways – a “classic” Archive cover.

That is something you couldn’t really say about cover option number five, which comes from what must surely be the most controversial and talked about ad campaign out there at the moment. It’s by DDB London and promotes the Sale at the Harvey Nichols chain of upmarket department stores, a British institution really, founded in 1831, that sells many high-priced international brands of fashion, beauty products, wine and food and attracts a younger – if just as affluent – crowd of shoppers than its rival Harrods.

They have a long history of great advertising as you can see in our online archive. The headline of this new campaign, in reference to the Sale, reads: “Try to contain your excitement.” I will be talking about the campaign at more length in the Letter from the Publisher for Vol. 4/2012.

So please go to our Facebook page and vote for the image you would like to see on the cover of Vol. 4. Voting starts on Friday 6 July 9am CEST and we will use your 'Likes' to decide the final cover and the subscription winner on Tuesday 10 July.