So they challenged us to create a campaign to attract the toughest of audiences, the Creative and Design Directors from the UK, to the exhibition. It’s a tough gig, I should know after our campaign in 2009 at LBi.

with under three weeks from briefing to print, we threw ourselves at the challenge to create a talkable, shareable awareness piece to drive people to the show.

After a frantic round of concepting, @floheiss and I came up with an idea. At New Blood, careers are made and students that may otherwise end up in other professions they’re less suited to are given a chance to pursue the job of their dreams. D&AD has been “saving” creatives from that fate since 1962.  We would show well-known Creative Directors and Designers at around the age of 20, when they themselves were leaving college, along with the “Plan B” they were saved from.

We both had exceptionally embarrassing pictures of us at that age, and figured that the campaign would be relatively easy to create by collecting the silliest old photos from old hands in the industry, and captioning them with even sillier titles.

I was hugely concerned about using images of people after the reaction to the 2009 campaign (these people don’t represent us, why aren’t they smiling, they should be looking at the camera…) so we moved from a series of individual shots to a more postcard-like design for the poster where we could feature a greater range of industry bods. we thought if we could be provocative and funny enough then the campaign would be seen for what it is – a genuine contribution to geting people along and helping students. To that end we used our most embarrassing personal photos as the thought starter to attract other people to take part.

We also created a site, http://www.dandad.org/noplanb where anyone could easily post their own pictures and text describing their Plan Bs.

It seems to have gone down well, and the exhibition was rammed for its three days. I hope we helped somehow!

The poster – Flo and I are in the top row.

The winners of the 2012 Student Awards

Born at Creative Social Paris, a team of us Socials were tasked with sharing our best ever piece of advice, and these were illustrated by the incredible talent on the books at Bernstien & Andriulli.

My advice is:
“Only boring people get bored.” as said to me by Mr Sophocles, the Head of English at my secondary school James Ruse, when I was in Grade 8.

It’s been beautifully illustrated by Andrew Rae, who also drew advice submissions from the audience  live at the event.

Check out pictures of the event here.

I spoke about optimism with consequences, personal responsibility, existential philosophy and the White Pencil of course.
Check out my pre-Campfire interview below:

So, what did they solve? We were able to work with our Post Office clients to unlock a brief for the students to work on – one that looks at how to make the experience of going to the Post Office easier. Where do people get frustrated? In the queue. We were after ‘ideas that could be advertised’ – innovation, events or products that get to the heart of the issue and give the Post Office proof points to potentially hero. We were joined in Manchester for the day by our Post Office client and Dare’s Client Services Director Gav, where we briefed the students as a group before splitting them into teams.

Week one and six student teams were coached by industry experts from AMVBBDO* and LBi* (as well as our good selves) in the basics of both brand strategy and experience planning. This culminated in a clear audience, insight and strategy that was presented back to the group and industry representatives. They then raced to swap their strategies in a deft game of office rowing, spurred on by poet and unicorn enthusiast Chris Clarke of LBi*.

Week two and the teams had a presentation from Plan B Studio* around Hunch vs Data, and a project crit from Work Club founder Andy*, as they worked hard pulling together tight presentations for a final showcase in front of our clients the following week. I was lucky enough to be in Manchester for the final 48 hours as the teams worked frantically in ‘art jail’ to get everything polished and rehearsed.

On the final day, both clients and Gav were back to assess ideas alongside Principal Lecturer Warren Harrison from Teeside University (Hyper Island is accredited to this University in the UK.)

The outcome? Six incredible ideas and brilliant presentations, some very happy clients up for taking the ideas further and an enormous smile on my face. And of course, a party afterwards to welcome Crew 2 to Manchester (from 16 different countries) that had just the right amount of Swenglish style.

I learned a lot from the experience about myself as a Creative Director and how to approach work and teams, and was blown away by the quality of the ideas and the dedication the students showed. And I hope the students learned a little too!

*Thanks to Raj, Chris & Chris, Little Chef and the Sandoz (and Dave and Lewis at Hyper)

You can check out one of their responses (that made it to PSFK) “QueueHacker” below.

This post can also be found on the Dare blog here. You can follow Hyper Island at @hypereverything.

I recently came across the amazing (and young!) Taiwanese artist PEIHANG HUANG 黃沛涵 . She talks about her art being a representation of the collision of Chinese, Japanese and American cultures – something I experienced first-hand when in Taiwan last year.

She says: “My work : Fleshy Fairytale series, of all those merely nude figures are based on barbie dolls and puppets, it links to the strong mixed influence of Chinese, Japanese and American culture to Taiwan, which refers to the issue of identity of my culture; and also focusing on several topics and events that is important in our life, such as death/life/ love/ beauty/body/timing, I believe puppets are the perfect figure to project human behaviors and philosophies.”

Check her out here, and her gallery in Taiwan out here

Dabitch

I’ve just been interviewed for the Adland.tv blog by the supercool Åsk, AKA Dabitch. THe rockingest redhaired viking in the industry. She’s so much cooler than Don Draper, and a lot more interesting to follow.

You can see the full interview here, covering all sorts of personal questions about my life, inspiration and idols.

Two of the questions are below (I hope you go read the rest and find it vaguely interesting);

Who is your advertising hero and why?
Being an Aussie growing up in the 70s and 80s it has to be the team of Allan Johnston and Alan Morris (who formed Mojo). They shaped my young consciousness in the most profound ways. Allan was probably the world’s best jingle writer and I still know the words to all his “songs”, and what brands they were for! It’s great to see joint ECDs in the 70s not adhering to the Art Director/Copywriter mould either (they were both trained copywriters).

What piece of advice do you wish someone had told you when you were starting out?
When a piece of work doesn’t feel right, its not right. If you see a project going the wrong way it’s always the right thing to do to say so, even if you don’t yet have the experience to know exactly how to fix it. If you say nothing it will ALWAYS come back to bite you.