D&AD at M&C

Last week we made our way to M&C Saatchi, where we had Tom and his partner Uche reviewing all of our D&AD advertising workshop work. We had five campaigns in ours but the guys didn't really dig most of them. Blimey.

The stuff they did like though we're accord with as well. So we're currently working with these strategies, to turn them into great campaigns for more suitable brands. And yes, we're quite excited with the outcome we have on our hands so far.

Overall we liked the advertising workshops, the briefs were not very ideal for a portfolio, as they are either charity brands (NSPCC) or very niche products (Rexel eco stationary, D&AD workshops). Nether less it was good practice. And we've met lots of nice people on the way. Thanks D&AD.

Change

Via Adsurd

Advertising Techniques

*hastily drawing dashed lines around our ads*

Le Publivores

Last week we went to The Night of the Ad Eaters. 6 hours of ads in a cinema with entertainment in between. We didn't stand the whole night, we might have, but at times the ad selection was way to random.

We reckon the IPA just used the french real, as for 20 minutes they had ads running with Paris as a location – zero idea and zero fun, mostly. Now if that would have been London it might have been more appealing right? Overall it was a good night, there were some pretty wicked ads that were fun to watch on the big screen with a non forgiving crowd that applauded the good stuff. Have a look at some of the spots that stood out, they are nicely assembled by Seventy Seven. Thanks for saying hi, Luke & Co. I think I also spotted Mike&Phil in the crowds?

The Bill, and The Chris.

Jai Wal

D&AD workshop portfolio

We are just collating all campaigns, and revising a few of them for a final D&AD advertising workshop book which we'll have to enter later today. It will then be sent to M&C Saatchi. They will look through them and give us feedback on all our work next week – should be quite interesting. We're pretty happy with most of the stuff in there. After that's done there's gonna be even more time to rock our own briefs.

Rewarding

Working all day, first caf, reading the brief, reading it again, running around in circles, surfing around, playing with the phone, changing location, changing music, rereading the brief, doubting the brief, doubting if you can deliver greatness, giving up, picking up again, thinking, chewing on everything around you, mindless sketching, joking, taking apart the problem, reassembling it again, texting, nonsense, the most random moment, almost the end of the day, the cliched spark, a line from the lips without thinking much, the tense silence, filled with oh's and ah's while a hundred and one new connections are made up there, based on this one thought.

You can't beat this stuff. That's why we're here.

Creative Henna

We're working. On the portfolio. Today it's Tropicana, Kingsmill and Tide. We don't like writing on hands. Sometimes it's fun though.

The big guys

Let's see what the advertising god themselves have to say about the first job, the portfolio and dedication, all things which are discussed in the thread below. Black Bag, a worldwide creative recruitment agency interviewed some of the finest creatives about a career in advertising. These bits I like best:

“…The only thing I know is that if you want to make money one day, the only thing people are paying for in this industry, is the quality of your portfolio. It’s up to anyone to decide at what moment they want to move for money, but obviously, the more you work, the better your portfolio is. The best one you can get. It’s as simple as that. People will be ready to pay you because you’re the star of the moment or whatever, but at the end of the day, invest in your portfolio and one day you’ll be able to do exactly what you want. You’ll have the freedom to choose the agency, freedom to move from one country or another or the freedom to get lots of money. Portfolio means money.”

“…I'm a really big believer that your first or second job can really make who you are. You can be really imaginative but if you get bad Creative Directors at the beginning of your career they can point you in the wrong direction and make you do hack work and you may never get it back.”

"If I am gonna to be in this industry I wanna be the best at it. You can't guarantee that you're the most talented, I mean that's something I couldn't guarantee. But I could guarantee that I'd work harder than anybody else. For the first six or seven years, which is terribly for my social life, I'd probably slept in the agency two or three nights a week. I would work as long as it took. I forced myself to write as many ideas as I possibly could. So I would do stupid things like, I'd get layout pads and fill it with a hundred squares. Like post-it notes. And I couldn't leave until I filled each box with an idea, even if I loved the first idea."

Have a look at their site Diary of a Creative Director for more interviews.

We want it, We'll get it

Phew, lots of comments on here recently. We read all of them and appreciate them.

We started this blog as a team to create a platform for us to keep track of our doings, to keep us looking around, to keep us exploring, to keep us writing & thinking. Perhaps it hasn't worked out as planned. Or maybe it worked too well? At some point a lot of people started tuning in. We think it was around the time we started getting our first placement offers. A conversation with you started. And we've been pretty surprised by it. There's no need to recap what was said on the comments, however it's been a lot of everything. We enjoyed it at times, and hated it at others. It seemed more of you were interested in comments then in the things we were actually writing.

Here's the most important thing we took away from it:

Our book isn't strong enough yet, the strategies could be far stronger. Yet it's nothing new, as we both know that we can do better. For us it's a constant process of improving the portfolio, and never to stop doing so because we'll never be satisfied with it. Admittedly we do slow down at times, as we're constantly doing placements. And they always take priority.

It's tough to work all day at the agency and work on the portfolio at night. Yet that's no excuse. In fact that's the main reason we went for the D&AD workshop in the first place. We wanted to have deadlines for ourselves that we had to keep hitting on the side of agency work. But it turns out that the briefs for the workshops aren't as portfolio friendly as we thought (more on this in a later post).

We need to and want to get better, constantly. All creative teams need to. It's our last day at adam&eve today. We haven't got anything lined up. So that gives us this weekend to work out a plan and refine it next week on where to go on from here. We want to make our strategies stronger, make our book more interesting and develop into a better creative team. From what we can gather hardly any agencies are hiring at the moment. So the only way in for us is to be better. We need to make them want to hire. That's what we're going to tackle. There's no shortcut, it'll always be hard work and it will demand a lot of time. We haven't had the luxury to create a book together at college, so we need to be quicker as well. If you like, stick with us and give us a hand. As long as you stay constructive, you're more than welcome.

It's gonna be a fun ride.