Shots 157 by Media Business Insight

157 JULY 2015

shots 157

Political advertising GETTING THE PARTIES STARTED

New York focus

shots

TAKING A BITE FROM THE BIG APPLE

Cannes Special TOR MYHREN, CINDY GALLOP & THE CROISETTE CONTENDERS

Susan Hoffman Andy McLeod

Preethi Mariappan CYBER SPACE INVADER

THANK YOU for being a part of such a wonderful adventure.

THE LIFT 10 years loving our craft. www.thelift.mx

Leader 05

“Yes, I’m writing this exactly one week after the UK general election took place and, defying all expectations, someone actually won. It was meant to be the footballing equivalent of a boring, doesn’tbenefit-anyone scoreless draw, but instead the Conservative Party romped to victory. ”

“I

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Above Editor Danny Edwards took a flying trip to New York for this issue of shots and reports back on page 60. Illustrator Simon Dovar, who gave Danny the typographic treatment above, kicks off the feature in his grand visual style 1 New York director Clayton Vomero introduces us to his city “equal parts beauty and grime” on page 64 2 Can you love lenticulars? Apparently so. Photographer Derrick Santini expounds on his passion from page 42

PHOTOGRAPH: JEFF ALLEN

t’s not the winning, it’s the taking part that counts.” I don’t know who first uttered those words, but whoever it was, it’s odds-on that at the time they were standing, somewhat forlornly, at the side of a stage as someone who was not them had a large rosette with the number ‘1’ emblazoned on it pinned to their pride-filled chest. Of course it’s the winning. And this issue is all about winners, and therefore, by default, losers. I’m writing this exactly one week after the UK general election took place and, defying all expectations, someone actually won. It was meant to be the footballing equivalent of a boring, doesn’t-benefit-anyone scoreless draw, but instead the Conservative Party romped to victory. Which meant Labour and, more spectacularly, the Liberal Democrats, suffered crushing defeat. Could the outcome have been affected by the respective parties’ advertising campaigns? Quite possibly, and from page 136 our features editor, Selena Schleh, takes an in-depth look at political advertising over the course of the last few decades. From the infamous ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster from Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 campaign, to Barack Obama’s 2008 social media-focussed presidency drive and beyond, she examines what works, what doesn’t and how political parties need to wise up when it comes to using the web. But who cares about elections? That’s just deciding who runs countries. What we want to know is who’s going to win in Cannes. Yes, it’s that time again; when the industry descends on the Côte D’Azur to consume the majority of the world’s supply of pink wine, pretend to their spouses that “Honestly, it’s actually hard work,” and find out what the industry thinks is the best of the last 12 months. As ever, we have attempted to second-guess the juries with our annual Cannes Contenders special. From page 101 we have insight, opinion and predictions from some of the industry’s top creative minds and, on the accompanying DVD, we also have our selection of what could – and probably should – win in the Film and Film Craft categories [our predictions for other categories will be on shots.net in due course]. We also have

interviews with jury presidents including Tor Myhren, David Lubars and, head of the inaugural Glass Lion, Cindy Gallop. Elsewhere, I was lucky enough to head to the Big Apple recently – though don’t let Tony Granger hear you call it that [page 81] – and from page 60 you can read about the city’s creative resurgence and get acquainted with some of the people and companies behind that revival. And then there are our two cover stars. I’m not sure which one you’re holding, but it could be Ben Priest, adam&eveDDB’s CCO, who welcomes us to his parish on page 144. Or maybe it’s Razorfish Germany’s ECD, Preethi Mariappan who, as she tells us from page 38, is making it her mission to push technology’s boundaries. The two of them together, along with the rest of this issue, our biggest ever, surely make for a winning combination.

Danny Edwards Editor @shotsmag_dan

21/05/2015 09:21

06 Contents | MAGAZINE

shots 157

July 2015 News Insight Inspiration shots.net shots 157 / front cover

The stars of our two different covers this issue are adam&eveDDB’s CCO Ben Priest, and Razorﬁsh Germany’s ECD Preethi Mariappan. JULY 2015

JULY 2015

JULY 

shots

shots 157

157

157 JULY 

Political advertising

shots

GETTING THE PARTIES STARTED

New York focus TAKING A BITE FROM THE BIG APPLE

Cannes Special TOR MYHREN, CINDY GALLOP & THE CROISETTE CONTENDERS

shots.net

shots.net TOR MYHREN, CINDY GALLOP & THE CROISETTE CONTENDERS

Political advertising GETTING THE PARTIES STARTED

New York focus TAKING A BITE FROM THE BIG APPLE

THE PREACHINGS OF…

Ben Priest

Susan Hoffman Ben Priest Andy McLeod

Susan Hoffman Matthieu Elkaim Andy McLeod

Cannes Special

60 22

Preethi Mariappan CYBER SPACE INVADER

shots 157 contributors Words: Iain Blair, Carol Cooper, Tim Cumming, David Knight, Adrian Pennington, Lee Sharrock, Simon Wakelin Illustration & photography: Jeff Allen, Christophe Boulze, Toby Burrows, Dan Burn-Forti, Blaine Davis, Michael Donald, Simon Dovar, Kristin Gladney, Julian Hanford, Jean Jullien, Diana Kaufmann, Chris Madden, Merk & Mark, Paul McGeiver, Sam Napper, Jamen Percy, Arjen Schmitz, Billy Siegrist, Peter Yang

shots 158 / September 2015

shots 158 will be the second annual guest-edited issue of the magazine. This year BBH Los Angeles are taking the helm and, under the editorial directorship of ECD Pelle Sjoenell, will be welcoming us into their world. We also have a special China focus where we’ll be lifting the lid on The Middle Kingdom’s creative landscape, plus we’ll be examining the rise of the boutique post house.

A shots subscription

A subscription to shots gives you all the creative connections you need: online, in print and on DVD. For more information and to subscribe turn to page 8.

154 Inspired 10

18 Key to symbols

shots icons indicate whether the work written about in the magazine is either on shots.net, the shots DVD or both.

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People 24

DIRECTOR PROFILE

CREATIVE PROFILE

AKQA’s chief technology officer Ben Jones sees a caring, sharing, techy future for Cannes Lions

CREATIVE PROFILE

GOING GLOBAL

NEW WORK

It’s a tricksy month for new work – deceiving jobless youth, frustrated lovers, and your very own eyes OPINION

Learn to lose bad habits and love clichés in our selection of worldwide ads this issue

Funny guy Jeff Low gets serious about “working his tits off ” ECD Matthieu Elkaim has a “fucking hard job” Mobile Lions juror and ECD Razorfish Berlin, Preethi Mariappan AD ICON

Creative-turnedRattling-Stick-director, Andy McLeod

AD ICON

Susan Hoffman, ECD at W+K, gets provocative and creative

144 THE WAY I SEE IT

Ben Priest, CCO of adam&eveDDB London, swears mass market isn’t a curse word

154 POST PROFILE

Diarmid Harrison-Murray of MPC London on his CGI-speed career

159 NEW DIRECTORS

The pick of the new

22/05/2015 14:00

Contents 07

136

150

Cannes Special 85

FILM PRESIDENT

Film Lion president, Grey’s Tor Myhren, lays down his filmic law

Places

60 NEW YORK

Director Clayton Vomero on his beautiful, grimy city; Droga5’s Matthew Gardner on turning New York’s cultural tides; Matt Ian at TBWA\New York cuts through ‘curatordirector bullshit’; and m ss ng p eces is curious about change

90 GLASS LION

Industry activist Cindy Gallop is the perfect head for the equality Lion

96 BRANDED CONTENT

David Lubars is not content when it comes to the definition of content

101 CANNES CONTENDERS Pickers and picks from around the globe

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GOING NATIVE

Y&R global CCO Tony Granger lays down the New York law

Insight

20 THE SOURCE

This Girl Can director Kim Gehrig regrets what she’s wished for

Pictures 22

136 POLITICAL ADVERTISING 42 Making political ads simple, effective and positive… Sadly, unlike politics itself

150 OUT OF HOURS

Old-fashioned, non-PC fun, cunningly disguised as a children’s nursery book

156 SHOTS TECH

CREATIVE SPACES

Amsterdam production house PostPanic’s bespoke off-plan office PHOTOGRAPHY

Derrick Santini explores desire and human nature through the vintage technique of lenticulars

162 SNAPSHOTS

The favourite NYC views of Jeff Robins, VFX supervisor/senior compositor, The Mill New York

Saatchi & Saatchi LA ED Jeremiah Knight’s fave kit

22/05/2015 14:00

08 Information | dvd / shots contacts shots 157 /July 2015 This issue’s top work on the accompanying DVD

shots 157 shots

Creative Showcase

1 States United to Prevent Gun Violence Guns With History 2 Audi Birth 3 Audi Stan Lee Cameo School 4 Centraal Beheer Welcome 5 Hertz Cleaned Out 6 Hefty #Blessed; Worth It; Turnt 7 Thunderhead Thunderhead 8 Quilted Northern Daddy Gator; Great Grandpa Thaddeus; Sir Froggy 9 Honda Civic The Feeling 10 Honda Endless Road 11 Volkswagen The Choice 12 Taco Bell Routine Republic 13 Finish Dishes; Glasses 14 Lurpak Freestyle 15 Robinsons They Grow Up Fast 16 Coca-Cola Man & Dog 17 Jose Cuervo Battle for Tequila; The Alchemist 18 Nike Golf Ripple 19 Kia Crash Text 20 Tassimo/Belvita The Rescuer 21 Canadian Film Festival The Academy of Cliché 22 Sauza 901 No Limes Needed

Late Entry

EA FIFA 15 The Bitter-Sweet Taste of Football

Music Videos

23 Run the Jewels Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck) 24 Hot Chip Need You Now 25 Fono Real Joy

New Directors

26 Son Lux Change Is Everything 27 Monsieur Monsieur The Badass Hijack 28 The Last Skeptik Me and My

New York Special

29 adidas Originals Superstar 30 Jordan Brand Re2pect 31 Beats By Dre The Game Before The Game 32 Moto 360 Pianist; Businessman; Golf 33 Southern Comfort Shark 34 Dell Centre for Selfie Improvement 35 Newcastle Brown Ale If We Won 36 Spectrum Cable Camping; Game Night 37 DIRECTV Fantasy Football Fantasy 38 NBC The Return Of Coach Lasso 39 Viacom Velocity The Social Influence 40 Axe Hotel; Pool 41 Gap Kiss, Drive, Stairs 42 AT&T Police Drama 43 GE The Boy Who Beeps 44 Johnnie Walker Blue Label The Gentleman’s Wager (clip)

Cannes Contenders: Flim / Film Craft

45 Honda Type R The Other Side 46 Sport England This Girl Can 47 Always #LikeAGirl 48 Leica 100 49 Ikea The Joy Of Storage 50 Ikea Beds 51 Hornbach Say It With Your Project 52 Tena Men Tips; Control 53 Geico Cleaning Crew; Family; High Five 54 Centraal Beheer Welcome 55 DialDirect The Notebook 56 Sainsbury’s Christmas is for Sharing 57 John Lewis Monty’s Christmas 58 Mulberry #WinChristmas 59 Honda Keep Up 60 Honda Dream Run 61 Audi Birth 62 Volvic The Giant 63 Virgin Atlantic The Idea 64 Canal+ Unicorn 65 Canal Digital The Silver Hand 66 The Times Unquiet Film Series The Art of Satire (clip)

July 2015 News | Insight | Inspiration shots.net

shots facebook.com/shots.net @shotscreative Editorial material to be submitted to shots on DVD or emailed to spots@shots.net Post to: Ryan Watson, shots Zetland House 5-25 Scrutton Street London EC2A 4HJ Many thanks to those companies that submitted material for consideration on shots 157. If your work didn’t make it this time, please do not be discouraged from sending work in again. If you feel that your company has produced anything that would complement the Creative Showcase please let us know. © shots. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted, either by conventional means or electronically, without written permission of the publisher. All efforts have been made to ensure the accuracy of facts and figures, which to the best of our knowledge were correct at time of going to press. shots accepts no responsibility for loss or damage to material submitted for publication.

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DVD programme credits Post production Envy, London Graphics Why Not/Clear, London

10 Inspired | new work 1

Everyone’s playing tricks in our Inspired round-up this issue. From unsuspecting unemployed youth, to a seemingly endless road, to a car that appears to come alive to give the gift of life, everything’s going a bit weird in adland…

4 7

Get on your bike and sell drugs WEB FILMS & SOCIAL MEDIA Circle The Jobless Generation The Uk government may boast of falling unemployment, but with 1.86m jobless, youth employment is still an issue. To address this, employment charity Circle and Publicis London invited jobless young people from Hackney, London to careers advice sessions. The twist? The ‘advisor’ was an actor and they were being filmed. Mustard’s Ben Liam Jones helmed the online film, which was “the hardest edit ever”, according to Publicis CD, Sue Higgs. “with three cameras running for 12 hours and 20 candidates, this was a social experiment with no storyboard. we needed to find the story in the edit.” Advised to ‘get pregnant and go on the dole’ or ‘deal drugs’, the candidates’ reactions suggest that the problem is public attitudes towards young people. It was important that the campaign went beyond witty social commentary and produced results. A social media campaign invited the public to visit joblessgeneration. com, where they could donate a tweet on a candidate’s behalf to prospective hirers. “Ultimately this wasn’t just about putting a few kids in an uncomfortable position to make a point about youth unemployment. our aim was to get jobs for the people who took part in it,” says Higgs. SS

6 1/2 Circle, The Jobless Generation 3 Honda, Endless Road 4/5/6/7 Jose Cuervo, The Battle For Tequila; The Margarita; The Alchemist

WEB FILMS Jose Cuervo The Battle For Tequila; The Margarita; The Alchemist

The road is long… and circular TV & ONLINE Honda Endless Road Don’t ask, ‘Are we there yet?’ when watching Honda’s hypnotic spot, Endless Road, which celebrates the new Cr-V model’s performance with an infinitely looping mountain pass. Created by mcgarrybowen and helmed by Chris Palmer of Gorgeous, with digital production from MediaMonks, the follow-up to the 2013 Lion-winning Illusions deploys a 3D version of the Droste effect (where a smaller version of a picture appears within itself, and so on) to stunning effect. The location was inspired by the Pigtail Bridge on South Dakota’s Iron Mountain road, which was

Three shots of tequila

recreated as a one-tenth scale model by The Magic Camera Company. Post was by Glassworks, who also worked on the digital version: the first ‘never-ending’ YouTube film, which used real-time data to reflect the time of day and weather at viewers’ locations. “Putting those added elements into the spot would have made it rather busy, so we decided to do an online version [for] the ‘Honda factor’,” Palmer explains. The final result belies its huge technical hurdles. “It felt like a russian doll; one challenge’s solution would open up another,” says Glassworks CD, Jordi Bares. SS

There’s a film festival feel in this trio of animated spots for tequila brand Jose Cuervo, helmed by Blinkink’s elliot Dear and Stephen Mcnally. In The Battle For Tequila, Dear crafts an epic story of the fight for the original distillery. Performers were shot in slow-motion and composited onto a miniature model. “I wanted to make the town itself the hero of the story,” explains Dear, who was inspired by Albert Bierstadt’s landscape paintings and old westerns. By contrast, for The Margarita, Dear looked to film noir and comic book artist Frank Miller to create “a more intimate, moody” feel which “really focused on the characters”. Helmed by Stephen Mcnally, The Alchemist combined 2D and 3D CG elements to bring the character of master distiller Don Francisco to life. SS

| Inspired 11

new work

Birthing a groundbreaking spot TV & ONLINE Audi RS3 Sportback Birth

What were the main challenges for the style and tone of this film? Proctor The challenge was creating a film that really stirs emotion, almost making the viewer uncomfortable, while treading the line between the organic, clinical and simply ridiculous.

Cars have long been compared to the sexy curves of a woman, and the power of a wild animal. Now Audi and BBH London take these ideas a step further in a visceral, wild and shocking spot for the new RS3 Sportback

THE SOUND What were BBH and Mill+ looking for when they spoke to you about the film? Will Cohen We were asked to create a voice for the car that would go beyond reality, and bed it into a landscape of sound effects that help set the scene and work to take the viewer out of their comfort zone.

udi’s new commercial for the RS3 Sportback, Birth, is a step in a different creative direction for the car manufacturer. And behind this change of direction is BBH London and Mill+, who have worked together to create this epic new film for the brand, along with String and Tins, who supplied the music and sound design. This combination of talents has resulted in a stunning, stylish, fully-CG spot, which sees an Audi R8 give birth to an Audi RS3. Below, Ian Heartfield, the BBH creative director on the job, Mill+ director Andrew Proctor, and String And Tins’ Will Cohen explain their parts in putting the film together and why it was a labour of love. THE IDEA How did the idea come about? Ian Heartfield The task was to tell the story that there is DNA from the mother of supercars, the R8, in the smaller RS models, specifically the new RS3. The idea of the R8 giving birth to an RS3 – actually, physically giving birth to it – came shortly after.

Rupert Sanders was a consultant on the film; what help and insight did he bring to the project? Proctor On a project that pushes the boundaries such as this, it was fantastic to have someone of his experience and vision to help refine the narrative and look. Along with bringing some great ideas into the mix he was the perfect sounding-board.

Did you know the sort of approach you wanted to take from the start? Cohen Regarding the mood and style of the music, we initially leaned towards something electronic and darker. Through testing different styles and eras, we and the agency came round to the idea that something more organic and classic felt right.

What was the most challenging part of this campaign from your point of view? Heartfield The single most challenging thing was getting the tone and feel of the film absolutely spot on. We talked about it being on a scale. At one end of the scale was a cold, unemotional, Transformers-like film, where one car just formed another. At the other end was a frankly weird, dark, messy film, closer to Alien. The task was to stay right in the middle between the two.

THE EXECUTION What did you think when you first saw the script? Andrew Proctor This is such a bold creative idea that it was one of those scripts that instantly resonated with me. There were images of what the birth of an Audi could look like flashing through my mind straight away and I just dropped everything to immediately start crafting and concepting an initial edit, locking myself in the room for four days straight to produce a test film.

How do you make a car sound like it’s in labour? Cohen My favourites are the engine morphing, with a gasping exhaling walrus and snarling bear, in the close-up engine top-shot near the start; the barking of the exhausts on the rear of the car shortly after; and the bellowing rhino and time-stretched horse sounds just before the R8 gives birth. These powerful animals seemed to link up well with the R8, and turn it into even more of a beast than it already is. DE The full version of this interview is available to subscribers on shots.net.

12 Inspired | NEW WORK 1

1/2/3/4 EA Games Battlefield Hardline, 360° Heist 5/6/7 States United To Prevent Gun Violence, #GunsWithHistory

All action from every angle

“I couldn’t believe A warning shot to the viral nature the trigger happy and how much the WEB FILMS & ONLINE media picked up States United To Prevent Gun Violence on it. It goes back #GunsWithHistory to intimacy: that’s nearly 60 per cent of US citizens a hidden camera; With believing that owning a firearm makes those are very real them safer, non-profit organisation United To Prevent Gun Violence emotions. It wasn’t a States (SUPGV) came up with a novel social huge production stunt to hammer home the reality: gun actually increases the risks deal and we did it ownership of injury and death. Working with Grey for very little money, New York, SUPGV ‘did the unthinkable’ opening a fake firearms store in New but it was just real.” byYork’s Lower East Side to target first-time

INTERACTIVE FILM Battlefield Hardline 360° Heist FCB West and EA Games’ new campaign for video game Battlefield Hardline is a 360-degree interactive film showcasing an all-action bank heist from every angle. The three-and-a-half-minute film was directed by MJZ’s Nicolai Fuglsig with LA-based digital studio Wildlife on board to help oversee the technological aspects. Below, Fuglsig and brothers, Jake and Scott Friedman, co-founders of Wildlife, explain the thinking behind the film and the difficulties experienced in getting it made. What was the brief you received for this project? The Friedmans FCB West came to us with a vision of delivering a bank heist in 360 degrees, witnessed from the perspective of a bag of stolen cash. Right away this concept distinguished itself from [other] examples, which required an app. That doesn’t really cut it in 2015 [so] the question became, can we finally deliver a true interactive video experience by clicking one link? How did the 360–degree element impact on your approach? Fuglsig This is a completely new. It was a challenge for the crew to understand there would be no hidden angles, that there would be no crew present during these elaborate action takes – that

6 everyone had to hide. On a normal set, you give an actor a certain amount of takes then move to another actor. When you’re doing 360, it is everybody’s take. What was the hardest part of putting the film together? The Friedmans The biggest challenges were up front. While WebGL afforded us many of the tools to create this experience, there were still limitations. We’re rendering a normal HTML5 video to the browser, but then have to take this unwrapped 360-footage and project it as a video texture on the inside of a 3D cylinder object. Fuglsig For me the hardest part was the fact that I had to accept a lesser quality than I’m used to working with, but we’re working hard now on getting to a much better picture resolution for next time. DE The full version of this interview can be found on shots.net.

buyers. Despite there being “a million legal hurdles to get over”, worldwide CCO Tor Myhren says securing a busy central location, with high foot traffic, was key: “If it was in the middle of the country, in the suburbs, I don’t think it would have been nearly as interesting.” Over the course of two days, hidden cameras captured the shocked reaction of potential punters when, in the course of his sales patter, the shop assistant disclosed each gun’s grim history, from the high-profile Sandy Hook high school massacre to unintentional shootings, homicides and suicides. Needless to say, most people were quick to re-think their purchases. Helmed by Andrew Lane, the resulting film and associated online store, gunswithhistory.com – featuring an interactive tool which used statistics, surprising truths about gun ownership and facts based on users’ real lives to help potential customers make a decision – quickly went viral. Unsurprisingly, along with critical plaudits, the campaign also drew ire from gun rights groups, with the National Rifle Association (NRA) launching a legal action (the case has since been dropped) which provided a huge publicity boost. Commenting on the impact of the campaign, Myhren says that despite gun control (and the lack thereof) being a live issue, it’s currently being fought “in so many wrong ways”, and puts the success of #GunsWithHistory down to its “very human” approach. “I knew when we did it we had something, but I couldn’t believe the viral nature and how much the media picked up on it,” he says. “It goes back to intimacy: that’s a hidden camera; those are very real emotions. It wasn’t a huge production deal and we did it for very little money, but it was just real.” SS

CINE

DIGITAL

| Inspired 15

opinion

The future is here and it’s called Cannes Lions 2015 opinion Ben Jones

AKQA’s chief technology officer Ben Jones takes a look ahead at the Cannes Lions in his non-existent crystal ball from the heights of his UberCopter ride and sees exciting innovation, the evolution of technology and a fun, progressive future where artists hold hands with geeks and we’ll all be frolicking as equals in the creative playground

bviously, I’m no clairvoyant and I don’t own a working crystal ball, and if I did, no offence, but I wouldn’t be sitting here tapping away at this article! Instead I’d be relaxing on some remote beach, with a cold beer in my hand and a wry smile on my face after the sale of my billion-dollar business built through the operationalisation of my ingenious mind to AOL… no, actually, scrap that, make that Verizon. So, what you will be reading from here on is more my hope than reality, but I believe we are going to see a different, exciting and much more progressive Cannes this year. We’re going to see techies on the Croisette, and Cannes will have an authentic digital attitude. It will be more relevant and exciting than it has been in past years. It’s going to take on the SXSWs of this world with the style and debonair attitude that only the Côte d’Azur can bring. Of course, beautiful design, poetic copywriting, simply stunning cinematography and original thinking will, as always, have their place on the stage, and rightly so. Creativity, art and storytelling will never fade; they’re at the core of human society. But so is relentless progression. Innovation through technology is the very thing that has driven our rapid evolution and exploration of this planet – and the wider solar system, for that matter. As Arthur C Clarke once said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And

it is this harmony between beautiful stories and new technology that will be celebrated at Cannes 2015. This year we will see the emergence of the Innovation Lions, a two-day ‘festival within a festival’ aiming to shine a light on products, services and experiences that we once thought would be impossible; a place where artists and geeks hold hands. My prediction is this: as normal, the Palais des Festivals will still have queues around the block as people clamour for the chance to listen to a celebrity who, quite possibly, generates less creative output than my six-year-old daughter does with a box of Crayolas. But I think you will see a new queue emerging, a queue with a different vibe. A queue leading to a much smaller stage, but a stage where the real insight will be shared by people who may have lower profiles but who are the chief technical officers and scientists at some of the most inspirational companies in the world. I’m not just saying this because I’ll be presenting with Chris Satchel, CTO of Nike, sharing insights into how you create products, services and experiences that cut through, endure and surprise. I’m saying it because to get ahead it’s the early bird that catches the worm, and the Innovation Lions is more about what is possible tomorrow than what was achieved yesterday. What comes with the Innovation Lions is a new wave of awards too. Part of me is dreading this, purely due to the honour (and I do mean honour) of being locked away in a windowless room for

“We’re going to see techies on the Croisette, and Cannes will have an authentic digital attitude. It will be more relevant and exciting than in past years.”

a week of judging while most grab a few rays on the Google beach en route to the next session or meeting. The Innovation Lions will recognise the impact of data science, of hardware and of products from brands highlighting that the future of advertising is more brain than brawn. It will recognise that for companies to succeed they must have limitless intelligence rather than the power and money to advertise en masse. Where the little (but very clever) guys can think, create, make and win against the giants who once had the power and assumed right to monopolise. We will see awards that recognise how technology has democratised what was once for the elite. Who, for example, would have thought that they would have been able to have their own personal chauffeur at the click of their fingers (or press of a button)? In fact, forget cars, in Cannes this year we will see the UberCopter! We will celebrate services and products, not just campaigns, that have been created in a new world of connectivity where everything is connected and so the clever part becomes taking 1, adding 1 and making 3. That is, creating completely new services and ideas by combining unexpected things. It’s a return of the Google Maps mash-up era when the evolution of technology became the creative playground. So, here’s to the brave and innovative. You now have your stage. Welcome to Cannes Lions 2015. S

THE CANNES LIONS BEACH

Thursday 25 June 2015

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18 Inspired | NEW WORK

GOING GLOBAL THAILAND

A grim warning in smokey ink EXPERIENTIAL Thai Health Promotion Foundation The Message From The Lungs

BACKGROUND ILLUSTRATION: CHRIS MADDEN

Smoking is a filthy habit, but it’s a hard one to break: just ask the 90 per cent of smokers in Thailand who have, at least once, tried – and failed – to quit. With 142 people dying from smoking-related illnesses every day in the country, the Thai Health Promotion Foundation sought help from BBDO Bangkok to raise people’s awareness of the dangers by broadcasting messages from inside their own bodies. The resulting campaign, Message From The Lungs, saw the faculty of medicine at Chulalongkorn University extract tar from lungs donated by smokers, and turn it into ink, in a gruesome but fascinating process. The substance was then bottled and distributed in public spaces around the Thai capital, with recipients encouraged to use it to create their own anti-smoking messages. As well as becoming a huge talking point across the country, the campaign has had a major impact socially, with more than 100,000 people sharing the messages across their networks. Crucially, that has translated into effectiveness: the number of participants in the Foundation’s quit-smoking programme has increased by 500 per cent compared to the previous year.

“There are other acting methods out there, but the cliché technique is 100% reliable. Everything we teach has been done a million times before.”

CANADA

A highly original take on clichés ONLINE FILMS Canadian Film Fest Academy Of Cliché Clichés in films. Just like an overpriced jumbo-sized box of popcorn and needing the loo just before the exciting bit, they’re an integral element of the blockbuster movie experience. It stands to reason that the tried-and-tested techniques of genre acting should be on the curriculum for any aspiring actor. That’s the witty premise behind Academy Of Cliché, a tongue-incheek film created by JWT Canada to promote this year’s Canadian Film Fest, a showcase of original work aiming to celebrate and advance homegrown filmmaking talent. Shot in a spoof documentary style, the two-minute film follows trainee actors at the fictional Academy of Cliché. There’s a marksmanship class (where students learn how to fire as many bullets as possible without actually hitting the hero); a romcom hero’s airport dash to declare his love; and the typical slasher film finale where it turns out – shock horror! – that the killer’s not actually dead. Providing a running commentary is head instructor Clement Bishop, who points out that “there are other acting methods out there…but the cliché technique is 100 per cent reliable. Everything we teach has been done a million times before.” Directed by OPC’s Jono Hunter, the clever spot closes by encouraging viewers to ‘escape the cliché’ by supporting independent films.

ARGENTINA

A beer campaign with lasting bite BRANDED CONTENT Cerveza Salta Beer Tooth Implant They say that football is the beautiful game, but cauliflower ears, split lips and black eyes all conspire to make rugby the exact opposite. And while wounds heal and bruises disappear, there are some things that, once knocked out, can’t be replaced. Teeth, for example. Or can they? Step forward popular Argentinian beer brand Salta, which has teamed up with Ogilvy & Mather Argentina to play the ultimate tooth fairy with an innovative campaign which does more than simply plug the gaps. Aiming to ‘reward players who gave everything they had on the field – including their teeth’, the campaign sees players fitted with hardwearing metal implants – Salta branded, naturally – which double up as bottle-openers. It’s a bold concept which shares the offbeat humour of the agency’s previous work for the brewer, the Rugbeer Machine, which featured a ‘world-first’ vending machine that only dispensed beer in response to a rugby-style tackle. Produced by Huinca Cine and directed by Fernando Roca, the two-minute campaign video follows the procedure in graphic detail from an initial consultation with a dental surgeon, to the players testing out their dual-purpose gnashers in the ‘third half’. Warning: not recommended for the squeamish.

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GLOBAL ROUND-UP

DUBAI

Just one letter spells death CINEMA & ONLINE Kia Motors Crash Text

THE NETHERLANDS

Dumb outcome at ‘smart’ home TV & ONLINE Centraal Beheer Achmea Welcome Technology: making all our jobs that little bit easier. Unfortunately, that goes for burglars, too – though not in the way you might anticipate, as this clever film from Centraal Beheer Achmea demonstrates. Created by DDB & Tribal Worldwide, Amsterdam (who were also behind the Dutch insurance company’s slapstick spots Speedboat and Self Driving Car), Welcome, from the ‘Just Call Us’ series, was entirely conceived, directed and produced in-house by the agency. “We wanted to give our own team the opportunity to develop their skills in new areas,” says ECD Joris Kuijpers. In the witty 60-second spot, a pair of burglars arrive at a fortress-like luxury home, fully expecting to embark on a tricky break-in. To their surprise, the gates open automatically; likewise the front door, no skeleton keys or crowbars required. Once inside the house, there’s no need to hunt for valuables, which are seemingly presented on a plate: priceless paintings are handily illuminated, a flatscreen TV emerges from a cupboard and a state-of-the art car unlocks itself. As the duo burst into incredulous laughter, the action cuts to a packed auditorium where the homeowner is demonstrating his latest ‘smart’ gadget with much Silicon Valley-style hubris. A remote control for “curtains, lights [and] doors” which can only be accessed by him? It all suddenly makes sense…

GERMANY

Purrrfectly brilliant spoof ONLINE FILMS Volkswagen Leasing Cat Video Whether you love them, hate them or are simply befuddled by their popularity, cat videos are now a bona fide internet phenomenon, so it’s no surprise that advertisers want a slice of the action. In this online film for Volkswagen Leasing, Berlin-based agency Mangan has put its own stamp on the trend by switching cats for people dressed as cats. ‘You don’t have to be a cat to get on the Internet. And if you want to drive a Volkswagen, you don’t have to buy one’ is the premise behind the 60-second viral video, directed by Curtis Wehrfritz through Tony Petersen Film, which sees cat cosplayers recreate their favourite virals, from the moggy jumping into cardboard boxes to the Roomba (robot vacuum cleaner)-riding feline and the Holy Grail of cat videos, Gato Malo, whose moody attempts to knock a glass off a table garnered more than 7.5 million YouTube views. To capture the ‘home video’ look of the genre, the people-cats’ antics were all shot on a smartphone, using a handheld device to steady the phone and allow it to be used more like a traditional camera. “I felt it important that we didn’t try to achieve the look in post, but rather figured out a work flow that allowed us to shoot HD on an iPhone 6,” says Wehrfritz.

Sometimes the simplest executions can be the most devastating, as this recent PSA from Kia Motors Egypt shows. To highlight the dangers of texting at the wheel, Saatchi & Saatchi Dubai eschewed the typically graphic approach for a more abstract style that leaves much to the imagination – and is arguably more powerful as a result. Strung together with the tagline ‘One letter can end it all’, the minutelong spot sees individual letters of the alphabet destroyed in ways suggesting the devastating effects of a car crash. ‘A’ explodes in a cloud of smoke and flames; ‘N’ crumples up and burns; ‘E’ cracks and shatters like a car windscreen; and X is suddenly, shockingly, spattered with blood. With the Middle East and North Africa having the second highest car fatality rate in the world – around 21 road deaths per population of 100,000, according to figures released by the Global Road Safety Partnership – Richard Copping, executive creative director of Saatchi & Saatchi Dubai, hopes the film will make people take notice. “The abstract approach was deliberate in the hope that people who see it are left with the message that it’s not necessarily the act of driving that causes accidents but the habit of texting and driving,” he says.

Where’s a handy place to keep a bottle opener? Bolted into your jaw, obvs. Selena Schleh learns this and other lessons – some sobering, some side-splitting – from her tour of the world’s latest, most wondrous campaigns

20 Inspired | the source

blood, sweat & diet coke Kim Gehrig, the Somesuch director behind the hotly Cannes-tipped This Girl Can spot for Sport England, gets inspiration where she can when juggling motherhood – with the help of caffeine and online supermarket shopping – and a genrehopping career. Her music tastes may be parental in nature but she expresses her adult side with hard-hitting psychological dramas and challenging art shows

What is the most creative advertising idea you’ve seen in the last few months? Tough without choosing Somesuch work… So, I’d have to say Daniel Wolfe’s Honda Type-R spot, The Other Side. I work in the same edit suite and when I saw it, even in its early stages, I knew it was going to be something remarkable. It made me up the ante; it set the bar higher. What website do you use most regularly? Sydney Morning Herald. What’s your favourite website? Ocado. I’m a working mum. What product could you not live without? Diet Coke and coffee (for the same reason). What product hasn’t been invented yet that would make your life/job better? Something that could enable longer days while still getting enough sleep.

If you could live in one city, where would it be? What track/artist would you listen to for inspiration?

What fictitious character do you most relate to?

Embarrassingly I’ve been so busy I’ve neglected listening to music other than my daughter’s Mrs H and the Sing-along Band, in particular Dance Away With Me, which is actually pretty good…

The truth is I always wanted to be Sandra Bullock with a laptop on the beach in The Net. But now I regret realising that 90s dream because it means never getting a real holiday.

Mac or PC?

What’s your favourite magazine?

Mac. What’s the best film you’ve seen over the last year? Whiplash. Incredibly simple in its structure but contains such truth about creativity. The psychological warfare, the agony, the blood, sweat and tears. Completely relatable. What show/exhibition has most inspired you recently? Last week I went to celebrate the 10th anniversary of my friend’s gallery Herald St, curated by the brilliant Sarah McCrory. The art they had on show, and what they’ve achieved in 10 years, I found hugely inspiring.

Time Out – so I can see all the events that I’m too busy to go to.

“I always wanted to be Sandra Bullock with a laptop on the beach in The Net. But now I regret realising that 90s dream because it means never getting a real holiday.”

That’s tough, I adore London but I love the ocean and good weather so I miss Sydney. There’s no better city in my humble opinion. Who’s your favourite photographer? Rineke Dijkstra. She captures what it means to be human. I’d love to try and do something similar in the moving image. On a completely different trip I am obsessed with Viviane Sassen. Who’s your favourite designer? I have many, but my top few would include: Alexander McQueen for his ability to transcend fashion design into performance and art. Zaha Hadid for being so driven in her vision; inspiring. And maybe Charles and Ray Eames because their chairs make me comfortable everyday. If you could have been in any band, what band would you choose?

The Velvet Underground. I’d be Nico. S

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KIM GehrIG 2 1 3

5 What inspires Gehrig: 1 Honda Type-R, The Other Side 2 Photography by Rineke Dijkstra 3 Photography by Viviane Sassen 4 Mrs H and the Sing-along Band 5 Nico in The Velvet Underground 6 Sandra Bullock in The Net 7 Psychological drama Whiplash

22 Pictures | creative spaces Buying our building off-plan meant we had more than a year to design it ourselves. With all the 3D knowledge we have and a great architect/ interior designer, Maurice Mentjens, we had a lot of fun trying to make a 3D version of the not-yet-built space into our dream office. We went crazy at times; from human-sized bird houses to wrongly-sized football pitches. In the end Maurice came up with a final plan that pretty much materialised our dream scenario. This PostPanic building is not just a production office, it houses all of our ambitions – ‘If you build it, they will come’. This new space allows us to organise our PanicRoom events where we invite people that we admire to talk about their inspirations. We need to squeeze in about 150 guests to those. Our meeting room is inspired by Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and we also created a gallery wall where we can have different artists display their work. Finally and most importantly, we have our grandstand – the perfect place to watch football! We chose to have an open plan office with each department having its very own identity. We created pathways and areas where we continually bump into each other, thus providing a friendly atmosphere. Essentially it makes us function as one unit. So production and post production feel related; this is very PostPanic. S

| Pictures 23

POSTPANIC AMSTERDAM

A NEVERLAND IN THE NETHERLANDS

PHOTOGRAPHS: Arjen Schmitz

Outsized bird houses and wrong-sized football pitches all figured in initial design ideas for the off-plan-bought HQ of the Amsterdam production house PostPanic. Finally, says co-founder and CD Mischa Rozema, they got the space of their dreams – inspired by soccer and space odysseys

photographs: toby burrows

jeff low

24 People | director profile

“I’ve realised that the thing I love doing the most is making things funny… it’s hard to get things past the goal line that are genuinely funny, and anything that people find funny is what I’m most proud of.”

| People 25

jeff Low

The story of Jeff Low’s journey to becoming the award-winning director of spots like Skittles’ Cat and Tena Men’s Keep Control, reads like the sort of surreal farce this funny-loving guy would write as a treatment. His unusual-tosay-the-least journey from covers band musician to IT tech to PA to director, via a combination of unbelievable luck, balls and sheer graft, may explain this writerdirector’s taste for the ridiculous – and ridiculously funny – but also his incredible work ethic, attention to detail and intense focus. But, as he tells Iain Blair, coming from nowhere and coming late to the business doesn’t worry him – “I just do the best work I can and work my tits off”

26 People | director profile

ver the past eight years, Canadian director Jeff Low has established himself as one of the top creatives in the business, largely thanks to a simple, but highly effective, philosophy: work as hard as humanly possible (and then work a little harder still), and never forget that comedy is king. “I’ve realised that the thing I love doing the most is making things funny,” he states. “It’s the most fun you can have on set, and I never feel like I’ve wasted my time if I’ve succeeded in making something funny. Not ‘ad’ funny, but actually funny, and it’s just so difficult to do, as there’s so many competing agendas with clients – ‘We have to do this’, ‘We can’t do this’, and ‘You must never do this’. It’s hard to get things past the goal line that are genuinely funny, and anything that people find funny is what I’m most proud of.” A look at some of his extremely witty Greatest Hits helps underscore his point: there’s the recent Tena Men Keep Control campaign for AMV BBDO; The Guardian, Use In Moderation for BBH London in 2014; Mattel/Scrabble Blank and Q for Pereira & O’Dell SF in 2012; General Mills Fruit Snacks Cocoon for Saatchi & Saatchi NY; and the famous Skittles Cat for BBDO Toronto, both in 2011. “And I just did World Animal Protection Before They Book [for BBH, which won Best Integrated at the recent British Arrows awards in London], so I don’t just like to tell jokes,” he adds. “Essentially all I really care about is, is it the best idea? And it’s the latest thing I’ve done that I’m proudest of, that and Tena Men. Everything else seems like a million years ago to me.”

Making it up as you go along Low sees the writing process as a key component. “The times when it works out best for me are when I get to write as well as direct,” he states. “I like the process of writing a lot, and I like to add as much as possible to a script on paper, before you go to camera.” Running with this thought, Low also admits that he’s “actually still unclear about what a director is, in a way. There are some who just take a script and execute it, and there are guys who are really good at that. I can do that, but I’m much more useful if I can also help write.” The Tena Men spot is a good illustration of this approach. “I wrote a lot of those scenes with the team,” he notes, “and so those are ideal conditions for me, when I can combine it with ideas and conjure ideas with the creative team. And then on set I’ll execute them, as a normal director would. It also allows me to write my own scripts, sometimes. So if there’s a script that isn’t perfect, but it’s a situation where everyone is pretty flexible, then I’ll tend to take that script if I can do stuff to it.” Low also “loves the satisfaction” of taking a blank page, writing something, and then later watching that idea “become a reality that works. There’s something very cool about that.” Despite his success, and self-awareness, Low comes over as genuinely modest and unassuming. “The truth is, I have a hard time even watching my own reel,” he insists. “I’m not my own cheerleader. I think I may be an honorary Brit in that way.” He’s happier talking about the work of others. The recent Honda The Other Side spot shot by Daniel Wolfe “blew my pants off – and if it doesn’t win the best ad of the year, I’ll be pretty shocked. I was very impressed.” And while Low feels that there are “just too many” awards shows, he recognises that the financial benefits of winning shouldn’t be ignored. “Just because I’m Canadian doesn’t mean I’m a socialist,” he notes drily. “A healthy amount of competition is good. I just wish I’d been

smart enough to start an awards show, as I feel that may be the best job in the whole industry. You accept money so you can hand out trophies? What could be greater?” But ask him about his favourite spots of his own and he quickly takes a considered step away from the subject. “I suppose there’s two ways of looking at it,” he allows. “There’s the ‘careerist’ way – stuff that sort of helps me in my career, and then there’s the stuff that I like, the comedy stuff.”

The accidental commercials director Successful comedy, of course, depends on timing, and it turns out that the Toronto native, who eventually found his way into directing through an unlikely and non-traditional route, always had a great sense of timing – and time. Starting off as a musician in his 20s, Low played bass guitar and keyboards, “in bar bands and David Bowie tribute acts, for drunk college kids mostly,” he reports. “It was tons of fun and a great way to spend a decade. I loved it.” But gradually he felt the gravitational pull “to grow up and do something other than just drink beer for a living, which is basically what you do as a musician in those kinds of bands,” he explains. So Low got a day job repairing computers in the back of a shop. “I was in my 30s, struggling to grow up and be responsible,” he adds. “It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but then I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and it was a job.” When one day he got called out to the sales floor as a temporary replacement for a salesman who’d had to leave, Low’s gift for timing arrived in a career-changing moment. “This guy came in who wanted to buy a computer, and I told him I couldn’t sell it to him as I wasn’t a sales person, but a repair guy in the back,” he recalls. “So he said, ‘Do you like your job?’ And I said, ‘Of course not – I hate it!’ So he said, ‘If you sell it to me at a discount, you can come and work for me tomorrow’. It turned out he was a production manager and needed an assistant, and thought I’d make a good one. I had to ask him what a PA even was. But it sounded far more interesting than what I was doing, so I thought, why not?” Low was promptly fired from the computer store for his unauthorised stint as a ‘salesman’ and started his new career the next day. “I didn’t mean to do any of this,” he laughs. “There was no big plan. It all happened by accident, and when I got on set, I found that everyone was really cool, and they all had the same problem I had – no one really knew what the hell they were doing with their lives.” After learning the ropes and gradually working his way up through production, a burned-out and frustrated Low decided to leave the film industry – but not before he gave it one last shot. “I’ve always felt creative and had that need to express myself, so I thought, ‘I’ll pick a job that I want, and I’ll really try to get it,’” he says. “And if I don’t get it, no big deal. I’ll leave and go back to my old life as a musician.” Aiming for the stars, Low picked ‘director’. “I wanted to do what they do, and by then I’d been doing treatments for them and sort of understood the job,” he adds. “I’d learned how to speak to agencies through treatment writing, and knew what they wanted to hear – good fresh ideas.” With this minimal training, Low “somehow convinced” an acquaintance with a local production company to build his reel. “I’d write fake commercials, and he’d help me shoot them on the backs of jobs he

“There was no big plan. It all happened by accident, and when I got on set, I found that everyone was really cool, and they all had the same problem I had – no one really knew what the hell they were doing with their lives.”

| People 27

jeff Low

28 People | director profile

already had,” recalls Low. “And he helped me get some scripts, which put me in a position to do what I already knew how to do – writing and crafting treatments. And ever since then, my strength’s been writing and crafting ideas on paper, and being very specific about them. And then, just with experience, I’ve learned to see what’s going to work and what’s totally not going to work.” Although Low paints a fairly breezy picture of his move into directing, he admits that if he’d known just how hard it would be, “I probably wouldn’t have pursued it. Every single happiness in your life has to be forfeited, for at least a year, and if you go into this thinking, ‘I’ll make a ton of money’, you’re an idiot. You need to let go of everything and forget about money, which is hard to do. And it was a real grind, a game of inches, and it’s so competitive.” His big break finally came with his acclaimed interactive Skittles spot which garnered 1.5 million views online within 24 hours of its debut (the overall campaign won two gold Lions at Cannes). “For a guy like me to even have a brand like Skittles really got me noticed,” he says. “And it was all blind luck. I worked my ass off to get it, but I didn’t write it.” But it was the spot that got Low signed to Biscuit, and got him leverage. “I had a cool little reel before, but this was a major deal, and it solidified me as ‘a funny guy’ whether I liked it or not,” he notes. “And in America, at least, I find you can only do one thing. You’re ‘that guy’. You can’t do four things, because it’s such a specialised market. But that’s not the case in the UK or Canada or Australia, at least in my experience.” Since then, Low has actively “tried to leave money out of the equation” and focus on work “that I feel good about. Forget about awards and so on – just do the best job I can, and work my tits off. That’s the secret.” That and intense preparation. “I do a lot of research and forensically go through every aspect of a job,” he explains. “I’m almost scientific about my approach, on paper. But that only gets you so far. You still need the je ne sais quoi.” While he still has a home and family in Toronto, Low rarely works in Canada anymore, and divides his time between London and LA, “almost 50-50. And I’ll almost always get ‘funny’ scripts in both markets, but the UK will give me opportunities to do other stuff,” he reports. “Culturally, it’s just more open to a director doing varied material, and I don’t know why.”

Come over here and sit next to me

Jeff Low

Asked about his directing style, Low describes his approach as “trying to be a conduit for the script’s author. Sometimes they may want me to totally take over, but more often when you’re working with a top creative team, they have a very strong position on how it should be,” he states. “So it’s not really my vision, and I want to amplify their vision. And you can work two different ways: either I sit down beside you and we go over things, or I sit across from you. And I’d rather sit beside you. That’s the best way I can describe my approach. Maybe it’s collaborative to a fault sometimes, but I love the debate and the back-and-forth.” As for the future, Low says he has no plans to move into movies. “I feel like I’m perfectly trained to make a terrible movie,” he claims. “I like the short format, so I can definitely see myself doing sketch comedy, and I love writing so much that – whatever I end up doing – as long as it involves writing, I’ll be happy.” S

Commercials representation UK and US biscuitfilmworks.com Canada opc.tv Australia rabbitcontent.com France lestelecreateurs.com

Key work • World Animal Protection Before They Book • Tena Men Keep Control • The Guardian/Observer Use in Moderation • Scrabble Blank; Q • Skittles Cat

“I do a lot of research and forensically go through every aspect of a job. I’m almost scientific about my approach, on paper, showing why an idea will work. But that only gets you so far. You still need the je ne sais quoi.”

1 The Guardian/Observer, Use in Moderation 2 World Animal Protection, Before They Book 3 Skittles, Cat

| People 29

jeff jow

Jeff Low is inspired by… What’s your favourite ever ad? Maybe Cat With A Pipe [for the Buenos Aires Independent Film Festival]. It’s just such a great idea with a 50 dollar execution. Reminds us that it’s all about having an idea. What product could you not live without? Lettuce spinner. It’s by far the most fun and dynamic of kitchen appliances. What are your thoughts on social media? Having a ‘stance’ on social media is like having a stance on pigeons at this point. It’s just part of life on Earth. And like pigeons it can be used for good and evil… but mostly it’s used for neither. How do you relieve stress during a shoot? Prep the job properly. Be organised and clear with everybody what the hell you’re going to do. I’m pretty serious about protecting our shooting time and I work very hard to keep stressful things off the set. I consider it part of my job to create the best shooting conditions possible beyond just the creative stuff. It’s not only the producer’s job, I guess is my point. Also it helps to understand that you are not obliged to adopt someone else’s stress. That’s their thing, not your thing. What’s the last film you watched and was it any good? I watched That’s My Boy with Adam Sandler and Andy Samberg just to see how bad it was. And it was pretty dumb but I laughed and didn’t regret it. I wouldn’t recommend it but I would never judge you for liking it. What was the last gig you went to? It was an opera with Noam Murro and [Biscuit UK’s MD] Orlando Wood actually. Which makes my life seem like something that it’s totally not. What film do you think everyone should have seen? Goodfellas. It’s just weird if you haven’t seen it. What fictitious character do you most relate to? Sisyphus… but more thankful for the rock. If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be? I’m pretty jealous of people in the hard sciences. Intense math seems to be the language of the universe and it seems like it would be really cool to be able to talk to the universe or understand things in a different way than the normal way that everybody understands things. To understand things rather than be trapped in the phenomenon all the time would be a nice perch to sit from sometimes. To me that sounds like a whole new level of creativity, way beyond anything we normally refer to as creative. I doubt I could hack it, but that’s what I’d like to do other than this. Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know… I can’t bend my left thumb because I split it open as a kid running with a glass Coke bottle. Because of this I’ve never been that great at imitating Jimi Hendrix on the guitar, ’cos he wrapped his thumb around the fretboard fairly often.

TMU-Most Wanted.indd 2

9/05/2015 10:18 am

| People 31

PhotographS: Christophe Boulze

Matthieu Elkaim

“What is the line at the end of your fucking idea?”

32 People | creative profile

or Matthieu Elkaim, executive creative director at BBDO Paris, there are two basic human needs that shape and provide for all the others – escape and fun. “I was a very bad student,” he laughs, looking back to his early years at school and college. “My priorities were to play with my friends outside, to not respect the hours, and just to have fun.” His older sister, of course, was a straight-A student, “always perfect, and when I grew up I decided to be different,” he adds. “By that I mean, the black sheep. The less I respected the rules the better I was. It’s one of my motivations. It’s a part of why I decided to work in advertising. I just wanted to have fun.”

An offer he couldn’t refuse After three internships, including one with Publicis at age 18, he eventually joined TBWA\ Paris as a junior copywriter in 2001. He was new to the French capital. “I don’t have a Parisian soul,” he says. “I grew up about 30km from Paris, in a small new city; not very exciting.” His father, however, worked in the industry as a media buyer for Publicis’ group of companies. “He found me my first internship. I remember him always reading the newspapers to check the adverts. So from when I was very young I was interested in the media, communication, the whole business.” Now in his mid-30s, Elkaim has risen to the top of the Parisian advertising scene via key creative partnerships, as copywriter alongside some of the city’s best art directors – including Emmanuel Bougneres and Pierrette Diaz. In 2012 he was invited to leave DDB Paris, where he had partnered with senior art director Diaz for the best part of eight years, to take up the reins as ECD at CLM BBDO. “I was talking to Mother and Fallon in London about a CD job, and some other agencies in the US,” he remembers, “but when BBDO suggested I take the role of ECD, I was 32 years old. It was such a chance to get the keys of the creative department. CLM, the French agency, has always been a beautiful, great agency with such a heritage – very big, popular, smart campaigns – and BBDO was certainly the best network in the world. The mix of the two – I couldn’t refuse it. As simple as that.” He is currently ECD of both CLM and Proximity, with a brief to reinforce and

strengthen the creative department at Proximity, and to create bridges between both agencies, with more integration. Which means overseeing around 400 people and 70 creatives. “BBDO is a fantastic house, really, like a family, but without any bullshit words,” he says. “Even at the network level, I can access [global CCO] David Lubars very quickly if I need to ask something. It’s a very friendly network. What I love is the good mix between international and local accounts. That’s pretty cool.” The local and the global are two engines of creativity that demand very different styles of driving, Elkaim believes. “Great creativity is definitely local,” he says. “It is very hard today to create something really outstanding at a global level. There are too many decisions, too many people to please, and suddenly the common denominator becomes the lowest. It is very important to remain a strong local agency, because it is definitely the best way to make the most outstanding work. Working only for global accounts is very interesting, especially for the strategy and brand platforms, but in terms of pure creativity – it’s hard. Very hard.”

The theoretician of creativity Elkaim’s first industry mentor was Eric Vervroegen, CD at TBWA\Paris, where Elkaim was junior copywriter – the baby of the agency, who grew a scratchy beard to look older. There, he worked with Emmanuel Bougneres on campaigns for the likes of Sony PlayStation, McDonald’s, SNCF, and Amnesty International. “I started to really know this job in terms of involvement, hard work and creativity, with Eric Vervroegen,” Elkaim says. “What’s really important is that he was a theoretician of creativity. He was able to look at campaigns and say: this will win gold, this will win silver, this will win bronze, this will win a Grand Prix. And he was right. It was crazy, really. He was very demanding, in terms of art direction. He told me to work harder and to never be really satisfied,” he laughs. “When I started in this job, I had this feeling it was pretty easy and cool, but the reality is very different. It’s a fucking hard job. You need to work a lot to find the great ideas. It’s not just waking up and going to the bathroom and thinking,

“It’s a fucking hard job. You need to work a lot to find the great ideas. It’s not just waking up and going to the bathroom and thinking, ‘Aaah!’ That’s not the job. That was a very important moment in my career.”

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Matthieu Elkaim

ECD Matthieu Elkaim tells Tim Cumming he likes it hard, fucking hard. Work, that is. That’s the biggest lesson he’s learned in a short but stellar career that’s seen him take the creative reins of BBDO Paris at the age of just 32. For a guy who claims to just want to have fun, he seems to take this creativity stuff pretty seriously…

34 People | creative profile

“I’ve discovered, as I grew up in advertising, that I love brands. I love brand strategies. I love to think for the brand, not just doing creativity in itself. It gives me the anchor.”

‘Aaah!’ That’s not the job. [Realising that] was a very important moment in my career.” At the same time, Elkaim was ambivalent about Vervroegen’s prize-oriented approach. “It wasn’t really the advertising that I loved, it was very Cannes-oriented, award-oriented. It was surprising, beautiful, a breakthrough, but not in a good way. Very strong images. I was very interested in the smart advertising I saw in the UK, the clever concepts. I was more conceptual. I love this dimension in my job, and I believe good advertising is a very strong visual with a very smart concept. And the concept was lacking in the Parisian scene.” At the age of 24 he moved to DDB, still a junior copywriter, and teamed up with senior art director Pierrette Diaz. The creative culture that

he found there was very different – just what he was looking for. “It’s the culture of observation. It’s all about human behaviour, and simple observation and how you can play with that and build a concept all around this little thing. For me, advertising is so smart when it is like that, because it talks to people.” He also won his first Cannes metal – two golds – for a print campaign for Volkswagen’s commercial vehicles, and the following year, with the Shox poster campaign for Nike. “Two beautiful brands. I’ve discovered, as I grew up in advertising, that I love brands. I love brand strategies. I love to think for the brand, not just doing creativity in itself. It gives me the anchor. You always have to take into account the brand issues, its strategy.”

Surviving death by iced tea Over the next five years Elkaim rose to become a senior creative at DDB Paris, but those twin drives for fun and escape still had their hold. “I don’t like comfort. I love to escape. I hate my comfort zone. The best way to stay creative is to put yourself in danger. Out of the comfort zone. After five years I said to myself, is this it for my whole life? No! I don’t want this feeling of having to pass an exam every year, with Cannes Lions, it’s impossible. I want something more.”

What he got was the Unilever account for Lipton tea, via Nick Bell at DDB London, who had become worldwide CD for Lipton, and appointed Elkaim as European CD on the project. His colleagues registered surprise, then concern. “Everyone looked at us with big eyes,” he says. “It was a case of, OK guys, you’re dead, your career is over. It was a death sentence.” He laughs. “At this moment, I knew it was a good choice.” It was no death sentence, of course, but it wasn’t an easy ride. “It was really hard work… We invented a new language and a new creative platform, and it worked well. But to do what we really wanted to do with our vision, it took two years of very hard work. The last year on Lipton Ice Tea, we established a good concept with two fantastic and very cool TV commercials, and with this, we moved the brand from nothing to something. It was such an experience, but at the end I was exhausted, really exhausted. When it’s Unilever, it’s really tough – you have to convince so many people in so many markets.” By 2012, he was ready to make another move. “It was the same drive – I wasn’t having fun. After three years with Unilever, I needed that, I needed to feel again. This job, it is so cool and fun, it is about ideas, but at that moment, I felt like I was a machine. I wanted a new project, a new challenge.” Potential moves to the US, UK and even

36 People | creative profile

“… so what is your great idea? The message, the creative concept, the idea remains fantastically true in our job today. And that makes all the difference.”

Australia were tested out, but it was the invitation from BBDO that sealed his next move. He took a couple of close friends with him – Olivier Lefebvre and Benjamin Marchal, creative directors at DDB Paris. “I wanted to build this project with people I like and can collaborate with,” he says.

The bottom line – is the line Elkaim had barely warmed up his chair at BBDO before he was pitched into a decidedly 21stcentury bout of brand damage limitation, after a naked man was left in the background of a shot of kids modelling threads on a beach for online retailer La Redoute. Oh dear. The resulting internet furore could have been a disaster. “It was all about crisis communication, based on a real fucking bad buzz – a real mistake,” says Elkaim.

The solution was to ’fess up, create ‘fails’ in 14 other La Redoute images, and invite the public to hunt them down, with the winner getting dressed from head to toe in La Redoute gear. Job done. “We told the client, guys you made a mistake,” he says, “and the best way to become human for a brand is to accept mistakes, to accept that you can make mistakes. It is, after all, what defines humanity from a robot.” The strategy bagged a PR gold at Cannes. A live weather billboard for La Redoute was another success. Operating day and night for a month, the interactive poster delivered live weather reports alongside models wearing appropriate clothing. Fashion and weather were fused into a grand narrative, and in the centre of Paris. What’s not to like? “One of my goals when I joined BBDO was to explain that the world had changed and that we needed to embrace the new media and new kinds of approaches,” he says. “Not just digital – we didn’t need to become a digital agency, that is a fucking mistake – but we needed to be an agency of today, which would include those platforms.” To achieve this, he directed his teams back to their own personal digital usage. “I’d say, guys, think about the life you are living right now. You use the internet every day, your laptop, your Apple watch, your smart phone.” That was the line he

wanted them to follow. But below that line lay a more permanent, heavy bottom line, one that ran through the whole of advertising. “Even if we have access to new technology, and many ways to broadcast and play with the media, one thing remains true,” he says, “the role of the good idea. What is the line? What is the line at the end of your fucking idea? What is the concept? Explain. It’s a concept before it becomes an integrated campaign, so what is your great idea? The message, the creative concept, the idea remains fantastically true in our job today. And that makes all the difference.”

All you need is love For Elkaim, what excites him today is that it’s the clients who are now calling for more creativity, for a new kind of activation, a new kind of approach. It’s a two-way street of innovation in communication – all to focus the attention of the people in the middle – the consumers. “We need to be better and even more creative than we were before,” says Elkaim. “What’s great is that clients are starting to understand that. I am passionate about this job and what makes the big difference today is that the great agencies, the great campaigns, come from passionate people, passionate creatives and from passionate agencies. Passion is key in our industry, we need to love advertising to make it well.” S

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Photograph: MERK & MARK

creative mission From designing apps that think like art curators, to fridge magnets that order pizza, Preethi Mariappan, ECD of Razorfish Germany, is all about pushing the boundaries of digital. Having won awards from Cannes to the Clios, she is well placed to judge the Cannes Mobile Lions category at this year’s event and here talks to Simon Wakelin about her thrilling quest to explore today’s new worlds of creative technology

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Preethi Mariappan

40 People | creative profile

reethi Mariappan’s expertise in the digital and interactive marketing space has taken her to posts all over the world. Already having notched up an impressive 13-year career working in digital and product design around India, Singapore and then Dubai, where she set up the digital division at MEMAC Ogilvy, in 2010 she launched TBWA’s Digital Arts Network in the Middle East, producing campaigns for clients including GE, Nissan, Standard Chartered Bank and Unilever. In 2012 she won four Lions for her Push For Hunger campaign for Dubai’s Red Tomato pizzeria, which involved the development of a handy fridge magnet that employs Bluetooth connectivity to double as an emergency pizza-ordering device. While in the Middle East, Mariappan also founded and managed the professional forum, Adwomen, a community of women dedicated to mentoring young female talent within advertising, business and technology. “It was a little bit of modelling that I wished I’d had when I started out,” she explains. “I ran it for four years on a voluntary basis. It was hard work but one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. We had many women go off and start different initiatives, and that for me is success enough. We profiled a lot of successful women, following how they built their businesses. It was also fascinating because I don’t really think enough women talk about their work.” Also in 2012, a busy year for Mariappan, she took the role as TBWA\Germany’s digital ECD, helping to grow the digital cultures of top brands, and also founding the CREATE lab in Berlin,

working with start-ups focussed on service design. “I’ve spent most of my working career with TBWA in one form or another,” she explains. “We’ve had the ability to drive amazing ideas rapidly upstream. Digital has been distributed evenly throughout the agency and it never sat alone. We got to push out some exceptional creative work.” Mariappan’s latest move has been within German borders, jumping from Hamburg to Berlin to join Razorfish Germany as ECD in January 2014. “I thought it would be an interesting time to work there,” she says. “Razorfish defines what it means to be creative in a very cutting-edge way.” One of Europe’s fastest growing hubs for tech startups, Berlin is also the perfect location to realise the potential of new tech and media: “The bulk of media business has traditionally come out of Hamburg, but Berlin is the start-up capital of Germany, and a better space to be if you are handling creative technology,” she says. Mariappan is in her element navigating uncharted ad territory for such clients as Audi, DHL, IKEA and UBS, and is excited that advertising is increasingly becoming a business that effectively uses data to map success: “It’s having the analytics in hand to see what drives people’s behaviour that allows us such rich insight into design and meaningful experiences. We are able to constantly switch up and change our approaches to better engage the audience.”

Connecting big data to big ideas Exemplifying this approach is the Planet Art app, created for investment banking company UBS. Designed to bring contemporary art news to a global audience, the app collects and distills the most relevant trending topics in art around the world. By analysing and indexing thousands of articles it then presents the most relevant information to its users. “Planet Art is a really interesting example of big data work,” Mariappan says. “We designed the app to think like an art curator to really get the pulse of the art world. The app uses unique algorithms to read and index information from a vast number of sources to present top-ranked news within the art world. UBS is one of the largest collectors of contemporary art in the world so it was the perfect match.” Recent work for Audi also inspired an audience

“It’s having the analytics in hand to see what drives people’s behaviour that allows us such rich insight into design and meaningful experiences. We are able to constantly switch up and change our approaches to better engage the audience.”

to test drive its new A3 model through a simple yet effective mobile app. Users were required to point their phones at the sun, allowing geo location and live weather data to book the perfect day for an A3 test drive. The app garnered immediate appeal with hundreds of test drives booked across Germany after its release. “We do a lot of work on Audi,” explains Mariappan. “In terms of social media engagement I’d say it’s one of the top five media brands in Germany. There’s a lot of strategic thinking behind their work and, as a result, we’ve seen a strong fan base develop.” Both of these campaigns illustrate the power of technology and how effortlessly it becomes part of people’s lives. “The possibility of connecting products and services to people is a very exciting field to be in,” she says. “Look at the mobile phone, it’s the universal remote for everything.” With Razorfish noted as a digital leader in China, I ask how the Asian market differs from Europe? “In terms of audience engagement it gets a much higher response when you run social media campaigns,” she answers. “Europe has a more evolved brand market so there’s a lot more emphasis on privacy. You don’t experience the same kind of barriers in Asia because people aren’t thinking about why you’re selling to them – but in Europe you’d better have an excellent reason for talking to just about anyone. You can’t just run a contest on Facebook and expect a million people to respond.” Response is key, especially when modernising a brand’s identity. Mariappan recently updated IKEA’s iconic catalogue, which was first published in 1951, successfully turning it into a social digital magazine online. Hej is a unique social media platform showcasing real IKEA products in real people’s homes. Users upload a 3600 view of their dwelling before designing it with IKEA products. “We do a lot of content creation and audience engagement work for IKEA,” she explains. “In the end it’s also about bringing utility to even the most basic advertising, making it relevant and meaningful for people. Hej featured photos and films showing authentic and genuine ways to use IKEA products. What’s great is that it’s not a catalogue, but real examples of people styling their homes in inspirational ways.”

Opening up new vistas With the role of technology increasingly a crucial part of branding, Razorfish must continually come up with creative innovations in strategic consulting, experience design and technology platforms. With so much transformational work being created, I wonder what the mood in the Berlin office is like? “Working here is like operating at the edge of chaos,” quips Mariappan on agency culture. “It’s a little bit like space

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Preethi Mariappan

1 UBS Planet Art app 2 Audi A3 series test drive app 3 IKEA Hej online magazine

“Technology opens up new vistas that we haven’t seen before, uncovers new ways of doing things that you thought were impossible. From one day to the next your whole world can change.” exploration to be honest. Our services are very diversified with specialised teams that make for a very complementary mix. We like to cross-fertilise strategy and technology, whereas most digital agencies are more one dimensional. There has to be a good ratio of diversity and stability. It’s about discovering opportunities and future platforms for brands that they didn’t know existed.” Being surrounded by so much stimulation and action on a daily basis, does she find it difficult to keep her focus? “I love the energy here,” she answers. “It’s exciting to come to work every day. Technology opens up new vistas that we haven’t seen before, uncovers new ways of doing things that you thought were impossible. From one day to the next your whole world can change. I could not think of doing anything

else. I walked in to my first job and said I’d give it a week – and here I am 17 years later.” I ask her how she thinks the markets she has worked in might differ to the American advertising industry. “I would say that, culturally, there is a lot more risk-taking in America, especially with technology,” she says. “It’s an entrepreneurial culture there and I think that that is its biggest plus, as it changes the way people approach the work and how ideas get realised. It’s not just about the hardware and software but the culture too.”

Inventing the future Back in Europe, Cannes Lions 2015 is on the horizon and Mariappan is itching to get on with judging the Mobile Lions category this year.

“I’m so excited to be on the jury,” she explains. “They couldn’t have given me a better slot than Mobile. I have a lot of respect for Cannes. You have to give it to them for reinventing the festival, changing it from an old-school classical format to a new stage recognising creativity, technology and strategy. I think it has a huge impact on those who attend and is a marker for where we are in the industry today.” Ask her about the road ahead and there’s nothing but a thirst for discovery: “I think I’m a bit of a futurist,” she answers. “How many of us really want to live in an agricultural society? I love the promise of the future, and can’t wait for flying cars. I love this space, and love where it’s headed. I get to invent part of the future which is truly amazing. How many creatives get to do that?” S

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loving lenticulars

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derrick santini

Derrick Santini investigates themes of beauty and desire through lenticular photography. Once a technique used in novelty rulers, it’s transformed in Santini’s hands into a beautiful, magical trick of the light, as Lee Sharrock discovers

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errick Santini fell in love with photography as a teenager in his hometown of Scarborough, when he began documenting life with his mum’s old Agfa camera. His passion was unusual for someone so young, and pre-dated our oversharing social media age where everyone is a photographer, and teenagers capture everything on their smartphones to tweet or share for a fleeting moment on Snapchat. Santini’s obsession with photographing his surroundings caused some of his friends to ask him why he couldn’t “just chill out and live things instead of always taking photos”. Fast-forward a few decades to the Instagram era, and that obsessive nature, combined with a BA in photography at the acclaimed London

College of Communication, has paid dividends, with Santini enjoying a successful career in fashion, reportage and portrait photography. In recent years he’s refocused his talent onto fine art photography. When shots meets Santini in his East London studio, he is deep in postproduction for his latest series of lenticular prints In Your Mind, buzzing with frenetic creative energy as he talks about his new series, inspirations and love of the technique of lenticular photography. The lenticular process has been around since the 1940s and, as Santini explains on his website, “involves photographing a sequence of still images of live models, which are layered and printed using a special technique, then placed under a thin ribbed plastic sheet which acts as

a lens, thus revealing the full animation within and enabling it to spring to life and move with the viewer, creating delicate and hypnotic animations with an illusion of depth and space.”

Turning novelty rulers into art Santini has captured the essence of some of the most iconic contemporary models, musicians, artists, fashion designers, actors, writers and taste-makers of our age, including Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Helena Bonham Carter, Gilbert & George, Dame Judi Dench, Lily Allen, Zadie Smith, Idris Elba and Suki Waterhouse. As a commercial photographer he has shot campaigns for brands including Apple, Reebok, Firetrap, Nike, K-Swiss and Asics and his

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derrick santini 2

“Invariably I’ll make up a sequence. It’s like stop-frame animation that I create in Photoshop.”

Santini’s lenticulars from the In Your Mind series: 1 Katie In The Sky Of Bubbles 2 CYMCA 2 Page 42 Like The Tide She Turns Page 43 Beauty In The Eyes Of The Beholder

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1 Controversial image from Santini’s 2012 lenticular exhibition Metamorphosis: Goddess Of Love 2 From the project Pictures With Lily: Lily and Mark Anthony (Sparky)

love of fashion has been rewarded by commissions from Esquire, US Vogue, Marie Claire and iD. However, creating fine art and making his mythological visions come to life with lenticulars is his true passion. Santini started experimenting with lenticulars about eight years ago, gaining the attention of the art world. In 2006 he created three lenticular images of actress Gwendoline Christie (before she found fame in Game Of Thrones). They were exhibited at Rendez-Vous in Paris, a prêt-à-porter salon fusing film, fashion and art. Santini originally came across the basic form of lenticular photography (or ‘flicker pictures’) as a child growing up in Scarborough, in the seaside arcades, in the form of novelty items such as rulers showing dancing hula girls: “I loved

lenticulars as a kid, like the rulers and pens. Their naivety reminds me of seaside humour.” He has taken lenticulars to the next level, creating animated loops from selects of his photos in Photoshop: “Invariably I’ll make up a sequence. It’s like stop-frame animation that I create in Photoshop. I create an image that’s a composite of all the shots put together. Then when you put a lens on top, it knocks out the other frames and you see one at a time. The lens realigns it.” In 2010 Shoreditch’s Neu Gallery gave Santini’s lenticulars their first London show, I Love You, I Want To Fuck You, and in 2012 Santini created the series Metamorphosis for London’s Scream gallery. The exhibition brought complaints from the Metropolitan Police after Santini’s lenticular

of a naked woman in a compromising position with a swan caught the eye of a policeman passing the gallery in genteel Mayfair. Santini went to great lengths to achieve realism in this reimagining of the Greek myth of Leda, seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan, using a real live swan in the shoot. Although the story had inspired many classical and Renaissance painters from Rubens to Michelangelo, Santini’s version was a bit too much for this particular bobby, who sent colleagues to demand the picture be removed as it “promoted bestiality”. The gallery was saved from having to put up a fight, though; the exhibition was ending anyway. Santini found the controversy amusing. He explained how much trust was involved between

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derrick santini 2

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Santini’s non-lenticular photography: 1 The Ely Family, Shaw, Mississippi 2 Lily and Billy (Childish), from the project Pictures With Lily

model and photographer on the shoot, and the difficulty of casting: “Most of the girls thought I was mad when I told them my idea about the swan. Then I found a French philosophy student who knew the story and loved the idea.” Santini is a romantic whose work is infused with influences from mythology, poetry, nature and a classical appreciation of the human body. In Metamorphosis and his new series In Your Mind, Santini addresses issues that have preoccupied mankind and influenced artists for centuries, exploring abstractions such as ‘the colour of love’ in his latest work. For him the lenticular process provides a bridge between fantasy and reality: “These series have their roots in mythology, fantasy

and good old folklore, and are a culmination of long harboured ideas based around people, animals and birds, and the metaphysical world that binds these creatures and characters – in lore and in reality, especially in the place where they intersect and cross over. Creating photographic lenticulars to tell these stories brings these ancient notions to interactive life.”

The inert desire of all mankind For In Your Mind Santini spent over a year shooting on location in the sea off Mallorca, and at a less exotic East London swimming pool, followed by six months in post-production. “The colour thing was a big deal, breaking down light into the spectrum.”

More than half of our body is made up of water, so by shooting in water Santini is looking deep into our physiology. The lenticular technique lends a fluidity that enables Santini to turn a model into a mermaid gliding effortlessly through water, or a naked sea nymph looping the loop like the Oceanids of Greek mythology. These primordial images examine the base instincts within all of us: desire, love of life, and fear of mortality. Santini sums up this quest to look deep into our psyche with his photography: “An inert desire in all mankind is to prove that we existed, and in a way photography could have been invented to do just that.” S In Your Mind, 11-22 June, pertweeandersongold.com

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derrick santini 2

50 People | AD ICON

ndy McLeod has made a career out of making people happy while also selling stuff. Two careers, in fact. For nearly 20 years he was half of a creative team behind iconic campaigns for Marmite, Doritos, Volkswagen and more – and co-founded a very successful agency. Then nine years ago he jumped the fence, and became a full-time director. He has gone on to helm some of the funniest and most memorable British commercials of the past decade. Whether it’s with deadpan humour for Mulberry, Kwik Fit or Ginsters, cartoonish satire for Paddy Power, surrealism for Wall’s, or wall-to-wall Hank Marvins for Mattessons, McLeod’s work has the knack of evoking emotion while firmly embedding brand identity into viewers’ minds. It’s an approach he fervently believes in. “You want good creatively-led advertising that, yes, sells products, but does it in a rewarding way for the viewer and for the people who work on it,” says McLeod. He’s forthright and passionate about his craft and his principles. McLeod’s work may be highly successful at embedding brands in viewers’ minds, but it’s also embedded a certain view of his own talents in clients’ minds. In his surreal Wall’s ads Kitchen and Garage, a couple of emotionallystunted males are only able to express their gratitude to women for providing them with their favourite sausages by producing a ringbox containing a tiny dog serenading the ladies on an electric

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piano. In Robinsons’ Birdhouse, a finch returns to its bird box, which turns out to be a decorated in human style, picks up laundry, watches TV, reads a magazine and drinks Robinsons; in Journey, for dogfood brand Cesar, an elderly Mediterranean man takes his adorable dog for a walk in their picturesque village – ending at the cemetery to put flowers on his wife’s grave. McLeod’s latest campaign for Virgin Money is an adrenaline bolt of visual comedy, with a pigeon bopping to The Selector in one spot, and a skateboarding tortoise, in another. In other words, McLeod has developed a bit of a pigeonholing problem – and it involves actual pigeons. He seems to have gained a reputation as a director whose particular forte is working with animals. “Which is bizarre,” he says. Yes, there are very entertaining and well-crafted animal-featuring ads on his reel, but he claims to be no more expert with furry and feathered creatures than any one else. Sitting in the office of his production company, Rattling Stick, McLeod ponders that it might have all started shortly after his highly entertaining commercial for Thinkbox a few years ago – an ad intended to sell the idea of making TV ads. It introduced Harvey, the resourceful four-legged resident of a dogs home, who creates his own ad, to sell himself to prospective owners. Not long after Dogs Home came out, McLeod received the Wall’s ringbox scripts. “I thought, ‘I probably shouldn’t do it, I’m going to get pigeonholed,’” he recalls. “It’s quite a weird idea, but the weirdness appealed to me, I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to do it.’ And thank god, because everybody loved it, and it won loads of awards.” Ultimately he stuck to his principle of following

Creative-turned-director Andy McLeod feels like he’s hitting his stride in his second career. Considering he’s already helmed such award-winners as Mulberry’s #WinChristmas and Wall’s ‘dog-in-a-ringbox’ spots, who knows what humorous heights he’ll hit next. David Knight dissects the fun-loving director’s knack for bringing an idea to life, making a good script better and getting the best out of people… and pigeons SH157_p50-53_AdIcon_AndyMcLeod_KF.indd 51

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52 People | AD ICON his instincts when it comes to how he treats any script that arrives in his inbox. “If it’s a good idea I’ll do it, and I’ll do it if it’s got animals in or not. I’m a sucker for an idea.” Now in his late 40s, McLeod grew up in South London and gained his first brief exposure to the workings of advertising at college in Bristol, on a business studies course. That was enough, he says, for him to realise that “if there was anything I might be okay at doing, it would be the creative side of advertising”. He went on to the highly-regarded advertising course at Hounslow where he met Richard

“Danny and Ringan both said to me at different times, ‘You might be quite good at this if you decided to give it a go’. That gave me the confidence to think about making the change. Because it is scary. The first time you turn up at six in the morning, and there are 80 people waiting for you to tell them what to do, is quite an unnerving thing. But I was cocky enough to think I could do it.” He adds that in his early days as a director he would worry about the technical aspects of filmmaking, until he learned to delegate those responsibilities to others, and just focus on the

Cold sweat. When you’ve got to get the guy and you’re not seeing him, it’s hideous.” His methods for casting and directing are the same for talent of the furry or feathered variety – and he completely shies away from using CGI to create his animal characters. He says that marvels like Robinsons’ Birdhouse and the new Virgin Money Pigeon ad were all basically achieved in-camera, by shooting a lot of footage, then finding the anthropomorphic moments in the edit that make them more human. And it’s a difficult, drawn-out process. “It’s really all about working with an editor and creatives and clients who can

“I just felt like I needed to reinvent myself a bit, to rejuvenate myself and get that learning curve back – and get scared again.” Flintham, and began a partnership that lasted the best part of two decades. At BMP DDB in the 90s, the pair hit a hot streak of big award-winners including Self Defence for VW Polo and TV bumper idents for Doritos that won a D&AD Black Pencil. They also developed Marmite’s Love It. Hate It. campaign, which runs to this day.

PHOTOGRAPHS: MICHAEL DONALD

Taking the scary way out Then in 1998 McLeod, Flintham and three other partners (Robert Senior, Laurence Green and Michael Wall) founded their own agency – Fallon London, with McLeod as joint creative director. It became one of the most successful agency start-ups of recent times, growing from five to 150 people in just eight years, with a host of prestigious clients. McLeod directed his first commercial while still at Fallon – for Skoda, one of his accounts. But at that point, in 2006, he knew he was leaving the agency. The original founders had sold their holdings to ad conglomerate Publicis. McLeod had done well financially as a result, but the game had changed. “It had been a brilliant journey, but if I’m honest, I was getting a bit bored,” he says, “I wasn’t writing much any more. I’d enjoyed running a department at Fallon, but once we were employees of someone else, it didn’t feel it was going to have the same pizzazz that it had. Maybe that was a bit of an excuse. I just felt like I needed to reinvent myself a bit, to rejuvenate myself and get that learning curve back – and get scared again.” He says that becoming a director offered enough of a difference, and enough similarity, to be a realistic option. He admits he wasn’t certain that making the transition to filmmaker would work without any formal training. But he had the encouragement of Danny Kleinman and Ringan Ledwidge, founders of Rattling Stick, who had noted his astute contributions when working together, sitting behind monitors on shoots.

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important stuff: telling the story, bringing the idea to life – and making a good script better. “If people think their script is absolutely perfect, they might not need me – they can send it to a proper filmmaker,” he laughs. “But invariably these things are a collaboration and it’s very rare that when you get a second or third person in the room, if they have something about them, that you can’t make an idea better, as you move it off the page onto a screen.” He says that making the ad for Thinkbox was a benchmark moment when he felt he had successfully made the transition to being a proper director “even though that’s a weird thing to advertise on telly.” In terms of a wonderful agency script, he says the greatest gift was probably the one provided by Saatchi creative directors Andy Jex and Rob Potts – who used to work for him at Fallon – for Mattessons, which involved a small army of schoolkids leaving school all dressed as (and doing the moves of) Hank Marvin, lead guitarist of 50s/60s Britbeat combo The Shadows. “The Hank Marvin script was one of those that turns up and you just go ‘That’s fucking great – please let me do it,’” he says. “It’s very rare to get something that high concept that you can describe in a sentence. Obviously you change things along the way but it is what it is, a great idea, a Cockney rhyming slang gag about kids being starving after school.”

Casting people and pigeons McLeod thinks that more light-hearted scripts have gravitated towards him because of what he sees as his core attributes as a director – good casting and getting good performances. “I think I’m a good observer of people – that’s something I’ve always had,” he says, adding that he finds the casting process both rewarding and excruciating. “If you’re not getting the person, it’s horrible.

see the value of your experience and nous.” For Cesar’s Journey, despite the furry co-star, McLeod says the lump-in-the-throat nature of the story meant the ad was something of a departure for him. “My work is usually blunter in its humour. You’re always striving not to do exactly the same thing again, try to make your reel a melting point of great ideas approached in many different ways. I’m very proud of it.” Adding a more serious flavour to his reel is the chillingly understated Road Safety spot Kill Your Speed about a man racked with guilt over the young boy he’s knocked over and killed, who sees the child’s body wherever he goes. And McLeod’s more recent Road Safety ad, which has a motorcyclist talking to camera as he lies dying in the road after an accident. McLeod reveals that his aim as a director is to have made three things in a year that make people sit up and take notice “and make those three things different from each other”. In that respect, 2014 was a good year, and ended very well indeed, with his hilarious ad for Mulberry. In #WinChristmas a young lady of the English upper classes is lavished with increasingly outlandish gifts on Christmas morning from members of her family (including a unicorn from her boyfriend). But she only gets seriously excited when she opens her grandmother’s present of a Mulberry bag, with the immortal line in modern toffspeak: ‘Shut. Up. Grandma.’ McLeod says this ensemble piece with six actors was a tricky but thoroughly enjoyable experience. He made important script changes during the one-day shoot at a country house near Rickmansworth. “I did that for very little money that job, because I loved it, and I thought it would be important to me. It was a great script but I added a lot to it that I was pleased with.” This year has, up to this point, been all about shooting and editing his two Virgin Money ads.

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ANDY MCLEOD

“Now I’m waiting for the next great script,” he says. Nine years into his directing career he feels like he’s still learning his trade – “I’m not the fully-formed article yet,” – but adds that it was at about this point in his career as a creative that things really started to come together for him. Some things he’s still trying to get used to. “It’s much more difficult than I thought it would be – because there’s no routine. You can go weeks without doing anything. At an ad agency your day is all mapped out.”

Research is the death of nuance With the benefit of his considerable experience, he’s not afraid to issue some words of warning about the general state of creativity in commercials. And he offers a spirited defence of the principles that have defined and guided his career. “There’s less trust from clients, from the industry in general, than 10, 15, 20 years ago – less belief in the economic value of creativity,” he declares. “Then, there was a strong belief that memorable, humorous advertising would punch above its weight. I think it’s less so now. You only have to watch telly a bit, to see that the sliver of the industry that people like me operate in is getting thinner and thinner.” The reason, he says, is the reluctance to put faith in ideas that haven’t been heavily researched. “I think research is the death of nuance, and a lot of good ads become great ads through nuance. Most of my work is the proof that you can do creatively interesting advertising that punches above its weight in terms of cost per pound.” As a case in point, the Hank Marvin

“You only have to watch telly a bit, to see that the sliver of the industry that people like me operate in is getting thinner and thinner.” ad for Mattessons was part of a 29 per cent uptake in sales for the product. Has he ever been tempted back to the agency side, to perhaps try to do something to improve the flow of decent scripts? He says not, but then veers towards the outspoken in his criticism of the age-old commercial production system, where the agency acts as a buffer between the client and the director. “I am looking forward to the day when it’s a bit more direct, and clients will say ‘You were a good creative and are a good director, can you write me a script on this property – write a script and direct it?’” Brand-owners, he adds, are not

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obliged to use agencies, and thus incur all the layers of cost that go with agencies, to produce commercials. “You can save a lot of money, and put a lot more money into production. Whether it’s 30-second commercials or internet content, whatever, there’s got to be a place for that. Relationships between advertisers and agencies are not suddenly going to crumble overnight. But I do think, as things become more project-based,

there will be bits around the edges where you can see that a new model might be worth exploring.” Andy McLeod may have worked on both sides of the fence. Just don’t expect him to sit on it. S

18/05/2015 11:07

25 years shots at Cannes Lions with

the Rewind experience score highest on the quiz to win x2 tickets to the shots beach party or a 6 month subscription!*

Thereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s so much going on! Come and say hi to the shots team, take some pics in our shots 25th birthday booth or have a go at the shots trivia quiz! The interactive quiz booth, will test your knowledge on shots & the advertising industry & the highest score on the leader board each day will win x2 tickets to the shots Beach Party or a 6 month online subscription to shots. The runners up will receive a bottle of champagne. PLUS Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s shots 25th birthday so make it a special one by showing us your lovely faces at the birthday booth!

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Visit the shots stand at Cannes Lions 2015 outside the entrance to the palais. *shots Beach Party takes place Thursday 25th June 2015. Quiz entries cannot win more than once. No cash alternative. The free 6 month subscription is online only with full access to shots.net. Competition closes Friday 26th June 2015.

56 People | ad icon

a portrait of

illustration: Jeanjullien.com / photograph: kristingladney.com

Susan Hoffman “Dan and David understood my craziness and freedom. With them it’s always been an attitude of wanting to do things differently, and I love that attitude.”

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susan hoffman

Susan Hoffman takes time out to discuss her long tenure at Wieden+Kennedy, what it takes to keep Nike relevant for over three decades, her experiences as a woman in adland – and why the agency almost jettisoned Just Do It as a slogan. She talked to Simon Wakelin

usan Hoffman’s career at Wieden+Kennedy began 31 years ago, and in that time she’s seen an endless array of hit campaigns come and go. What many don’t know is that Hoffman’s alliance with Dan Wieden and David Kennedy stretches back even further than her time at W+K. “I first met Dan and David when they hired me to work at the William Cain agency,” she recalls. She rejoined the pair at Wieden+Kennedy a few years later. “Dan and David understood my craziness and freedom. With them it’s always been an attitude of wanting to do things differently, and I love that attitude.” Hoffman recently returned to the agency’s flagship office in Portland after helping managing director Neal Arthur find creative leaders (Jaime Robinson and David Kolbusz) to replace Scott Vitrone and Ian Reichenthal, dynamo talent that left the NY office for Barton F. Graf 9000 last year. Hoffman enjoyed her time in the Big Apple, and equally enjoys time in the agency’s network of offices, which now stretches out to London, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo, Delhi and São Paulo. “I’ve opened a few offices in my time,” she says. “To be successful globally you really have to understand what each city is about.”

56 People | ad icon Arguably the most recognised and successful independent advertising agency in the world, W+K has fostered a desire to be unique right from its inception. After three decades the shop still holds legendary brand Nike – its founding client. Highly visible, global and influential, Nike’s commercials have garnered worldwide acclaim over the years. There’s the Emmy award-winning The Morning After, an unforgettable spot directed by Spike Jonze featuring a runner on New Year’s Day 2000 ignoring every dire Y2K prediction that has come to pass on his morning jog; and Move,

mother telling you to clean up your room,” she explains. “But it made sense as an identity because it put in place a broad communication platform where we could talk to almost everybody. We all have to exercise – young or old, we all need to work out. I think Nike has an understanding of self because its core identity is the audience itself.” Quizzed on the agency’s approach to branding the swoosh over the years, Hoffman answers that their approach has never changed. “Advertising should be like a magazine,” she says. “You open it up and see ads and editorial.

“We wanted to show the truth and reality of travel and ignore any glorified version of what it’s like. It’s a provocative ad for Delta because it’s saying the brand knows the reality out there.” an eloquent Emmy winner helmed by Jake Scott that seamlessly edits dozens of athletes moving from one sport to the next. Few agencies manage to instill a brand with the level of awareness that Nike possesses, told through a lineage of thought-provoking ad campaigns. It began when Nike turned the sneaker industry on its head by introducing the Air Jordan 1 in 1984, a red-and-black colourway that violated NBA uniform policies by being “non-regulation color”. Jordan – a superbrand himself at the time – was fined $5000 each time he stepped onto the basketball court, a fee paid by Nike while W+K capitalised on commercials that touted the rebellious nature of the brand’s shoes. “Since its early years Nike has always wanted to push out provocative advertising, and in doing so they set the industry standard,” says Hoffman on those early years. “We discovered that Nike was, and is, a living brand with a personality, so we knew it was okay to make mistakes along the way.” Hoffman references work including the infamous I Am Not A Role Model ad featuring basketball celebrity Charles Barkley. The work sparked great public debate at the time about the obligation of sports figures to set an example. The commercial played it straight, rolling with the banter of the 6ft 6in offensive-style player who claims: “I’m not paid to be a role model. I’m paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court.” “We should all be prepared to entertain and never be afraid of polarising the audience in the way that spot did,” Hoffman says. “Mistakes are part of the game. It’s down to finding a brand’s truth, then discovering an appropriate way to tell that truth. I think controversy is a good thing for a brand like Nike if it shows that it has an opinion.” Speaking of opinion, Hoffman reveals that Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ slogan almost didn’t see the light of day. “Some were worried it felt like a

I think W+K’s advertising is the editorial content, ads that make people feel and allow them to learn something. It’s always been about discovering ways to pique people’s interest.” Hoffman is particularly proud of new work for Delta. On The Road, the most recent instalment in Delta’s Keep Climbing campaign, salutes frequent flyers around the world. Directed by Martin de Thurah through Epoch Films, with voice-over by Donald Sutherland, On The Road features a weary business traveller experiencing the anxieties and travails of international business travel, before arriving back to Delta on his return flight home, sinking back into his seat with a sense of relief. “You know what? It’s not always fun travelling,” Hoffman insists. “We wanted to show the truth and reality of travel and ignore any glorified version of what it’s like. It’s a provocative ad for Delta because it’s saying the brand knows the reality out there. Clients need to be brave enough to put out intriguing and provocative work like

clothing brand. O Pioneers, a spot featuring the poetry of Walt Whitman, exemplified the campaign’s emotional centre. The spot unleashed a stunning flow of rapid-stream images of people from across America, recalling those distant American pioneers who paved the way for the majority to follow. Go Forth successfully tied denim to the spirit of America, and in doing so won back the brand’s appeal. The Go Forth campaign created a mythology of the brand’s own past, placing Levi’s at the very heart of the American Dream. “Levi’s had lost their way but we found their core truth which was to be a pioneer,” says Hoffman. “That idea naturally led to the Go Forth work. They were a great client to work with.” Smart humour has also been an important facet of W+K’s success, recently evidenced in a series of wry spots for Southern Comfort. Beach and Karate from the Whatever’s Comfortable campaign stand out as compelling work, each celebrating the self-affirming attitude of characters that display an attitude of complete comfort with themselves. Directed by Biscuit’s Tim Godsall, Beach strikes a warmly funny and ironically hip tone. The spot celebrates the boldness of an oiled-up, beer-bellied chap in Speedos and sunglasses strutting along a beach, somehow wrangling a Southern Comfort along the way. The saga continues in Karate, where a scrawny cowboy type, anachronistically getting some highlights done, impresses the ladies at a local hair salon with his karate moves – perfectly matched to I’m A Fool To Care by Les Paul and Mary Ford. Hoffman sounds a cautionary note when it comes to the humour in W+K’s campaigns, however. “We try not to do sophomoric humour on the whole and attempt to create comedy that has a little more thinking to it. With Southern Comfort, the humour is very close to being over the top, but there is still a sophistication to the work that makes it very attractive.”

“I will say that advertising is a very hard field. You have to log in the time and pay the price. I have two kids and at times haven’t see them for many months while travelling and working.” this. It can often be very scary for them.” The challenge inherent in recovering a brand’s identity is ground Hoffman has also covered. Levi’s springs to mind – an account that W+K oversaw for five successful years, reviving a brand that had been founded in San Francisco over a century before. W+K immediately hit a homer, creating the immensely popular Go Forth campaign that celebrated America’s pioneering spirit. In doing so W+K tagged Levi’s as an iconic American

Apart from a delicate touch with the funny stuff, what other magic does W+K possess that keeps its success afloat? According to Hoffman it’s about accessing our feelings: “Years ago somebody said that W+K aren’t a great agency because they really don’t have a point of view,” she says. “I thought that was a really interesting comment because it’s about the client’s point of view, not ours. There’s also enough diversity in the work to access all kinds of human emotions. I think that’s another reason for the success.”

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And what about diversity when it comes to gender at the agency? For Hoffman it’s more about attitude. “It has never come down to guys and girls per se because you always hire the talent first,” she answers. “I’ve never felt, or was even aware of the lack of women around me when I started out because it felt so normal working alongside Dan and David. “Now there is more dialogue about the issue,” she continues. “I will say that advertising is a very hard field. You have to log in the time and pay the price. I have two kids and at times haven’t see them for many months while travelling and working. Thankfully I have a partner who wasn’t on the road as much as I was, so it helped a great deal. You really have to figure out what works for you.” She’s excited about embarking on a new era in advertising with a need to craft content for multiple channels. An iconic commercial for Nike featuring Ronaldinho hitting the crossbar of a

goal several times without the ball touching the ground became the first YouTube video to reach one million views in 2005. A smart new Gap campaign helmed by duo Daniels of Prettybird is a recent signifier of opportunities afoot for brands in new and unexplored regions. The 12-part Instagram-based micro-series, Spring Is Weird, stars SNL alum Jenny Slate and actor Paul Dano. Each 15-second episode features the pair, clad in the retailer’s spring fashion line, in a surreal adventure where their real and virtual Instagram lives merge. “You can be so adventurous on so many fronts today,” Hoffman enthuses. “It’s a new world, and with Gap it’s an opportunity to find new ways of having a conversation. I love the idea of putting a lot of work out there in this fashion.” If there are any caveats offered by Hoffman, it’s that deadlines and costs become the main inhibitors of successful creative work: “It’s been the same problem since the dawn of advertising,”

“Campaigns need to discuss issues that people care about. You need to sit down and ask yourself what it is that moves people. This is probably the most important element of the game.”

she says. “How do you make it great regardless of the confines of budget and time? We all know that a lot of money doesn’t necessarily make something great. Sure, it helps a bad idea look average, but you also need time to craft things. The industry needs to be more aware of this. “I think that everything you put out there today must be, by and large, provocative and creative. Campaigns need to discuss issues that people care about. You need to sit down and ask yourself what it is that moves people. This is probably the most important element of the game.” Meanwhile, thought provoking and inspirational work continues to be the heartbeat of the agency, a spirit aptly summed up in Find Your Greatness for Nike. The campaign’s most memorable spot features an overweight kid slowly running toward us, determined to keep going. It’s work that highlights how greatness is not down to some rare DNA strand. It’s something we’re all capable of achieving. S

60 Places | NEW YORK

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NEW YORK

“It’s not just one thing; it’s not just comedy, it’s not just emotive, it’s not just digital, it’s multidimensional work coming out of big agencies.” SH157_p60-61_NY_overview_SW.indd 61

ILLUSTRATION: SIMON DOVAR, EYECANDY.CO.UK

Danny Edwards returns to New York to find a city rediscovering its creative mojo and industry professionals still addicted to a tough town that’s never affectionate but always infectious

22/05/2015 15:35

62 Places | NEW YORK

Bold, brash and back Two years ago, some were saying that the city that never sleeps appeared to be in a bit of a snooze while LA’s industry romped ahead exploiting new forms and media. But now, by adopting a wiser approach to tech, New York agencies – both Madison Avenue massives and smaller, independent shops – are once again leading creative innovation

“I’

ve lived and worked in Europe,” says DDB New York’s recently installed chief creative officer, Icaro Doria. “I’ve lived and worked in South America. I’ve lived and worked on the West Coast of America. But there is this thing about New York where, at times, it makes no sense to be here; it’s too hot, or too cold, or too small, or too expensive. But there is also this feeling that you get addicted to when you live here. A feeling that everywhere else is just less important.” And you can understand his point. New York lives in the world’s consciousness as one of the greatest cities on Earth. It has a number of iconic nicknames (none of which you should use, according to Tony Granger on page 81) and its

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architecture and skyline is probably the most recognisable of any city. But, from a creative advertising point of view, is New York living on past glories? When shots last did a New York special, in 2013, there was much talk of the competition it faced from its West Coast rival, Los Angeles. LA’s creative output was, many said, more forward-thinking and in tune with the needs of today’s consumers than New York’s. The desire for longer-form, story-led content, people said, perfectly played to LA’s Hollywood-focussed, storytelling strengths.

One bad tweet and you’re twatted Two years on though and the general consensus is that New York has got its mojo back – if it ever really lost it. “It feels like there is a lot of [good] New York work coming through these days, in the way that there used to be a lot of stuff from LA,” says Y&R New York’s chief creative officer, Leslie Sims. “And I think we’re seeing more interesting work too. I say interesting, because it’s not just one thing; it’s not just comedy, it’s not just emotive, it’s not just digital, it’s multi-dimensional work coming out of big agencies, and that’s fantastic to see.” Another consensus from our last visit to New York was that the city’s agencies, and to some degree clients, had not navigated the broad world of technology very well. They were too eager to jump on every platform and the old adage, ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean you should’, was roundly ignored. Now though a more, if not cautious, maybe thoughtful approach holds sway. “I think,” says Saatchi & Saatchi New York’s chief creative officer, Jay Benjamin, “we now understand those social media channels. And that’s what they are: channels. They’re media vehicles, not an idea in and of themselves.” However, says Benjamin, that’s not to say that agencies shouldn’t experiment. New technology, such as virtual

1/2 Wieden + Kennedy New York’s posters for the CooperHewitt Design Museum

reality, is coming to the fore and agencies need to be able to see how they can use new opportunities to their advantage. “With something like virtual reality,” says Benjamin, “you want to be able to play with it but not necessarily on a live project because you need to figure things out before you jump straight into them. Look at how some athletes use Twitter for example, it’s laden with mistakes. I’d like to make those mistakes on our own time so that when we’re doing work for our clients, it’s brilliant.” Technology, believes Jacqueline Bosnjak, partner at music and sound design company Q Department, is what’s fuelling New York’s creative resurgence. “It [creativity] is out of this world,” she says, “and Oculus Rift’s virtual reality and the ‘cinematic reality’ of Magic Leap [Googlebacked augmented reality start-up] are directly responsible.” But as exciting as new gizmos like Oculus and similar inventions are, the advance of that technology can also cause a problem for the advertising industry with many creatives eschewing the advertising arena for the world of Big Tech. Facebook, Google and other similar businesses are exciting and attractive opportunities for young creative talent. Those businesses are often at the more experimental end of the spectrum, willing to put faith in new ideas and explore different avenues of creativity which is appealing to this generation of maker-doer creatives. And while that’s not a concern specific to New York, it’s one that agency leaders in the city know they must face. Y&R’s Sims is well aware of the problem and believes it’s down to her and her contemporaries to confront it and that starts with building trust with their brands. “We want to make sure we’re doing something that’s actually going to progress [a brand’s] interests,” she states. “We have to ask ourselves how we pull ourselves out of taking eight months to curate a TV

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OVERVIEW 2

commercial. Those things need to be made, but we also need to do other stuff in a way that we feel really confident and the only way of doing that is to try some things out and build trust.” One of the problems with implementing that, though, is also one of the positives of New York: its scale. Everything in the city is big, including the brands that reside there. “New York is probably, pound for pound, more dense with those [big] sort of clients,” continues Sims. “And they are fantastic clients, but they have a lot at stake. Globally, a lot at stake. So when you’re talking about brands that are in almost every household in America, the opportunity for epic fail is immense. It just takes one bad tweet… so that sort of explains why it’s not their fault [for being cautious], but the biggest danger is not to move with this new methodology of being out there and doing stuff, and not being paralysed by fear.”

Reinventing the new Experimentation and innovation are, agrees Ed Brojerdi, chief executive officer of KBS+, the lifeblood of New York and something it is at the forefront of, despite the potential pitfalls. And that, in turn, encourages new talent to the sector. “What New York always seems to have,” he says, “is an edge on the invention of the new; new capabilities, new concepts. And that’s how the city drives the landscape forward a little bit. Silicon Valley has tech innovation and I think New York has creative innovation. And I think progressive

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“What New York always seems to have is an edge on the invention of the new; new capabilities, new concepts. And that’s how the city drives the landscape forward a little bit. ” agencies are providing career paths for those that have inventive, creative skills that don’t naturally apply to other industries.” Currently, there’s no shortage of creative ideas and execution emanating from New York. Work for brands as diverse as Beats by Dr Dre, Dell, Newcastle Brown Ale, AT&T, DirecTV, Johnnie Walker and GE has pushed the creative envelope and, interestingly, that work has also come from a diverse range of agencies. “It’s been evolving for the past few years, maybe most notably since the turn of the decade” explains David Kolbusz, Wieden+Kennedy New York’s executive creative director, whose agency is behind recent work for Delta Airlines, Gap and the brilliant CooperHewitt Design Museum posters. “Smaller shops have grown up and risen to prominence, becoming as defining a voice for the New York landscape as the larger, heritage-rich Madison Avenue shops. For ages this market’s voice was defined by your BBDOs, JWTs and TBWAs but now, when people think of New York, it’s as much about us, Droga5, Mother or BFG9000. Big and small, old and new now coexist peacefully.”

So, while there are some issues and dilemmas to address, as there are in all industries in all cities, it seems as though the perceived malaise of New York’s ad scene of two years ago is long gone and that the city now is focussed on what it’s doing, rather than what is being done by those around it. “We can be a bit of a ‘grass is greener’ industry,” states Droga5’s chief creative officer, Ted Royer. “We often think everybody else is wonderful. But New Yorkers don’t talk about what it’s like in other places as much. I adore Sydney but a lot of Australian creatives think about moving somewhere else and I’ve noticed a lot of people in London talk about coming to New York, but New York creatives, maybe because we have our heads so tightly to the grindstone, or because there’s so much shit going on here all the time, think less about going somewhere else.” “New York is never going to give you a hug and whisper sweet nothings into your ear,” concludes Michael Feder, managing director of production company Hornet, “but if you take full advantage of what it offers, it can be an inspiring place in a way that’s infectious.” S

22/05/2015 14:04

64 Places | NEW YORK

The universal truth about youth After a circuitous career path of sound studio engineer, DJ, party creator and cofounder of a small agency, Clayton Vomero finally realised his dream of being a director. Now signed by Furlined, his breakthrough film was Gang, a lyrical tale about youth that avoids the clichés and was inspired by his home town, New York, a city he describes as equal parts beauty and grime

PHOTOGRAPHS: JEFF ALLEN

any people, when they think of New York, think of opportunity. As a melting pot of people and cultures, and one of the centres of the modern world, New York has been the gateway for countless dreams becoming reality. But for Clayton Vomero, a true New Yorker, raised in Staten Island, the city was more a barrier than a welcoming embrace. As a kid he loved film and wanted to be a director but the life he lived and the contacts he had – or rather, didn’t have – made him feel that it wasn’t ever anything other than a pipe dream. “I grew up always wanting to be a director in some sort of way,” he says, “but it was so far removed from the reality of my life that I had no way of knowing how to become one. So I never explored the idea of going to school for it, never explored the idea of making my own films… it just didn’t feel accessible to me.” That’s not to say that New York hasn’t had a huge impact on Vomero and his eventual

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directorial output, more of which later, but he had to leave the city before he was able to realise his ambition. Vomero’s other love was music. He learned the guitar at 12 years old and played in bands as a teenager, but it wasn’t until his brother suggested he take notice of an advert for a school for audio production that his life came into focus. Though not in the way he expected. The school in question turned out to be on the other side of the country, in Seattle, and at the age of 19, Vomero decided to take a leap of faith and enrolled on the course. “I went to school for a bit,” reveals Vomero, “but I kind of realised it was bullshit. It was kind of like one of those scammy trade school kind of things.” While on the course he also started attending a local recording studio to gain experience and soon dropped out of the school programme to take a full-time role there as an assistant engineer. Eventually Vomero produced an EP for an up-and-coming band who were signed to Epic Records but, he says, “did a total bullshit job” and decided that life as a record producer “wasn’t really working”. What did work was Vomero’s stint as a DJ, which he took up next. “People were like, ‘if you play in a band, you should also be a DJ because that’s cooler than actually trying to be a DJ’. So I was like, cool, I’ll do that.” And he did, creating an event in Seattle called Sing Sing, which grew from a relatively niche party for 100 people to a mammoth, twice-monthly extravaganza for around 750 revellers. This then led to agencies in Seattle contacting him to consult on projects and brands they had which were aimed at youth culture. “They were like, ‘you’re cool. You do cool things. What do kids like? What type of shit are they into?’” laughs Romero. “But it opened up this whole other world for me,” he continues. “Doing events through the party and then eventually putting on events myself, then later doing

some experiential marketing stuff and just putting things together for companies and brands that were related to music.” That lead to Vomero, with a group of friends who were at another production company, starting a small agency to develop ideas for events. Soon after they were being asked about ideas for commercials. “So we kind of just started writing out ideas and scripts and stuff,” he says. “And that lead to people saying, ‘well, you wrote the script, you should direct if it you want’. And I thought, okay, let’s do that.”

This will change everything... Under Armour was the first client they worked with, developing music, creative ideas and content pieces for the web, as well as for broadcast. “It kind of just made me think, holy shit, I think I have this chance to do something that I thought I could never do. So I just aggressively went after it and realised, too, that I didn’t want to run a company, that I’d much rather pursue [being a director]. So we agreed to part ways and I just went and did my own thing.” By now in his late 20s and back in New York, Vomero was finally a director and he freelanced on a number of projects including short films and music videos, throwing himself wholeheartedly into his new career. “Everything was going to be the biggest project I’d ever done,” he remembers. “No matter what it was, no matter if it was a US$4,000 budget, I was like, ‘this is going to fucking change everything’. But it didn’t, of course.” But what has changed everything for him is his short film, Gang. The 16-minute film follows three young friends searching for meaning and identity as they traverse the city of New York. Starring musician Major Lazer’s choreographer, Mela Murder, as well as Infinite, the son of rapper Ghostface Killah, the short is a beautiful, poetic look at youth but, Vomero states, without the

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CLAYTON VOMERO

“I grew up always wanting to be a director in some sort of way... but it was so far removed from the reality of my life that I had no way of knowing how to become one.”

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66 Places | NEW YORK

Clayton Vomero is inspired by… What’s your favourite ever ad? That San Miguel A Life Well Lived ad is something I always come back to. It actually makes me want to be a bottle of beer. What product could you not live without? Coffee? Fruit of the Loom white T-shirts? I really identify with the Jumpman logo. Like, to the point that I’ve almost gotten it as a tattoo. To me as a kid, Jordan was this idea that through sheer will and talent you could transcend everything that stepped in your way. It’s a symbol that has meaning beyond just being a brand. When there’s a new edition of the book of symbols, I want to write the chapter on the Jumpman logo.

“[New Yorkers] often get a bad rap for being rude or scary or tough but the truth is that our directness derives from a place of mutual respect. We all share a very finite space.”

What are your thoughts on social media? I think it’s in an amazing evolutionary phase. People are getting tired of being taken out of the moment by their device and as new perspectives on social media develop to bring people into the moment, into life, into reality, I find it really interesting. The angle of connecting real life to people through some platform is inspiring to me.

What’s the last film you watched and was it any good? Mommy. It was an amazing film. What was the last gig you went to? I went to see Murlo in London recently.

How do you relieve stress during a shoot? I’m not a very stressed person, so that usually keeps things calm. I’m not one to yell or throw things, or tolerate anyone else doing so. I try hard to curate the right personalities to work with. It’s not just about talent for me, we have to be motivating ourselves from the same place, and acknowledge that stress is counterproductive.

What fictitious character do you most relate to? Part Little Prince, part Colonel Kurtz. If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be? I really wish I was a better basketball player. Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know… I’m very comfortable riding a horse.

What film should everyone see? Die Hard.

usual derivative themes. “Growing up in New York there was always a feeling that if you didn’t have money or opportunity or somebody to give you a hand into some of these worlds – whether it be film or music or a job at a magazine – that those doors just wouldn’t open up for you,” explains Vomero. “And I think, in film, there’s a certain attitude through which those kids get looked at. As if you have to focus on the aesthetics, whether it’s graffiti or dancing, that’s the only way people will be interested in it, and I felt like, being a kid from that world, why can’t we just make a film that talks about the feelings and stuff that everybody has? Something that people can all relate to, that doesn’t just have to be about some kind of weird idea that’s associated with that world.” It’s easy to tell, when talking to Vomero, that New York is his main inspiration. Despite leaving the city he grew up in for some years, it never really left him and Gang is a manifestation of his experiences in, and thoughts on, his home. “There’s something very respectful and inclusive about New York,” Vomero says. “[New Yorkers] often get a bad rap for being rude or scary or tough but the truth is that our directness derives from a place of

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mutual respect. We all share a very finite space. ‘Don’t waste my time, and I won’t waste yours’. ‘Cut the bullshit’. ‘Be real’. I think the shedding of all that artifice in my daily life has now become something I look for in every film. If anything, we all grow up here knowing that it’s equal parts beauty and grime, and that’s what makes this city the magical place that it is [and] that truth feeds the idea that everyone has a story worth hearing.”

The beautiful inconsistency of life Gang was, for Vomero, a labour of love, but one he admits couldn’t have been brought into existence without the help of others. He applauds the actors involved, stating that he wanted “kids who were proud to be exactly who they were”, and Diane McArter, the president of Furlined, the company to which Vomero has signed, garners equal praise. “I’d never been signed to anyone before,” he says. “There was never anyone who inspired me the way Diane did and I genuinely feel that so much of what has been happening is because of her and Furlined.” Vomero has been screening Gang around the globe at bespoke events – he only arrived back

in New York on the morning we chat, after a screening the night before in London – and there are also plans to enter it into a number of festivals. Away from Gang, Vomero has also shot successful commercial projects, including one for Facebook called Alison, another human story that follows Alison Chavez, an attorney and triathlete, as she battles cancer. And it is intimate, human stories that Vomero excels at and which he thinks the ad industry is moving more towards. “I find it hugely inspiring how agencies like Wieden, Droga5 and 72andSunny truly embrace [human stories] as it really leads to a much more honest form of advertising,” he says. “They understand that people only empathise with people and not with an endlessly focus-grouped script that has shed all the human detail in order not offend anyone. Communicating the idea of perfection is a falsehood and I think, for brands, that view is truly done. I think as people if we aspire to anything anymore, it’s just to feel good about who we are. We want to see things that embrace our messy tempestuous nature, our contradictions, and the inconsistencies of our lives and show them for what they really are: beautiful.” S

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68 Places | NEW YORK

Making friends and influencing people Culture is a cruel mistress: you can’t just watch her go by, you have to go out and get her. Thus, Matthew Gardner, as Droga5’s director of brand influence, must not only make sure his agency’s work reflects the zeitgeist but that it generates cultural property that will enhance brands. The former music journalist explains how New York is just the place to do this

PHOTOGRAPHS: PAUL MCGEIVER

dvertising has always been about influence. At the heart of any commercial campaign – whatever platform it is made for, whatever product it promotes – the goal is to influence someone, hopefully many people, to buy that product. Obvious. But the way people are influenced has changed. Change is nothing new, you might say, the industry’s always been changing. From print, to radio to TV and online. Fair point. But what has changed in the 21st century is the infinite importance of culture and advertising’s place in it. You can easily argue that advertising has always been a part of culture but, way more often than not, it’s been by accident rather than design. ‘Whassup!?’; ‘You’ve been Tangoed’; ‘For mash get Smash’; ‘Just Do It’. All great lines from great campaigns that entered the wider public consciousness and became part of popular culture but, generally, through repetition and chance. Now though, it seems content no longer stands alone as king, it’s joined on the throne by culture. Someone who knows more about this than most is Droga5’s Matthew Gardner. Gardner is

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the agency’s director of brand influence and his role, he says, “is to sit at the intersection of [the agency] and culture in order to bring in cultural opportunities and make sure that the work we do for brands is culturally leading. But also to bring what we do for brands, to cultural properties. Basically, what I do is try to make sure the ideas we create are culturally influential.” Gardner studied journalism at college and worked at Fader and Vice when he was “super young” writing about what he loved; mainly music and culture. While working at Fader he realised that the publication also used an advertising agency – Anomaly – on certain projects and got himself an internship there. “They put a book on my desk,” he laughs, “titled, What is Account Planning? and I just learned from there.” After the internship ended he went back to Vice, again as an intern, working with brands at their in-house creative agency. Eventually, in 2010, someone he’d worked with at Anomaly moved to Droga5 and offered him a role in the strategy department there. But since Droga5 was bought into by talent agency powerhouse William Morris Endeavour in 2013, Gardner has essentially been a staff of one within the strategy team. His role had always been to marry creativity with culture, something it seems he was born to do, but since WME’s involvement that role has been “supercharged”. “I’ve been obsessed with music since I was born,” he says. “Collecting records, playing the guitar, all that stuff. And that was what I brought to the table as far as strategy went. It was just keeping people up to date, bringing that whole world in here.” Gardner also thinks that working in New York makes his job a lot easier. A role that is defined by a knowledge of culture, of what people find interesting, relevant, exciting and – for want of a better word – cool, means that he needs to be constantly in tune with the zeitgeist, and the

city of New York enables him to do that. “I can’t imagine doing this job in any other city,” he says. “I mean, you can walk around it in one day and be the most up-to-date, cultural person on the planet. And I also think that the people who live here are much more interested in making sure that we’re pushing culture forward and understanding where it’s headed. If you lived in LA I can’t imagine driving to a book store, record shop or coffee shop, talking to people and picking up on stuff.”

Entering the world of influencers Being out in the world and actually experiencing culture first hand is important to Gardner, who believes that, too often, people are too passive. “A lot of times we sit in the agency and look out [at culture], but I don’t think people realise that you really have to go out there and bring [culture] in. So I just kept doing that. I just kept one leg in that world and eventually it became something that was really powerful and valued here, especially when we got with WME. The appetite for [that kind of work] is now a lot bigger.” Many were surprised when Droga5 announced that WME was buying a minority stake in the business, thinking that a more likely route would have been a deal with a major holding company, but the partnership has worked brilliantly. Droga5 is no stranger to leveraging popular culture to its advantage – its very first piece of work, Still Free for Ecko Unltd in 2006, saw a faked (but wholly real-looking) break-in at Andrews Air Force base and a man seemingly graffitiing Air Force One, go stratospherically viral and even appear on the national broadcast news. Then there was 2010’s Decoded for Bing/Jay-Z in which specially made extracts from the rapper’s autobiography were secreted around New York and fans could utilise Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, to track them down. More recently, clever campaigns for

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MATTHEW GARDNER

“I’ve been obsessed with music since I was born. Collecting records, playing the guitar, all that stuff. And that was what I brought to the table as far as strategy went.”

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70 Places | NEW YORK

Matthew Gardner is inspired by… What’s your favourite ever ad? When I was about 10 years old I had an unhealthy obsession with Absolut ads. I used to sneak into my middle school library and tear out the obscure ones from the back pages of Art Forum and Art in America – Absolut Scharf, Absolut Haring, Absolut Ruscha. I still have them. What product could you not live without? Perrier. What are your thoughts on social media? Just because you can does not mean you should. How do you relieve stress during a project? Yoga. What’s the last ﬁlm you watched? Maps To The Stars by David Cronenberg. It was twisted, and viciously accurate. What was the last gig you went to and was it any good? Young Thug and Travis Scott. Young Thug was brilliant. Travis Scott was not. What ﬁlm do you think everyone should have seen? Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be? A monk.

Newcastle Brown Ale have used actress Anna Kendrick to great effect, and 2013’s Recalling 1993, for the New Museum, leveraged the culture of two previous decades to create a historical, pay-phonefocussed experiential piece of work. “Culture is probably the best media platform brands have now,” says Gardner, “and if you can let the culture, and cultural figures, carry your message and spread it, unless you have the spend of someone like Apple, that’s probably your best bet at breaking through. We use culture itself as a platform to spread our message, and when you do it authentically, with the right people who are actually passionate about your idea, they’ll spread it for you. And if [those cultural figures] are cool and influential and it all fits right, and the people who follow them also think the idea’s cool, you’ve got, like, a billion impressions.” Authenticity, says Gardner, is key. Partnering the right brand with the right person or cultural property is at the heart of his role and there is, he

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“Culture is probably the best media platform brands have now, and if you can let the culture, and cultural figures, carry your message and spread it… that’s probably your best bet at breaking through.”

reveals, a dividing line between using influence and being an influencer. “When you get into the world of influencers,” Gardner states, “you start to see things like Lindsay Lohan tweets that have ‘#Ad’ at the end of them. It’s when influential cultural figures start to do things like selling their tweets. We don’t want to do that, we want to use influence and influential ideas. We always look at how we can make it authentic.”

Between a Rock and a hard sell As well as partnering brands with cultural properties, Gardner and Droga5 now create brands for and through those cultural properties; effectively, celebrities are the new clients. Take Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, for instance. He is, says Gardner, WME’s biggest client; the highest grossing movie star of 2013 and the second highest paid actor of last year, and he wanted to leverage that momentum. “So we took what we usually do for brands,” explains Gardner, “which is to give

them strategic guidance and develop a creative idea off that, and did that for him. Normally a strategist works with brands to build on their purpose, unlock opportunities and guide them. We applied that for the first time to one of WME’s biggest clients.” And what they’ve created is Project Rock, “a motivational lifestyle brand that’s going to expand into several different multimedia formats in the future”. Gardner believes that what he and his agency are doing is no longer simply competing with other advertising campaigns and messages but with the wider culture and that culture’s content. In effect, it’s no longer good enough to be the best commercial, you need to be the best piece of content. “We want to make the most culturally influential ideas,” he enthuses. “We think that the content we make should be like what Netflix is doing, what Amazon is doing and what Vice does. We think of our stuff as not ads but beautiful, culturally-leading content that people flock to.” S

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72 Places | NEW YORK

Conducting a creative orchestration He decided to study advertising because his high school friend suggested it, and then semi-dropped out mid-career to have a go at being a rock star. But Matt Ian, executive creative director at TWBA\ Chiat\Day, is now firmly in control as he conducts a new band of creatives to greatness in a complex media landscape

s a guitarist – first bass then lead – in a number of bands, music has long had a strong pull on TBWA\Chiat\Day New York’s executive creative director Matt Ian, and it’s a musical analogy that he uses to good effect to describe his view of how a creative department should work. His feeling that advertising, and more specifically New York advertising, has become too reliant on freelance creatives is illustrated by comparing the creative director role to that of an orchestra’s conductor. “In a media landscape that has become so complicated, where there are so many more moving parts, the idea that CD stands for ‘curator director’ is bullshit,” he states.

Actually doing the work

PHOTOGRAPHS: PETER YANG

Ian explains that a lot of creatives in the industry, and certainly a lot of creatives who were at TBWA\Chiat\Day New York when he arrived in September 2013, were freelance because they

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craved some creative freedom. They didn’t want the ‘political bullshit’ of an agency but simply to make good work. These freelancers, thinks Ian, are the people who should be the industry’s CDs, GCDs and ECDs. “But a lot of these guys still see the CD role [as a political one], and the problem now is that nobody’s really leading, nobody’s conducting the orchestra anymore. It did used to be that [a CD thought] ‘OK, I’m going to be the rock’n’roll guy, the band leader and I’m just going to sit here and listen to what people have to play [and pass judgement].’ But now, you have to be the leader of the orchestra. You have to have a very, very clear idea as a CD of what the overarching idea for a campaign is, which means you have to actually be doing the work, not just commenting on it.” Ian, a near-native of New York (he’s from Greenwich, Connecticut, about 30 miles north of Manhattan) has been doing the work since

his first role in 1996 at a West Coast agency called Lambesis. He fell into advertising after a friend from high school, (now director) Tom Kuntz, moved west to study advertising and convinced Ian to join him. “I didn’t really know what advertising was,” says Ian. “I mean, I liked the Little Caesar’s ads but I didn’t realise it was something I could actually do.”

Art director to copywriting Ian had studied art and joined Lambesis as an art director, but the agency was short of writers, so one day his boss came to him with an offer. “Hey, Matt, do you want to switch over to be a copywriter?” “No way, man, I’m an art director.” “I’ll give you another $20k. That’s double your current salary.” “Hand me a pen.” Or words to that effect. Ian recalls that after about a year he was fired for being consistently late. At this point he also wanted to try and make a go of his potential music career and wasn’t sure if he wanted to commit to advertising, so he moved back to New York and freelanced at various places between playing gigs with his band. Soon, though, he was offered a job at TBWA\Chiat\Day New York, followed by stints at Crispin Porter + Bogusky and a very successful tenure in LA at Deutsch, running the Volkswagen account, and hasn’t looked back since. He returned to New York – and TBWA – 20 months ago because, he says, they sold the job to him in the right way. He loved his time at Deutsch and realises he was working with a client that was completely committed to creativity, but the pull of New York and the offer to make TBWA’s New York office a creative powerhouse was too much to turn down. “I loved Deutsch but [TBWA] said the right

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MATT IAN

“In a media landscape that has become so complicated, where there are so many more moving parts, the idea that CD stands for ‘curator director’ is bullshit.”

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74 Places | NEW YORK Matt Ian is inspired by… What’s your favourite ever ad? It’s probably Apple’s Think Different. It’s a big reason why I work where I do. What product could you not live without? My blood pressure medication. What are your thoughts on social media? Sort of like my thoughts on gravity: we depend on it, it’s not going anywhere, and it can really fuck us up if we’re not smart. How do you relieve stress during a shoot? I go for a run or I meditate. (Just kidding. I overeat, like everyone else.) What’s the last film you watched and was it any good? I watched Star Wars with my twin five-year-old boys. Their mom takes them to church, and this is my contribution to their religious upbringing. What was the last gig you went to? Does listening to Delroy Wilson in my office late at night count as a gig? What film do you think everyone should have seen? The Decline Of Western Civilization. What fictitious character do you most relate to? Steve McCrosky from Airplane! because I’m always picking the wrong week to quit drinking. If you weren’t doing the job you do now, what would you like to be? I heard that Alex Bogusky used to ask a similar question in interviews. The only right answer was “I’d be doing this.” I probably would’ve screwed that up and said, “Heir.” Tell us one thing about yourself that most people won’t know… I was never a male model.

things. They recognise that New York needs…” he trails off, before starting up again, more passionately. “I look at Droga5 and what they do is amazing, but New York needs another one of them, and TBWA were posing the question of, essentially, can we be that competition? And I’m from New York and this is where I want to do it.” Ian says it’s been a rollercoaster since his arrival, with the agency in transition, some key creative departures and a reliance on the aforementioned freelance brigade. But now the teams seem to be hearing the music for themselves and the agency is getting more in tune, though Ian doesn’t take anything for granted, least of all his agency’s location. “There’s no manifest, God-given right for New York to be the best,” he says. “New York has to be the best, by being the best.” The city itself has changed, according to Ian. When he was younger the city was something of a mean, dirty place “where only the scrappiest

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survived” but it’s now cleaned up its act. For the better? “I think for the better,” he replies. “I have kids so I think it’s a good thing that you can walk down the street with them and not get knifed. The lack of knifing potential is a definite positive. But I do miss some of the old New York. There is that safety now, and that’s not necessarily conducive to some of the stuff that used to just spring up and grow naturally in the city.”

“There’s no manifest, God-given right for New York to be the best. New York has to be the best, by being the best.”

New York state of creativity But there’s still more than enough of that ‘stuff’ to inspire Ian, his creatives and a whole raft of other companies and people. Manhattan is a concrete metropolis seething with ideas and unexplored potential and New York’s artistic pulse, thinks Ian, is what drives the city and its creative industries. “[This city] has a lot of hidden treasures because there’s just so much stacked onto so much,” he explains. “It’s that stimulus that draws people here.” S

NBCU: Watch TV Without the TV campaign, Laundromat

22/05/2015 13:49

76 Places | NEW YORK

Virtual reality will fill the gaps Finding its offices in darkest Brooklyn may be a journey into the unknown for New York’s finest cabbies, but once there you’ll find ‘production and entertainment company’ m ss ng p eces is enjoying blazing trails into the future of platformneutral storytelling and exploring a model of curiosity and change

PHOTOGRAPH: BLAINE DAVIS

“H

ow do you go?” “Pardon me?” “How do you go?” “I’m sorry, but that sentence seems to make no real sense.” “How do you get there?” Ah, yes, of course, the motto of all New York taxi drivers. Seemingly not knowing the whereabouts of Brooklyn is, admittedly, a high water mark in cab-driving ineffectiveness but, map in hand and a few casual stops to ask passers-by for directions, and I’m only 30 minutes late meeting the team at Brooklyn-based (It’s just there! Over the water, to the east. You can see it!) production and entertainment company m ss ng p eces (the gaps are theirs). If New York’s yellow taxis are an example of an institution which is ill-prepared and directionless, m ss ng p eces exists in stark contrast. It was set up in 2005 at the advent of the online video boom, by Ari Kuschnir (and a former business partner), who saw the potential of platforms like YouTube and technology such as the then-new iPod with video capability. Though Kuschnir attended film school in his youth, he says he never felt like a traditional producer or a director, but when the idea to concentrate on short form and branded content hit, he remembers “very clearly selling my car in Miami to buy a laptop and camera. We were like, ‘OK, this is going to be the thing.’” The company’s first real project put them firmly on the map. Cool Hunting, an online magazine covering design, technology, art and culture, had also seen the potential for online video and joined up with m ss ng p eces to create a weekly show, Cool Hunting Video, in 2006, which was a huge success with audiences. That led to conference trailblazers TED asking the company to document what it was like to be

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part of the TED community, giving m ss ng p eces access to some amazing people. “That’s sort of where this idea of making meaningful stuff came from,” says Kuschnir. “It was like, we’ve got to do something with this. It’s really something and we’d better use it for good to propel things. It gave us a sense of the futuregazing thing that’s always been in the company, the wanting to be a little bit ahead.” Despite the huge amount of content the company produced almost from the get-go, m ss ng p eces was, for around five years from inception, still only two people. It worked with a number of directors on a regular basis, including Josh Nussbaum, but in a freelance capacity. Nussbaum became a partner in the company in 2011, along with executive producer (formerly of Ogilvy) Kate Oppenheim.

What do you do again? Why did it take so long for more people to join the company? “By 2010 it was clear that we had to figure out who we were,” explains Kuschnir. “We were so ahead that you couldn’t pinpoint us and that can backfire. I remember coming out of a meeting or two feeling like people didn’t know what we did. If you step into a meeting and people ask, ‘What do you again?’ then you’ve fucked up. And so [bringing Kate and Josh in] sort of de-mystified parts of our process.” “Between 2005 and 2010 there still wasn’t an established way of working when it came to content,” says Oppenheim. “As a very young company, and a very small company, we weren’t necessarily prepared to put a stake in the ground and say, ‘This is how the business model is going to work.’ But between 2010 and 2012 it started to become really clear that the way that agencies in particular were going to want to make content was not dissimilar to the way they were making

“VR is going to grow and mature, and it’s really exciting to see what those opportunities will be. I think that everything [with VR] is wrapped up to the point where change is now going to happen a lot quicker and technologicallybased storytelling will open up.” 1 From left: Ari Kuschnir, executive producer/founder; Josh Nussbaum, director/ partner; Brian Latt, executive producer/partner; and Kate Oppenheim, executive producer/partner

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M SS NG P ECES NEW YORK 1

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78 Places | NEW YORK 1

commercials.” The company now has 12 full-time employees in New York and has recently opened an office in LA, headed by former Tool of North America MD, Brian Latt. Like their early work for Cool Hunting and TED, much of m ss ng p eces’ work has broken new ground. Last year they helped create the first global campaign for Starbucks, which encompassed the not insignificant task of producing a TV spot, an interactive film and eight short documentaries shot in 59 different stores in 28 countries using 39 local filmmakers and 10 local photographers.

Explorers of curiosity and change The Red Bull Music Academy project in 2013 gave the company the task of creating and releasing content every day for 30 days, including lectures, concert recordings, animations and behind the scenes footage. Then last year saw the release of their interactive film for Pepsi, Now is What You Make It, which allowed viewers to change the direction of the story through a simple mouse click. The eclectic nature of m ss ng p eces’ output means they cannot be pigeon-holed. The company’s site defines them as ‘a production and entertainment company inspired by storytelling, technology and the limitless potential of the web’ and it’s that potential that excited Brian Latt when he joined the team. “There are a whole bunch of very successful [traditional] production companies,” says Latt. “They have something that works for them, they have a steady flow and run a steady ship, but what’s the drive for them to move and change? m ss ng p eces started with that model of change and curiosity and we want to use that to tell great stories, regardless of the platform.” One of the platforms to which Kuschnir and his team are applying their storytelling skill is virtual

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reality. Last year they worked on the hugely successful Dos Equis VR campaign with Havas Worldwide, called Masquerade, which featured the brand’s character, The Most Interesting Man, as he held a fancy masquerade party at which the viewer is a guest. The live-action film allows the viewer – or should that be participant? – to interact with other guests, choosing various paths through the story which impact on the final outcome. As Kuschnir correctly predicted the huge impact of online video ten years ago, does he see VR as the next step in video’s evolution? “You know, 3D was the thing for a while and [that technology] comes in and out in waves,” says Kuschnir, “[but] at the end of the day the storytelling doesn’t change whether it’s 3D or not. When you’re getting into VR the story is entirely different and that’s the wonderful challenge, that suddenly you’re tasked with creating a story that’s a full 360-degrees, with no edit points, and where you’re a participant in that story. It’s so exciting from a creative, writing and directing standpoint.” “VR is going to grow and mature,” adds Nussbaum, “and it’s really exciting to see what those opportunities will be, but I think that everything [with VR] is wrapped up to the point where change is going to happen a lot more quickly and technologically-based storytelling will open up. [We have] a wonderful range of opportunities where we’re explorers in this model of curiosity and change. And it’s not only discovering how we tell a story in VR, but how we do that in a 60- or 30-second commercial that’s super-fresh and hasn’t been done before.”

Bigger, better and more exciting Exploring what hasn’t been done before seems to be one of m ss ng p eces’ fortes. Kuschnir started the company on the basis of exploring the potential of online video and that ethos of

“And it’s not only discovering how we tell a story in VR, but how we do that in a 60or 30-second commercial that’s super-fresh and hasn’t been done before.” 1 This American Life, Videos 4 U 2 Dos Equis, Masquerade 3 Pepsi, Now Is What You Make It

exploration and discovery is still at the heart of the company. Whether it’s using new technology or simply looking at new ways of working, he and his team are constantly pushing boundaries and are excited about the direction in which the company is headed. “We’re attracting incredible talent,” concludes Kuschnir. “Some amazing directors – and the very definition of ‘director’ is expanding as we speak – and we have some announcements about directors, and beyond-directors, to come. Plus we’re venturing more into original content, and solidifying our relationships with agencies and clients. We just want to do bigger, better and more exciting stuff.” S

22/05/2015 13:50

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NEW YORK

Going native: New York

There are unwritten rules about New York, e.g. never look a native in the eye or walk on the left. Tony Granger, global CCO, Y&R, shares the decrees and delights of the place you mustn’t call New York What is the best thing about working in advertising in New York? The scale. This city is one of the only places on earth where agencies can pitch for US$10, 15, 20m-plus in revenue. And the worst thing? The scale. There’s a lot at stake. Clients spend a lot so they tend to be cautious (rightfully so). What advice would you give to a visitor? Firstly, don’t call it NYC, the Big Apple, Manhattan or New York. It’s ‘The City’. The best way of getting around is by subway. It’s easy; it runs uptown (north) or downtown (south). None of that crazy, spider-web underground that confused the hell out of me in London. Wait until the train has stopped at your stop before you get up, and let the passengers off the before you enter. Never make eye contact – it creeps us out. Walk to the right on sidewalks and stairs. Tourists look up and amble

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down the street. We look down, so please stand to the right. We’re in a hurry. Don’t expect us to walk around you when you’re taking a shot of your buddy on Wall Street. We’ll walk straight through your shot. Please don’t ride the horse carriages in Times Square. We think they are cruel and you’ll get shouted at. Walk, it’s good for you. You may think we’re rude. We’re not. If you’re lost, we’ll help you find your way, it’s our pleasure. If you’re struggling up the subway stairs with some heavy luggage, we’ll help you, no need to ask, and if the door is closing on you as you rush into a train, we’ll hold it open for you. Who do you/would you love to work with in the industry? John Hunt for his magic. Lee Clow for his cool, LA surfer thing. Bob Isherwood for his drive. Eric Vervoegen for his craft. Kerry Keenan for her fighting spirit. Menno Kluin for his ambition. I could go on and on and on.

What is the best US ad you have seen in the last year? The Game Before the Game for Beats by Dre. Great insight and great production. From ‘digital’ (isn’t that word so old school?) agency R/GA.

If you’re booking a hotel in New York, where would you stay? Different strokes… If you like to party and are a bit of an exhibitionist, The Standard, High Line in the Meatpacking District is the place for you. Floor to ceiling windows gives everyone views of your room. If you’re a little shy don’t forget to close the blinds. If you like classic, old school luxury, The Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue: an iconic Upper East Side hotel. Be prepared to dig into your wallet. And, for the hipster crowd, Wythe Hotel. Ok, so it’s in Brooklyn and not technically in ‘The City’, but it’s on the East River with crazy-good views. One table, four places. You and who? My dad, I’d love to have one more conversation with him. Nelson Mandela, I’d ask him a million questions. John Lennon, I’d ask him how such a young songwriter had so much knowledge.

What do you miss when you are out of the city? My family.

If it were a product, what would New York be? An adrenalin shot. What’s your one-line life philosophy? To infinity and beyond (thanks, Buzz Lightyear).

What’s New York’s favourite pastime? Lying in Central Park in the summer. It’s our beach.

If you could have one question answered, what would it be? What are the Powerball numbers for a US$400 million jackpot win next week? S

Where’s the best place to eat in New York? I love Da Claudio in the financial district. His place was taken out by Hurricane Sandy and re-opened six months ago. Best Italian food in the city. Period. The best place to drink? The newly restored Pier A Harbour Bar in Battery Park. The perfect place to drink a Belvedere martini while watching the sun set over the Statue of Liberty.

What’s your favourite memory of New York? My first trip here for a shoot. I stayed at the Plaza and was driven around in a black stretch. I thought, ‘I could get used to this’.

1 Nelson Mandela 2 Sunbathing in Central Park 3 Subway travelling 4 Belvedere martini at Pier A 5 John Lennon 6 Always walk to the right 7 Pier A restored waterfront

“Firstly, don’t call it NYC, the Big Apple, Manhattan or New York... It’s ‘The City’.” 22/05/2015 13:47

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26/05/15

17:49

CMY

FINLAND not only snow

www.filmfinland.fi

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tor myhren

The Law of Tor

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A natural-born ad man, Tor Myhren is all about gentle persuasion. Grey’s wunderkind worldwide CCO and president of its NY shop sees his role as Film jury president as a chance to enjoy and moderate smart people with strong views, ‘kill with kindness’ any bulky egos and remind his team that the jurors will be judged too. He tells Carol Cooper his thoughts on the pros of Cannes and cons of other awards shows, the value of having fun and the industry’s worrying brain-drain

obody’s calling Tor Myhren immature, but he does share traits with possibly his most famous creation, the stockbroking infant star of his longrunning E*Trade Baby campaign – namely he’s ridiculously cool, witty and kind of winsome, plus he’s rather a high achiever for his age. In 2010, aged 38, he was promoted to worldwide CCO of Grey and president of its flagship New York office; he was picked as one of Fortune magazine’s 40 under 40; he’s a two-time TED speaker and has garnered a slew of awards for work such as the hilarious DirecTV Cable Effects series, the Oprah car giveaway and powerful spots for States United to Prevent Gun Violence. A graduate in English literature, he got into advertising purely on the strength of a collection of writings, including poems and short stories, and his early work as a newspaper sports reporter. Kicking off copywriting at a small agency in his hometown of Denver, he hurtled up the career ladder, working at Wongdoody and TBWA\Chiat\Day in LA, Leo Burnett in Detroit and then joining Grey New York as CCO in 2007. He’s largely credited with turning the agency’s fortunes around – in five years its revenue grew by 60 per cent and its headcount doubled. Last year the shop was named Agency of the Year by Ad Age and it formed a considerable part of Grey North America’s haul of $370 million in new business. Despite his abundance of wins, Myhren believes creatives should have the freedom to fail. In fact, one of the many innovations that’s helped to revolutionise his agency’s workplace culture – and thus massively boost its creativity – is his Heroic Failure Awards, which credit staff who take creative risks. He’s sat on three Cannes juries before: Film in 2010 and 2013 and Titanium last year. This is his first time as president.

What was your first reaction to being offered the post of Film jury president? Well first off, it’s a huge honour to be chosen as the president of the Film jury so I was super-excited. I love judging at Cannes; I’ve done it three times before, but I’ve never been president. I think Cannes sets the bar for creativity in our industry, so I’m psyched to be heading up what I consider to be one of the most interesting juries.

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What strategies will you employ to marshal any conflicting or supersized egos? Best thing for supersized egos… kill them with kindness! There are so many big egos in that room anyway – and mine isn’t small – I think you’ve just got to hear people out and let them talk. I think what’s really cool about judging at Cannes is that there are so many smart people in the room with very strong opinions. So you’ll hear one person give an argument and you’ll be, “Wow, you’ve just changed my mind! I think you’re right,” and another person will give a different argument and you’ll say, “Wait a minute – maybe you’re right.” It’s not like it’s a bunch of morons talking. However, if you do have one or two gigantic egos you can’t let them dominate. The only time I’ve been on juries where the outcome was disappointing was when one or two outspoken people repeatedly swayed the jury. You can’t let that happen. But I don’t think the president should be making the decisions either. You can’t get heavy-handed as a president.

What type of work or new trends are you hoping to see from the last year? Where we, as an industry, are taking storytelling in film is to me the most interesting thing. In many respects, more interesting than where we’re taking the technology. I know those two things can go hand in hand, and when they do – that’s a beautiful thing. I’m looking forward to seeing – particularly in the online video space – if we are taking engagement and interaction to the next level. I think some of the best work I’ve seen recently follows a trend away from ‘big’ stories to more intimate storytelling. For example, last year’s #LikeAGirl campaign for Always [from Leo Burnett Chicago] was a really nice piece; moving and intimate and it went phenomenally viral. It was all about the humanity. There was a similar intimacy to our campaign for States United to Prevent Gun Violence, where we opened a gun store in New York [read more about this in Inspired, p12]. It used a hidden camera to record real emotions. It wasn’t a big production deal. We did it for very little money, but it was just real. I knew we had something, but I couldn’t believe the viral nature of it and how much the media picked up on it. I’ll tell you one trend I don’t like in our industry, I feel it’s very hard now to find truly funny ads anymore. There are few that really make me laugh and that bums me out. It’s really getting watered down, it’s way too mass, all the edges are being worn off. I have a theory this could be that we have less fun than we used to in this industry, partially because of the speed at which we work now, partially because of a fundamental change in the economy since 2007. Now every business is doing more with less people. So it makes it really important that all of us that are running agencies focus more on culture – if you have a really strong, fun, optimistic culture you not only attract more young talent but people tend to not worry as much about the fact that they’re working harder, for longer hours.

Will you have any time to relax and socialise? I have some evening plans, but I’ll be judging every day. The Film jury is the longest – from Saturday to Saturday. I was on Hegarty’s Film jury in 2013 and he said, “We’re getting this done on time. We’re not going to stay till 8 or 9pm.” I’ll do the same. I think you can get caught up in long, meaningless conversations if you’re not careful.

Is advertising still global? There are still interesting regional differences, but one of the biggest trends in our industry is the movement towards more global ideas. It’s a much smaller world now because of the connectivity. I think it’s the ultimate test of an idea – if it can truly cut through to the majority of markets in the world, you have a pretty damn good

What guidance will you be giving the jury? The most important thing to remember when you’re judging is that your name goes on every single piece of work that wins, just as your name is on your own work. Your reputation is on the line, so you better pick the best stuff. I think we’ve all seen juries in the past that have made really questionable selections and you look at the jury and you kind of end up judging the jurors, in a way. Do you think Cannes falls prey to hidden agendas? I think it’s impossible for any juror to be 100 per cent pure. Almost everyone in that room has a horse in the race and many might also have an axe to grind. So as regards individuals being biased, yes – you’re going to have some of that. It’s human nature. But that’s why you have 22 jurors on the Film jury and you have to have three quarters of the vote to win.

“I feel it’s very hard to find truly funny ads anymore. There are few that really make me laugh and that bums me out. It’s really getting watered down, it’s way too mass, all the edges are being worn off.”

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“First off, awards should never be the goal, never. The goal should be to do work that becomes famous, that finds its way into the cultural conversation – and by the way, if you do that you will probably win awards anyway.”

idea. And that means that it has to be simple, clear, and oftentimes it has to be visual. I always say it’s an art director’s world, I just live in it. It’s a bit annoying for writers I think, but it’s a fact. Do you think there’s a pressure to exploit new technologies for the sake of it, when what’s vital is the core idea? The fundamentals haven’t changed, it goes back to what we always talk about – a strong idea. But the technology and different platforms give you a much bigger canvas to work on, and it’s why I think we’re in the most interesting time in the history of advertising right now. We can now tell stories in so many different ways. Frankly I don’t think it’s made the work any better or worse – but I do think that it should be better than it is, and I don’t think it’s technology or clients that are dragging it down. The biggest problem we have right now is that we’re losing some of the best creative minds to other creative industries. Now that creative industries are, in one way or another, merging – the talent is going into gaming, or designing for Apple or working on Facebook or the million opportunities that Google are offering – and those are just the obvious companies. There are loads more small, interesting tech companies popping up left and right. I think the younger generation is more entrepreneurial than ever so I think we need to do more to attract creative minds. The best – and hardest – way to do that is just to do better work. Also, I think there are some workplace culture issues we as an industry need to tackle; we’re a little bit behind on the more progressive things the tech companies are offering, whether it’s for pregnant women, new dads, healthcare, or a more open management style. You made a number of workplace improvements at Grey, do you think that’s how you turned the agency’s fortunes around? Grey was a very account-driven agency for decades, so I think putting a really sharp focus on the creative product was the most important thing we achieved. We had to convince every single person working at Grey that the creative product is what our value is, and that it can come from anybody, it’s a task for the entire agency. Once everybody saw that great creative product led to more

and better business, everybody got on board. That simplifies more than seven years of trying to change an agency! Having a partner like Jim Heekin [Grey’s global CEO], who totally understands the importance of a creative culture, has been fantastic. In your 2011 TED Talk on creativity, you advocate promoting the freedom to fail and list competition as a ‘creativity killer’, but surely the competitiveness in the ad industry comes to the fore at Cannes? So how would you advise creatives/agencies to approach the desire to bag as many Lions as possible? First off, awards should never be the goal, never. The goal should be to do work that becomes famous, that finds its way into the cultural conversation – and by the way, if you do that you’ll probably win awards anyway. When you are looking for inspiration, the last place to look is in last year’s award show book. It was great when it was done, but it’s done; you won’t find inspiration there. Find your inspiration in life, in travel and art and music. There are million things you can do to nurture your brain creatively. The great thing about awards shows is that, in some ways, they keep our industry honest about what good creative is. Sometimes as an industry we tend to rationalise – so because an ad sold more than the next ad, or because a client was happy in a meeting, it was great creative. But I think what is great creative is something that’s new and unique; that takes the industry to the next level and I think that is something awards shows can decipher. On the bad side, I think there’s way too many awards shows and most of them don’t matter. At Grey New York we only enter two awards shows – Cannes and the Effies. Many agencies spend an inordinate amount of money entering every single, local awards show to try to score in The Gunn Report. And ultimately I don’t think that it’s important. I would much rather take the money that would be spent on awards entries and spend it on the staff, on somebody’s raise or bonus, or trying to get some awesome graduate to come to Grey. By the way, I am in the minority in this argument! That said, we do enter Cannes and we strive to do well there – because it is the benchmark for creativity in our industry, and it’s global. That’s the other vital thing – if you are going to measure yourself, you’ve got to measure yourself against the world. S

Glass ceilings don’t last long around industry activist and ardent feminist Cindy Gallop, making her the obvious choice for jury president of Cannes Lions’ newest award celebrating gender equality. But, while lauding its birth, the former account executive tells Selena Schleh she can’t wait for the Glass Lion to become obsolete

photograph: julian hanford / julianhanford.com

90 Cannes Special | glass lions president

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cindy gallop

cindy’s war

92 Cannes Special | glass lions president

ounder and former chair of BBH New York, Cindy Gallop has worn an eclectic selection of hats since stepping down from agency life in 2005: advertising and marketing consultant; motivational speaker; sex-tech entrepreneur. Her real-life wardrobe is equally idiosyncratic. When we meet at London’s Haymarket hotel, Gallop opens the door to her suite in spray-on PVC leggings and a hefty pair of biker boots, which must come in handy when your day job is kicking through glass ceilings and stomping on gender stereotypes.

Irked by extravagance This summer, Gallop will be switching her urban warrior attire for something a little more Croisettefriendly, as she dons yet another hat: that of jury president for the inaugural Glass Lion, which recognises ‘work that implicitly or explicitly addresses issues of gender inequality or prejudice’. Although it’s her first time on a Cannes jury, Gallop is no stranger to the festival itself, having engineered a visit many years ago through a copywriter boyfriend working at BBDO Amsterdam and becoming a regular in the 90s while running BBH New York. “It was a big deal for doing business,” she remembers. Her fellow agency heads weren’t initially as keen to attend. “I told them we [all] needed to go, in order to establish ourselves as a global network, and dragged a very reluctant Nigel Bogle and John Hegarty along with me.” Business opportunities aside, Gallop’s personal views on the festival are decidedly mixed. “It’s the only truly global meeting place

“[The Cannes Advertising Festival] is also appallingly old world order – all those ridiculous yachts and lavish spending in a way that I honestly find embarrassing on behalf of our industry. That is not the image that we want to be putting out there.”

for the advertising industry and a phenomenal celebration of the best of the best in terms of creativity and the extraordinary talent that exists within our industry, so I love it for that,” she ponders. However, while supporting its core values, Gallop thinks the festival’s flashness is increasingly out of touch. “It is also appallingly old world order – all those ridiculous yachts and lavish spending in a way that I honestly find embarrassing on behalf of our industry. That is not the image that we want to be putting out there.” There are other aspects of Cannes that have irked Gallop over the years, including “the appalling gender ratio” of the juries. Lately, her attendance at the awards has been sporadic, but physical absence is no barrier to the self-dubbed ‘Michael Bay of business’ – Gallop simply blew up the issue on Twitter and Facebook instead. That sparked a conversation with Cannes’ director of brand strategy, Senta Slingerland, who was, says Gallop, “already acutely aware of the [gender inequality] issues herself” and taking steps to address them through initiatives such as the Sheryl Sandberg-backed ‘See It Be It’, introduced last year to help accelerate the careers of women creatives. “Senta rang me and said, ‘We’re working on a project we think you’ll like, and we’d like to bounce it off you and get your input,’” recalls Gallop. “So we had a long call where I recommended how I thought the award should be positioned and characterised, and what the criteria for entries should be.” Interestingly, the Glass Lion had been foreshadowed by a proposed Lioness award just a few weeks earlier, cooked up by a creative team from DDB Sydney for the Young Glory competition, to honour work ‘that changes the culture of objectifying women in order to sell stuff’. The fact that the concept was generated by young male copywriter, Christian Tough (and female art director Effie Kacopieros), shows that it’s not just women pushing for radical change in the old world order of advertising, claims Gallop.

Reimagining male morons and hapless husbands, too Although she was closely involved in the development of the award, Gallop says her subsequent appointment as jury president came as a complete shock: “I was absolutely gobsmacked!” Not that she lacks the chops for the role. Her background is account management, rather than creative, but she has ample experience of reviewing and evaluating work, having chaired a creative review committee at the Advertising Council in New York for years, as well as organising Advertising Women of New York’s now-shelved awards event, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, which celebrated depictions of women in a non-offensive, non-stereotyped, non-objective way and shamed advertising that did the opposite. The male-female ratio of the Glass Lion jury will be 80:20 in favour of women and while the priority remains recruiting industry leaders (“We need people who can really evaluate the best of the best creativity”), in an ideal scenario, says Gallop, some of the 10-strong jury will have been drawn from beyond the agency sphere. “We want people who operate in areas where there is a real need to rethink the gender ratio and representation of gender,

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whether that’s media, entertainment or technology, because everything that this award is about is also true for popular culture generally.” Since this interview, jury members announced include the executive director of UN Women, Elizabeth Nyamayaro and founder and CEO of non-profit organisation, The Representation Project, Jennifer Siebel Newsom. So how will she direct the jury, when it comes to judging the entries? For Gallop, the award should recognise “great creative work in our industry reflecting the world around us, as opposed to perpetuating outmoded stereotypes.” What it’s not about, she stresses, is going to the other extreme and bringing in new gender stereotypes. “Ads showing women in wildly empowered situations is, unfortunately, what people’s minds go to, but it’s enormously important that this [award] is about great creative work where a complete re-envisioning of gender is a fundamental part of the DNA.” And that goes for both sexes. “When we talk about shattering gender stereotypes we’re not just talking about women. I am fed up with young male morons in beer ads and hapless husbands in household goods ads – and men are as well. I have a very wide [social media] network and every day young men are critiquing advertising for the stereotypical way it depicts them.”

Making the Glass Lion less of a ‘girl’ thing When asked for examples of brilliant gender-neutral advertising, Gallop is more cagey. “For me, the best advertising of that sort is where I don’t even think about it; I don’t have to be outraged. I’m not going to point to all the usual suspects and say ‘[these ads] really empowered women’. By far the most interesting creative work is where gender is not an issue at all.” She cites Apple as a brand which has never discriminated between men and women in its advertising, in contrast to what she dubs the usual ‘pink it and shrink it’ marketing approach. Where does Gallop stand on the widely-publicised wave of pro-female advertising such as Always’ 2014 spot #Like A Girl and, more recently, Sport England’s This Girl Can? While she applauds the likes of Pantene and Dove – “Obviously, I’m absolutely thrilled that all this is happening, and we can’t have too much of tackling this issue from every possible angle” – she is keen to see a creative diversity of approach when it comes to entries. “I just worry those ads are creating a very narrow bandwidth of what people think would win the Glass Lion,” she explains. “There are just so many different ways that we can reflect the real world. Those [types of] campaigns are one area – which has gotten a lot of coverage because it’s so rare – but I want to see the entire spectrum.” One of the biggest challenges for Gallop was positioning the Glass Lion as more than just ‘the women’s award’. “Things concerned with gender equality – because it’s not something that affects men – can very easily be marginalised,” she says. “I want this to be the award that every single young male creative around the world is gagging to win. Obviously I want every young female creative around the world to enter, too – but if we crack [the young male creatives], we’ve cracked the problem.”

“Ads showing women in wildly empowered situations is, unfortunately, what people’s minds go to, but it’s enormously important that this [award] is about great creative work where a complete re-envisioning of gender is a fundamental part of the DNA.”

If anyone can galvanise people into action, it’s Gallop. After all, this is the woman who got into advertising after being told ‘You could sell a fridge to an Eskimo’. After landing her first job at Ted Bates in 1985, she moved to JWT, Gold Greenlees Trott and BBH London, where she worked on a string of big-ticket accounts including Coca-Cola and Polaroid. In 1996 she left the UK for Singapore to start BBH Asia Pacific as Simon Sherwood’s number two; two years later she set up BBH New York (essentially Gallop “in a room, with a phone”), growing it into a successful shop with the likes of Johnnie Walker, Unilever and Levi’s on its books and bagging herself the 2003 Advertising Woman of the Year award along the way. After her textbook rise through the ranks, it was a surprise to many when, in 2005, Gallop stepped down as chairman in favour of fresh challenges and a portfolio career – founding her own brand and business innovation consultancy and carving out a niche as a professional public speaker. It was during an explosive TED talk in 2009 that Gallop launched the first of her two internet start-ups, MakeLoveNotPorn (MLNP). Garnering over 1.2 million views on YouTube to date, the talk tapped a global social nerve that Gallop had no idea existed, catapulting her into the sex site industry. “It’s the start-up the world asked for, but it started off entirely by accident,” says Gallop. “Through dating younger men, I experienced first-hand what happens when today’s total access to hardcore porn online meets our society’s equally

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total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex. Porn becomes by default the sex education of the day.” MLNP seeks to redress the balance by depicting “real people” having “real world sex”. In two years, Gallop’s “tiny clunky site” has blown up in a way she never anticipated, gaining 350,000 members across the globe (their biggest market is Scandinavia, followed by China), undergoing a sleek facelift and taking a monthly revenue, “in the low five figures” admits Gallop, “but in a world where the received wisdom is: nobody pays for porn, they’re paying for real world sex.” Following prolonged but ultimately fruitless discussions with Durex (who “fully endorse the concept but are too nervous to partner with us”), Gallop is negotiating an interesting brand partnership that’s currently cloaked in secrecy. The branding opportunities, she says, are huge.

Flip the gender, fix the ad MLNP’s success has put Gallop’s second, socially-minded start-up, If We Ran The World (a web platform designed to turn good intentions into action) on the back burner for now. With all these projects on the go, does she ever miss her agency days? “Not in the slightest,” she says cheerfully. “But I love the industry and I’m very much still involved.” And she’s unlikely to step away any time soon since her twin goals – advertising that reflects the real world and parity of men and women in the top creative and management roles – are still some way off, as her experiences as one of the chairs of the Ad Council’s campaign review committee have shown.

While Gallop won’t name names, she recalls “a very large agency” presenting a campaign in 2014, which featured a daughter in the kitchen with her mother, and a son on the football pitch with his father. Gallop’s first recommendation? Flip the genders of the kids. Another recent review illustrated the problem even more clearly: in a series of six TV spots, every single one featured a male-centric scenario – despite the fact that the main decision-maker and action-taker in the household would be the woman. When Gallop pointed this out to the “two older white guys” who’d presented the campaign, there was a “deathly silence”: the issue hadn’t even occurred to them. “And that,” says Gallop, “is what happens when you have all male ECDs, all male creative directors, all male creative teams – they unfortunately default to outmoded stereotypes.”

Looking back in anger and forward to smashing glass

“I can see all sorts of things which horrify me now, but at the time… well, you’re ambitious and you’re working really hard. It isn’t until you’re older and you have the chance to take a very clearsighted look at your industry, that you start thinking about things like this.”

The paucity of female creatives, especially at the higher echelons of the industry, isn’t a new issue, but it’s reached a tipping point now that women are the predominant purchasers and doers of virtually everything the industry targets. Now more than ever, it’s head-slappingly obvious that there’s a huge commercial case for taking women seriously: “Gender equality is not a ‘nice to have’, it’s great business.” Incremental changes, with the odd female hire here and there, won’t bring change fast enough: agencies should be, as Gallop puts it, “bulkbuying”. Tokenism famously doesn’t work; one senior woman cannot change things single-handedly so ends up adapting to the environment around her, inevitably becoming like her male colleagues in what Gallop calls Highlander syndrome (“There can be only one”). That leads to “the very unfortunate dynamic of women competing with women. And it’s a syndrome entirely brought about by men.” It’s tempting to speculate that Gallop is speaking from personal experience, so just how much gender bias did she encounter while working her way up through the agency ranks? “Quite frankly, it’s not the kind of thing I ever thought about,” she claims. “Obviously I can look back and see all sorts of things which horrify me now, but at the time… well, you’re ambitious and you’re working really hard. It isn’t until you’re older and you have the chance to take a very clear-sighted look at your industry, that you start thinking about things like this.” Notwithstanding the flaws that are now apparent with 20:20 hindsight, Gallop’s affection for the advertising industry is clear – “it’s jam-packed full of brilliant, talented, creative, articulate people who do not get enough credit for that talent from the outside” – and for Cannes itself: “I welcome any opportunity to celebrate those vast amounts of talent.” As for the award she helped shape, Gallop is already looking forward to the day that the Glass Lion is smashed to smithereens. “I really want this award not to exist in a few years’ time; I want it not to be necessary. To paraphrase a well-known slogan, every Cannes-award-winning ad will be built this way.” S

96 Cannes Special | cannes lions branded content & entertainment president

Seems these days our language adopts new words and phrases faster than you can ROFL, or look up ‘askhole’. Finding himself in a lexical loop-theloop about the actual meaning of the term ‘branded content’, Danny Edwards asked David Lubars, president of this year’s Cannes Lions Branded Content jury, to share his definition of this most industrydefining erm... thingummy

hat is branded content? This is both an actual, and rhetorical question because while it seems everyone has an answer, no one really has the answer. Content is a word that is thrown around by pretty much everyone these days. It’s the Holy Grail of contemporary advertising and the elusive thing that every brand would like to successfully create. But the definition of ‘content’ changes depending on who you talk to and can be confusing: “So, what are you working on?” “A great piece of content for Brand X.” “Fantastic. What is it exactly?” “It’s actually a music video but you never see the product and only get a ‘sponsored by Brand X’ caption at the end’.” “Right. Sort of like an ad.” “<silent, hateful look>” It’s tempting to revert to journalistic cliché and quote the dictionary definition of the word ‘content’, but I don’t think we need to. Content is basically everything, and everything with a brand attached is, therefore, branded content. Right? A 60-second commercial is branded content. A short animated film sponsored by a fast food chain is branded content. A tweet sent from the Academy Awards by Ellen DeGeneres on a Samsung phone is, it seems, branded content. But then, what do I know? Because according to this year’s president of the Cannes Lions Branded Content and Entertainment jury, chief creative officer of BBDO Worldwide and chairman of BBDO North America, David Lubars, that explanation is not strictly true. “Branded content, to me,” he says, “is where [an idea] couldn’t exist without the product.” If anyone can fathom the definition of branded content it would be Lubars. A veteran of Cannes juries (he headed the Titanium jury in 2006, and both the Film and Press juries in 2009), Lubars is no stranger to a darkened room, a set of guidelines and a whole heap of creative ideas, but even he admits that there can be various interpretations of what branded content is. Most importantly, the Lions festival defines the category thus; “The definition of Branded Content and Entertainment… is the creation of, or natural integration into, original content by a brand. Entrants will show how a brand has successfully worked independently or in association with a content producer or publisher to develop and create or co-create entertaining and engaging content for their audience. This could be either by creating original content or programming for a brand or by naturally integrating a brand into existing formats by partnering with a publisher or media partner.” And who are we to argue? [Though we could. A TV spot is also ‘original content’. Usually, anyway]. “I loved judging all those other categories,”

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david lubars

the content

conundrum

PHOTOGRAPHS: billy siegrist

“The definition of Branded Content and Entertainment… is the creation of, or natural integration into, original content by a brand.”

98 Cannes Special | cannes lions branded content & entertainment president

“All kinds of video is what a campaign really consists of now; different lengths, different channels. Everything’s blurring into entertainment because first of all [people have] got to want to look at it, to send it on, and that’s how it’s going now. To me, this [category] is where the future is.”

explains Lubars of his previous jury stints, “but this is the category for right now. What a campaign is has changed so much. It’s funny because everyone predicted the death of regular television but that’s still going strong. And all kinds of video is what a campaign really consists of now; different lengths, different channels. But everything’s blurring into entertainment because first of all [people have] got to want to look at it, to send it on, and that’s how it’s going now. To me, this [category] is where the future is.”

Modern Family’s quintessentially modern content Lubars states that a piece of work which has caught his eye over the past year is the Daniel Wolfe-directed spot for Honda’s Type R, The Other Side, created by Wieden+Kennedy London. An interactive film featuring a ‘dark’ and ‘light’ storyline that sit cleverly side-by-side with a press of the ‘R’ key, it has already picked up a slew of advertising awards. A good example of branded content then? “I think a lot of [deciding what is branded content] is just gut instinct,” Lubars says. “But Honda is great content that is highly entertaining, interactive, fun and cool, a great product demo and it’s different [and] it really is entertainment. And I assume they’ll enter it into this category.” Another, more unusual and possibly purer example of branded content that Lubars admires is a February episode of US comedy show, Modern Family – which ironically was not actually paid for by the brand. The episode in question, Connection Lost, was shot using, and takes place entirely on, Apple products – utilising laptops, iPhones and iPads for the characters to interact with each other. “It’s fantastic,” he states. “I mean, I don’t know if they’ll enter it, and at the start you might immediately roll your eyes because it does feel a bit product placement-ey but it’s so well done you’re just like, ok, I’ll go with it. And it’s really, really funny.” Picking him up on the product placement point, asking whether this is branded content or, indeed, pure product placement, Lubars returns again to the salient point he made before, that to be branded content it needs for the content to only be able to exist because of the brand, and that this is a perfect case in point. “Product placement is when you see a movie or a TV show and they suddenly pull out some branded crackers or something, it’s when a product’s just stuck in there,” he says. “Take our spot for GE with Jeff Goldblum [Enhance Your Lighting]. He actually talks about and shows the product the whole time, talking about lighting and how light works, but the whole thing couldn’t exist without that product and it’s super-entertaining rather than being entertaining and then a product is just randomly dropped in.” Lubars is perfectly placed to head this particular category, not just because of his experience at leading a jury in general but due to his very early adoption of branded content as a form of advertising. Back in 2001, when he

was at Fallon Minneapolis, Lubars was the driving force behind BMW’s series of films called The Hire. Starring a then relatively unknown Clive Owen, the shorts were directed by luminaries such as Wong Kar-Wai, John Woo, John Frankenheimer and Ang Lee. The car was front and centre but the content was clever, interesting and rich enough that people sought it out. The films were also released on DVD because download and streaming speeds at the turn of the century aren’t quite what they are today, and The Hire heralded a new era of both content-rich and non-TV commercial centric campaigns. The Hire was hugely successful and was actually a big factor in Cannes Lions introducing the Titanium Lions, to celebrate ideas that defied categorisation and which broke the mould, and Lubars states that it was the limitations of the time which actually helped them in the end. “They were long-form films but at the time there was really no place to put them,” he says. “You didn’t have YouTube or anything like that so you had to download them over a period of hours. It was actually supposed to be an hour-long film but you’d never have been able [to download it] so we chopped it into six minute [segments] and then thought, why make it continuous? Each one could be it’s own film, and we actually had several directors [lined up] so the idea actually became better because of those limitations.” As for contemporary branded content campaigns, Lubars believes that it’s now much more difficult to create such financially expensive work as The Hire. Though there’s still a place for big productions, he says, it’s now more about the constant flow of smaller ones. About quantity as well as quality. Citing the old adage of being able to choose two from ‘cheap, fast and good’, Lubars states that nowadays you need all three and the only way to do that is to create content in-house, as BBDO New York did with its Vine-based Fix in Six campaign for DIY chain Lowe’s.

Conversations about the categorisation of content As for the festival, a discussion with the Cannes hierarchy could be on the cards, he says, over the whole definition of this category. “Maybe they should just call it branded entertainment,” he muses. “I’d get that. But then that’s the good thing about those guys; Phil [Thomas, Cannes Lions CEO] and Terry [Savage, Cannes Lions chairman], they’re happy to have those conversations.” Mostly though, Lubars is once again looking forward to being locked in a room at the tail end of June with a selection of his peers for the best part of a week – “it is a long time to be in a dark room, looking at everybody else on the outside, but it’s always great to be there” – and to examining the best of what the industry has to offer in terms of Branded Content and Entertainment. Even if none of us still quite know exactly what that term means. S

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CANNES CONTENDERS

THE JURY’S OUT We quiz the big creative names from around the world on whether our reliance on data and tech is stiﬂing the imagination, how the relationship between brand and consumer is changing, what the biggest talking points of the next 12 months are likely to be and – most importantly – what they think the 62nd Cannes Lions festival juries will be looking for and who might be in line for metal in this year’s visual extravaganza SH157_p101-104_CannesContenders_FINAL.indd 101

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Darren Bailes Executive creative director, VCCP London

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in the UK? Surely that’s for a group of bearded South Americans to answer in a darkened Cannes room in the next few weeks? But I hope we’ve been creatively successful. Honda made a digital experience a single index finger flex [The Other Side]. Beautiful. IKEA made T-shirts fly and put themselves away nicely in the drawers [The Joy Of Storage]. Nice one Dougal [Wilson, director]. And I now have the pleasure of glow in the dark (well, almost) trousers thanks to Volvo Life Paint. My dog never gets lost on night-time walks either. Not to mention the brilliant This Girl Can [for Sport England]. So yeah, I think we’ve had a bloody good year here. What pieces of UK work have impressed you most and why? Two of the above are standout for me. This Girl Can is my favourite thing this year from our shores. It’s proof that a great idea, great strategy can be all you need. The filmmaking and photography is brilliant. No UX, apps or widgets. I wish I’d made it. Secondly Volvo’s Life Paint. For years the brand seemed to have forgotten their Simon Sinek-style ‘Why?’ The answer is ‘safety’, dudes. It’s great to see them find their feet. Then spray them so they reflect light in the dark. No car needed. Just a great bit of thinking to build the brand. I see a light-reflective Lion or two some day soon.

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What for you is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? Smart people. Fresh minds. Minds that know nothing of the past, just the new. People with thought processes different to my own who come at stuff in ways that shock me. That’s why I come to work. Oh, and we have a cupboard full of biscuits at the agency. It’s amazing. The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry and can they stifle creativity? Good data doesn’t maketh a good idea. Neither does tech. It’s our role as creative people to make sense, unravel, see the opportunity and make something useful that never existed before. Does this need yet another category at Cannes? I’m not sure. It should be just what we do. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learnt since Cannes in 2014? Respect the judging process! I’d heard a lot about the windowless rooms in Cannes where the judging happened. Never really believed anyone could be in Cannes and not be drinking or soaking up the sun. Until I did it last year. But it’s true. It’s grim and it’s hard work. A thousand-entry tour of the globe with a supermarket scanner. Joy. With regards to the work, I was pleased to see that great ideas can win across all borders. Harvey Nichols cut through the crap, the cliques, the bias across the board in my category and rose to the top unchallenged. What has been the biggest industry talking point in the UK in this last year? Changing of the guard. A lot of the traditional super agencies have lost big accounts. A lot of great creative talent is moving around and moving on. And a lot of previously dull giants are doing really great work. Never a dull moment. Interesting to see what happens next.

What will be the biggest talking point of the next 12 months? All the brilliant ideas that haven’t even been thought of yet. Who knows? What has been your favourite campaign – UK or otherwise – from the last year? Did I mention This Girl Can? So fresh. It’s not selling anything or pushing anything. It’s the polar opposite to a world of Nike and Adidas that we’ve been gorging on for years. Kim Gehrig directed her socks off. I was on an awards jury a while ago and a lot of the male judges around the table were: ‘Meh!’ But the females around the room spoke up and put us in our place. They were invigorated. They felt after years of staying away from competitive sports it was back on their agenda… some had started playing netball again, many were inspired to exercise more. Job done. Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so what are you most looking forward to? I will be there. Room 506 at the Majestic Hotel. Open house. Please pop in. Looking forward to it.

Rosie Bardales Executive creative director, BETC London

IKEA T he Joy Of Storage A very surprising execution for storing clothes. Incredibly well executed. I’m a big fan of the endline ‘The Wonderful Everyday’. It’s brilliant. I’m sure Beds will also do well. Harvey Nichols Bad Fit A print campaign that captures the “crazy” of a sale perfectly. Well executed, super simple and globally true. Karma Nirvana Suffocation This is a Direct piece I’ve judged on quite a few juries now. It’s done very well in every one, so I think Cannes will be no different. Simple idea, arresting execution, unexpected media. Honda The Other Side This is one of my favourite pieces. Mainly because of the simplicity of its technology, idea, and stunning production values. This is the kind of brief any other client would bring to you as a Direct piece. ‘Test Drive Today!’ But because it’s Honda, the magic takes it to the next level. Moneysupermarket Bootylicious I struggled on this last one. There are actually a couple of other films I debated over, but I chose this one because it’s funny. After sitting in a jury watching thousands of ads you debate over for hours – this one lets you off the hook. It’s just funny. I wish there was more of it.

1 Volvo, Life Paint 2 Sport England, This Girl Can

3 Harvey Nichols, Bad Fit 4 Honda, The Other Side 5 IKEA, The Joy Of Storage

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Cannes Edited Identify all ten people in this ad and you could win a magnum of RosĂŠ. Email Kath@mse.tv with your entry.

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US these days. It’s great that Cannes is celebrating the interplay between these disciplines. What has been the biggest industry talking point in the US this last year? Corporate social responsibility.

Ari Weiss Chief creative officer, BBH New York

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in the US? It’s been a great year for creativity in the US. We’re starting to see less technology for technology’s sake and more technology serving great ideas. What pieces of US work have impressed you most and why? I really loved Google’s Made With Code. It had a great reward to encourage engagement and brought humanity to technology in a way that felt fresh in a category where so many brands are trying to bring humanity to technology. I also was really happy to see a return to great comedic films. I loved HBO GO’s Awkward Family Viewing campaign and GEICO’s Unskippable ads. What, for you, is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? There are so many ways to tell stories these days that the actual storytelling mechanics can become as creative as the actual stories we’re telling. The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry now and can our seeming reliance on them sometimes stifle creativity? The combination of data, tech and creativity serve as the foundation for all of our thinking

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And what do you think the biggest talking point of the next 12 months will be? Mobile. What’s been your favourite campaign – US or otherwise – from the last year? Always’ #LikeAGirl is pretty unbeatable and to do it in a category where very few clients would be brave enough to break out of category norms is incredibly inspiring. Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? I will be attending Cannes. I’m looking forward to getting insanely jealous of all the incredible thinking from around the world and using that to fuel another year of creative work.

Chuck McBride

Adrian Rossi & Alex Grieve

Founder and chief creative officer, Cutwater San Francisco

Cardstore W orld’s Toughest Job One from an unsuspecting brand. I didn’t expect this from a greeting card. I know “mom” has been in vogue lately but this was a surprising reveal and well done. Apple Misunderstood I hope this wins something. For Film Craft, maybe. What a deserving piece of film and one that went straight to the heart of what our teens are doing – staring at their phones all day. HBO GO Awkward Family Viewing This is a real contender in the campaign arena. I loved the subtle executions of such a funny insight to HBO content. It seemed effortless and we all know how hard that is. Ariat Know Where You Stand As for Cutwater, we compete in the footwear sector with Ariat boots. Tough to say the least. And our budget can’t compete on a traditional scale so we entered our work where it had impact: POS. The imagery was stunning and the idea so clear it’s very differentiating. Sunrun Solar Brilliant We also entered our work for Sunrun Solar. It would have been fun to be shown next to Exxon or Con Edison for contrast with our sunny (pardon the pun), upbeat, message about energy.

Executive creative directors, AMV BBDO London

IKEA Beds This is beautiful and made us want to get into an IKEA bed right away (although not together – we’re close but not that close). This is what happens when great craft and a great idea collide. Sainsbury’s 1914 When an ad becomes part of culture then it is special. This was the most talked about ad of the year. More importantly it also made £500,000 for The Royal British Legion. [Director] Ringan Ledwidge at the pinnacle of his powers. Perfection. TENA Men Control We pissed our pants when we saw this. Luckily we were wearing TENA Men. This isn’t just a hilarious ad that redefines a category, it is simply a great ad in its own right. Honda The Other Side This is an effortless combination of technology and craft. Unlike some so-called car ideas that have nothing to do with cars, this puts the brand at the heart of the ad. The Times/The Sunday Times Unquiet Film Series It was going to take something special to dispel the hell of our evening commute. This series was just the job. The content mantra is cheap and fast but it hasn’t been forgotten that this series (and rather lovely website) need to be engaging and good.

1 GEICO, Unskippable 2 Always, #LikeAGirl 3 Cardstore, World’s Toughest Job 4 HBO GO, Awkward Family Viewing 5 Sainsbury’s, 1914

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* check our happy clients reel on our website

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Mobile It depends on your target, your brand, what you want to communicate. But definitely you have always to think about mobile. At least as an important tool in most of the campaigns.

Guga Ketzer Partner and chief creative officer, Loducca São Paulo

What’s your definition of what this category means in 2015? To me, mobile is simply any work that wouldn’t make sense if it wasn’t portable. It doesn’t necessarily have to be on a mobile phone or tablet. What, for you, makes a great Mobile entry and what, from the last 12 months, has impressed you in this category? It’s got to be pertinent to the user and to the brand. Never technology just for technology’s sake. Anything using simple technology that is easy to use and with a powerful concept behind it makes a great entry. There’s a piece that I particularly like because it’s not an app, not a mobile site, nothing techy really. It’s a campaign to let people know how they can use their mobile phones to spot eye cancer just by snapping a picture with the flash on. So simple. Not one line of code. Still mobile. How important has Mobile advertising become to brands over the past few years? Our job is to understand people. So, the more people using mobile devices, the more important mobile becomes to advertising. With recent statistics showing that there are now more mobile devices in the world than there are people, is a successful mobile campaign now the best way to reach consumers? Not necessarily.

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DENMARK

Mads Munk

Orlando Wood

Founder and owner, M2Film Aarhus

Executive producer, Biscuit Filmworks London

Spies Rejser Do It For Denmark A great performance with great consumer and PR insight, combining a clear business target and a creative angle. Perfect for the social media landscape.

How do you think this area of the business will evolve in the coming years? All we know is that everything is changing very fast. So, more than ever, we need to keep our focus on people and how they relate to technology, regardless of what we’ll be using over the coming years. It’s always about human behaviour in a digital world.

World Food programme 805 Million Names (Zlatan Ibrahimović) The god of football meets a really good cause. Strong emotions and a great film combine to give me goose bumps in this fine example of philanthropy at work. Midttrafik The Sequel Our fingers are crossed that one of the winners will be our own baby. We came close last year with the Cool Bus campaign.

Will you be attending this year’s festival and, if so, what are you most looking forward to about it? Not this year. A first miss in a decade.

j.views The DNA project This project from Hello Monday has won awards already and should, in my opinion, continue to do so for showing us a great digital interpretation.

TV2 Zulu + Carlsberg = Zulu BFF This project is rethinking and re-developing TV as we know it. Powerful partners and good creative work have combined well across multiple platforms.

1 Childhood Eye Cancer Trust, #HaveYouCHECT 2 Sport England, This Girl Can 3 The Times/The Sunday Times, Unquiet Film Series 4 Spies Rejser, Do It For Denmark 5 IKEA, Beds

Honda T he Other Side Daniel [Wolfe], W+K and Somesuch put this together brilliantly. It’s a joy to watch. The quality of the visual storytelling is more interesting than the story itself, but that’s just another way of saying that the singer may have outdistanced the song. IKEA Beds Sometimes things are just beautiful. And when they are, there’s little more to say. This is beautiful. That’s all I have to say. TENA Men Keep Control A perfect balance of information and entertainment makes this an ad that showcases a product worth advertising. Sport England This Girl Can This is this year’s Meet The Superhumans. Not likely to win gold, either because of its UK sensibility or because people may have difficulty distinguishing it from the existing pantheon of Nike advertising, but it certainly made me happy. Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes The Gun When it comes to Branded Entertainment, this is what we should all be doing. It prepares consumers for the world they’re about to enter, makes them excited without giving away plot-spoilers, and entertains them in the meantime. The Prince’s Trust Learn The Hard Way Sometimes craft simply means capturing something that resonates and makes people who haven’t experienced it understand what it means to have gone through it. This does. The Times/The Sunday Times Unquiet Film Series Coming from a documentary background myself, I appreciate how difficult it is to keep creative standards and consistency across multiple doc pieces. They’ve done a great job.

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108 Cannes Special | CANNES CONTENDERS 2

PR 1

SPAIN

Maxi Itzkoff & Mariano Serkin Chief creative officers, Saatchi & Saatchi Europe

Toyota M ysterious Stories An innovative app by Del Campo Saatchi & Saatchi Spain, capable of scanning any Toyota on the streets, rendering exactly the same car, opening its hood, and discovering amazing stories.

Liam Fay-Fright & Aaron Cole Founding partners, Semaphore London

What’s your definition of what this category means in 2015? Fay-Fright: It’s the category no one really understands, but the one that everyone now needs. In this category are the campaigns that are the most influential – earned media is by far the best driver to action – but the ones that are the most difficult to get right. You need a blend of smart earned media strategy; great creative; seamless integration with paid and owned media; and a dollop of dark arts – it’s a slippery proposition, but by far the most exciting as the returns for a brand can be huge. How has the category of PR altered over the past few years? Fay-Fright: As media budgets have dwindled and channels multiplied like rabbits, earned media has catapulted to the top of many marketers’ agendas. PRs are getting a louder voice at the table, but with that comes greater responsibility for effectiveness. The best agencies act as brokers between clients and the media and bring their commercial interests together. The worst ones are call centres. Are more personalised, targeted campaigns/stunts that have the ability to spread digitally after the event something that’s more sought-after now; and if so why? Cole: For us the goal is still to get people to talk about our work in the pub, down the gym, to their granny.

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It used to be very rare to have a paid-for brand ‘moment’ that then spread, now everyone is at it; creating events that have genuine meaning and are useful to consumers and fans is the key, and many campaigns fall over when it comes to being specific and relevant. But then that’s why we’re here. What, for you, makes a great PR entry and what from the last 12 months has impressed you? Cole: It needs to be more than just a headline grabbing, click-bait thing. The judges have seen a zillion case study videos that claim a zillion impressions – but what did it actually do? If it didn’t change behaviour it didn’t work. The best thing in the last 12 months? Epic Strut by Mother [Moneysupermarket] got the media, social media and the real world talking. How important has data been in pushing this area of the industry? Cole: It feels like there is too much data and not enough ideas. Data is useful when it’s not a hindrance to quality and good judgment. We’re trying to influence human minds with human emotions. How has the relationship between a brand and its consumers changed in recent years and are brands more aware now of their place in a consumer’s life? Cole: Many brands seem to be scared to offend. That’s understandable as maintaining

market share is vital, but increasing your market share and acquiring new users/consumers takes balls. Searching for positive reinforcement is weak – no one falls in love with neediness. We need simple ideas, which entertain and inspire, with less of the self-doubt. How do you think this area of the business will evolve in the coming years? Fay-Fright: We need people who don’t rely on one channel to make the news. Ideas will always win the day, but smart deployment is now more crucial than ever. Will you be attending this year’s festival and, if so, what are you most looking forward to about it? The shots party. Obvs.

1 Moneysupermarket, Epic Strut 2 Changyou, Playing Can’t Be Bad

Toyota Aygo The Weather Challenge An original way to promote a car with a sunroof, by challenging three famous European forecasters. Again from Del Campo Saatchi & Saatchi Spain. Holograms For Freedom The World’s First Hologram Protest There is a law in Spain which forbids any demonstrations in front of the congress. The hologram protest solved this problem in a very smart way, aided by DDB Spain. Scrabble Saving Words A beautiful film from Lola Madrid that shows the magic of words with a delightful edit. Changyou Playing Can’t Be Bad A very funny campaign, from Saatchi & Saatchi Greater China/ Del Campo Saatchi & Saatchi Spain, that encourages gamers to never stop playing. It uses ironic humour to take a critical look at human relationships.

3 Toyota, Mysterious Stories 4 Toyota Aygo, The Weather Challenge 5 Holograms For Freedom, The World’s First Hologram Protest

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#CallMamma

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Branded Content & Entertainment

Luke Taylor Head of branded entertainment and channels, Pulse London

What’s your definition of what this category means in 2015? This is a huge category this year due to the exponential growth in this area and the incredible campaigns that are now a part of it. This year, the category feels much more like it’s about storytelling and connecting with the audience on a deeper level – raising awareness, driving sales and deepening relationships with audiences. It feels like there is much more of an appreciation for the value of this category, which is evident from the increase of creative briefs that are dedicated to it. How has the category of Branded Content & Entertainment altered over the past few years? The area has broadened its scope. It’s no longer just about making supplementary content to support an ad campaign – the explosion of branded content we’ve seen over the past 12 months has pushed agencies and brands to think more creatively. And the possibilities of how brands and creatives can work together are now pretty much limitless. In turn we are seeing a much wider breadth of brave and interesting work, making this category much more important than in recent years. What, for you, makes a great Branded Content & Entertainment entry and what, from the last 12 months, has impressed you? Before I joined Pulse earlier this year I was

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already blown away by the film it made for the release of Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes with 20th Century Fox called The Gun. I loved how it created a completely new and beautifully shot film that bridged the 10-year gap between the two reboot films, engaging an audience both of and beyond its hardcore fans. It’s a great example of how you can use this space to attract an existing community and push out to a much wider one, while keeping the quality premium and cinematic. What do you think the Cannes jury for this category will be looking for in their deliberations? I hope that they’re looking for campaigns that push the boundaries beyond the 30- and 60-second spots. I think they’ll be looking for entertainment in individual films, series, interactive campaigns or social integrations that use the different platforms to the best of their ability and harness audiences that truly engage, interact with and share the content. How has the relationship between a brand and its customers changed in recent years and are brands more aware now of their place in a consumer’s life? I think the main difference is brands are becoming

1 Sopalin, Le pouvoir est entre vos mains

more appreciative and savvy to what consumers actually want. Having a better understanding of how we want to engage with, be a part of and consume the content, so that it works for us on our own terms. There is more consideration about talking to an individual rather than jumping on the latest tech or platform fad. How do you think this area of the business will evolve in the coming years? It’s going to become even more competitive and give agencies and brands a greater opportunity to be groundbreaking. The evolution of this area is so important to Pulse that we want to lead with it in the marketplace. Since 2005 we have been successful in commercials, music videos, film and TV and we believe that all these disciplines complement the world of Branded Entertainment. For us it is the future and a pivotal part of the business. Will you be attending this year’s festival and, if so, what are you most looking forward to about it? I’m looking forward to the work, the awards, the talks, the sunshine, the sea, the chat, the lunches, the parties – I could go on! Also, the secret event that Pulse is putting on with some very special guests. Oops!

FRANCE

Quentin Martin Executive producer, MPC Paris

Sopalin L e pouvoir est entre vos mains Because his films are all about comedy, I’ve always been a big fan of Vincent Lobelle. Solid story, great cast, nice photography; this spot is for a mundane everyday product but Lobelle takes it to the next level. He’s got superb timing. Canal+ Unicorns Another epic film from Matthijs van Heijningen, it’s very cinematographic and funny at the same time. You can feel his perfectionism coming through, from the cast to the quality of the final image. Cartier Shape Your Time I always await the next Cartier film by Bruno Aveillan like it’s the new Star Wars. Amazing photography, an epic story and brilliant VFX, this film is one you can watch again and again. CanalSat The Battle Who isn’t sick of waiting for the next season of their favourite show to come out? It’s often the French audiences who miss out and I love the approach made by Thierry Poiraud in the new Canalsat TVC. He takes us back to historical films reminiscent of Excalibur or The 13th Warrior.

2 CanalSat, The Battle 3 Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, The Gun 4 Cartier, Shape Your Time

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Digital digital creativity? Data is the vehicle for understanding our audience and their desires. It’s also become incredibly powerful for iterating ideas. The successful start-ups have put a premium on this for years now. Adland’s willingness to do so is bringing our digital work forward by leaps and bounds.

Tom Le Bree Strategy partner, rehabstudio London

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in terms of creative digital ideas? It seems like agencies and brands are finally getting UX, which has definitely improved digital work. Traditional advertising is about telling people what to feel, digital is about making them feel it first-hand – user experience design is at the core of this. So on that front I think the last 12 months has been great. What pieces of digital work have impressed you most and why? Wieden+Kennedy and Honda have done fantastic stuff this year including The Other Side and Keep Up. They focused on simple and effective use of tech, which has really helped convey the brand’s message and proposition. What are your predictions for Cyber Lion success in Cannes? I couldn’t possibly hazard a guess as to who will win. I can offer up a hope though: I hope whoever wins comes from an independent agency – and pushes not only what is creatively possible, but technically achievable, in a brutally simple way. There’s not enough elegance in digital advertising. The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry and how have they impacted on

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What, for you, is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? The opportunity. We now have a greater understanding of our audience and more ways to communicate with it. We’ve moved from three key media channels to tens of them, each with greater customisation. This is providing lots more interesting ways to answer our clients’ problems. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since Cannes 2014? Don’t put the company card behind the bar on the Carlton Terrace. Especially if the managing partner isn’t there.

4 Shell, Football pitch powered by footsteps 5 Guy Cotten, A Trip Out To Sea

Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? Yes. I’m looking forward to the two-day Lions Innovation festival – I’m always keen to soak up some new ideas and hunt down interesting bits of inspiration. Also, the Google beach – they always outdo themselves.

DIGITAL

Andy Thomas Executive creative director, Huge London

Honda The Other Side Two films, superbly edited and synchronised by stinkdigital and W+K, evoking polemic emotions. With this custom YouTube build, Honda has created something really memorable for the user, while asking very little of them in return. For those who make it through to the end of the video, the payoff is super-slick. GEICO Unskippable This is such a simple and effective way of preventing people from clicking ‘skip’ something that’s very hard to do. It’s the reverse psychology which is the genius of this collaboration with The Martin Agency, there’s nothing happening but you feel so compelled to keep watching. Netflix Spoil Yourself Spoilers actually encourage people to watch the shows and films they’ve been shown the ending to. Or so Netflix says. Its Spoil Yourself platform, where it shares the final scenes of some of its biggest hits, is ballsy and smart. It’s car-crash viewing – I know I shouldn’t watch but I can’t stop. And I love it. Guy Cotten A Trip Out To Sea Terrifying. But that’s the point. Guy Cotten created this first-person experience with CLM BBDO to highlight the dangers of boating without safetywear. The furious scrolling to stay afloat makes me anxious enough – I defy anyone to step on a yacht in Cannes without a lifejacket after visiting this site.

1 Honda, Keep Up

3 Honda, The Other Side

And what do you think the biggest talking point of the next 12 months will be? Keeping digital creative thinking in advertising, media and production as simple as possible, while always considering ROI.

2 Netﬂix, Spoil Yourself

What has been the biggest industry talking point in the digital arena this last year? We are seeing clients moving away from the agency of record. There is lots of specialisation happening, especially in the digital space. It’s particularly interesting for us at rehab, being a creative technology company, to see who will win.

Shell Football pitch powered by footsteps Harnessing the energy generated by the football players’ footsteps, Shell powered ﬂoodlights on a community football pitch in a favela in Rio de Janeiro. Unveiled by Pelé and showcased with a vibrant, emotive video, this was a great demonstration of Shell’s commitment to sustainable energies.

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Outdoor in seconds it will be a digital ad on social media channels. We don’t think about this power but it’s pretty amazing. The consumer is the medium – it’s part of the reason we started Johannes Leonardo, to maximise this phenomenon.

Jan Jacobs Co-founder and chief creative officer, Johannes Leonardo New York

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in Outdoor advertising? I guess living in NYC makes me a bit biased towards Outdoor – in a good way. Here you see it everywhere and you actually pay attention to it, as New Yorkers spend so much time walking. The creativity can always be improved, but I think the experimentation is good. What pieces of Outdoor work have impressed you most and why? Like everyone else, I was really impressed by the British Airways digital board [#Lookup]. It’s the sort of thing that will find its way onto people’s vacation pics of their trip to London. We will see more and more of this interactivity as the technology becomes commonplace. Having said that, you can still achieve huge impact with very simple, graphic billboards if the message is powerful enough. As an example, we were lucky enough to get a placement in Times Square for the new Adidas Originals Superstar campaign. A simple, powerful statement from the brand on the modern notion of being a superstar, for its shoe of the same name. How much of a positive impact has technology had on this category? Very positive. Even OOH in its most static form, let’s say a static billboard, can now be captured digitally by anyone walking by, and

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Where do you think this category is heading in the coming years? Potentially we could see a whole new era of interactivity between OOH and our mobile devices. Your phone knows where you are. It could also know where a billboard is, and the billboard could even know that you’re there. When that starts to be the norm you can imagine the creative possibilities. The industry has long struggled with mobile advertising, and its link to OOH could well be the thing that unlocks its potential. What, for you, is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? The fact that the digital vs traditional debate seems to be subsiding. Not only has digital pretty much become traditional – as we’ve now lived with this tech for long enough – but marketers are

1 Jim Carrey’s Saturday Night Live spoof of Matthew McConaughey’s Lincoln spot

coming back to what works: strategic insight and great creative to carry that insight. All mediums are on the table. There should be no bias by an agency. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since Cannes 2014? More an observation than lesson: people have tried very hard to dethrone it, but film still remains an extremely powerful medium for telling a story, or explaining a brand’s POV. Where the film lives is what has opened up – it doesn’t need a TV anymore. What’s been your favourite campaign – Outdoor or otherwise – from the last year? Jim Carrey’s Saturday Night Live spoof of Matthew McConaughey’s Lincoln spot. Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? Yes, I’ll be there. What I’d most like to see is what people do on big, global brands. The one-offs can be fun executions, but seeing someone execute a big idea for a global brand, at scale, is always inspiring. It’s the hardest thing to do in our business.

FRANCE

Fred Raillard & Farid Mokart Co-founders, Fred & Farid Paris

Biocoop The Eco-Friendly Campaign This is a genuinely creative idea by Fred & Farid. It is true and outstanding in terms of content, and brilliant in form. It makes you want to consume in a totally different manner. Assassin’s Creed Unity Providing a cutting-edge experience, this website by Sid Lee Paris showed a simple use of an innovative idea – using a site as a teaser – for a launch that engages users right up into the streets. Coca-Cola Peace And Love An iconic, simple and beautiful print idea by Ogilvy Paris that makes you want to invest all of your media budget in press, at a time when digital is taking over. Noemi Association The Eyes Of A Child Since Cannes is no longer the biggest international advertising festival, but the biggest charity festival, we might as well make the most of this new situation. This is a very beautiful idea by Leo Burnett.

2 Biocoop, The EcoFriendly Campaign 3 Adidas Originals, Superstar 4 Coca-Cola, Peace And Love 5 Noemi Association, The Eyes Of A Child

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CANNES CONTENDERS

France innovations just for the sake of it. We should evaluate the true value of our proposals and their impact on the audience. I always say to creatives: ‘Would you actually respond to the idea you are proposing to me?’ Let’s not try to impress other creatives. Let’s build brands in real life, for real people.

Olivier Altmann Co-founder and chief creative officer, Altmann + Pacreau Paris

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in France? It is a transitional year, in term of economic recovery, as well as in term of digital adaptation for agencies and advertisers. To me, the world of advertising seems to be divided in two. Those who are building strong brands over time with great campaigns using powerful media such as TV, print, outdoor, and now YouTube. And those who are trying to make brands look cool with clever digital one-shot ideas, attracting PR and online buzz. But I feel we are still struggling to do both at the same time on a more regular basis. We are missing strong integrated global campaigns that deliver seamless and engaging storytelling to multiple touch-points. Maybe it’s because, to do such great campaigns, you need enough time to work and, above all, a brand vision; hard to find in an environment under permanent economic pressure. What, for you, is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? The freedom to have ideas in so many different fields. Whether it’s an app, a documentary, an online service or an event, it seems we have moved from advertising to creativity. But the consequence is the risk of distraction from what advertisers are paying us for: finding creative solutions to real business problems. We shouldn’t fall in love with the latest technological

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What pieces of French work have impressed you most and why? I am always impressed when smart thinking and solid work push boundaries or shake up a category. • Volvic Unstoppable Volcanicity, Young & Rubicam Paris. • Assassin’s Creed Unity website, Sid Lee Paris. • Intermarché The Freshest Orange Juice, Marcel. • Biocoop The Eco-Friendly Campaign, Fred & Farid. • Canal+ Unicorns, BETC. • Water For Africa The Marathon Walker, Ogilvy Paris. • Musée de la Grande Guerre, DDB Paris. The Innovation Lions section of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry and can our seeming reliance on them sometimes stifle creativity? Big data seems to be the hot topic now. And it’s true that analysing data can allow brands to target customers more precisely. But let’s not forget that human behaviour isn’t entirely predictive. We are a complex animal by nature. Just because I bought a toaster online doesn’t mean I need to receive a ton of ads for cooking equipment the week after. According to research, most people hate online advertising. It’s intrusive and dull. You just want to skip ads and close pop-ups to go directly to what you were originally searching for. So big data without big (or even small) ideas just leads to Big Brother. It is the content that you deliver which will entertain. We aren’t just wallets, we are human beings responding to emotions, not just promotions.

It is true, though, that technology is rapidly changing our world. Connected devices, for instance, will have an increasingly important role in our life. On the other hand, some of this technology could be forgotten because we have just 24 hours in a day. Who is really regularly using a QR code? How many apps among all those that you’ve downloaded are you really using? Are you really using Kinect to change channels on your TV or do you just press buttons on the remote control? Technology is just a means to an end. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since Cannes 2014? Launching your own agency not only challenges your professionals skills, but also who you really are and what you’re made of. What has been the biggest industry talking point in France this last year? The usual, I guess. Like everywhere else in the advertising community: digital, big data, innovations, the GAFA [Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon], [Publicis CEO] Maurice Levy’s succession plan, [Vivendi chairman] Vincent Bolloré’s business intentions, [WPP founder] Sir Martin

1 Volvic, Unstoppable Volcanicity

Sorell’s bonuses, agency pitches, clients reducing fees, margins, poached talents, gossip – but not enough talk about ideas and passion for the work. And what do you think the biggest talking point of the next 12 months will be? See my answer to the previous question. What’s been your favourite campaign – French or otherwise – from the last year? The Other Side. What I like is the simplicity of the experience. I’m jealous as I proposed the same idea for the launch of the new Renault Espace and its different driving modes. The client rejected it and maybe they were right in the end, because telling five different versions of the same story would have been a nightmare to shoot. Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? I will try but it will depend on our business agenda. Each time I go to Cannes I feel re-energised by all those great ideas coming from around the globe. It’s the moment when you realise that, despite our complaining, we have one of the best jobs in the world.

2 Assassin’s Creed, Unity site 3 Canal+, Unicorns 5 Water For Africa, The Marathon Walker

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Germany

Michael M. Maschke Head of creative services, Saatchi & Saatchi Germany

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in Germany? Well, it looks like this year will be a good one for the German agencies. What pieces of German work have impressed you most and why? A social campaign called Rechts Gegen Rechts (Nazis Against Nazis) from Grabarz & Partner/GGH Lowe, where real neo-Nazis became part of their own anti-neo-Nazi walk; very smart. Two package design ideas from Kolle Rebbe in Hamburg: The Invisible Tape for 3M (not visible in the package), and The Weddinglope for Rosenthal – an envelope made out of real porcelain with a voucher within. Each of them well thought out and executed. And – last but not least – the Love Sucks campaign for Vorwerk by our Düsseldorf office in cooperation with our colleagues in London. The lovely idea (to combine an extended product demo with a charming love affair between a toy robot and the vacuum cleaner robot) was killed due to bad test results at an early stage of the project. But it came alive again because our great client decided to follow his intuition. We need more clients like that. What, for you, is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? Today, everything is possible at any time. Embrace the new opportunities and you can ride a gigantic wave of digital possibilities.

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The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry now and can our seeming reliance on them stifle creativity? The data/ tech opportunities are like a big wave. They will flood and fertilise the classical advertising territories. We are all free to decide if we want to stay in the assumed safe harbour and possibly drown or if we are willing to lift our ‘we-always-did-it-that-wayanchors’ to go on a new adventure. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since Cannes 2014? Bad times are good times for good people. What has been the biggest industry talking point in Germany this last year? A well-known client invited the best German agencies to pitch. The pitch ran for more than six months. Many presentations, feedback rounds, blood, sweat, tears and – of course – money. But the pitch ended with an unexpected and simple announcement. The client stated that none of the agencies – neither the incumbent one, nor one out of the new potential partners – was considered good enough. And that’s not the end of the story. Only one or two weeks later the same client announced that it was going to give the whole account to an agency that had not been part of the pitch at all. And – until today – had not even been founded. As I said before, these days everything is possible at any time. And the client? Mercedes-Benz. And what do you think the biggest talking point of the next 12 months will be? It will be content marketing until everyone knows what it means. If you want to exploit this extended potential, you have to think differently right from the beginning. It should be part of your strategic briefing, part of your creative work, which will then lead to the right execution. It’s about a different view of the market and media and, of course, a new way of communicating

with your customers. If you start to work on your content strategy during the execution phase of your campaign – and believe me, some agencies and clients still do, you will just burn energy and money. The difference between one-way campaigns and content campaigns can be compared with a voluntary ‘chair circle’ with your customers vs. the ‘frontal teaching’ way of telling facts. But, like in school, more and more people are waiting for the bell to ring (only five, four, three more seconds till this ad ends), so they can jump up (skip the boring film) and run out to do the things they love to do (watch the content they like). In other words, if you want to stay in contact with your customer, provide content they are interested in. What’s been your favourite campaign – German or otherwise – from the last year? Dear Future Mom (World Down Syndrome Day) from our colleagues in Italy. Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? I don’t know yet but if I go, I want to attend the 25th anniversary of our Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors’ Showcase.

1 World Down Syndrome Day, Dear Future Mom 2 Fashion Revolution, The €2 T-shirt 3 Smart, Dancing Traffic Light

GERMANY

Steffen Gentis Chief production officer, BBDO Germany

Smart Dancing Traffic Light I like this piece we created, it’s really modern in that it’s about a brand that wants to change things for good with its product: the Smart car helps change the city into a better place. Fashion Revolution The �2 T-shirt Fashion Revolution wanted to use the two-year anniversary of the Rana Plaza disaster to raise awareness of the millions of people still working in life-threatening sweatshops. We tried the test: would people still buy a T-shirt if they knew how it was made? We filled a vending machine with T-shirts on sale for €2 – after paying, buyers were shown a short film about the people who made it and the conditions in which they work. They were then given the choice to buy or donate. Hornbach Goth Girl Well directed by Pep Bosch from Goodoil, this a perfectly crafted piece from Heimat Werbeagentur. Great art and casting combines with a brilliant attitude and a strong storyline. Exit Deutschland Nazis Against Nazis A brilliant idea for a really tough challenge by Grabarz & Partner/ GGH Lowe – it’s difficult to win donations for a sympathetic cause! Often campaigns against extremists backfire and make them more resistant, but the humour and intelligence of this campaign gained attention, and made the Nazis a laughing stock. The approach also impacted on the numbers of people leaving the Nazi scene. BMW X4 The Wave Director Sebastian Strasser sets the landscape into absolute hallucinatory motion. The whole piece feels like a dream. Serviceplan’s execution is one of the strongest to come out of Germany this year.

18/05/2015 14:33

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120 Cannes Special | CANNES CONTENDERS 5

Netherlands 1

NETHERLANDS

Bas Korsten Executive creative director, JWT Amsterdam

Vodafone Vera’s #FirstConcert A great activation within the Vodafone Firsts campaign about a special concert created for a deaf girl so she could experience music for the first time in her life.

Pol Hoenderboom & Bart Mol Creative directors, DDB & Tribal Worldwide Amsterdam

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in the Netherlands? In the past couple of years Dutch agencies have picked up several Grands Prix, for instance for ALS, Dela, Sweetie and G-Star. A trap you could fall into is trying to make a version 2.0 of one of those ideas. This is a slippery path to go down because anything you make will be compared to the award-winning 1.0 version. We’ve seen a couple of those examples in the Netherlands this year. Some might be successful, but I don’t think they’ll reach the greatness of the original pieces. What pieces of Dutch work have impressed you most and why? We think MediaMonks did a lot of good work this year. For instance their Google Night Walk for 72andSunny. Besides that I don’t feel there was a specific agency that really stood out this year. What, for you, is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? Helping clients to step out of their comfort zones and making them want to buy into your unconventional ideas. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since Cannes 2014? No matter how much energy and love you put into your project, it’s dead until you get it live.

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The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry now and can our seeming reliance on them sometimes stifle creativity? We think data and tech open more doors than they close. Agencies don’t get away with making beautiful yet ineffective advertising anymore. But so many possibilities open up, we think the whole business will get better and more progressive because of it. What has been the biggest industry talking point in the Netherlands this last year? There has been a discussion about the ambition of creative work. A lot of work from the Netherlands is very harmless; easy ads that we know the public will love. It often happens that a project that shows more artistic ambition is attacked by cynics. There seem to be two camps: people who feel comfortable just where they are and the people who believe in creativity and want to push the industry forward. And what do you think the biggest talking point of the next 12 months will be? A trend we’ve seen being very successful on an international level seems to be getting more popular in the Netherlands as well: agencies working together with clients on product innovations or as business consultants. Product and

advertising aren’t seen as two separate things anymore, but as aspects of a whole that can benefit from each other. A strong product or service often communicates a million times better than an ad. What’s been your favourite campaign – Dutch or otherwise – from the last year? Nazis Against Nazis – Germany’s Most Involuntary Walkathon really stood out for us. Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? This year we gave our tickets to the teams who worked hard and deserved to party.

1 Google, Night Walk 2 Nazis Against Nazis

KitKat Give Holland A Break If you introduce the biggest KitKat ever, you need to create the biggest break ever. A break for a whole country. So KitKat sent Gordon, Holland’s most annoying and omnipresent celeb, to a desert island, turning Holland into a Gordon-free paradise. ABN AMRO House Promoter Building a roller coaster in a house is one hell of a way to promote a bank’s house promoting tool. Allstars Cover Band How do you promote a cover band? By using Shazam to show that the imitators are as good as the original. ELAN Taste The Translation How does the David of online translation (Elan Languages) beat Goliath (Google Translate)? Translate a recipe via both tools, cook it and let innocent bystanders taste the translation.

3 ELAN, Taste The Translation 4 ABN AMRO, House Promoter 5 Vodafone, Vera’s #FirstConcert

18/05/2015 13:46

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Sweden

Sophia Lindholm Art director, Forsman & Bodenfors Stockholm

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in Sweden? I think it has been a year of well-produced advertising with a few exceptions of really great campaigns. I think we could have done better. What pieces of Swedish work have impressed you most and why? The work that has impressed me the most this year is small, smart campaigns. Not the usual bigbudget, well executed and integrated campaigns. I love The Rag Bag for clothing brand Uniforms for the Dedicated. A simple, smart idea that makes it easy for people to recycle and donate old clothes. Simply turn the shopping bag inside out and put it in the mailbox. The postage and address to a charity have already been taken care of. The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry now and can our seeming reliance on them sometimes stifle creativity? I think the introduction of an Innovation Lion is great and that data and tech, when used right, can inspire our industry. I think the trick is to not think that you have to understand everything. There are always experts to ask. The reason why I love working on digital projects is that once you have a great idea, almost anything is possible.

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What, for you, is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? I strongly believe that the advertising industry needs to be more about entertainment and I love how this is forcing us to think differently. Today advertising needs to be more interesting than the programme it’s interrupting. And not only that, it has to be more interesting than whatever we as consumers set out to do in the first place. People today choose to watch or interact with advertising. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since Cannes 2014? When you think you have the recipe for success, dare to challenge your own ideas. They might just become even better. What has been the biggest industry talking point in Sweden

this last year? Branded content and what makes great branded content. And what do you think the biggest talking point of the next 12 months will be? I hope it will be relevance. Go crazy if you like, but make sure your target group understands why.

Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? I’m not sure if I can make it this year, but if I do I’m definitely looking forward to the sun (I’m Swedish remember?), nice wine and meeting interesting people.

Change One Life Twin Souls This powerful project from Y&R Moscow is a great example of how data aligned with new technology can be applied to solve a problem. Not simply to have an impact or improve some people’s lives but to literally change their lives.

3 Uniforms For The Dedicated, The Rag Bag 4 Voskhod, Admade 5 Kaspersky Lab, One Dollar Lesson 6 Change One Life, Twin Souls

Chief creative officer, Y&R Central & Eastern Europe

What’s been your favourite international campaign from the last year? There are a lot of great campaigns from last year, but one that I still laugh at when I watch it is the Karate spot for Southern Comfort. So funny and so simple.

2 WWF Russia, WWF Tiger Challenge

Jaime Mandelbaum Kaspersky Lab One Dollar Lesson Cyber security is a hard topic to broach at all, let alone trying to educate people on it, so this project by Grey Moscow is a nice immersion on a very tricky subject. There’s loads of data, presented beautifully throughout. Any website these days that can make you spend over two minutes on it has achieved a great feat.

1 Southern Comfort, Karate

RUSSIA

Dislife More Than A Sign If you’ve been to Russia you’ll know the etiquette behind the wheel – or lack thereof – is amazing. It’s easy for drivers to completely disregard handicap signage on parking spots, but could they ignore an actual person and run them over just to get a parking place? WWF Russia WWF Tiger Challenge Hungry Boys, Moscow have gamified donations with this app. Runners race GPS-tagged wild tigers – if they lose, they donate. So you’re doing good for the tigers and also doing something good for yourself. Voskhod Admade There’s not a lot of very good self-promo stuff out there, but this piece from a Yekaterinburg agency, Voskhod, (who’ve been doing some great work for the past three years) is something worth taking notice of. Even though it’s seemingly small at first sight, I think it taps into something much larger. What if we could repurpose on an even larger scale? I think the world would benefit and I wish that could become more of a trend.

18/05/2015 13:46

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South Africa that, as creative people, we’ve moved from storytelling to doing and making. We now have a myriad of ways to connect with people, solve problems, tell stories, create experiences, add value, land ideas and prompt behaviours.

Jonathan Beggs Chief creative officer, Saatchi & Saatchi South Africa

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in South Africa? South Africa had 34 One Show finalists and also scooped 18 D&AD Pencils, putting us in the top 15 countries globally. We also got another Grand Prix at Cannes in 2014. There continues to be a healthy number of agencies producing fantastic work. What pieces of South African work have impressed you most and why? The most impressive piece of work was King James’ One Rand Man for Sanlam. This was an interesting idea, and a very ‘new age’ approach to building a story. It’s basically a web series that followed the story of a man who received his salary in bucketloads of one rand coins. It helped explore our relationship with spending and debt. The campaign received massive PR, and was very well produced and organised. After Ogilvy’s Cannes gold-winning Selinah TVC for Topsy, they’ve made another HIV campaigning piece, Kevin, that did well at our local awards. It follows a guy who pops pills to get him through his #firstworldproblems, then suggests there are people who need drugs more – those living with HIV. What is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? It’s impossible to be bored. Things move fast, and there’s always so much to learn. I also think

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The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry and can our seeming reliance on them stifle creativity? South Africa has lagged behind in all things digital – mainly due to our demographics and infrastructure. Data, tech, analytics are becoming increasingly important for agencies and clients – for connecting, targeting, measurement and for prompting purchase. I think it brings a different kind of creativity to the table. At Saatchi & Saatchi SA we have a fantastic digital team who make our work more potent. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since Cannes 2014? Insight into culture, psychology and behaviour, and a feeling for what’s interesting and useful to people, is as important ever, despite the perennial buzz around the Next Big Thing.

And what do you think the biggest talking point of the next 12 months will be? I think we’ll see more of the same themes – plus mobile, and winning on the African continent. What’s been your favourite international campaign from the last year? I loved Intermarché’s Inglorious Fruit And Vegetables, Terres des Hommes’ Sweetie and the ANZ GayTM campaign. Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? I’m not sure if I’ll be there this year – but whatever happens, I’ll be keeping a keen eye on my favourite categories: Integrated, Cyber, Direct, Promo & Activation and Film.

SOUTH AFRICA

Rob McLennan Founding creative partner, King James II Johannesburg

Napier Haven Night Shelter The Street Store This is an excellent activation for South Africa’s homeless that just keeps on giving around the world. The Street Store is the world’s first rent-free, premisesfree, pop-up charity store, giving away clothes to the poor. This pop-up is made of posters on the sidewalk and runs entirely on donations. It’s pretty simple: you bring clothes and shoes you don’t wear and the homeless help themselves. Volkswagen Golf R Terminal Velocity A print ad that’s a throwback to simple, powerful, visual demonstration. Sanlam One Rand Man In order to feel more connected with his money, one man took part in a social experiment for National Savings Month: spend an entire month with his salary paid out in one-rand coins. 5FM Without 5, It’s Just You A keen reflection on the culture of music in South Africa. Caltex Licence To Live It’s proven that people drive better when their family is in the car. A simple, effective idea using a vehicle licence disc holder with a picture of your loved one to remind you of the consequences of irresponsible driving.

1 Intermarché, Inglorious Fruit And Vegetables

What has been the biggest industry talking point in South Africa this last year? Digital and integration is an ongoing theme. Shrinking budgets. Specialists vs. Generalists. “Fast is the new good.” These are all things that keep coming up. On the other hand, it has been the year of mergers and acquisitions. Publicis and WPP made a scramble for Africa in 2014, buying up many of the independents.

2 Caltex, Licence To Live licence disk holder 3 ANZ, GayTM 4 Sanlam, One Rand Man 5 Napier Haven Night Shelter, The Street Store

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China

Tony Liu Greater China partner & creative chairman, M&C Saatchi Shanghai

How creatively successful do you think the past 12 months of Chinese advertising have been? While there have been some truly excellent examples of creativity, overall I feel progress has somewhat plateaued, largely due to the fact that many marketers continue to underestimate the average Chinese consumer. In the end, it is up to us as marketers to understand and empathise with our audience. What’s been your favourite Chinese campaign over the past 12 months and why? For me the most impressive piece of work has been Lowe China’s Human Traffic Signs, a public information-style TV spot for Buick. In mainland China, accidents arising from the non-observance of traffic rules have reached pandemic proportions. A great commercial is a combination of all the finest executional components, and this bold ad achieved exactly that. What do you think are the main barriers to creativity in China at the moment? The main barrier to creativity in China at the moment is what I call the ‘short-sighted syndrome’. This is brought about by the supersonic progressive state of China’s macroscopic environment. The advertising industry is not oblivious to the pressures to achieve quick successes and short-term gains.

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What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned over the past 12 months? While there’s no doubt that logic and relevance are equally important, the bravery of a willing client is crucial in creating great work. For me, something that hasn’t been so much a lesson, but a reminder, is that to get noticed and to engage audiences, advertisers need to ensure their ideas can move across all channels. What has been the biggest industry talking point in China over the past year? That digital work should no longer be an afterthought, but rather it should be a thought starter. In my opinion, digital communication should not be a short-sighted advertising activity that ends too quickly; it should be the beginning of even greater ideas. And what do you think next year’s conversation will revolve around? How to ensure and sustain China’s economic growth. Will you be attending the Cannes Lions festival and how valuable do you think it is in terms of signposting the future and evaluating the past? The Cannes Lions Festival is in my calendar. The advertising business and creativity are wired together. There’s always an underlying tension between them, but from that tension greatness can be achieved. The festival is the weathervane for our industry. It’s the benchmark by which advertising standards are judged and heightened, and it provides a healthy pressure to elevate the greatness of creativity.

metamorphosed over the last 10 years, and I expect it to do the same over the next 10 years, which to me is very exciting. The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry now and can our seeming reliance on them sometimes stifle creativity? Data and tech are now the oxygen to the whole media and advertising industry. Without them much of what we produce would not be able to work or grow. Data and tech innovation are always important in our industry. Data can help to give us more focus while technology can provide new platforms through which we can communicate. But at the heart of every effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is as powerful as an insight into human nature. For me, data and technology can only enhance creativity as long as our commitment to understanding the compulsions that drive us as human beings, the instincts that dominate our actions, and our true motivations, is kept at the heart of all creative concepts.

CHINA

Kien Hoe Ong Executive creative director, Y&R Shanghai

VisitBritain G REAT Names For GREAT Britain This is a really fresh idea from Ogilvy Beijing. Memorable and truly social. The national tourist board asked people in China to come up with amusing and memorable Chinese names for 101 British tourist attractions via a special microsite and via [Chinese social media] Weibo and WeChat. PETA Maria’s Fur Shop To stop people buying fur, we started selling it on Taobao, the world’s largest online store. When users clicked on products they saw the gory processes involved. The campaign got a lot of buzz and the shop was closed down after 72 hours. It’s still being shared on social media.

1 VisitBritain, GREAT Names For GREAT Britain 2 PETA, Maria’s Fur Shop 3 Buick, Human Traffic Signs

What are your predictions for success at Cannes this year, regardless of nationality? Any work with ‘brutal simplicity of thought’ [M&C Saatchi’s creative philosophy] will stand a chance of success! What, for you, is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? The pace and scale of change. The media landscape has

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www.pigchina.com

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India What has been your favourite international campaign from over the last year? My favourite this year was the Honda Civic Type-R, The Other Side. It’s a perfect example of an ideal marriage of a great idea and technology.

Sukesh Nayak Executive creative director, Ogilvy Mumbai

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in India? We’ve had a good year. Lots of interesting work has been done across categories but we need to push harder in new directions. What pieces of Indian work have impressed you most and why? Lots of interesting work from other agencies has caught my eye. There was this great topical cricket World Cup campaign called Mauka Mauka [Chances, Chances]. It started off with a joke that Pakistan has never beaten India in a World Cup match. It followed Pakistan through the entire World Cup, with the joke being that a Pakistani supporter changed allegiance to whoever had the best chance of beating India. Then there is lots of work done by us at Ogilvy: the BJP election campaign that resulted in a majority for a party for the first time in decades. The campaign for the Pro-Kabbadi League, turning an ancient game into a popular league game in India, almost as popular as cricket. Fortune’s Mother Exchange, [a platform for mothers to cook for each other’s children when they’re working or studying away from home]: a beautiful solution that will benefit mothers across the country. JSW Group’s Will Of Steel ad, the true story of the grit and determination of a girl, Geeta Phogat, who went on to become India’s first female wrestling champion.

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The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry now and can our seeming reliance on it sometimes stifle creativity? I feel data and tech are important, but so is an idea. Technology without an idea will be cold and just meaningless. I think the future will belong to those who use this opportunity to go beyond just advertising and maybe co-create innovative solutions for the brands.

What do you think the biggest talking point of the next 12 months will be? I think the biggest talking point across India in the industry will be the role that we can play in creating meaningful platforms for our consumers. I see this trend continuing throughout the next year. Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? Cannes is truly the most deserving global award show. Last year I saw work from across the world in different languages winning across the categories. That is reassuring. And yes, I will be attending and I am really looking forward to seeing work from all across the world that makes me go green with envy.

RUSSIA

Marco Cremona Creative lead, Google Russia

InTouch Most Terrible Fatal Car Crash Ever I love this idea because it took an existing platform used by billions and found a clever way to insert an idea in it without using extra layers, links or gadgets. Witty, uncomplicated and pertinent. Dislife More Than A Sign Few things are more annoying and uncivilised than perfectly healthy people who leave their cars in disabled parking spaces. Dislife found an impactful way to change this behaviour by literally bringing an evidently too unnoticed sign to life. IKEA Cinema Beds Watching movies in bed is a pleasure everybody enjoys. BBDO took this simple insight and scaled it into an event in which fun was the main hero and the IKEA beds were the best supporting actors.

1 JSW Group, Will Of Steel 2 Cricket World Cup, Mauka Mauka 3 Fortune, Mother Exchange 4 Dislife, More Than A Sign 5 IKEA, Cinema Beds

Google Russia Karenina. Live Edition An idea that gets into Guinness World Records deserves respect by definition. This front-to-backcover, 36-hours-in-a-row Hangout reading of Lev Tolstoj’s Anna Karenina brought together more than 700 people all over the globe. Most importantly, it originated a site which will preserve forever the precious words and the unforgettable characters of a timeless masterpiece. Change One Life Twin Souls One of the biggest problems for adopted kids in Russia is integrating with their new families (more than 30 per cent of them return to orphanages within the first year). Among the many reasons for this is the lack of physical resemblance with the adoptive parents. Using face recognition, Change One Life found an effective way to help.

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Australia / New Zealand Google Sandbox last year and what he said has resonated with me since. Dopamine and oxytocin, the two chemicals our bodies produce when we experience love or thrill, are still the most powerful tools we have.

Philip Andrew Executive creative director, Clemenger BBDO Wellington

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in Australia and New Zealand? It’s been a mixed year creatively for the two Southern nations. Everyone is wrestling with the future. Pressure on budgets, the mistaken notion that the media is the idea and agencies struggling to define what they do that’s relevant. What pieces of Australasian work have impressed you most and why? The best thing I’ve seen out of Australia in the past 12 months was the JWT work for breast cancer awareness, I Touch Myself. The best thing I’ve seen out of New Zealand was DDB’s Murmuration for Sky TV. Both pieces strike deep emotional chords in very different ways. What, for you, is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? The most exciting element? Surely it’s still great work. The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry now and can our seeming reliance on them sometimes stifle creativity? Data and tech? Shiny new tools. More options than ever. More chance to stuff it up. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since Cannes 2014? I saw Andrew Robertson’s talk at the

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What has been the biggest industry talking point down under over the last year? Australia and New Zealand have struggled, like the rest of the world, to navigate the rapidly changing comms landscape. Blurred lines and creative and financial expectations stretch the industry further. While agencies invest in the ability to create work in the data and tech space, they can’t help but divest in writers and art directors who are skilled in traditional areas. Craft suffers as a result. And what do you think the biggest talking point of the next 12 months will be? We will be preoccupied with how we deliver to an increasingly hard-to-reach audience and how do we make those messages relevant for more than a

moment. How will we make compelling memorable content that builds preference for a brand rather than one-off instantly discarded crap that clicks? I’m tempted to use the now worn-out term ‘storytelling’ but perhaps it’s better to say we should be reminded of Andrew Robertson’s point that without love and excitement we are nothing. Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? I won’t be at Cannes this year. I have the opportunity to have a sabbatical and soak up some dopamine and oxytocin for myself.

AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND

Andy Fackrell Regional creative director, DDB Asia Pacific Sydney

Sky Casting Tapes One close to my heart and from my time in New Zealand. Awarded at One Show, and at local shows, it hopefully has a good chance internationally. Radiant Radiant Return The other one doing really well is from DDB Melbourne; Radiant Return could do well in any number of categories. The insight is spot on and is handled really well in the film and all other component parts. WWF Poachers My ecological bent won’t let me go past the WWF anti-poaching posters from Leo Burnett Sydney. It visually shows the chain from poacher to consumer. Tells a film-like emotional story, albeit in a 2D format. VW Reduce Speed Dial From Colenso BBDO Auckland. A great idea that tugs on the heartstrings to reduce speeding – replacing speed dials with ones featuring children’s handwriting. Another wonderful insight leading to a great bit of innovative thinking. St John Ambulance Break The Barrier From The Brand Agency, Perth; a really great solution to a very Australian problem.

1 VW, Reduce Speed Dial 2 Cancer Council NSW, I Touch Myself 3 WWF, Poachers 4 St John Ambulance, Break The Barrier 5 Radiant, Radiant Return

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Brazil

Anselmo Ramos Co-founder and chief creative officer, DAVID São Paulo

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in Brazil? Brazil has always found a way to be creative, even amongst uncertainty. But lately this has been tougher than ever. Political confidence is at an all-time low. We don’t need Luther, Obama’s ‘anger translator’ in Brazil. The entire country is angry. Unfortunately the country’s bad mood has affected creativity in general in the last year, but hopefully not for long. What pieces of Brazilian work have impressed you most and why? From last year, I liked Speaking Exchange for CNA out of FCB/São Paulo, and VW’s Kombi Last Wishes out of AlmapBBDO. What, for you, is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? We’re living in an era of no excuses. Do you want to duct-tape a Sony Action Cam to an eagle and let it ﬂy off the tallest building in Dubai? OK. Do you want to tag a six-storey billboard in NYC with a spray can attached to a drone? OK (although it’s not exactly legal). We have the technology to do whatever we want. Sometimes we’ve got the technology, but we lack the courage. Technology is nothing without courage. The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data

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and tech become to the industry now and can our seeming reliance on them sometimes stifle creativity? I love the Innovation Lions. It pushes us forward as an industry. I particularly like the fact that you have to pitch your own ideas. This is Madison Avenue meets Silicon Valley. But we need to be careful. Sometimes creatives show me ideas and I say, “This is not a communications idea, it’s just a great app idea. If I were you I would just leave the agency and start a company!” I think Cannes should be a celebration of creativity. The sweet spot is when technology enhances creativity for the benefit of the brand. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since Cannes 2014? I guess it’s “There’s life after Real Beauty Sketches.” It’s a personal lesson. After …Sketches, every client was asking for one just like that, but it doesn’t work like this. We need to move on. Last year we did Bald Cartoons for GRAACC out of Ogilvy & Mather Brasil, and this year I’m happy to see ideas like Proud Whopper and Random Gloria for Burger King out of DAVID. I guess the big lesson is: you’re as good as your last idea. What has been the biggest industry talking point in Brazil this last year? A lot of people have been talking about the death of organic views. Nowadays, for anything to become viral, you need to buy digital media the same way we used to buy traditional media. You need to support your idea with money and not only pray for views, and I agree. But at the same time, because I’m a hopeless romantic, I’m on an eternal search for The Big Organic.

one decides to talk about digital again, it’s fine with me…

BRAZIL

Marcelo Reis Co-president and chief creative officer, Leo Burnett Tailor Made São Paulo

What’s been your favourite campaign – Brazilian or otherwise – from the last year? I love #LikeAGirl. Maybe it’s because I’ve got two young daughters. It’s a universal insight executed extremely well. It’s such an important message. I love when big brands do good and help to make the world a better place.

Leica 100 A film from F/Nazca Saatchi that features great moments in the history of photography, with stunning craft and copywriting. Brazilian Association Of Organ Transplantation Donation Badges One of ours. With a simple badge we’ve shown people how life goes on after organ transplantation.

Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? Of course. It’s that time of year you get a reality check in terms of how you’re doing creatively. It’s a great time to get your clients inspired as well, especially those who haven’t been up on stage yet. I’m looking forward to getting envious and thinking “How haven’t I thought of this? It’s so obvious.” That’s the beauty of this business. We can be forever students, always in awe of creativity.

1 Always, #LikeAGirl

Sport Club do Recife Security Moms A simple and unexpected way to fight against one of Brazil’s most common issues: violence in soccer stadiums, by Ogilvy & Mather Brazil. Pirelli Christ’s Gaze Leo Burnett Tailor Made put a camera on top of the Christ the Redeemer statue and gave it its own Instagram account.

2 Pirelli, Christ’s Gaze 3 Sport Club do Recife, Security Moms 4 CNA, Speaking Exchange 5 Leica, 100

And what do you think the biggest talking point of the next 12 months will be? Unfortunately, probably budget reduction and lack of client confidence, along with the fact that the industry will need to be more creative than ever. As long as no

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Argentina

Rafael Santamarina Executive creative director, Del Campo Saatchi & Saatchi Buenos Aires

How creatively successful do you think the last 12 months have been in Argentina? They weren’t the best 12 months. There were a lot of changes at a lot of the agencies – people leaving, new people coming in. I think that at Del Campo and throughout the rest of the industry, we’ll see these big changes manifest very soon. What pieces of Argentinian work have impressed you most and why? They’ve done some great work at Grey Argentina for products that people generally forget about, such as laundry detergent. We think Almost Identical was a great campaign that did a lot to address the negative perception of chewing gum. Coca-Cola’s Life from Santo also stands out for its simplicity of message. Simplicity is something that we often forget about in our eagerness to impress. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned since Cannes 2014? To be simpler. The world is full of information and life can get so complicated. People appreciate and enjoy simplicity. What, for you, is the most exciting element of working in advertising at the moment? It’s the same thing that keeps us coming in every day, which is the thrill of a great idea. Whatever the format or medium, that moment of coming up with an

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amazing idea is gratifying. And if you can experience that surrounded by friends and people whose ideas you trust, even better.

We’re obsessed with soccer. For an entire month we basically forgot about our problems, politics, the financial crisis…

The Innovation Lions element of the festival has been introduced this year. How important have data and tech become to the industry now and can our seeming reliance on it sometimes stifle creativity? Data is super important. The more information you have about consumers, the smaller the margin of error, and that’s something that has been pivotal in advertising in the past few years. It’s so important now to construct very specific messages that reach a precise target. You almost have to have a telescopic view these days. Technological advances in advertising have been incredible – it’s been really eye opening for all of us. We’ve had to relearn everything and approach our jobs almost as children, thinking harder and with totally open minds. It’s no longer acceptable to say: “That’s not possible.”

And what do you think the biggest talking point of the next 12 months will be? I hope combating hunger, poverty and war. All other topics are ephemeral. We appreciate it when advertising tackles political issues, but only in earnest, with the intention of actually doing good, rather than just winning at festivals.

What has been the biggest industry talking point in Argentina this last year? I think the World Cup, especially for Argentines.

What’s been your favourite campaign – Argentinian or otherwise – from the last year? Almost Identical, for the strength and simplicity of its message as well as its execution. It’s a piece of work that both consumers and the industry really respect. Will you be attending Cannes 2015 and, if so, what are you most looking forward to? We will! We’re looking forward to seeing work that makes us jealous. We love seeing work that creatively resolves problems we ourselves have been trying to tackle. It’s so important to always keep learning and to see how they think in other markets.

BRAZIL

Max Geraldo Vice-president, Creative, FCB Brasil

Leica 1 00 This film from F/Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi poetically reproduces some of the most important photographs in history. Mix Brasil Cultural And Diversity Festival Everyone Is Gay A film by Neogama BBH that challenges prejudice. It’s a humorous punch in the stomach. Beautiful and brave, it would be perfect for a Glass Lion. Sport Club do Recife Security Moms A brilliant idea from Ogilvy Brasil addressing violence between fans of rival soccer teams. The mothers of fans were specially trained to act as security in a game between two traditional rivals. Smiles Trip Book Smiles Smiles, one of the airmiles programmes in Brazil, created a book with FCB Brazil where the scene changes according to the reader’s geolocation. HP Print For Help Print For Help is a solidarity network from NGO Maes da Se. It connects families of missing persons to HP print users in the region where they disappeared. Every time someone goes missing, thousands of HP printers are enabled to receive posters automatically, thereby optimising the family’s search.

1 Beldent, Almost Identical 2 Coca-Cola, Life 3 HP, Print For Help 4 Mix Brasil Cultural And Diversity Festival, Everyone Is Gay 5 Smiles, Trip Book Smiles

18/05/2015 13:46

136 Insight | political advertising

spin it to win it

hen it comes to an advertising brief, could there be anything less thankless than politics? Endlessly spoofed and derided as bitter, dull or hopelessly out-of-touch, political advertising makes selling cigarettes, gas-guzzling cars and sugar-laced foods look like a walk in the park. Risk-averse politicians are the clients from hell, and creative opportunities few and far between. Only one campaign – Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid – has ever won at Cannes. Plus, there’s no hard-and-fast evidence it even works. In his recent book Mad Men & Bad Men: What Happened When Politics Met Advertising (see ‘A clash of cultures’, p143), journalist Sam Delaney examined the past four UK elections and concluded that while an agency’s strategic thinking, discipline and focus can certainly help shape political campaigns and give parties a better chance of winning, individual adverts have never changed the result. Yet the sums blown by power-hungry parties on posters, broadcasts, tweets and films are eye-watering. India’s general elections last year commanded a total advertising budget of US$300 million – small change compared with the US presidential elections in 2012, where Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent a combined US$900 million on their marketing campaigns. In the wake of the 2015 UK general election, shots takes a look at the ads which broke the mould and the trends shaping the future.

Fear and loathing versus hope and positivity When it comes to political advertising, one of the biggest complaints is its unfailingly negative tone. That’s a pedigree you can blame on the Saatchi brothers, who set the trend in the UK with Labour Isn’t Working – their infamous 1979 poster for the UK Conservative party with its endless queue of unemployed workers. Forty years later, the ad has inspired endless pastiches, been awarded Campaign’s poster of the century, and was even resurrected by the Labour party in this year’s UK general election under the headline ‘The doctor won’t see you now’ to highlight the increase in waiting times. Delaney describes it as “the poster which changed everything” because it “heralded the moment when the gloves came off”. Daisy Girl, DDB’s attack broadcast for Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 election campaign, set an even blacker tone. In a bucolic setting, a young girl innocently plucks the petals off a flower, but her childish counting is interrupted by an official voice-over: cue a massive, mushroom-cloud

As the dust settles on the UK 2015 general election, Selena Schleh investigates the changing face of political advertising across the world, from bland broadcasts and punchy posters to merciless memes and high-tech holograms

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political advertising

3 4

1 Saatchi & Saatchi’s 1979 Tory poster 2 M&C Saatchi’s 2015 Tory poster 3 DDB’s Daisy Girl, 1964 4 Shepard Fairey’s 2008 Obama campaign poster

“As an incumbent, you sell fear: ‘Things are going ok – so don’t let the other lot back in because they’ll balls it all up.’ As a challenger, you sell anger: ‘It’s time for a change.’”

5 2015 Labour poster by BMB

obama poster: Shepard fairey/obeygiant.com

nuclear explosion. Despite being aired just once, the ad’s powerful subtext – vote for the opposition and he’ll blow up our innocents – was credited with helping sweep Johnson to victory. “[Daisy Girl] encapsulates the kind of negativity that has come to dominate political advertising in the States,” says Michael Franz, co-founder of the Wesleyan Media Project, an academic organisation tracking political broadcasting in the US. The tendency to ‘go negative’ is all down to the emotions being traded, says Benedict Pringle, the account executive behind the blog politicaladvertising.co.uk; “You can dress it up any way you like, but essentially there are only two political campaigns you can run. As an incumbent, you sell fear: ‘Things are going ok – so don’t let the other lot back in because they’ll balls it all up.’ As a challenger, you sell anger: ‘It’s time for a change.’” Plus, there’s significant evidence that putting the boot in is a quicker and more effective way of getting your message across than singing your own praises. That’s down to two things, says Pringle: firstly, “there’s almost nothing negative you can say about a politician that people won’t believe”; secondly, we remember negative ads, as a kind of “evolutionary” response.

Franz agrees that US candidates and consultants “see negativity as the key to success”. It’s a similar story down under. “When it comes to sport and politics, Australians don’t tolerate mediocrity and are quick to judge and condemn those who don’t live up to expectations,” explains James Needham, a planning director at CHE Proximity Sydney. “Ads that dramatise and demonise the failings of governments tend to resonate the most.” It’s not all doom and gloom, though. A rare example of a positive – and highly effective – campaign was Barack Obama’s 2008 presidency bid, its message of hope perfectly summed up by the Shepard Fairey ‘Hope’ poster. A witty highlight was The Great Schlep, created by Droga5 New York for political action group the Jewish Council for Education and Research, which centred on securing Florida – a key swing state – for the Democrats. Opting to tackle the brief with humour, the agency enlisted aggressively non-PC comedian Sarah Silverman to galvanise young voters to travel (‘schlep’) to their grandparents in Florida and convince them to vote for Obama. “Given the dynamic, it seemed like comedy – the best of which is firmly rooted in honesty – was the only way to go,” explains Andrew Essex, vice chairman of Droga5 NY.

138 Insight | political advertising

1 2015 Conservative poster, In His Pocket, by M&C Saatchi 2 2015 Conservative video, Call The Tune 3 Labour 2014 party political broadcast, The Uncredible Shrinking Man 4 Labour’s Easter Cleggs 5 2015 Green Party video Change The Tune

“…people vote out of fear, fear of change. If you can identify what people are most scared of, and play on that in your advertising, that’s the way to win.”

Shot on a shoestring budget, the resulting spot sees Silverman bring together a Jewish nana and a young black man over a shared love of tracksuits, Cadillacs, bling… and the fact that “all their friends are dying”. Essex admits there were “a few references to Nazis with strap-ons that we had to gently encourage her to reconsider”, but that Silverman was “the one and only” choice to front the campaign and “got the idea immediately”. Moreover, her Jewish heritage gave her authenticity: “When you use a celebrity for celebrity’s sake, it suggests there’s no real idea…If the person has a relevant connection to the material, they can cut through the clutter like little else.” The gamble paid off creatively, scoring the work a Titanium Lion, but, perhaps more importantly, proved hugely effective: Obama received the highest elderly Jewish vote in 30 years and won Florida by 170,000 votes. Glance at some of the 2015 UK election offerings though, and it’s clear that negativity still rules. While claiming to run a ‘clean campaign’, Labour and Beattie McGuinness Bungay played on fears of further National Health Service (NHS) cuts with their tagline ‘Next Time, They’ll Cut To The Bone’ above an X-rayed fracture. M&C Saatchi’s sledgehammer efforts for the Conservatives, meanwhile, included a wrecking ball smashing into the slogan ‘A Recovering Economy: Don’t Let Labour Wreck It’. A more creative approach is to temper nastiness with clever humour – but, says Delaney, that generally requires the confidence of a comfortable majority. ‘Sometimes in elections that aren’t that close run you can get away with it.” He cites the “witty” and “cocky” ads produced by Trevor Beattie (then creative director at TBWA) for the UK Labour party in 2001, when the party was an election shoo-in. Witness the famous ‘Wiggy’ poster, warning voters to ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid’ of Conservative leader William Hague in ex-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s bouffant blonde wig: it raised eyebrows but quite a few chuckles, too, making people feel warm-hearted towards the Labour party while ultimately making a serious point. In a similar vein, the big ad hit of this year’s UK general election was M&C Saatchi’s In His Pocket poster, which played on English voters’ fears of a Labour-SNP (Scottish National Party) coalition, with a Photoshopped Labour leader Ed Miliband in (former first minister of Scotland) Alex Salmond’s pocket. A single, powerful message, simply and wittily expressed in a way everyone could understand, politicaladvertising.co.uk’s Pringle says this could be “one of the most effective political posters of all time”. Labour tried to neutralise its impact by ruling out a formal coalition with the SNP, but in time-honoured style, the Conservatives and M&C Saatchi ruthlessly hammered home the message with a sinister animation, Call The Tune, which peeped through a keyhole at Westminster to show Miliband dancing a helpless jig for the Pied Piper-esque Salmond. And the strategy worked. The spectre of a post-election deal was a key factor in Labour’s defeat at the hands of the Conservative party. As Delaney points out, “people vote out of fear, fear of change. If you can identify what people are most scared of, and play on that in your advertising, that’s the way to win.”

Boring politicians talking bollocks Attack ads may leave a bad taste in the mouth, but at least they’re not dull. At the other end of the spectrum is the official party broadcast. In the UK, US and Australia, that has generally meant one thing: “Boring politicians talking a load of old bollocks from behind a desk” as Delaney puts it. Contrast that with the glorious free-for-all on TV screens during Brazil’s elections, where every candidate – from presidential to city councillor level – gets a free airtime slot and Jesus, clowns and superheroes vie for viewers’ attention. “[It has] transformed political broadcasts into either the most boring or the funniest thing to watch,” comments Mariana Borga, a creative director at JWT Brazil, “depending if you’re optimistic or not.” It didn’t feature a candidate decked out as Wonder Woman, but the

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A Labour of love Andy Nairn, co-founder of Lucky Generals, the London agency behind Labour’s 2014 party political broadcast, The Uncredible Shrinking Man, explains how they took a fresh approach to a tired medium What was your initial reaction to being approached by the Labour Party? Frankly, one of surprise: political accounts are traditionally awarded to large, well-established agencies and we were less than one year old at the time. We were excited by the chance to make a difference in the most important ‘category’ of all and impressed by the Labour team’s desire to take a new approach to campaigning. Of our three founders, only Danny [Brooke-Taylor] had worked on a political campaign before – for Labour, back in Tony Blair’s time. We managed to ignore all the siren voices that warned us that it would be a thankless, financially draining and time-consuming task… How much research did you do on past campaigns? We looked at the great political ads of yesteryear – from Labour’s

1945 ‘And now – win the peace’ to the Clinton and Obama campaigns. We even reminded ourselves of some of Saatchi’s iconic billboards for the Tories. But ultimately, this was a very particular election, so precedent was only so much use. And the Labour team emphasised that they had chosen us precisely because we were a new agency, who would not feel bound by conventions. The Uncredible Shrinking Man was a departure from traditional political broadcasts. How did you come up with the idea? The brief was to win over disillusioned Liberal Democrat voters in the run-up to European and local elections in May 2014. To do this, we needed to highlight Nick Clegg’s broken promises and his supine relationship with the Conservatives. At the same

Labour Party’s 2014 European and local election broadcast The Uncredible Shrinking Man was a mould-breaker nonetheless. Created by London shop Lucky Generals, the 1950s sci-fi pastiche played on the public perception of then-deputy PM Nick Clegg as a political pushover, dwindling in size with every broken election promise. Although the ad drew ire (The Guardian called it a ‘classic example of politics with all the hope stripped away’) it also grabbed people’s attention, with agency co-founder Andy Nairn insisting it was “humorous rather than vicious – and underpinned with real substance”. The follow-up stunt, Easter Cleggs, immortalised the Liberal Democrat leader as a chocolate treat in a box proclaiming “contains no nuts”, “completely hollow”, and “100% artificially Conservative”. Often it’s the smaller parties who take bigger creative risks with their advertising, as the UK Green party proved with its offbeat broadcast this year. In Change The Tune, Creature of London and comedy director Johnny Hopkins – known for his ‘singing farmers’ spot for dairy brand Yeo Valley – highlighted the homogeneity of the Greens’ opponents by imagining their leaders as an identikit 90s boy band. Having rejected past offers to shoot election broadcasts (“having a politician talk down the lens just doesn’t engage me”), Hopkins says it was a chance to bring some fun and appeal to a business that’s often “full of bitterness”: “It feels like politics has been wasting big opportunities to engage with the audience in an innovative and entertaining way through the medium of film.” Nairn agrees that in an age of increasing political disengagement, there’s a strong argument for a more creative approach to advertising.

time we wanted to break the conventional mould of a litany of facts, inserted into a series of unrelated and humourless vignettes. Instead, we wanted our party election broadcast to have a creative idea, a storyline and a sense of humour, so that people would actually watch it. [Labour] was great at supplying us with the political detail and ‘straight’ argument and we explored different metaphors for bringing these dry facts to life. We settled on [the idea] because it characterised Clegg perfectly and allowed us to make our serious points in a funny and fresh way. What was the biggest challenge? That the product effectively changes every day. New policies are unveiled in the morning; a rogue tweet might cause a stir in the afternoon, a speech

creates an opportunity for social media fun in the evening. The old adage that “a week is a long time in politics” could now be applied to “a minute”. What do you think about the general standard of advertising in this year’s general election? It could be argued that this wasn’t a vintage year for political advertising: the stakes were too high for anybody to take big risks; the battle was fought at street level (or tweet level), rather than with flashy films; and in Labour’s case, at least, there was a conscious desire to focus on substance, rather than style.

Ultimately, though, it can only ever be about effectiveness. “More than any other category, the results are absolutely definitive and brutally public. So a lacklustre campaign that gets you over the line will always be preferred to a dazzling one that doesn’t garner votes.”

Tea parties and tweets Creative green shoots may be emerging, but technology is also shaking up traditional communication channels in politics. During India’s elections last year, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Narendra Modi took inspiration from an unlikely source: rapper Tupac Shakur’s ‘resurrection’ at Coachella.

140 Insight | political advertising

1 Obama 2008 campaign, The Great Schlep 2 The Obamacare campaign video, Things Everybody Does But Doesn’t Talk About 3 Meghna Patel poses in support of the BJP party

“Obama proved that with creativity and a genuine understanding… social media can be a fantastic tool with which to engage and inspire.” 3

He enlisted the same digital agency, London-based Musion Das Hologram, to create a Modi hologram, which was beamed out to 1,400 different rallies simultaneously. Equally innovative was Obama’s decision to exploit the growing gaming industry in a move which saw ‘Vote Obama’ ads pop up in 18 video and smartphone games, from Tetris to Burnout Paradise. In the UK, too, the days of rolling out a campaign across the nation’s billboards are clearly over: The Times reported earlier this year that parties’ spending on outdoor posters was down by 50 per cent from 2010. With paid-for TV advertising, the most impactful medium for politics, still banned under UK law, the Conservative Party turned to video-sharing on YouTube to get round the problem by using pre-roll advertising to push out a swathe of US-style attack ads such as Call The Tune. With Google tracking algorithms allowing for micro-targeting of adverts by age, gender, and location, the party could focus on marginal constituents and floating voters, just as Obama used sophisticated data analytics to laser-target his TV campaigns. With none of the rival parties having the funds to follow suit, those millions of YouTube views undoubtedly played a part in the Conservative victory. In general, the interactive opportunities offered by social media, particularly with a younger demographic, have seen it grab an everincreasing slice of campaign budgets. As ever, Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns are the gold standard, says digital brand strategist Beckie Williams, former head of social at Converse. Chatting on Reddit’s ‘Ask Me Anything’ sessions (a tactic also seen in Australia’s 2013 elections); inviting America’s top vloggers to quiz him on superpowers and social reform; and not forgetting that record-breaking ‘Four more years’ 2012 victory night tweet, “Obama proved that with creativity and a genuine understanding of the spaces (and the audiences, crucially) social media can be a fantastic tool with which to engage and inspire,” says Williams. Given how visual elections are, says Simon Francis, director of PR and digital agency Claremont Communications, Instagram is a social media platform that has so far been underused. That could all change next year, with the Washington Post suggesting that now it has overtaken Twitter in user numbers, the battleground for the 2016 presidential elections could move to Instagram. It can also be a powerful organisational aid as India’s BJP showed in the 2014 elections, using Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp to publicise on-the-ground events such as rallies and interactive ‘tea parties’ – live question-and-answer sessions with leader Modi, screened at tea shacks around the country, which were lauded as a pioneering fusion of the traditional and the technological. With 2015 touted as the UK’s first ‘social election’, much was made of Obama’s seasoned strategists David Axelrod and Jim Messina joining Labour’s and the Conservatives’ respective campaigns, which signalled a seismic shift away from a previously guarded approach. (Who could forget David Cameron’s “too many tweets make a twat” comment?) While Labour got all chatty with its ‘four million online conversations’ pledge, the Conservative campaign adopted an ‘impressions’ approach, shelling out a whopping £100,000 a week on Facebook adverts and using social media to broadcast ‘top down’ communications and amplify the messages in traditional print media. How far this helped win them the election isn’t yet clear, but Williams thinks “these bland and generic strategies ignored the greatest opportunity that social media presents – actual dialogue with the public. Done well, social media could be the world’s biggest and most effective doorstop, helping people get to know and understand the candidates vying to represent them – and in turn, help candidates understand the people they are hoping to represent.” When it comes to shareable, creative content, parties should look at what’s being generated outside official channels, continues Williams. Take creative tech agency +Rehabstudio, which added some much-needed political vocab

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The power of political parody Mike, one half of Cassetteboy, the mash-up artists behind viral spoof videos Cameron’s Conference Rap and The Emperor’s New Clothes, talks about turning party conferences into hip-hop tracks and the enduring appeal of political parody When did you first get into the business of mash-ups? We’ve been doing it for 20 years. It started out as a hobby, making compilation tapes for friends with snippets of talking in between the music. Those bits got more complicated the longer we did it. It’s only recently become possible [to commercialise it] since the law on copyright infringement changed last year. How do you come up with ideas for your political spoofs? The ideas are always generated by the material. There’s no point going in with a pre-conceived notion of what you’re going to make, as you might not find the necessary words. With the political raps, party conference speeches have a bit of the swagger and boastfulness of hip-hop, so it seemed like a good idea to try to make them rhyme.

Why do you think mash-ups are so popular? For the makers, they’re easy in one way, as you don’t need cameras, actors or studios. You just need time, a computer, and an idea. For the viewers, they still have a certain novelty factor. New technology has meant it’s exploded as an art form, so it’s an exciting time. It’s also very satisfying to see the famous and powerful mocking themselves with their own voices. You deemed the Liberal Democrats’ recent ‘joke election’ video ‘the political equivalent of dad dancing’. Should mash-ups only be a tool for satirists? I think mash-ups are much more effective when they are used to criticise someone rather than praise them. Why would [the Liberal Democrats] mash-up Nick Clegg to get him to say something

to the emoji lexicon with ‘politicons’ including ‘smiley poo’ party logos, a smoking gun and a crying NHS nurse. Or the many parodists, both amateur and professional, whose creations now reach mass audiences online.

Cameron takes the rap and Mitt gets Gangnammed British mash-ups artists Cassetteboy (see ‘The power of political parody’, above) have secured the kind of viral success political parties can only dream of. Cameron’s Conference Rap mashed up Eminem’s Lose Yourself with the Prime Minister’s speeches, causing him to spit rhymes about falling wages (‘We have the bravery/To bring back slavery’) and social class (‘I’m hardcore/ And I know the score/I’m disgusted by the poor’). The result garnered five million views online; the official speech, a paltry 44,000. Elsewhere, the satirical standout of 2012 was Mitt Romney Style, from LA-based comedy website CollegeHumor. Slick production values coupled with on-point lyrics lampooning the Republican candidate’s ‘benefit hopping’, distinguished hair and over-privileged progeny bagged the Gangnam Style spoof 57 million YouTube views. Some candidates have taken an ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ approach: in 2013, Julian Assange popped up in a spoof election broadcast for Juice Media’s Rap News, to bolster his Australian Senate bid. A Game Of Polls saw the Wikileaks founder don a mullet wig and bandana and mime along to chart-topper You’re The Voice, in a baffling attempt to present himself as a bona fide ‘bogan’ [unsophisticated person]. Though it went down surprisingly well online, the stunt ultimately failed to secure Assange a seat.

he’d happily say anyway? And politicians should behave with a bit of dignity, which was sorely missing from that effort. Would Cassetteboy ever consider becoming guns for hire if a political party approached you? I think it’s better for satirists to try to stay above that sort of thing. We’re more effective as outsiders looking in: once you have come out in support of a particular party, it can taint how people perceive your work. Why do you think political satire is so much more powerful than regular political advertising? I think people are much more likely to pay attention to someone outside the political sphere, as people don’t necessarily trust politicians. Politicians have

an ulterior motive and they’ll say anything to get votes. What were the best political spoofs of the UK Election 2015? The Green Party’s Change The Tune was good, it used humour to get a message across, but the joke was on their opponents, not on themselves. And the Sky News I Swear promo was well put together. People kept asking us on Twitter whether it was us. It wasn’t, but I sort of wish it was.

Obama, too, goofed around to great effect with a selfie stick and Joe Biden’s sunglasses in a recent Buzzfeed spot to promote his HealthCare.gov initiative, Things Everybody Does But Doesn’t Talk About. Arguably, success all comes down to national attitudes. Australians generally dislike grandstanders, or ‘tall poppies’, explains CHE Proximity’s Needham. But in Britain, most people still expect politicians to conduct themselves “with a bit of self-respect”, argues Cassetteboy’s Mike, which is why the Liberal Democrats’ ‘joke’ mash-up of Clegg’s speeches bombed so spectacularly. So is there any way for political parties to ‘spoof-proof’ their adverts? In an age of universally accessible editing tools such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro, the answer is no. “You have to accept that you can’t second-guess what people will try to do,” says Delaney. “What you can do is avoid giving them open goals.” A classic example referenced by both Delaney and Pringle is Euro RSCG London’s much-derided 2010 campaign poster of David Cameron alongside the headline: ‘We can’t go on like this. I’ll cut the deficit, not the NHS’, which spawned its own spoof-generating site, mydavidcameron.com. As well as lacking intellectual clarity, a zealous hand with the airbrush left Cameron looking like a beauty counter assistant. It was a “terrible” poster, says Pringle, “which quite rightly got put to the sword.” Equally spoofworthy was the M&C Saatchi In His Pocket poster, but here the parodies were a bonus, because the original was a creatively strong offering in its own right. “M&C Saatchi would have known that it would attract lots of media coverage, and the spoofs would just extend its lifespan by getting more people discussing it,” says Pringle. And when it comes to

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political ads, generating a media buzz is the name of the game, agrees Delaney. Sharing memes and mash-ups on social media isn’t enough to make a difference – because friends and followers usually have similar political values. “Effectively you’re trying to convince people who don’t need convincing [to vote a certain way] rather than reaching the true ‘floating voters’ who ultimately decide an election.”

Three’s a crowd

1 Mobilize Brazil’s social campaign creating ‘political furniture’ 2 Politicons created by +rehabstudio 3 CollegeHumor’s Mitt Romney Style spoof video 4 Stage, the Priorities USA Action TV spot

“Done well, social media could be the world’s biggest and most eﬀective doorstop, helping people get to know and understand the candidates vying to represent them…” 3

While the average Joe creating memes and spoofs for lolz may not be changing the course of history, there are other, more powerful players emerging in the field. Benedict Pringle and Michael Franz both agree that the rise of these third party influencers is currently one of the biggest trends in political advertising – and one which looks set to continue. They include political pressure groups, such as the UK’s Operation Black Vote, who enlisted Saatchi & Saatchi London to create a print and online campaign in which several black celebrities, including Homeland actor David Harewood and footballer Sol Campbell, appear “whited up” alongside the tagline: ‘If you don’t register to vote, you’re taking the colour out of Britain’. How effective the campaign has been in galvanising black voters isn’t yet clear, but it has been hailed as one of the most striking pieces of advertising to emerge from the UK 2015 election. In the US, says Franz, it’s the super PACs (independent political action committees which aren’t required to disclose their sources of funding) that are dominating political advertising. Not only is their advertising output prolific, much of it is framed as real life stories which Franz’s Wesleyan Media Foundation identifies as resonating most with voters. Take 2012 TV spot Stage, released by pro-Obama group Priorities USA Action, in which a blue-collar worker talks of building a stage at a paper plant, only for executives to use it to announce his firing following a takeover by Mitt Romney’s company, Bain Capital. The ad closes with the line: “Turns out that when we were building that stage, I was building my own coffin.” “That still gives me chills when I think about it,” says Franz, “because it’s such a powerful message.” It turned out that quite a few voters shared Franz’s response; the ad was widely credited with torpedoing the Republican party’s hopes in Ohio. Franz predicts a huge increase in super PAC-sponsored attack ads versus those released by the parties in the 2016 presidential elections. As well as raising questions about transparency and accountability, it’s a trend which won’t help the prevailing climate of negativity. “The fact that anyone can say anything creates a vicious atmosphere,” agrees Pringle. Independent creators were behind much of Obama’s 2008 campaign, too – from street artist Shepard Fairey, to director Charles Stone III, who rebooted the Budweiser Wassup adverts. Showing the original characters in miserable straits after seven years under ‘Dubya’, the heavily critical spot secured a special jury commendation at Cannes, as “an extraordinary piece of work…a standalone political statement [that] is perhaps second to none”. Celebrity endorsements can be hugely influential. While political parties have long relied on star power to sex up their official ads – most recently, the UK Labour party chose The Hobbit actor Martin Freeman to front their election broadcast – hip-hop artist will.i.am’s Yes We Can music video was a powerful piece of content that was created entirely independently of Obama’s official camp. At a time when Hillary Clinton was the favourite to lead the Democrats, says Pringle, “the impact of a pop star may well have changed the course of history.” Similarly, in India’s 2014 elections, the most talked-about ad was an unofficial poster, put out by model Meghna Patel, who went all American Beauty in support of Narendra Modi by posing naked – with only a handful of petals to spare her blushes – on a bed of roses. Though the BJP party threw a virtual modesty blanket over the ad – “We are not in support of

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A clash of cultures Sam Delaney, author of Mad Men & Bad Men: What Happened When British Politics Met Advertising, talks about his account of the relationship between admen and politicians over the past four UK general elections How did you get the idea for the book? In 2007, I wrote Get Smashed, a book about the golden age of British advertising. The chapter that interested me the most was about the Saatchi brothers and their relationship with Margaret Thatcher. I also have a lifelong

interest in politics, having studied it at university and briefly worked as a researcher at the House of Commons when I was 19. I wanted to write about politics and thought the advertising aspect was my unique way in, spending 18 months interviewing ad men, politicians, spin doctors and pollsters.

extremely close in the polls. Saatchi devised a focused, brutal and unashamedly narrow campaign based on tax, featuring the ‘Labour’s Tax Bombshell’ poster. The Conservatives pulled off a surprise victory and I think it was largely down to the strategic discipline that the Saatchi team brought to the campaign.

What would you characterise as the watershed moments in British political advertising? The famous ‘Labour Isn’t Working’ poster was the first example of the ad industry using the same marketing techniques for politics as they did for commercial brands, and it was the starting point for everything we’ve seen since. But my favourite campaign story is that of the 1992 [UK general election]: like this year, it was

In the book there’s a sense that the golden era of British political advertising was from 1979-1997. What’s changed? New Labour succeeded by managing the party message with a ruthless discipline. Between Philip Gould, Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell, there was a ring of steel around Labour’s campaign communications, which meant the ad agencies had less freedom than they’d

such vulgar displays…and we completely condemn this behaviour” – the resulting media furore only fuelled Modi’s election campaign. It’s a similar story in Brazil. “The most interesting initiatives of the last couple of years appeared not from the candidates’ marketing [departments], but spontaneously, from internet users,” says Mariana Borga of JWT Brazil. She references a popular fictional Facebook character, Dilma Bolada (‘Crazy’ or ‘Badass’ Dilma), the straight-talking alter-ego of Brazil’s current President Dilma Rousseff. Created by student Jeferson Monteiro, Dilma’s fake Facebook profile has attracted over 1.6 million ‘likes’ and scooped a 2013 Shorty Award (the Oscars of the social media world) for Brazil. Rousseff even agreed to an interview with her virtual doppelgänger, thereby boosting her own social media following and the popularity of a campaign mired in allegations of serious corruption.

Turning a problem into a solution So what does the future hold for political advertising? It goes without saying that social media will continue to exert huge influence. As Popbitch founder Camilla Wright pointed out in her AdWeek Europe 2015 talk: “by the next [UK general] election in 2020, the voters will have grown up using it.” In order to translate that into an election advantage, political parties will need to tailor their content and messages accordingly, says Claremont Communications’ Francis. “It’s all very well paying for impressions and likes… but you need to make sure that your content is as shareable as possible and that you’re having the right conversations.” As for the political poster, both Delaney and Pringle maintain it is here to stay – albeit largely in digital form. But, quoting Jeremy Sinclair,

had in the past. Because that strategy worked, everyone copied it. The Tories and Labour alike are cautious about handing their messaging over to outside ad men and the whole thing is tightly governed by spin doctors. Why are people still fascinated by political advertising? Because the nitty gritty of real politics – debates, committees, local issues and constituency surgeries – is dull. But the cut and thrust and creative imagination of political ads make it all seem more sexy and confrontational.

the creative mastermind behind many of the successful UK Conservative campaigns, Delaney says posters will always remain relevant, even though mediums change, “because if you can’t boil down your core message to five or six words in a punchy headline, the chances are that your message isn’t right in the first place.” And there will always be a role for agencies in crafting these messages, says Pringle. “Politics can be complicated and politicians tend to nuance the statements they’re making in order for them not to be taken the wrong way. That can lead to very verbose, cluttered and fuzzy communications. Ad agencies can help to distil these complex messages into something incredibly clear and impactful.” Delaney agrees: “Politicians are not naturally capable of giving people simple, understandable messages that are a fair reflection of the values they represent. Admen, however, specialise in creating those sorts of messages – which can only be good for politics.” Win or lose, even the worst cases of political advertising can serve a common good. Witness a recent creative initiative from JWT Brazil and Mobilize Brasil, who came up with a novel way to tackle one of Brazil’s biggest post-election bugbears: illegally-placed sandwich boards advertising candidates’ names and numbers. As well as lacking creativity, being “without concept, philosophy or ideology” says JWT’s Borga, the placards disrupted mobility, creating over 250 tonnes of rubbish in São Paulo last year. The answer? Turn them into sleek, useful furniture. Designer Mauricio Arruda published the designs – including the droll ‘mesa de centro’ table – alongside step-by-step tutorials. “By thinking of a more useful destination for that material, we turned a problem into a solution,” says Borga of the project. If only politics were that simple, effective and positive… S

144 People | THE WAY I SEE IT

THE WAY I SEE IT

Ben Priest I was born a long time ago – before electricity – on 22 February 1968 in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. I’ve never been back, but that’s no reflection on Walton-on-Thames. My first real memory is playing with a gun and lining up all the soldiers at the top of a hill in Reigate. Just to be clear, it was a toy gun and toy soldiers. It’s worrying that it’s my earliest memory, as I must have been about four or five. Mind you, I can’t remember what I did last week. My dad worked client-side at Volkswagen but my mum wasn’t connected to the [advertising] business at all. She had an amazing career as a child protection social worker, dealing with thinly-stretched resources and horrific situations of abuse, for which she got very little thanks and was paid bugger all.

photographs: Dan Burn-Forti

I really enjoyed my childhood growing up in Balcombe, a fabulous village in Sussex. My brother was my best friend and we went everywhere together. In the morning, Mum would open the door and out we’d go, and we’d only come back when we needed a meal. It was great: Brighton was a train ride away, so we vaguely knew what was going on in the world, but mainly we were kept naïve and innocent. Tragically, I always wanted to be an adman. I soon worked out that there was a connection between all the outrageous, fun people that came to our house through my dad’s work – which was that they were all from the ad agency. That got me thinking: ‘Maybe I could have a go at that’.

With both a father and godfather in the advertising world, Ben Priest might have seemed destined for industry success, but his 25-year career didn’t enjoy the smoothest of beginnings. After a false start as an account man and a ‘bludgeoning’ approach to copywriting, he finally hit his stride as an ECD, co-founding agency adam&eve and overseeing its meteoric rise – via a multi-million pound merger with DDB London – from boutique shop to multiple Lion-winning powerhouse. The recently promoted CCO tells Selena Schleh about the Christmas campaign arms race, potting-shed politics and why mass market appeal isn’t a dirty word

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ben priest

146 People | THE WAY I SEE IT I’m outrageous and very conservative rolled into one, so although I really enjoyed acting at school, the conservative part of me said: ‘It’s not a real job, you can’t do that’. Looking back, I can’t think of anything worse. The acting world isn’t healthy: there’s too much self-analysis and torture. Auditions are really tough. You stroll into a room and there’s five disinterested people sipping cappuccinos, managing to keep half an eye on you while you go through the part. Boarding school was a bit of a bear pit, so I had quite a few horrific nicknames which I’ve managed to keep secret. At adam&eveDDB, everyone calls me Priesty. James [Murphy] is Murph and David [Golding, co-founders] is DG. For a creative agency, very limited creativity has been applied to our nicknames. My school career was like most of my life: [I had] limited ability, but I worked very hard to make sure that I got what I needed. I’m not an academic. I see myself as more intuitive and emotionally intelligent. I’m a ‘people’ person – I read the room and ‘feel’ people. Not physically, of course. Oxbridge would definitely not have been an option. Instead, I went to Swansea University and studied English. That was good for me: prep school and boarding school was a bit of a conveyor belt, so it was good to go somewhere that wasn’t a redbrick university. It knocked a few of those Home Counties edges off.

On my dad’s advice, I spent two summers doing work experience at GGT (when it was the best agency in the country) and then at WCRS. Work experience was brilliant: it confirmed to me that advertising was a really vibrant business with lots of interesting people. After university, I got a place on the copywriting course at Watford College, which was amazing. I was in the same year as Charlie Rudd [MD of BBH], Karen Buchanan [CEO of Publicis London] and Neil Simpson [co-founder of The Corner]. At the same time I went for interviews in account management, because my dad said, ‘You’ve been at university for three bloody years – get a fucking job!’ The first place I went was Ogilvy, where Cilla Snowball, now group chairman and CEO at AMV, offered me a job. I didn’t really know what it entailed, but my dad told me to take it and swap between departments once I got in there. As soon as I started, I realised account management wasn’t what I wanted to do at all. I loved the people and the agency but the work made me very miserable and I was terrible at it. I ended up hanging around with the creatives for about a year. In the end I said, ‘I’m going to resign, because if I don’t go now, I’ll never be able to’. So I went on the dole and wrote a collection of the world’s worst advertisements. Eventually I got an art director partner [the late David Harvey] and we did a week’s placement at Simons Palmer, which in those days was the hottest agency in

“I’m a ‘people’ person – I read the room and ‘feel’ people. Not physically of course.”

town. On the basis of that everybody wanted to talk to us, and I ended up back at Ogilvy in a weird full circle. I wasn’t the greatest copywriter in the world, but I had this energy and drive and I just bludgeoned my way through it. I was very lucky in my mentors. My godfather is Alfredo Marcantonio, of Holmes Hobbs Marcantonio, who co-authored the book Remember Those Great Volkswagen Ads? [with David Abbott and John O’Driscoll]. He took me under his wing when I told him that I wanted to be a copywriter and when I showed him wave after wave of appalling ads, he never once said to me, ‘You can’t do this’. He always made time to see me, even after a full day’s work. We used to sit down and write together. My other mentor is my dad, who is still the best person in the world to show work to. He doesn’t spray praise around, so if you get a thumbs-up from him you know that you’ve got a winner on your hands. He is a great influence on me. The first adverts to really make an impression on me were John Webster’s for Hofmeister and Unigate. We used to shout ‘Watch out, watch out, there’s a Humphrey about!’ at each other in the schoolyard and do the George the bear walk. It was only years later that I realised all the ads we liked were written by the same bloke. He might have won loads of awards, but John’s real genius was that the country took the advertising he did to their hearts. One of my big gripes with UK advertising is that we’ve allowed a group of people who regard doing famous and populist work as almost vulgar, to create a potting-shed industry. They spend a lot of time noodling about on little things, and what they’re really doing is making ads for themselves. That’s easy to do; it’s like recording a really weird concept album. What’s difficult to do is to write six consecutive albums that the whole world buys and which are critically acclaimed and commercially successful. There are still a few bad apples in my generation running creative departments, and if you sat them in a taxi and said: ‘Right, tell the driver about the six pieces of work you’re most proud of,’ the cabbie literally wouldn’t have a clue, because they’ve spent their career in the potting shed. Once they’ve gone, mass market appeal will be the name of the game. I need to get my creative kicks in lots of different ways. There’s nothing wrong with spending ages crafting a poster campaign that only goes up on 30 sites. But to be focused on that kind of hit every time is really weird. The Foster’s campaign hasn’t won any awards – apart from the IPA Effectiveness Grand Prix – and nor should it, but I love listening to the lads in the local pub joking about budgie-smugglers. That gives me more of a thrill than any critical award.

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ben priest

My favourite piece of advertising would be pretty much anything David Abbott ever touched. He was the greatest there has ever been. Every lesson you need can be learned from reading his work and looking at his life. I also really like David Kolbusz’s work for Lynx [Sporty Girl and Flirty Girl]: the voiceover was a copywriting masterclass. The campaign had been going for 10 years, but he totally flipped the idea on its head. Or the Stella Artois poster: ‘“My shout,” he whispered.’ How can you tell a whole story in just four words? It’s insane. You’ve got to have heroes in this business. It’s a shame when agencies slag everyone else off and don’t vote for their work. The very best people, the people that know they can achieve success again tomorrow, are generous with their praise. In the early days of my career at Lowe and TBWA, I was a massive pain in the arse to work with. I couldn’t write and create in a swashbuckling way, so I made up for it with effort: I’d walk up to the chief executive’s office and hammer on the door, demanding to be seen about a tiny body copy change. I still see people now who obviously want to cross the street to avoid me. If I were creative directing myself now, I would probably fire myself. It was a no-brainer to sell adam&eve to Omnicom in 2012. It was a lot earlier than we expected, but after all it was DDB London, it was Volkswagen, it was the agency my dad had worked with and the agency Ben [Tollet] and Emer [Stamp, co-ECDs] had come from. People talked fondly about the halcyon days of John Webster, but the truth was [DDB] had ceased to be that type of agency years before and it needed resuscitation. The only people who were going to do that were people who didn’t give a fuck about what was sacred. We steamrollered in there and smashed every office down. I thought the most profound visual thing we could do was intermingle everybody. Even if it wasn’t a good idea, it sent a message that we were here to change things.

“I still see people now who obviously want to cross the street to avoid me. If I were creative directing myself now, I would probably fire myself.”

Sometimes in life, something comes along that mirrors or connects with what you’re doing, and that was the case with The Long Wait for John Lewis. I was getting divorced at the time; I had two little kids, and the ad itself was about a little kid. My ex-wife and I have been very fortunate in that we’ve ended up being good friends – we go on holiday, the four of us, as a family – but it didn’t always look like it would be like that. It was a very strange time for me. But funnily enough it was the easiest ad I’ve ever made, from getting Dougal [Wilson] on board as director to choosing the music and casting Lewis, the little boy, who was just delightful. I remember the look on David and James’s faces when I showed them the finished ad. Afterwards, David turned to me and just said: ‘What the fuck are we going to do next year?’

148 People | THE WAY I SEE IT Ultimately, getting it right every time is difficult, whether it’s humour or emotion. Any job you do with Dougal is bigger than the job itself. It’s an experience you’ll remember forever. It’s a wonderful collaboration. You disappear off into this bubble and then suddenly you fall out the other side, clutching the memory stick with the ad on it, and you have to come back to the real world. There’s a mass of emotional advertising right now. It’s become acceptable and it’s what everybody does. I think [adam&eveDDB] has it slightly easier, in a way: when the John Lewis logo comes up on screen, people are prepared to be emotional for the brand. It would probably be different for something like Zurich Insurance! Although after Monty The Penguin and the Sainsbury’s Christmas ad came out, my mum said something very interesting, which was: ‘Be very careful, you lot. This looks like an arms race to me. You all need to remember what you’re there for: to flog mince pies and woolly hats.’ We had no idea at the time, but [adam&eveDDB] presented the same idea behind the Sainsbury’s Christmas ad [the First World War Christmas Day football match] to John Lewis in March 2014. They thought about it, but because they didn’t have a connection to the British Legion, they decided not to go ahead. So we went with Monty the Penguin instead, and then found out two weeks after it was all finished that Sainsbury’s had made their version. That was terrifying.

I can’t concentrate on anything for longer than 20 minutes, so one of the brilliant things about this business is that you spend the morning talking about very sensitive, emotional stuff for John Lewis and then you come out and go into another room, and the script is: ‘Is it alright if my mate rubs sun cream on my back?’ When we started adam&eve, we tried hard to be different, but soon worked out that we didn’t need to do that – we just needed to be good. We’re a very honest, ego-free environment. In many places, you have to do something because the ECD says so. It’s not like that here: if you want your way, you have to be able to justify and explain it, not bully people. I didn’t want to make Monty The Penguin for John Lewis: I thought a fluffy penguin would look like we were tugging at heartstrings in a very obvious way. Also, we’d already sold the client a different idea. But Rick [Brim] and Dan [Fisher] kept coming back with new ideas [on Monty], and everyone else loved it. That’s how decisions should be made, rather than: ‘We need to look after Ben’s ego’. Job titles are ridiculous. Being CCO doesn’t mean anything to me. There are a lot of oldfashioned people out there who place great store by what it says on their business cards, but if you want to have a great agency you need three or four creative leaders who can go out, win pitches and create great work. I always think of the England rowing coach, whose only criteria for considering suggestions was: ‘Does it make the boat go faster?’

“Job titles are ridiculous. Being CCO doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Juan Carlos Ortiz [president of DDB Latina] gave some brilliant advice during a recent talk at the agency. He said: ‘We never, ever set out to do great work’. There was a collective intake of breath – then he went on: ‘People who do that sit around, piddling about, and nine times out of ten it doesn’t turn out to be great. We set out to do good work, and 50 per cent of what we do, through energy and love, migrates upwards into great work’. Generally speaking, though, I’m not very good at taking advice. I tend to do everything in my life once very badly and then go on and do it better. I don’t really learn unless I get burned. There are far too many awards, and most of them aren’t worth winning. When we were still adam&eve we didn’t enter as many, but we’re a global agency now with a responsibility to the network and we have to play the game. My personal view is that awards are irrelevant and meaningless – and yet rather lovely if handled the right way. Be a doer; be busy. That’s what I’d tell anyone starting out in the industry today. Don’t sit in a dark room trying to persuade yourself and everybody else that you’re a genius while minutely adjusting the typography for the millionth time. Energy will create work and work will get sold on the back of that energy. I struggle with the whole advertising thing en masse and my love-hate relationship with awards ceremonies means that the best days of my career truly are about the process and making of advertising; being the potter at the wheel. If I could change one thing about myself I’d like to be able to hit a golf ball about 400 yards, dead straight. Other than that, it’s not something I think about. Make the best of what you’ve got; make your peace with it. You’re the best you are today, the wisest you can be, and if you’re lucky you might learn a little bit more. If I was given the chance to time travel, I wouldn’t go back to the past. I’d much rather explore the future. I would never work on a campaign for the Conservative Party. Or for Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club. Outside of work, I do a lot of running. I’m training for the London Marathon at the moment [Priest finished in 3 hours 22 minutes], which has given me a very sore right leg. I love Crystal Palace [Football Club] very dearly and I watch the England rugby games at Twickenham. Before I had children, I played a lot of golf, and one day I will return to it – though probably when I’m too old to be any good.

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ben priest

Money isn’t that important to me. When I was at Lowe, I did a spot with Burt Reynolds who told me: ‘Ben, I’ve been unhappy rich and I’ve been unhappy poor. Unhappy rich is better.’ But honestly? I’m relatively low-maintenance to run. I like nice things and I buy silly things from time to time, but I could exist pretty simply. I’m not the kind of person who’s kept awake at night by worries. Two glasses of red wine and talking to people who see advertising as utterly ridiculous will usually do the trick. It’s why I love getting out of the bubble and going back to Sussex, where no one cares what I do. My family just tell me to come and set the table. That’s really healthy, it keeps you grounded. I’d class myself as an extrovert. I’m very chatty and noisy. I can be quiet and reflective, of course, but generally I get my energy from other people. Injustice makes me angry. I get very unhappy if I think someone has been treated badly, or is behaving badly. I find it hard not to get involved. It matters what people think about me. But you can’t control every story. Someone says something, it spreads and then suddenly it’s become fact. The most recent one I heard was that in the early days of adam&eve, we had a ‘War Room’: four PRs locked in a room who worked around the clock. The internet’s a weird thing. When you do work that matters and people are talking about, then you’re in the firing line. When we released Sorry, I Spent It On Myself for Harvey Nichols there were lots of nice comments on YouTube, and just one saying: ‘This is shit.’ Underneath that, someone had written: ‘Why don’t you shut up and go back to doing the agency Christmas card?’ I thought that was brilliant. The mobile phone is both the single best and worst human invention. My five-year-old daughter always says: ‘Daddy’s gone into the phone space!’ When I’m actually texting her mum, trying to work out what to pack for the holiday. If I were UK Prime Minister for the day, I would throw my heart and soul into the National Health Service and I’d fix the railways. As someone who’s wrestled with a three-and-a-half hour commute for seven years, the decline in the train services is terrifying. They are being run for profit, but they don’t work and they’re unfeasibly expensive.

“The best days of my career truly are about the process and making of advertising; being the potter at the wheel. ”

I’d like to be remembered fondly, as a good friend, a good dad and a good brother. I think of that quote from the book Birdsong, when the character Firebrace says: ‘There is nothing more than to love and be loved’. At the end of the day, that’s what really matters. S

150 Inspired | out of hours

Photograph: jamen percy

letters to die for

You’ll not find this nursery book in Toys ‘R’ Us, but then its authors, illustrator Chris Walker and AKQA associate creative director Matt Longstaff, are more about raising grim giggles than teaching ABCs. Carol Cooper meets a couple of sunny guys with darkly droll minds

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Let’s PLay: murDer

“It has to be death by anything that is readily available around the house… I think the appeal is that we have had to be really creative with each one, like S is for skewering.”

t’s a sunny spring morning in a quiet corner of London’s fashionable Farringdon – I meet Matt Longstaff and Chris Walker, two well-mannered, softly-spoken gents, outside the AKQA London HQ, which happens to sit above the oﬃces of Save the Children. Everything seems so wholesome. Until we go and sit in a dark pub and discuss two kids slaughtering each other. These would be Rosé and Fred, who find 26 gruesome ways to kill in Longstaff and Walkers’ wickedly funny ABC book of cartoons. In the vein of Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies – another abecedarium, or alphabetical list, of darkly comic deaths – Let’s Play: MURDER is, in its creators’ words, ‘old fashioned non-PC fun, cunningly disguised as a children’s nursery book’. The concept dates from Longstaff ’s art school days in 2004. “I was going to do a scary mural outlining a different way to die for every letter of the alphabet. I didn’t do it, but kept it in mind as something that would be funny.” In 2006, on graduating in graphics and advertising, he got an internship at AKQA that led to a copywriting position. Now associate creative director at AKQA London, his time with the agency has seen him help open the new Berlin oﬃce and work on such imaginative campaigns as MTV’s Under The Thumb app and the Nissan IDx project in which virtual reality headsets gave users the chance to design their own cars. AKQA was also where he met Walker, who had spent nine years at the agency until last year when he quit his role as senior designer – having worked on such high-profile digital projects as the Nike and MINI websites. Now successfully freelancing, his bold career move has afforded him more time to develop Let’s Play: MURDER . Longstaff first mentioned the idea to Walker around two years ago and they started refining the concept and researching comedy deaths. “Our

“…there shouldn’t be anything overfantastical, no D is for dragons, or G is for gun. G ended up being for gas, helium gas, which Fred inﬂates Rosé with till she explodes.”

Google histories looked terrible for a while,” says Walker. “It wasn’t even going to be kids at first,” says Longstaff, “but then kids seemed more funny. If it was just two dudes beating the shit out of each other it would have been too dark. Then we thought, it should all be real, there shouldn’t be anything over-fantastical, no D is for dragons, or G is for gun.” Walker elaborates: “It has to be death by anything that is readily available around the house, anything that could happen if you left these kids alone for long enough. I think the appeal is that we have had to be really creative with each one, like S is for skewering. We could have just done that with a spear, but we used a swingball set. G ended up being for gas, helium gas, which Fred inﬂates Rosé with until she explodes.” The duo say they are not fans of horror, it’s more about having a laugh, “even if it’s a shocked or nervous laugh, it’s always a laugh. We don’t see it as death, the kids are alive on the next page,” says Walker. The book also celebrates the macabre side of childhood imagination. “In my house we weren’t allowed toy guns,” Longstaff recalls, “so we just found sticks that looked to us a bit like guns or space lasers and off we went.” Walker joins in: “Yeah, and you would play until someone got hurt, then a parent would step in. We’ve just removed the parents, to see what happens.” The characters were originally developed to spoof the 90s UK kids’ show Rosie and Jim. “We thought it might be funny to do a corrupted version of them but then we found nothing rhymed with Jim. And Fred rhymes with dead,” says Walker. “We wanted a chavvy name like Chardonnay. So we came up with Rosé.” After refining the concept they started bouncing the idea off various people, one of whom was Chris Baker of independent publishers Dead Canary Comics. “They kicked us into action to finish it

152 Inspired | out of hours

“Yeah, and [when we were kids] you would play until someone got hurt, then a parent would step in. We’ve just removed the parents, to see what happens.”

“We’ve been thinking about an interactive e-book, so on a touch screen you’d ‘swipe right to behead’. The users would be complicit. That would add to the black humour.”

and they will represent the book when it’s done. It’ll be their first book, which is exciting,” says Longstaff. DCC will be able to utilise their connections with Waterstones and Firebox, online purveyors of irreverent titles such as Crap Taxidermy and Images You Should Not Masturbate To. “And we’ve been talking to people at Magma Books and Urban Outfitters,” says Longstaff. So, although they admit it’s not exactly WH Smith material, there is definitely a market for this brand of gruesome fun, something that their outstandingly successful Kickstarter campaign has borne out. At the time of going to press the campaign had closed with more than 400 backers. “I thought it would tail off when we ran out of mates, “ says Walker. Longstaff enthusiastically outlines their progress: “We unlocked Brazil over the weekend,” he beams. “So now we have 20 countries who want to get involved in this. Which is just hilarious. We thought that we needed £4,000 to get it to print and we’re up to £9,000 now.” At the time of going to press, £13,250 had been pledged and they book will be shipped to 29 countries. The extra funding enabled them to up the quality of the product to hardback, with a dust jacket, too. It’s ironic that a Kickstarter page set up by two digitally-focused professionals proudly boasts the sensual, old-fashioned delights of textured paper and I suggest to them that this yearning for physical cultural artefacts is a response to the digital age, much like the resurgence of vinyl records. “That’s true actually, we’ve come to slightly fetishise it. Since we started talking about GSM [paper weight] it’s like a whole new world has opened up. We have MP3s and Kindles and so on but we really wanted to make something ‘real’. Maybe because that doesn’t happen so much any more,” muses Longstaff. “I’ve been a digital designer and illustrator

for 15 years and this is my first ever printed piece,” Walker adds. The project is not only a labour of love, it’s also fed back into their professional lives. Longstaff admits he used to avoid social media briefs but the experience of setting up a Facebook page and engaging with users has also improved his skills. “I’ve always been into making a point, cleanly and crisply and getting out. But in social, if you do that you can come across as rude and abrupt. For example, I don’t ask questions in my advertising but in social it’s all ‘what’s your favourite blah blah?’. But I’m learning to adapt what I do, even if it’s not about asking questions, it’s about getting people to share or like or be involved. The next time a social media brief comes my way I’ll pick it up as I feel I’ve more legitimacy now.” For Walker, the social media element has boosted his professional profile. “I’ve had more reaction to my work and actually got commissions off the back of it. Just from my name being on Kickstarter and Twitter.” The sales of his original Let’s Play: MURDER artwork has also garnered him new fans, selling fast to buyers around the world. Not bad for something that started out as a bit of a laugh. I ask them if they have further plans for Rosé and Fred. “We’ve been thinking about an interactive e-book, so on a touch screen you’d kind of ‘swipe right to behead’. The users would be kind of complicit and that would add to the black humour,” Longstaff chuckles. Walker agrees, “or maybe the next step should be a pop-up book. That would be nice.” Hmm. Not sure if ‘nice’ is the word. I leave them to ponder their dark arts and reemerge into the spring sunshine. Heading for the bus stop, I make a failed dash for the No. 73 – as it pulls away, I notice the particularly malevolent grin of a child staring at me from the back seat. S deadcanarycomics.com/store

154 People | post profile

pet projects VFX supervisor, director and artist at MPC, Diarmid HarrisonMurray came to the business late but shot through the ranks at CGI speed, to lead the creation of favourite CG characters John Lewis’ Monty the Penguin and the IKEA flying T-shirts. But his latest creature craze, he tells Adrian Pennington, is a badger

photograph: Sam napper

iarmid Harrison-Murray has a thing about badgers. A year ago, late at night in central London, he stepped out of a cab only to see a badger waiting on the curb a metre away. It didn’t seem in the least bit perturbed to either be on a street in the capital or to have Harrison-Murray staring back at him. “It was a bit of a Crocodile Dundee moment,” he says. “There was mutual respect. It seemed he walked off with a swagger. I’ve been quite obsessed by badgers ever since. I’m just waiting for the right script to come along.” That may come in soon as there is a remarkable amount of creature work being commissioned from creative houses like MPC, where Harrison-

Murray is VFX supervisor, director and artist. “I love creature work,” he says. “It’s so difficult to do well. It comes in cycles but the amount of creature scripts I quote on and look at is incredible. I wander around the floor here and marvel at all manner of strange things being made. A lot of those have come here because MPC does such a great job. After a period when creature work went a bit more stop-frame and lo-fi-style, high-production-values CG is back in fashion.”

Cute penguin, flying T-shirts Among the latest trendsetting CG characters is Monty the Penguin, heartwarming star of John Lewis’ 2014 Christmas spot conceived by adam&eveDDB, directed by Blink’s Dougal Wilson and supervised by Harrison-Murray. “When I moved to MPC I hoped I’d get a chance to work on John Lewis and with Dougal and I got them both within my first year,” he says. In fact, Harrison-Murray landed back-to-back jobs with Wilson, following up with the Joy Of Storage spot for Ikea via Mother, which saw MPC’s 3D team morph migratory birds into flying T-shirts. “John Lewis was a real highlight for me because you worry about the weight of expectation that’s carried by the ad before it comes out,” Harrison-Murray reveals. In that respect it bore similarities to the Skyfall title sequence he made at Framestore in 2012, one of many high profile projects that pepper his CV. “[Director] Danny [Kleinman] had great ideas about what he wanted for Skyfall, which at the very beginning he presented as a set of concept frames, like a pack of cards,” he explains. “I love being able to help directors materialise their creative vision. I’ll make some very quick technical prototypes to evolve the idea from a sketch into 3D. For me, working in a creative team where you can continually bounce ideas back and forth means the result of your collaboration is greater than the individual parts.” Harrison-Murray’s natural talent and strong eye for colour and composition have seen him swiftly rise to the top. Armed with a psychology degree from Oxford, he moved to London in 2000 to work as a freelance photographer’s assistant on fashion shoots and still lifes. He taught himself Photoshop and spent time as a retoucher, but his ambition wasn’t satisfied. Friend Jake Mengers, [then CG supervisor at Framestore, now director at Passion Pictures] suggested he learn 3D

animation package Maya and became his mentor, setting him challenges and projects. “I was driven to please Jake and I had a lot of catching up to do,” says Harrison-Murray. “I didn’t fancy getting into the industry at the bottom competing with runners 10 years younger than me.” Driven to succeed in VFX post but without any formal portfolio or training, the 29 year old worked night and day for a fortnight to compile a showreel that would meet the deadline and the stringent quality test for entry onto a prized Skillset-funded VFX masterclass. He nailed it, completed the seven-month course and landed a placement at The Mill, immediately starting on a Heinz commercial for director Duncan Jones, and then a crowd simulation for Lynx. After joining Framestore in 2006 as a midlevel CG artist, within three years he was head of 3D commercials. Taking charge of DJ Hero, a CG animation for Activision’s console game, Harrison-Murray developed a look that was part photo-real, part hyper-real and part nod to gameplay and which took a raft of awards including a gold Clio for Animation. “Until then, I’d integrated CG into plates lit by a director of photography, but this was fully CG from scratch and was more creatively fulfilling,” he explains. “It echoed back to my time in photography, crafting in light, tone and colour. It was a massive jump for me into a fully virtual world and was the first time I’d run a team of any size and creatively and technically it was a real landmark.”

A future in features? Since DJ Hero, Harrison-Murray has enjoyed the creative challenge of a number of other fully CG projects, including The Big Fish for Three Mobile. In addition to VFX supervising, he also directed this charming, award-winning spot. Now at MPC, Harrison-Murray has his sights set on expanding his directorial skills through MPC Creative, the facility’s bespoke in-house production service. He is nurturing a fledgling Houdini 3D department and nursing his own pet film project. Currently existing simply as a treatment with story and characterisation, the CG-animated short could be worked up into a fully-fledged feature, given the right backers. “Feature work is always of the highest standard, but in commercials we have to be slightly more experimental in our approach. I don’t mean that the quality of work suffers, more that I’m not too

Diarmid Harrison-Murray

| People 155

“John Lewis was a real highlight for me because you worry about the weight of expectation that’s carried by the ad before it comes out.”

fussed how you get there, so long as we produce stunning final images. On a film you’re in production for a year or more, so the discipline of how you get there is as important as the result.” Harrison-Murray also thrives on the multifaceted, multitasking nature of short-form. “On the same project I could be breaking down a problem to solve it technically, talking creatively with a director, rendering shots and performing early compositing work,” he says. “One minute I’ll be making a photoreal penguin, the next I could be dealing with a giant fluid simulation or a collapsing dinosaur.” Or even, one day, a swaggering badger… S

156 Insight | shots tech

jeremiah knight Executive director, digital, Saatchi & Saatchi LA

favourite kit 4 3rd Gen iPad plus an Apple Camera Connection Kit

This kit has a theme, namely travelling well (and light) with tech. The items below aren’t necessarily the latest-and-greatest tech. In fact, in some cases you might not want to travel with your latest gadgets. But they do consist of many of my favourite things to bring with me, whether I’m travelling for business or for family fun.

One of the plagues of near limitless digital photo storage is that we rarely take the time to select our best photos. So our photo libraries swell and aren’t as much fun to browse as an old-fashioned photo album. Here’s how I reduce the crud. Take an old iPad with the Apple Camera Connection Kit (so it can read SD cards from your camera) with you on your travels. Load the photos you’ve taken each day, review and be ruthless about deleting the bad shots. Keep the photos on your SD card (don’t delete them) and your iPad becomes backup storage.

1 2

5 Macbook Pro Retina 13” Who needs the 15” when you’ve got a retina display and 500gb of storage. This is my workhorse machine and it’s only a pound or two heavier than the Macbook Air. Crazy.

5 4

6 Bose QC15 Noise Cancelling Headphones I have had these headphones for so long that the rubberised padding on the ear and headpieces have worn thin and started flaking off. (Bose, if you’re reading this… lifetime warranty?)

7 Flight 001 gadget bag I use this bag to manage wire clutter. Check out their shop at flight001.com.

8 Romoss battery backup 9 6 3

9 Kensington Presenter Pro with Remote Green Laser

At about US$70 this has got to be the dorkiest thing I’ve ever purchased. But if you’ve ever found yourself at a client meeting or a conference with badly-working presenter tech, you’ll thank yourself for toting around your own stuff. S

photograph: Diana Kaufmann

1 Osprey Meridian 28” convertible travel luggage Perfectly designed for big city travel, especially European destinations with cobblestone streets. It’s got rollerblade style wheels, 28” of packable space, an internal suspension frame that can convert to a back pack and a detachable daypack that includes a padded laptop (or iPad) sleeve, so you can take what you need with you during the day.

2 Polaroid Cube This quirky little digital camera costs US$99 and is like the cute Tamagotchi version of a GoPro. One click and it takes a photo. Two clicks it starts filming video.

Team One (Saatchi’s sister agency in LA) gave this to me a couple of years ago. It can fully charge an iPhone twice or one iPhone and one iPad fully. It’s part of my daily kit.

3 Fujifilm XF1 The X100T is one of my favorite cameras of all time (and Instagrammers love it, too. #X100T). But it’s still a fairly bulky camera to tote with you on vacation. Instead you might opt for the XF1 – one of Fuji’s smaller offerings in the X line. The XF1 has a fun-to-open folding lens system that, when closed, means you can easily fit the camera into your pocket. Open, it gives you 4x optical zoom and manual DSLR controls so you can futz with depth of field, making point-and-shoot photos seem more pro than they should. And with the same CMOS sensor as the bigger X30, this tiny little camera is pretty dang good in low light conditions.

Apps and Sites Circa Keep up with the latest world and US news in simple, digestible, Twitter-card style formats. Word Lens Google added this tech to its Translate app a while back. Provides real-time translation of signage. Helpful for figuring out how to get around in a foreign country. Tablet Thanks to Jason Schragger (our CCO) for turning me on to this gem. The best site for finding last minute deals on boutique and luxury hotels.

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new directors

PIN PUSHERS Everyone’s just decided to have a go at directing music promos. Ryan Watson talks to a Scottish sitcom actress and a pair of agency creatives who’ve turned their hand to interpreting sound in vision. Plus, another newcomer regrets his choice of ﬁddly, time-consuming medium Nathan Johnson music vidEo son Lux change is Everything

Nathan Johnson refers to the “lots of something little” approach when asked about the production on his video for Son Lux’s Change Is Everything. The description couldn’t be more relevant. Made with 200 push pins and 500 feet of rubberised thread, the stunning piece involved over 4,000 individual formation moves on a white board and was carried out over a month spent working 14-hour days at the director’s home. “I’ve always been attracted to art that uses very simple materials in its execution,” explains Johnson of his attraction to the painstaking process. “I love the idea of seeing something ordinary and mundane transformed into something beautiful and lifelike. It feels extra-empowering to know that the price of admission is only the amount of time and energy you’ve got to spend.” The resulting work, created with Denver-based design company The Made Shop, incorporates motion-captured rotoscoping of human bodies, buildings and expressive forms made with the materials picked up from a hardware store, to tell a story of change.

Johnson is a friend of Son Lux, aka Ryan Lott, and their collaboration represented a continuation of the pair’s longstanding working relationship. “When his team came to us for this project, they wanted us to oversee everything related to the visual presentation of the album, from the artwork to the music videos and stage show,” explains Johnson. “Son Lux’s music is so cinematic and it’s just waiting for imagery. Really, it feels like it’s built to be a welcoming partner for visuals and it’s one of my favourite things when your eyes and ears are working in tandem, receiving equally great stimuli. If you can get the sight and sound working toward the same purpose, that’s the ultimate goal.” With a narrow window of time and a small budget the job would always prove challenging, but Johnson reveals that he probably underestimated the actual amount of work that would be involved when conjuring up his idea. “I was just racking my brain, trying to think of something we could do relatively cheaply in the studio and I wrongly assumed that it would be easy to move pins and thread. My brother Zach does

“Son Lux’s music is so cinematic and it’s just waiting for imagery. Really, it feels like it’s built to be a welcoming partner for visuals.” hand-painted rotoscope animations that literally take months, so I figured I could squeeze this out in a couple of weeks without too much sweat.” The most challenging part, he says, was the point in the video when the camera zooms in on a TV screen, requiring more pushing and pulling of pins than at any other point. “On the third day, we were still working on the TV zoom sequence,” the unsigned director concludes. “I just hadn’t anticipated that a) organic shapes require exponentially more nodes than simple architecture or geometry, b) outlining teeth with pins and thread is idiotic, and c) combining all of this into a zoom means moving every single pin a minuscule amount for each frame. In the end, it was all quite a bit longer, harder, and stupider than I imagined.”

160 People | new directors

Georgia King music vidEo The Last skeptik me And my

Georgia King has carved out a consistent career as an actress in TV and film – appearing in a string of series, most recently as Goldie Clemmons in US sitcom The New Normal, and as Rebecca in this year’s Kill Your Friends movie – but her latest job saw her go behind the lens to deliver as the director on promo for artist The Last Skeptik’s track Me And My. Featuring Charity Wakefield, of Wolf Hall fame, and Gossip Girl’s David Call, the moody black and white piece deals with the breakdown of a relationship between a cohabiting couple. Set in their shared LA home, the video plays out with strong, symbolic choreography as they wrestle with their emotions and resentment towards each other before finally calling it a day. King tapped into the theme after a painful experience in her personal life and wrote the treatment a week later, homing in on the

“sadness, repetition, anxiety, pain, frustration and disappointment” expressed in the track. “I found that ‘right time’ moment with The Last Skeptik and Me And My,” she explains. “I had been looking to direct a music video for a while to explore, experiment and learn more. I was told the song was about loss and longing and I thought I could do it justice.” Her approach came with a cyclical theme to complement the repetition and strong narrative with quick push-ins, unusual alienating angles, close-ups, pans and tilts via a Movi rig. The emotion was further emphasised with the limited palette in contrast to a bright paint-like substance which crops up throughout to remind viewers of the tarnished love at stake. “I was really intrigued by stripping away colour and seeing how to use light and shade to express the emotions and layers of the music.

It felt more raw, exposed and vulnerable to shoot it in black and white,” adds the director, who is represented by Paradigm LA. “The textures, patterns and lines really came to the fore without colour. The story is quite emotionally complex and I thought the black and white would bring simplicity to counterbalance that.” She’s heard plenty of interesting interpretations about the film but what does it all really mean? “At the core, for me, it’s the tug and pull that you experience at the end of

“I was really intrigued by stripping away colour and seeing how to use light and shade to express the emotions and layers of the music.”

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new directors

Etienne & Julien-Pierre music video Monsieur Monsieur Tear The House Up

a relationship,” King responds. “The need to let someone go, to walk away from someone who has hurt you but at the same time the heartbreaking need to hold on to them, the overwhelming desire to continue to love them.” On a more upbeat note, she recalls having an incredible time working with the reversing shots, speeding up, slowing down and quick cuts to tell the story in the edit, putting the film together with editor, Sushila Love. King is excited about what lies ahead: “Directing gives me so much joy. I would love to do more music videos because I love how open they are creatively; your imagination can go wild. I’m also working on writing a feature script. That’s a big goal, I think. When I’m ready, though. I still have so much to learn. But I’m OK with making mistakes too. I’m not sure I will ever be entirely happy with what I make… but is anyone?”

When it came to taking their first punt at directing, Fred & Farid creative team Etienne and Julien-Pierre wanted their project to come alive without any ‘barriers’. As keen gamers in tune with modern pop culture they found their desired freedom in the debauched and limitless world of action-adventure franchise Grand Theft Auto (GTA). Having been assigned the brief for French dance music act Monsieur Monsieur’s remix of Zebra Katz’s track Tear The House Up, the creatives worked on the promo for five months around their roles at the Paris agency and the result is a four-and-a-half-minute bout of cool West Coast chaos in animated form. “[Monsieur Monsieur] had wanted us to do something for them so we asked if they had a brutal and frenetic badass track to share,” state the pair. “We listened to them and settled on the remix of Zebra Katz’s track because it fit perfectly with what we had in mind.” Their idea is set in the fictional city of Los Santos, a virtual habitat based on Los Angeles which has become synonymous with the look and feel of the GTA gaming world. Introducing a typically reckless rock’n’roll-type character and following an ever so familiar law-breaking decline throughout, the story takes the viewer on the ultimate fantasy thrill ride with Trevor, the protagonist. “We follow the craziest character of GTA having a late night drink in a strip club,” describe the duo, who are unsigned as directors. “Our hero gets kicked out of the club and finds himself drunk in his underwear at midday before getting into an epic police chase.” The high level of storytelling of the hit title has impressed the creatives and they’ve spent time playing almost all of its iterations over

the years, labelling it a “creativity catalyser which every creative should play”. The chance to break free from the confines of the agency and client world, transitioning to the virtual realm, wasn’t the only appeal of the job; their budget was non-existent and the chance to utilise GTA’s video editing feature and hijack the game as a form of new media allowed them to make a movie with “crazy production values without spending a dollar”. Don’t think that it was any less work though, as the pair makes it clear that they still had to take the same approach as they would with a live-action agency shoot. “We had exactly the same modus operandi as with a live shoot,” they confirm. “We defined our story, chose our locations, made a character and objects casting, chose our weather, shoot rates, angles, everything. The pre-production was what we’re used to.” And despite the video being made with game footage, the aim was to try to make people forget about the GTA factor, which, with so many fan-made videos out there, wasn’t easy. “On one hand it’s easy to record and shoot game footage: there are thousands of machinima videos on YouTube. On the other hand, it’s very hard to bring up the cinematography level, and build up an interesting story without any downtime using the physics and locations that the game can offer,” they say. The video has been well received on YouTube and with this unique directing experience under their collective belt, the creatives believe that their agency careers can only help in creating more of the same: “Working as creatives is the best way to stay in the creative effervescence and learn from some of the huge directors we collaborate with on beautiful brands.”

162 Pictures | SNAPSHOTS

SNAPSHOTS

Bridge architecture, transport hubs, roads and a doughnut to die for are top New York City sights for Jeff Robins, VFX supervisor/senior compositor at The Mill New York 3

1 On the roof deck of The Mill New York 2 George Washington Bridge Bus Station 3 The Staten Island Ferry’s Whitehall Terminal building 4 Williamsburg Bridge 5 Columbia University Medical Center 6 Road signs at the top of Manhattan

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7 A cable car at the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge 8 A New York City bike lane 9 Walking the dog, Williamsburg Bridge 10 The best doughnut in the city – from Doughnut Plant 11 The view on my bike commute to The Mill

12 Portrait on the Williamsburg Bridge 13 Coliseum, Fort Washington Park 14 Gates to the Riverbank State Park 15 The Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge, aka 59th St Bridge 16 Watching the traffic jam at John Finley Walk

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