CREATIVE REPORT
An Interview with Kate Allsop Creative Advitisor at GREY London
An interview with Kate Allsop, Creative at Grey London. Kate has worked on many major TV Ad productions, print and all other advertising collateral. She has influenced and worked on projects such as Dove ‘Real Women’, and worked on briefs for Procter & Gamble, GSK and Nomad (Birds-Eye). Grey have an ‘open door’ culture, allowing ideas to flow whilst providing a workspace for designers to make the ideas come to life. I wanted to find out how Kate got into advertising, and where she thinks the future of the industry is heading...as well as find out about her most famous campaign. History
GREY* London- 7 Years
Ogilvy & Mather- 4 Years
MCBD - 2 Years
*Grey has since re-branded to Valenstein & Fatt, March 2017 their new forward moving intentions
to represent
Interview: Kate Allsop Studio
: GREY London
Date
: 08/12/2016
How did you get into what you are doing at the minuet? Okay I did graphics at Leeds Met and it was in about second year I didn’t know about this job, I liked arts, did a foundation course and naturally progressed into Graphics, or being an illustrator, or something, i didn’t know what was out there. And then, I did a regional D&AD workshop, they did them both in Leeds and Manchester it was a 6 week thing, you had to enter a brief to get accepted onto the course and about 10 teams went round a different agency every week and do a live brief, so say you’d have a week to do it, you’d turn up at a different agency, one being TWBA in Manchester which was in a church, and well lots of different ones, and you’d pitch your work and well the creative director critter it and by the end of it you basically had a portfolio, so you had 6 pieces of work and you’d been into all of those agencies, and been like ooh I like this and I don’t like this and that was really good. Was it the control of briefs that naturally led you into advertising as oppose to another art form? Well, I enjoyed having the taster course of the D&AD regional workshop and working on those briefs, and we actually graduated as a team
so we did a joint degree and we took our book around and then you did placements. Its not as simple, you don’t just get a job. We also got seduced by the bright lights of London so came down here, I mean there are agencies from the North, I’m from the North, I’m from Rochdale, but I felt that that’s where the opportunities where, and I wanted to leave home and get far away *laughs*. So thats how I got into it. Then there was the placements in advertising, someone described it to me once that trying to get a job in advertising is like trying to park a car in London, its full, but if a space opens up here then you can fill that space; if you’re just patient enough, eventually you’ll find a space. You just have to bide your time, go around all the agencies, go and see the people, get the crits, be patient. But, its expensive to live here! Its not easy. So what was in your first book? Whatever we did at university changed drastically, it wasn’t really what agencies wanted to see. It was good to get the degree, but you might of spent 6 months crafting something for your course and then you’ll go and see a creative team with your portfolio and they’ll be like ‘change that change this’ so you really can’t be so precious. You might of spent 6 months at uni crafting and mac-ing it up but they really
didn’t care how well kerned the letters were or how well crafted it is, they care about the idea. It was a bit more design rather than thought and concept. I’ve heard that graduates don’t really get paid for ideas anymore, do you think that’s true? I think that younger people that join the agency are much more Mac literate, they can come up with an idea and bish- bash- bosh, but whereas I am of a different generation. So I’d probably marker pen it and then I’d need a younger designer to come and create it. I can find some images and know what I want the type to be like and I’ll find some references, but I’ll need to say right a bit up a bit, so maybe that’s just a generational thing. I should probably learn the basics really.
What would a standard day in the life of a creative be like? Well I work in a team but I’m also creative director on a piece of Braun business, which means I have creative teams coming to me with the ideas and I kind of help steer them. What am I working on at the moment? I’m working on the new Captain Birds-eye script.. so basically you have to come up with a number of scripts, and then present them to the client. That takes a long time for them to say yes or no.. then once you have that script finalised you’d produce an animatic, this is for a TV ad, we do all sorts here we do TV we do print we do online, and when I mean script I mean actual script like a TV script, a document, words typed. The animatic is like a cartoon version of the ad to sort of visualise it. Then they put that into testing, everything tested these days, especially for large companies, Birds Eye’s a big brand. I work on quite a lot of the large ones actually, Procter & Gamble, GSK, Nomad, its not just a little independent shop doing an advert, they want to research everything and make sure it’s all justified. And its global, so it has to work in all different markets. So its currently in testing and whatever the results of that are, if it passes testing, then we’ll make it. So today, I was talking to directors, this is just for a TV ad, you have three directors at least that
you speak to, and they come and talk to you about the script how you see it, how they have their ideas, and then they go away and make a treatment, which is sort of a document proposal of how they would like to bring it to life. So they would say this camera, these lights, we’ll use this as a reference, it will look like its shot in space or whatever. And then you’ll pick your favourite and go off and shoot it. So its cool, you get to work with loads of interesting people. So you’ll go on the shoot and the director will be in charge but you’ll be on hand and your job really is to protect the idea. That includes saying no to people, there’s a lot of pressure and a lot of money at stake that people have spent.
extremely varied, its also the digital element, clients want to cover all basis, they want the press ad for the paper they want the poster then the TV ad then they might want an app or Facebook add and social media collateral. So its more than one thing its a whole campaign now.
When we the Fat Cat campaign with Richard Branson and Simon Cowell and that started off a mouth pen drawing and then you show it to the client, and then they say yeah we like it, and then you pick a photographer and you do the shoot, go on the shoot and well, guide them. You do all the retouching and go into editorial design and do the layout and all of that, so that’s part of the job. We might do a radio ad, where you go into a recording studio and you might have a celebrity or someone doing the voice over which is cool. Its extremely
Planners have the psychology and get all the relevant statistics from research and what the target market are, and they have all the insights like people like this and people buy this so that’s a planning area we design to really.
We have a design department here, well we have two, we have people a whole bank of desks where everybody helps you bring your ideas to life. Typographers, animators, they’re amazing, they can just design a font like that. If you’re creating the next Lucozade campaign for instance, they might make a font for that to avoid any copyright and so its theirs..
Has your role at Grey always involved so much script writing? It started off more design and art direction, potentially it’s the current briefs I’m
working on it is a lot of writing at the moment, but that might just be the nature of what I’m working on being a lot of big TV scripts. You have to do the voice over and the other stuff, whereas if a nice print campaign came in then I’d be dealing with all the photography. Again, it’s never the same job twice. It’s a bit weird that we have to do all these skills, and I work in a team, with a girl called Jo who is off on maternity leave at the minuet but traditionally you were either an art director or a copywriter but we never wanted to, we liked doing both, some people don’t like that and you have to be one or the other, but we’ve got this far so it can’t be too bad! We’ve been doing it a while now, so I’m kind of words and pictures. How did you go about getting into Art Direction? You just learn it on the job really, getting into an agency and having the ability to collaborate with some brilliant people. Its interesting, if you gave a brief to six different teams, Kung Fu Panda, I don’t know why I said that, but everyone will have their own take on it and do it differently. Do you illustrate it, do you use photography, is it in black and white, is it minimal. Art direction for advertising is different to just art, its all the quickest possible communication so everything has to be stripped, it’s all about minimising the elements. So you wouldn’t have a logo there, the headline there, the copy up there, you want your eye to draw it to one place in the most concise way. I don’t
know how many seconds people read magazines for but normally you have about three seconds to stop them and I think your art direction is about stopping people and communicating instantly, you don’t want any ambiguity, or want them to take out or want them to take out the wrong brand or message or no message- that’s your job. Advertising is about communication essentially. Do you think consumers are at all aware of the graphic decisions made to help change human behaviour? I don’t think they care about it, if you’re not interested in that world you just sort of take on information, but there’s offensive rubbish, not offensive as in rude but offensive as in 10% off or takeaways with bad type and you just shove it straight in the bin, but if it looks beautiful you might even keep hold of it. Talking about typography and doing something for good, and harnessing the power of your situation working for a big agency, they did an amazing thing here, they made a font called Eco Ryman, it was designed specifically to use less ink, using thinner strokes and then you think about all the ink cartridges and all the pollution, so that was just an idea that came from here, but its now an available font that can actually make a difference and save people money . I worked on the wild aid stuff, I’m working currently on a social responsibility piece for GSK, but the things that make you think, that’s what makes me feel good.
I value social responsibility. As long as you don’t pollute the world with bad advertising, 99% of it is just crap, all ‘buy! buy! buy!’ but you have a responsibility to do something beautiful or funny, if you can do good make it funny or make it beautiful- that’s my advice! How do you get inspiration for the campaigns you write and keep new ideas coming? Normally you get the brief and as a rule of thumb you go with three routes, and also to go back to a client these days they like to see a choice, or if you’re trying to win a client its always best to give them a choice so they’re not backed into a corner. To do this job you just have to be naturally switched on to know how people tick, to think like a denture wearer to write an advert for dentures, or like a footballer to sell some football boots, you kind of always have to put yourself in different personas, like an actor on paper. Often clients like this that seem beyond their time, but often these idea’s still get rejected. It’s all about awards our job too so that’s how you measure success, that’s how you get your pay rise, that’s how you get the next job. D&AD the Pencil and Cannes Gold are the two biggies still.
DOVE - REAL WOMEN CAMPAIGN
It just started off as a little word doc, a script that you’d written, and then all of these people were here because of me. Not just the camera man but the lighting, the crew, the caterers the catering vans, the medic and it was like shiiiit. So thats the TV bit, but then theres print. We were relatively fresh out and we got to work with the likes of David Bailey. When all of the beauty industry was all doing these airbrushed images, probably about 15 years ago, we did it so none of our models were retouched, and
shot as they are, really classy shots. It probably doesn’t sound ground breaking now but in the day it was, it was WHAT you haven’t retouched?! But that was what the beauty industry was like back then and it was nice to work on that because it empowered women, it was helping society. It felt that we were part of the movement not part of the problem. I think everybody working on it knew that it was kind of a moment in history, so everyone wanted to get involved so we got a higher calliber of
of photographer and director and everything, where as if it was just some regular face crème add where we have retouched everything we wouldn’t get any of that, we’d get someone else, still very good but not the PR story behind it! Dove won a few awards and at the time we all knew; because it was anti-beauty advertising, all the pressure on women to look beautiful and thin was removed. Actually the reality is we’re all beautiful and we’re all normal that’s fine, it’s okay! Pheryew!
Interview: Kate Allsop Studio : GREY London Date : 08/12/2016
Do you think there is still a North/South divide in the creative industries? Well when we were starting out, we sent our book down to Adam & Eve DDB, and they gave us a month placement. I think my brother was living in London at the time so I put down my brothers address so they didn’t go oooh too far away, she’s in Manchester so. I do feel that it is all London based. Don’t get me wrong, there are advertising agencies iin Scotland and Wales and the North of England, but they’re everywhere. The concentration is London still. I do feel like Leeds and Manchester don’t really have the ties with the advertising agencies down south, whereas the lead courses for Advertising are Watford, Bucks and Falmouth I think and they have quite good contacts with us, perhaps some of the employee’s are ex-students or something and they get seen, they get crit’s, where as I feel there is still North/South divide. I think that just because its miles away you shouldn’t have contact. It’s a barrier not just 2 hours on the train. Do you think more women are coming into the world of advertising? I do, but I look around and you could fit in a room the amount of women in the industry, where as you could fill a tower block with men. Grey’s very progressive and cares about all the right issues, and women, that’s quite a big topic at the minuit. In our industry especially, there’s not a lot of women in advertising, I don’t know why, but there is still a lot to be done. But it is getting better. Often though, you’ve done a three year degree, a foundation year so
that’s four years; then you have to do placements to get into any departments. You have to sleep on people’s floors, and eat pot noodles…and it’s, well i’ve got a four year degree why should I slum it when I actually have higher values and I respect myself, maybe that’s what it is keeping people away, I don’t know! What do you feel about the rise of Instagram for self promotion? It has become a tool but I don’t maximise it because im busy doing my own thing. I have two kids and I’m trying to have a career. I also think people in advertising or creatives are terrible at building our own brand... we’re so busy looking over there and doing brands for someone else you forget and neglect your own brand. I need to do that as well. I actually came across a really great site the other day called The Dot’s, it’s sort of a hub for creatives, but yeah, get on Instagram! its a great way to get contacts and meet people from all manor of creative sectors- I think again there is a generational gap but your generation should really grab it if you can.
Do you have any additional advice for hungry design students starting out? Is there a placement you can do? You just have to be keen and useful. It’s just about being hungry, and it sounds like you’re devaluing yourself begging for a job earning peanuts, but it’s a foot in the door it’s just kind of the way it is. Because it is so competitive and it can be such a glamorous world. We sent books, not even a website just a physical book, but I was talking to a team that have just been hired and they have a digital book. So they’ll have a website, so say they were coming in to see a creative director they’d just send a link like ‘Hi can I come and see you, this is who I am!’, but when you go, you also have a physical book for them to thumb though and say change this change that, whereas if its so sort of polished and digital you’re not as adgile, you can’t just take that sheet out or alter so something and say ‘oh so you mean like that”. That is something everyone should do definitely; and London’s happening, sorry to say! I think more opportunities are down here.