Juniors, meet Kieran Antill. Originally hailing from Sydney – Kieran is a Creative Director at Leo Burnett in NYC. Not only is he one of the most awarded Art Directors in the universe (voted Cannes 2010 #1 Art Director), he is also a fine artist – exhibiting in Sydney, London and New York for the last 10 years. Together with his creative partner and good mate Michael Canning, he’s responsible for flippin’ successful campaigns like this, this and this. We got in touch with Kieran to find out just how he got so darn good at making stuff. Turns out, it could be as simple just saying “yes”…

Junior: Hey Kieran! How is NYC treating you? How has the first year been?

Kieran Antill: Great! I made the move to New York with the Leo Burnett network with my great mate Michael Canning which was a reunion with Chief Creative Officer, Jay Benjamin. So to be honest it has been about as smooth anyone could ask for. We’ve had an amazing year 1 in New York – opening the office winning 2 major clients in Chobani Yogurt and Dewars scotch, and launching a new creative platform in New York Writes Itself.

Jr: Jealous! We’ve got so many questions… Let’s go from the top – What’s your background? What did you study? How did you get into advertising?

KA: My background? Ok, here is the abridged version: I grew up in Australia. Chased girls. Left on a basketball scholarship to the US aged 18. Had to pick something to study at University in the States so I chose Biology. A year into my degree I did a photography class and fell in love with the arts. I changed my degree to Fine Arts with a Graphic Design emphasis, but spent most of my time in the painting studio, and on the road with basketball. Basketball took me around the states for 5 years and then to Europe, but after knee surgery and thousands of better players I returned to Australia.

When I got home, I spent a full year waiting for people to ask me to design and paint them something while selling my art at the local Manly markets. That never happened and I finally I realised I hadn’t told anyone I existed – so I took a freelance job with a friend of mine. That only lasted a month, but he gave me contacts at two other companies. I called them both. One of them never called me back (dick) and the other one asked me to come in. I met Graham Nunn at the then FNL offices. He was a very nice man and he seemed to like my work. I left, a.k.a I went back to the beach and sold my art for two more months. The phone then rang when I was in this shitty hardware store where I couldn’t find the right paint colour I was looking for. Graham somehow hadn’t lost my number (nice man) and he asked if I could do style guides. I, naturally, lied, and said “of course”-  then called my friend and asked what the hell a style guide was. I started freelancing for FNL, and left 2 years later with a business card that said ‘Art Director’. From there on I have kept saying “yes, I can do that”, then figuring out how to actually do it. Along the way I have realised the secret is to just say ‘yes’ and figure the rest out as you go.

Jr: So true. Lots of people we’ve interviewed got started in a similar way. It’s nice to know we all have to start somewhere – be it style guides, 8×7 press ads or that shitty retailer no one wants to work on. Do you see your time at FNL as a bit of an advertising apprenticeship?

KA: FNL was a small agency that had very premium clients like VW, Sony and Harley Davidson (at least back 8 years ago). It was a great training ground for me as the work was top shelf, but by the agency being so small, even as a junior my role was important.

The best agencies to get a start in are often the smaller more boutique agencies that have a big reputation. Working at a smaller agency means ‘all hands on deck’, so you will be exposed to everything and it’s much easier getting onto big opportunities in that kind of environment. If the agency is too big the culture tends to teach hierarchy to its creatives, so you spend your first years being told that you are a junior – which in my opinion just stunts creative growth and simply serves as an excuse not to be better.

However, the thing to realize about larger agencies (150+ people) is that they are often made up of smaller sub-agencies. Not defined by walls, but by the personalities of the people that work there. If you are a junior, you want to find out who you report to – who is the Creative Director that will be giving you your opportunities. Great work is often made by a handful of people regardless of the size of the agency. You want to know who they are because just having the same business card does not mean you will work with them, or learn from them. If the agency is too small there are often no opportunities and the budgets can be so tight that keeping the doors open is considered a success.

Ultimately however, you need to learn the people and not the agencies. Find out who does what work and contact them directly. If they work in your agency ask them to tell you more about the work they have done, and maybe a brief you could help out on. If they work somewhere else, ask for a job (you never know what they will say). A tip on finding really good people is that they have done more than just one great bit of work – consistently great work is the real test. Google names of people credited on the work you like and see what else they have done.

Jr: Coming from more of a graphic design background – Did you ever do Award School – or did you ‘get’ advertising straight away?

KA: AWARD school is heavily weighted towards idea generation, and it should be. But, once you have a great idea you need to be able to articulate it in words and/or pictures to help people around you understand the idea. Your Creative Director, the Account Management team, your client and in the case of AWARD school, your tutors. This might be the hardest part.

Producing your ideas lives outside of AWARD school and it usually comes more naturally to those with a design and art background. This is something no school can really teach, it is only though the doing that you get better. Plenty of great ideas stumble and fall at this stage.

So in short, if you were in a job interview you might have someone ask – “I see you’ve done AWARD school, what else have you done?” – Make sure you have the ‘what else’.

Jr: Tell us about your art. Was that your “What else”?

KA: My art is my personal space. The role it plays in my life is to feel completely free. I love all the commercial ventures I find myself apart of, but collaboration often comes with compromise. My art is the thing “what else” that has opened plenty of doors as it has not needed to compromise.

That being said, when it comes to my commercial ventures I’ve learned from working with great creatives like Michael Canning, Steve Coll, Jay Benjamin and Andy DiLallo that it’s all about protecting the core idea and never compromising on that part, which has led to work that has defined my career to this point.

Having personal projects for all creatives in whatever form is essential. It builds confidence. You know you can create without all the hype, all the meetings and all the award shows.

Jr: At what point did you aspire to become a Creative Director?

KA: I’ve never aspired to be a Creative Director by title. But I’ve never enjoyed reporting to people. That has been a mix of immaturity and confidence to tell the truth. But today it just feels like the right position to be in, the younger guys teach me as much as I teach them.

Junior: Ok Andrew – Can we call you Footey? Tell us, how did you get into advertising?

Footey: I was studying law at university, and realised the only thing I’d learned was that I didn’t want to be a lawyer. I’d never really thought about a career in advertising, because quite frankly it hadn’t occurred to me. (Truth be known I was probably spending too much time on the golf course to think about any career at all.) But I got to talking to a couple of mates in the ad business who suggested I give it a go, firstly by doing AWARD School. One of those mates was Adam Francis, who was an art director at the Adelaide start-up Killey & Withy, which was to become KWP! Anyway, I finished my law degree, then did okay in AWARD School, and by this time Adam had moved to Clemenger Adelaide and was in need of a writer. Fortunately, Clems gave me a crack. That was over 18 years ago, and Adam and I still work together to this day.

Jr: 18 years! That’s longer than some marriages. At what point did you consider starting your own agency?

AF: Just to give you the career context, I went from being a writer at Clemenger Adelaide to a senior writer and creative director at Clemenger Harvie/CHE, then to Y&R Melbourne as a senior writer under James McGrath, then to joint creative director at Y&R Adelaide. We had an interesting 18 months or so at Y&R Adelaide. When Adam and I, together with MD David Hallett arrived, the place was struggling badly despite having an agency full of great, talented people. We worked incredibly hard, did some good work, turned things around, and then… lost Mitsubishi, our biggest client. The decision was made in Japan, and was totally out of our hands. Y&R made the decision to shut the agency, so we initially decided to start our own shop in Adelaide, which we did, although it proved to be a false start for AJF Partnership. At around the same time, CHE asked us to return as joint executive CDs, and for one reason or another this seemed like the best option at the time, particularly as it allowed us to return to Melbourne. But after ten months at CHE we realised that we really would like to have a bash at it ourselves, so we left, and we did.

Jr: It’s obviously paid off now, but what were some of the initial challenges you first faced? Obviously it didn’t take long to pick a name?

AF: Winning clients, obviously. Ever tried cold-calling anyone? It’s pretty daunting. We had to decide who we were going to call, who would actually do the calling, what they’d say, and then how we’d present if they were interested in hearing from us. What was our point of difference? What could we offer that other agencies couldn’t? Fortunately, our approach must have worked – in six years we’ve gone from three to sixty five staff in Melbourne, and have our Sydney office up and running with around a dozen staff. As for the name, crazily enough we did think about other options. Fortunately we resisted, and AJF Partnership it was. The fact that the three founding partners have exactly the same initials has been a pretty good icebreaker.

Jr: There’s a lot of factors in play when it comes to a winning new business pitch, but what advice would you give young creatives when one lands on their desk?

AF: I don’t think young creatives should treat a pitch brief differently to any other. Simply put, answer the brief in a creative, engaging way. More often than not, you need to find a big brand thought that can be easily demonstrated across a whole range of media. You might find that the CD pushes you down a certain path, and may not always go for what you consider to be your ‘coolest’ or most creative ideas. But as you say, there are a lot of factors in play in a pitch, so there are a lot of strategic decisions being made that you may not fully appreciate. Clients pitch for a lot of reasons, but there are generally very specific things they are looking for in an agency, and it’s the CD’s job to make sure the work delivers on those. One thing I’d say is that it’s important to get up to speed with the client’s business, their category and their target audiences very quickly. Any agency that demonstrates a good understanding of these things will be off to a good start.

Jr: Selling ideas – whether it be a pitch or a presentation is the second part of what we do. Can you tell us a few things we can do to get our ideas made?

AF: As a junior, I think the best thing you can do is to make sure your ideas answer the brief, and can be achieved on time and on budget. You may not be presenting the work yourself, so you’ll often have to leave the selling to others, be they account management or senior creative people. But you can make the sale somewhat easier by developing a bulletproof creative rationale, explaining why the idea is right for the brief and why it will do the job it needs to. If appropriate, include plenty of reference so that the client can really picture what you’re trying to achieve. But don’t despair if work doesn’t get sold. Chances are, you’re working on smaller briefs at this stage, and although you’d no doubt like the agency to fight tooth and nail for your idea, in the bigger scheme of the client relationship it may not make a lot of sense to push too hard for a smaller job. It’s a ‘lose the battle to win the war’ situation. In any case, if your idea’s good enough it’ll still stand out in your folio, and CDs will understand the reasons why it didn’t get made.

Jr: Speaking of folios – What do you consider when judging the strength of an idea?

AF: Does it answer the brief, and will it work its arse off. In other words, will it get the people we want to do what we want them to? That’s what all great advertising does. Of course, there are many ways to achieve this – that’s where the creative bit comes in, and that’s what we’re paid to do.

Jr: And what do you look for when hiring a potential creative?

AF: For a start, we’ve got an unwritten no-dickhead policy. You spend a lot of time with people at work, so I’d rather enjoy their company than not. We look for people with honesty, integrity and a good work ethic. We look for people who can create campaigns, not just one-off ads. We look for people with a certain level of maturity so that they can work autonomously. And we look for people who create brilliant work that is designed to sell stuff, not just make their reel and folio look good.

Jr: As a copywriter, what process do you go through when writing headlines?

AF: I sit down with a pad and a pen. I scribble words on a page. If I kind of like a thought, I’ll draw a box that’s the shape of the ad and write the headline in it. Sometimes I pull out a thesaurus, just to look for other ways into what I’m trying to say. I keep referring back to the brief. Maybe flick through an annual, visit the client’s website, stare out the window – all the usual stuff. It has to be quiet – I can’t write with music on or people talking around me. I really enjoy the process. I don’t delete or chuck out anything either, because a lot of thoughts that you don’t end up using for that particular headline can make great bits of copy, or lines for digital pieces, or become other ideas altogether.

Jr: Lastly, what’s the best piece advice that was given to you when you were a junior?

AF: Here’s a good one for writers: buy a stopwatch. Whenever you’re writing for TV or radio, read your scripts out loud, at a leisurely pace, and time yourself. This will help you to stop over-writing, and prevent much stress in the recording studio.

There are all sorts of those little things that you pick up along the way, but I can’t recall any single profound pieces of advice that I’ve lived by. I guess I’ve always just observed everything and everyone, and reached my own conclusions about what I thought were the right and wrong ways to do things. I’m still doing it today.

30 events in 3 years! Look at us go. And what better way to finish twenty-eleven than with Grant Rutherford, who took a little time out from hanging out with dolphins to tell us how to be the next ECD of DDB. Well, sort of, kinda. He’d be out of a job if he did that. Silly. Still, he taught us how to be better creatives by not hating Katy Perry and making us realise that beer is not a food group – and he made us laugh. At him. And his Dolphin. Anyway if you missed it, you missed out. We’ll see you next year at our next event, homies.

Jr: So Heath, start at the beginning.

Heath Rudduck: I started as an art director at Y&R. But originally my background was in architecture. I’d lived in the UK and the US before I took my gig at Y&R and I was just amazed in ‘91 or whatever it was why we really weren’t using desktop publishing, and why people weren’t using these new-fangled Macintosh systems to produce stuff. In the UK in architecture practices, we were using desktop publishing for all of our documents and promotional work – and I thought that advertising could use some of that technology. I’ve got a thing for gadgets anyway, so wanted to work out what this whole desktop publishing thing was about and this ‘internets’ thing. Back then, If you knew what an @ symbol was, you were a bloody genius. Anyway, long story short, I basically teamed up with a couple of the guys in the office to try it out, and we toyed around with making a website for Jeans Plus. It’s so funny to think that in 1994 we were even considering doing something like that. We were teaching ourselves the most basic of HTML and learning the fine art of image compression, whilst still doing traditional print and TV stuff for Mobil, Beaurepaires and Myer ads.

Jr: That’d be a pretty sweet blast from the past – seeing that website. We still get a kick out of the original Space Jam website.

H: We put it online, and of course no one was likely to see it, because no one was online. It took ages to upload stuff on the damned dial up modems and the office had no connection online. It’s amazing to think of that now. We really just wanted to know what we could do and how it would work. It was pretty basic. Soon after I was asked if I was interested in a gig at CHE, which was still really joined at the hip with Clems. Clemenger had a few things brewing in the online world so I jumped on board. We had a ball. Glenn Williams asked me one afternoon if I was interested in teaming up with a Danish bloke to explore more of the online stuff. I knew a little bit about this interweb business so I started working within Clemenger to start Clemenger Interactive – where we built sites for Libra, Mercedes and RACV. It was great fun and all very new. We were using a lot of Macromedia Director – that was a drag – heavy load times and all. And Flash was still called Future Splash for goodness sake. But it would change everything.

Jr: Did you notice a big difference moving from Melbourne five years ago, to Digitas in Boston?

H: Yes, firstly the scale. I had 240 creative staff over three offices when I arrived. That was just mind boggling. Wrangling a smaller creative team has enough ups and downs. But that many staff, plus $160 million bucks worth of business  and three offices is a real bloody challenge. There was a lot of ‘this is how we do it, this is how we like to do it, this is how we’ve always done it’ going on, and it was the true definition of drinking from a fire hose. At that scale, there’s politics galore and you spend a lot of your time trying to create a sanctuary for your teams to do great creative. But the real challenge came with some massive reductions in spending by some clients. Especially GM. The auto industry got caned. Tens and tens of millions of dollars vanished overnight. And of course that really affected my team. We had layoffs everywhere in the US. It was a pretty dark time, and quite depressing. At one point, round two, we were putting people on the skids at Christmas. I hate that part of our business.

Jr: Who survives those dark days? Or is it just pot luck?

H: It was a no brainer that you kept hybrids. You get people that I call T shaped, people that had a core skill set and were obviously good at what they did, but they could spread and be accountable for work in a spectrum of their skillset. So for example, art directors that had a strong design bent and digital understanding were invaluable. And there were plenty of people who still saw themselves as “TV” or “Print” creatives. I hadn’t seen that in Australia for years.  You need people who will step up and own work, and who aren’t afraid to share an idea around. That was another really important thing – people who weren’t precious about sharing an idea and making it a team effort, or jumping on board an idea that had already left the station, helping to make it better. I’ve been spending some time with the President of MCAD here in Minneapolis lately, and their course structure is reflecting this way of thinking.

Jr: It does seem that digital ideas, and the process, is a lot more collaborative than the traditional art director/copywriter process.

H: It really is, but I think what you will find is happening – and I’m certainly pushing this where I am now – is that it needs higher process, it needs to be open source, it needs to be collaborative, no matter what the brief.  This is a challenge, because you need to own things, but also have to be able to share. It’s a balance. What’s interesting is that some of the big schools in the US are really working this open source model into their curriculum. Like I said, MCAD seem to have an awesome grip of it. Basically, what they’re doing, is engineering incredible projects. Real world projects that, e.g, a water saving device that they’re working with a community, lets say in Tibet, and working to make some sort of community based program that needs to be invented, marketed, conceptualized, produced and finally released to the world. Those projects can take five to seven years, but if you are doing a three year course and you come in half way through that project, you’re not starting fresh. You’re coming in half way. It’s just like life. If you join a business, there’s already work in progress. It’s getting people to embrace the moving train and just get on board to make it better. But still feeling they’re part of the village that makes the ultimate product. It’s interesting that a lot of us have been encouraged over the years to be selfish in the way we look at our work. Ultimately you’ve got to build a book of the things you have conceptualized and worked on over the years. But the reality is that a lot of what you are doing is really coming from a team, and you need a director, a programmer, a UX person, and all these other people to make it happen. I think it’s Kevin Roberts that said ideas are like assholes, everyone’s got one – it’s what happens with the idea and how it comes to life that really counts. There’s a business at the end of it that also needs to benefit from your ideas. I’m seeing a lot of that thinking change within agencies in the US. Everyone is trimming back, and we’re bringing hybrid type people in. I’ve got people who aren’t traditional art directors but by god can they produce a beautiful piece of work. Man, there’s an awesome guy named Manny Bernardez I discovered at Nike. I plucked him out and he really helped change the shape of our work.  He can design, shoot, edit and wield After Effects like a champ.  He helped produce a really nice little piece for United Way for us recently.

Jr: For people who read Junior who are coming through the ranks and doing uni courses, do you think the skill set of a creative is going to change vastly?

H: I think I’ve seen it changing already. Some schools seem to be catching up faster than others. RMIT seem to be on top of it. I’ve done a lot of work with Miami Ad School over the years, and they’ve really changed their shape too. They’re producing these hybrid students who come out and have a real firm grasp on the fact that you are in the business of creativity. That’s very different from even ten years ago.

Jr: So are you imagining that your art director would even have skills in motion, filming, etc?

H: Yep, and they don’t necessarily have to be able to produce a hard core coded flash thing or know how to shoot the perfect shot – just to have a grip on how it all goes together. Look at the classic Art Director/Writer team, I’ve got a diagram I share with my team, that shows it’s not so long ago that it was just the Copywriter. Then the Art Director was let out of the studio, then planners came in, and if you look at the cast of people that it now takes to produce a piece of work, it’s as long as your arm. If you look at the skill set of each discipline, in a spectrum, there is so much crossover. Design, art direction, user experience, where does it start and stop? Planning and user experience — a user experience person is hard-core information architect at one end, but neuroscientist at the other. Planning is neuroscience at one end, and hard-core statistics and insights on the other. It’s a bloody awesome time. Then I look at companies like Ideo, they’re inventing business ideas. I really honestly believe that agencies moving forward need to be so bound so tightly into what their clients do, that they’re delivering business concepts based on human insights as much as they are marketing pieces. I clearly wasn’t around then, but that’s kind of how it used to happen. In 1935,  Ray Mithun said that “everything talks”. His belief was that every single little thing, around a product or a service, has to have a tone, a manner, and deliver a service that reflects the underlying message. His belief was to get in deep. So deep, that you’re delivering business solutions, not just ads. We should be inventing stuff to take it to our clients. Constantly. And I reckon the appetite for new thinking is growing.

We’ve got this social based idea for Mayo Clinic, that directly reflects their wonderful collaborative nature. It’s called Mayo Connect and it facilitates the connection of people with particular concerns or ailments, with qualified experts who have dealt with the same affliction. It helps people share their concerns and approach their issue with more confidence and support. To me this is awesome, that we can have an effect on someone’s life, as advertisers.

Jr: It feels like that the best work, the stuff that consumers really pay attention to, are those kind of ideas these days. That’s where the bar is these days for advertisers. You’ve worked here in Melbourne, and now you’ve been working in the US for the last five years. Do you think those business changing ideas are more common in the US than in Melbourne? Do you think we are catching up still to that thinking?

H: Depends in what category I think. I think I often see more courageous thinking outside of the US. But volume and access to technology here is enabling people to experiment. I am starting to see clients start to stick their necks out a little more.

Jr: But obviously the US has the scale.

H: Like I said, scale helps, and it has the dollars. Reduced significantly, but it has the volume. Volume means you can take a bit more risk. But they’re also more risk adverse so you need to eat the elephant a bite at a time.

Jr: We hear things move a bit more slowly over there.

H: There’s a lot of layers in businesses here. Loads of titles and politics. We tend to be a bit more ballsy in Australia.  But let’s be honest, there’s a hell of a lot that’s the same. I think wanting to give things a go is in our DNA though. I’ll say things like “let’s just try it”, make something, take it to the client and see. There’s been a reluctance to do that. It’s like people have been emasculated. What we’re doing in our agency now is dedicating time to test the water. Make stuff and take it. Doing the real Aussie thing of barbed wire, string and sticky tape to make something and take it to see if they like it. If a client sees that it can be done, and you can demonstrate it to them, even if it’s fake, they’ll go for it.

Jr: Do you think that’s an important part of selling it?

H: I really think so. This entrepreneurial R&D mentality – you have to do it. Unless you can make it look like it can be done, they won’t go for it. Telling a story around things too – this is the one thing I’ve really noticed younger students from good schools are really able to do. The VCU students for example. It’s an awesome school. I’m seeing a lot of them really have a grip of how a brand lives in the middle of these fragmented media elements and how it might harness each one of these things to operate. I’m a huge believer that everything is kind of spherical.  You’ve got this sphere, and depending on which place, which person, what time of day, and what device, you could be having a completely different story and conversation with them. Understanding that – this is why planning has become vital to what we do. And the big brands, like the Targets of the world – these guys are hiring neuroscientists into their teams to get deep down into human behavior. Agencies need to get almost under the next layer of skin of people.

Jr: Especially in the digital sense with all these layers, it’s a very different level of communication than just passing a billboard.

H: The thing I think is happening very quickly in the US is the separation between digital and traditional is disappearing. The reason why I was so interested in this gig I have now is that they’ve merged the two businesses. They’ve pulled the two hemispheres of the brain together. They’re forcing osmosis within the business. I saw a quote the other day that basically said, if you can’t accept where digital is at, that these digital media elements are here to stay, then you may as well retire. I’ve been banging on about this for years, I really honestly believe that it’s finally having a big influence. All the big campaigns that are cutting through the award shows have digital components. But I love the other stuff too – it’s finding the balance.

Jr: Here in Australia we have AWARD school, which has been around for years, kids at the end come out with a folio of essentially print ads. Which is great for showing  a CD quickly how you think. From your end, in terms of hiring, what do you think kids these days should put in their books?

H: It’s still about the ideas. It has to be. The difference is now that ideas can be massive. Big campaigns, really genius little snippits, little snacks. I’d want to see a spread of those. It’s fine to have a bunch of print, but the reality is that the cost of developing a print ad and the lead times – a lot of clients have vastly reduced budgets.  I’m in the final stages of editing a TV spot that had it’s budget cut after the ad was shot. So we are releasing the spot online now. We’ve got to work out how to be smarter and more effective in these tricky financial times. Every year – faster, cheaper, smarter. Sheeesh.  I’d want to see a book that has a real spread of beautiful traditional ideas, because then I can get a grip of your art direction and writing because I still think that beautifully art directed and deliciously crafted words are a great demonstration of your visual and cerebral mindset, and being a thinker. Then I want to see that idea off the chain – a big organising idea, an umbrella thought, that’s campaigned out in different ways. The finance pressure that I’m under as a creative director means I can’t hire a one trick pony. It doesn’t mean you have to be able to code HTML, but you have to have a grip on every medium and what is possible.

Jr: Have people come around to the thinking that small is good? Especially in the online space, it seems like everyone is still of the mentality that the big campaign is what goes.

H: My writing partner Reid Holmes and I were chatting about this stuff today. We’ve had the “BIG” idea expectations for years. But a big idea can start very small now. A few years ago when the primary elections were on in the US – one of my team came to me and asked, if there was all this noise around Primary Elections, and we had Holiday Inn Express as a client and ‘It’s a smart choice’  (that’s their positioning) – wouldn’t politicians be smarter if they stayed there? We built a simple comparison site, showing how much smarter they would be if they had have stayed in Holiday Inn Express. It cost 98K, and in the first two week got 85 million free media impressions. You can’t buy that media. I think on the first broadcast on Fox News in the morning it was mentioned 17 times. That was awesome. All  from a smart little thought. That stuff is super smart.

I’ve seen projects where someone has walked into the office and said, did you know that there are going to be two million 3D glasses handed out at the super bowl, and then someone else says well why don’t we do this.. and then it finds a head of steam. Bingo. It’s this collaboration that makes what we do gold. Our director of technology, Sean O’Brien, is a total legend. He’s basically a super smart hacker brain working in advertising. He’s got that experimental-entrepreneurial brain. That type of spirit really needs to be let off the chain.

The beauty now is it’s all so accessible. For years the digital teams played classic technical tricks, keeping it under the cloaks and then, tada! By keeping it collaborative, we’re growing things quicker and better than before, and doing it more often. It’s truly a great time to be doing what we do.

Tony. He hangs out with rock stars, wins a shit load of awards, and I’m sure gets mocked for being a little bit ‘Special’. Ha! Oh, we’re so clever. A talented Art Director by trade, Tony is the ECD of one of NZ’s top ad agencies, and is kicking goals left right and center in the creative scene — the world over. We don’t quite know where he fitted in a beer or three with us in the midst of all that, but we managed to ask him a few questions while we could.

Junior: Where did it all begin, take us back to the start?

Tony: That should only take a minute; Design school Auckland, I got bored of just design, and started doing advertising halfway through the course, much to the confusion of my tutors. I got a job here (Auckland) at a company that no longer exists called DMB&B. I did an ad, which got a bunch of attention. Went to London, had fun for seven and a half years, spent mainly in bars. Then went to Amsterdam for two and a half years working on Volvo across Europe. Then I came back to New Zealand as the Creative Director for Generator for about two years, resigned when it was sold, started Special. Three years later, we are here.

Jr: What is your best tip for juniors starting their creative career?

T: Well besides the obvious things that you can’t control… (an older man interrupts our conversation. He looks similar to a actor off a 70′s cop show)

Older man that looks like a 70′s cop: (slightly slurred and angry tone) I thought leaving my drink and my glasses would be enough to reserve my seat while I was gone.

T: So are you saying that you want your seat back?

Jr: We can move if you want?

Older man that looks like a 70′s cop: I’ll move inside.

T: Besides things you can’t control like being really, really good or being really lucky. I’d say be positive and really enthusiastic and basically keep coming up with ideas. Don’t stop or go home early, don’t think that this idea is good enough or that will do. You’ve got to keep going. The other thing is you have to make yourself indispensable. Be hungry for everything. Everything is an opportunity — even if it is just a brief for a banner, you can still try to do something really good for it.

Jr: What is the trick to winning 8 Gold Axis awards, The Best in Show Axis, a Grand Prix at Cannes, which ranked Special as the 8th best Independent Agency in the world — then come back to New Zealand to win National Business Review Agency of the Year, Fairfax Independent Agency of the Year, as well as taking home USD $10,000 for the Grand Prix at Adstars — all in 2010?

T: Don’t sleep? Ha. I think a lot of that stuff was achieved through being ambitious. Not thinking you can or can’t do things. So I think it is really about thinking ‘why couldn’t we do this?’, or ‘why couldn’t you try and do that?’. With the Iggy thing I think there was a bit of luck in pulling that campaign off, timing and everything else worked really well, but the main thing about it was ambition – believing ‘sure we can sell this’, ‘sure we can get Iggy’, ‘sure it will work.’ The other thing about it is we started Special to do things our own way, and to do things better, and as soon as you say that — you put yourself out there. You put your neck on the chopping block. There is no hiding; people know it’s your agency and your work — you can’t blame anyone else. So you have to try really hard to avoid screwing up in public in a big way. Which means working every weekend and working every night, very late.

Jr: Was it fun hanging out with Iggy Pop?

T: Yep, he is very cool. He was pretty focused. We met him by the roof top pool at our hotel in Miami, and besides taking his shirt of in the first two minutes, he was very focused on the orchestration of it. He really looked at the different people and had already worked out in his own mind the structure of the song. He was really pleased with how the ad was received, and how much acclaim it got worldwide. We had dinner with his manager, who is a really nice Scottish guy, when Iggy was playing at the Big Day Out this year. He told us over dinner that Iggy kept talking about this Grand Prix and how much he really liked it etc, so we ended up giving it to him backstage at the Big Day Out. We thought we’d had enough use out of it so he may as well have it. He was chuffed.

Jr: How do you live a balanced life?

T: 3 of the 4 partners at Special have young kids, so we normally finish up at 5:30pm or 6pm and go home to bath time and all the rest of it. I know it doesn’t sound that rock and roll. Then we turn the laptops on again about 9:30pm. You have to work very quickly and be very focused. You can’t muck around. Then the big trick is to put down the iPhone the rest of the time you’re at home. Otherwise it is too much of a distraction.

Jr: What floats your boat when you are looking through a junior’s book?

T: I would say, actually, not ads that look like classic award winning press ads, or ads that look like they are created for Luerzers Archive. I guess I want to see ideas that are a little broader or a little bit different, as opposed to just big visual and little logo. I want to see ideas that are more engaging and involving, just interesting, different stuff really. Because what you are really looking for is how someone thinks.

Jr: How much digital should we have in our book?

T: Digital is so important. Almost everything thing you do now has a digital component to it. Good uses, or misuses of digital are great to have in your book. Often the trick is to make technology really simple. Don’t be put off if you haven’t actually made anything digital – it’s the simple, engaging ideas people will be looking for. But yeah – pack your book full of digital thinking.

Jr: What’s your best/worst junior story?

T: Nah, they’re all pretty boring really. Look, starting out is tough. Everyone knows that, you’ve got to work your socks off and hopefully you can get a chance to create some good stuff. You’ve also got to look for opportunities, not wait for them to be handed to you.

Jr: If you could do your creative career again what would you do differently?

T: Shit, I don’t know. Work at better agencies, work under better Creative Directors. I really think it is all about working with better people. It is one of the key things. It makes it more enjoyable. You respect their opinion more. If you work in agencies that want to do good work rather than agencies that want to do things for other reasons you will have a better time.

Jr: Do you think you need to be at a great agency to do great work?

T: No, but it definitely helps. By a huge amount, but no, that is not essential, but it helps a heck of a lot.

Jr: What keeps you inspired?

T: I guess all creatives like the excitement of ideas. They like seeing things come to life and getting out there in the world and seeing how the public react to it. I also think creatives are highly competitive so that always keeps you motivated. I think also personal pride and fear of embarrassment keep you motivated. You don’t want to do stuff that people don’t like. Even though there is nothing wrong with doing work that polarizes, there is nothing wrong with doing work that a bunch of people don’t like as long — as the right people react the right way to it, in other words, as long as it creates the right results. Was that an answer?

Jr: Yeah, that was good. What is your best/worst moment in advertising?

T: Well one of the best moments was winning our first bit of business for Special. I think that was good, basically because it says you’re up, you’re away.

The worst moment in advertising? Shit, that is a tough one, there have been lots of tough moments. I guess the worst moment is when you see an idea that you believed was going to be great, turn out not as good as it could be, for whatever reason. You kinda die a little bit inside, so yeah that is kinda the worst bit for me.

Jr: Do you have time to do other creative stuff apart from advertising – have you got a side project?

T: I used to have a few. But now I have young children, and Special. Both are really consuming.

Jr: Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

T: That’s a good question. I’d be a bit old by then. That’s a tough one, I don’t really have a smart enough answer for that one, sorry!

Jr: How does the NZ/Australian junior creative scene stack up to the rest of the world?

T: I think New Zealand has had a really good history in Young Guns and young teams doing really well in award shows. I think NZ punches above it’s weight creatively, as we said at Axis last year, per capita NZ had more Cannes Lions than anywhere else in the world. Also, New Zealand junior creatives seem to be quite broad and flexible thinkers, which I think really helps.

Jr: How do you get ideas?

T: I think it is about distilling the business problem down and down, until you can get it into a malleable size in terms of focusing on what we really are trying to do here. Once you strip away all the layers of the brief, you get to what you are really trying to achieve. Then once you’ve got that in your mind, then you can generally work out interesting ways of bringing that to life. But I think it is about keeping things simple, that doesn’t mean you can’t be spectacular. But it is getting right down to that thing you want to say, and then doing something extraordinary with it. And throw in a rockstar, it always helps.

Interview by: Jono Kemps

Chances are you’ve done AWARD School if you’re working, or wanting work in an advertising agency in Australia or NZ. For those of you not in the know — AWARD School isn’t a place that you end up learning how to craft trophies and useless dust collecting items to hang in your agency reception. It’s an industry-led 16 week part-time crash course in ideas — figuring out how to make the shiz that wins the awards in the first place. Usually the cream of the crop, i.e the top ten, land themselves a gig. Sounds awesome, right? Especially if you’ve placed 1-10. We wanted to do an interview for the fifty-odd others in the course that find themselves a few grand poorer and unsure what to do next. We spoke to Ben O’Brien — this CD and partner of Kastner & Partners in Sydney used to run the Award School show. We met up with him for a liquid-lunch in Pyrmont and we got his thoughts on the matter.

Junior: The best place to start is probably the beginning. Where did you start off in advertising? Actually, we read somewhere you started in fashion, is that right?

Ben O’Brien: That’s very true, yes. Out of uni my first career was fashion design. I was working while I was at uni at R.M. Williams, and went out to the factory a couple of times. I thought the process seemed pretty easy. I pulled apart a whole bunch of my favourite jeans on the dining room table at home, and worked out the patterns. And I started manufacturing jeans. I made 2000 pairs of these jeans, and they sold pretty well. Made another 2000, then another 2000, and ended up with three stores in Adelaide.

Jr: What was your label called?

B: It was called ‘Bullet Proof Jeans’. People would ask if they were really bullet proof, and I’d say ‘Put them on, and I’ll get a gun and we’ll find out.’ And it was a good business, made some money, and I had a lot of fun doing it. You reach a point where you either invest a lot of money into it and take it to the next level, and you have to make a decision about whether you are going to go down that track or not. At the time I had some friends who were working in a design agency down the street, and I used to go there for drinks on a Friday afternoon. And they’d have these beautifully designed brochures, but terrible spelling mistakes. I used to get out a red pen and go through all the mistakes, and they started paying me for it with beers. I found it more interesting than the fashion thing. So, I just made a decision one Friday afternoon – am I going to keep going with fashion, or get into some form of copywriting? Even as a proofreader, maybe. I didn’t understand what the jobs were in advertising.

Jr: And so you’d always been good at English?

B: Yeah, I did English and philosophy at Uni. There wasn’t a huge calling for professional philosophers, so there wasn’t a future there. But advertising seemed to be fun. They were designing, I was proofreading, making a couple of dollars, and I thought I should make a go of it. So I put together a folio of what I thought was advertising, but it turned out to be a very bad portfolio. Somehow I got in the door of KWP! in Adelaide where Andrew Killey and Pete Withy very kindly said that I could work there for free. That was really good of them. So I sat in there and worked for free for a few months, and put together some ads. In the end they backpaid me to when I started and produced a few of the ads that I’d made, and that was my start in advertising. So I took the portfolio that I’d built up there over six months to Clemenger where Pete Watt interviewed me and gave me a job at Clemenger on a very small salary. I ended up working there for a couple of years with some guys, Jack Davies and Simon Briscoe. They decided to move up to Sydney, and when they arrived they rang me up and said man, you gotta get over here. This town has a lot of things happening and it’s a really cool place. So I rang around, made a bunch of interviews, snuck out of work for a week and came and met every creative director in Sydney and eventually ended up getting a job at Foster, Nunn, Loveder. Which unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore. But it was a great agency at the time. They were a tiny place but doing Volkswagen and Sony, which were amazing accounts. I got out a whole bunch of ads, and it was a really good start.

Jr: Did you find it hard to move from Adelaide over to Sydney, with the different kinds of work you were doing back home?

B: Not really. I learned some very valuable things at KWP! They had an account at the time called Sip & Save, which is a chain of bottle shops in Adelaide. Sip & Save had an ad in the paper every week. Every week they’d get a brief, which was a special, e.g a carton of beer for x dollars, and it would relate generally to one or two of their stores. It might be by the beach, in the mountains, in the city, etc. They were simple briefs, but you didn’t have much to work with. You’d have the picture of the bottle, or the carton of beer. What they’d built up was a personality of the brand, which was a quirky, larrikin kind of style. My job was basically writing headlines. I’d write hundreds of headlines a week – I’d fill up my floor with little boxes with headlines, and I got incredibly good at drawing a carton of beer, and a bottle of wine. I can still pull that out whenever I’m required to draw a bottle of wine! That was an incredibly good foundation for understanding the personality of a brand, but through words. The art of writing a really good headline is a little bit lost. I think that you couldn’t have had a better start in advertising than being forced to write a million headlines. The ad had to be off to the paper on a Friday afternoon, and every Thursday in the middle of the day Pete would walk into my office and I’d have thousands of headlines spread over the floor. He’d kick out of the way the ones he didn’t like, and then hopefully we’d end up with two or three that he did, which we’d present to the client. And then they’d choose one, we’d lay it up, and then we’d start the process all over again. It’s just an amazing thing that is a little bit lost now. Simple ideas, presented in a really simple way.

Jr: Sounds like a great start. How many months did you do that for?

B: Six months. Hundreds and hundreds of headlines.

Jr: Do you remember any of them?

B: Well, if I tell you one, people will say ‘that’s a shit headline’! But there was a carton of beer, which was $19.99. And it was 1999. So the headline was ‘Party like it’s $19.99’. You know what I mean, just a classic matter of going bang, that’s a solid headline with personality. It was 1999, so we are going back in time a fair way!

Jr: It’s so hard to find junior writers, who can actually write…

B: Exactly. Unfortunately there was no AWARD School when I was in Adelaide and I started off, so there was no option. I just kind of had to fight my own way. AWARD School is an incredibly great door opener. I have run AWARD School in the past, and I’m a huge fan of it. It’s a really fantastic way for people to get a foot in the door who have no other way in. Say you are a bus driver out west, for example, you are interested in creativity and advertising, but where do you start. That in a way is the purpose of AWARD School. A lot of people give it a hard time because it’s not digital enough, or focused enough. That’s not really the point of it. The point of it is to give people a way into the industry. And I don’t think that it’s just for advertising creatives. A powerful idea is powerful whether it’s a script for a movie, a product, etc. If you understand the power of a simple creative idea you can use that in your industry. People do it one or two times, just because it focuses you on what you want to do, and maybe it’s a good way to decide not to do advertising too. It’s hardcore pressure in AWARD School. I think it’s a very valuable course.

Jr: First folios are always very convoluted. Too many ideas on every page. And it’s a really valuable thing to teach people who have a talent for visuals or words to hone their ideas.

B: I think the question of, “Are you a writer or are you an art director”, and people who get to the end of AWARD school and still can’t decide – that is a very bizarre thing. There’s a very separate set of skills for those two jobs. Some people come in and like pictures, and think therefore they should be an art director. You actually have to have skills for these jobs. As a writer, you have to have an interest in words. It’s a skill built up over many years. I don’t think it has to be taught, but you have to have an interest in reading. And know how to use punctuation, and grammar. I had a Brazilian guy once who came out from Brazil and was working in our office, but English was a second language. I couldn’t give him any writing tasks because he literally couldn’t write. His ideas were good, but the writing wasn’t. I can’t proof read everything and be on top of everything all the time – so it makes you unemployable in a small agency. And the same thing goes for Art Directors – there are some Photoshop skills and InDesign skills that you pretty much have to have. The days of over the shoulder art director are over. I think it’s a shame because there are some very talented people who don’t have the Mac skills, but in a small agency like ours, it would be very difficult to employ someone who didn’t have them.

Jr: You’re essentially employing two people – a studio operator, and an art director.

B: Exactly, and at the moment I can’t afford to employ two people.

Jr: Totally. Hey, do you want another drink?

B: Sure.

Jr: (Leaves to get more drinks..)

B: (to the recording device): You better make me sound smart. Or else. (laughs)

Jr: (Returns with two beers.) The folio that you end up with out of AWARD School is very ideas based. If you were going to give advice to a young wannabe copywriter, in terms of the folios that you see these days, how best do you think that they can demonstrate that they can actually write? Do you still think you should still have one long copy ad to show that you can write?

B: I think that your portfolio defines what you want to do. Looking at folios, you can’t help but pigeon hole people depending on how their folio is. For that reason, I think that if you want to sell yourself as an ideas machine, then your portfolio should be full of ideas. If you want to sell yourself as a graphic designer, then it should be full of graphic design ideas. If you want to sell yourself as a brochure writer, then your portfolio is full of brochures. And it’s very important that you get that balance right of what it is that you want to do in your job. I think that if you want to work at a big, good agency, and you want to work in the creative department, then your folio should be full of good ideas. I don’t care if they are visual or written ideas, but as long as they are single minded, on brief, clever ideas, that is what I’m attracted to. I think that there are aspects of the job that anyone can do, but the ideas is the really hard part. If you can come up with ideas then you’re valuable. If you can write as well, then you’re even more valuable. If you can art direct too, then you’re even more so. The ideas are the important bit. For me it’s important to demonstrate that you can write, but I think that you can go overboard. I can usually tell if people can write just by reading a couple of paragraphs and talking to them. If they can communicate well, then that’s enough for me. I wouldn’t fill up my portfolio with philosophy essays from uni or anything like that. You can easily pigeonhole yourself by overloading your folio with writing rather than ideas.

Jr: So ideas are king.

B: Absolutely. They are the most important thing in advertising. And in business. I like to look at the work that we do from a business perspective as to how powerful it is rather than some hard to pinpoint ideas sense. It has to relate to business. Which is something that I learnt when running AWARD School. We got to listen to twelve speakers – and I was really fascinated by David Nobay’s speech, who was so focused on the business side of what he was doing that I think it brought some perspective, even for me, and I’ve been in the game for a while. It made me think. I think a lot of creatives lose sight of the business perspective of what we do.

Jr: It seems like a good idea – to understand the business side of the business you work in.

B: Yeah, I have an interest in business. I like to think I have an interest in the business of our clients. Rather than get too worried about my peers and what other people in the industry think about our creative work, I’m interested in what my clients think and how the creative work is affecting their business.

Jr: And it’s their money we’re spending after all.

B: Yes. When I was associate CD at JWT, I was working on Kellogg’s, which is a business driven marketing company – they understand that marketing is the most important part of their business, because they’re still selling Cornflakes, and their products aren’t really changing. So what changes? Only the marketing. And the marketing affects their business directly so they can measure it in every possible way. Having the creative director in their business really interested in their sales figures, which is literally the business — that opened them up and we became friends on a business level. As a result we had valuable conversations about how really good creative work can effect their business, and we ended up in a really good place, rather than using an ‘us and them’ approach.

Jr: So basically, you think taking that interest helped you to sell in better work?

B: Totally. I’m very proud of the work that we did on Kellogg’s in the two years that I was there. It was super creative, and it sold a shitload of cereal basically. I think that was a really good relationship. I think a lot of creatives forget that we are in business, we aren’t artists.

Jr: At what stage in your career did you aspire to take the next step and become creative director? Did you actively try or did you sort of fall into it?

B: I always wanted to be a creative director from the first minute I started.

Jr: It’s funny because some people really don’t want it.

B: I’ve always enjoyed the process of helping people make great ideas. Even if they aren’t my ideas.

Jr: Obviously – you did AWARD School teaching.

B: Yes, and I give a lecture twice a year as part of AdSchool on creativity. I really enjoy tutoring AWARD School for three reasons. 1) The most important is that it keeps me on my toes. It’s just too good of a reminder that a whole lot of people want my job, and I need to keep my act together. I’ve got to stay on the edge, and up to date. The second is to look for people, up and coming talent, and the third reason is just a general interest in helping people get good ideas somewhere. You can get as much enjoyment out of that as you can from your own idea. I really do like helping people fulfill their ideas.

Jr: You learn a lot as well?

B: Definitely. I love it when there’s a completely unusual way of tackling a problem that I hadn’t thought of. I find it inspiring. Sometimes I find it quite sobering, humiliating almost. But it makes me better. Maybe I’m doing it for selfish reasons almost, because I think it helps me in the process.

Jr: We read somewhere that you learn a lot putting into words what we do in terms of thinking and creating better ideas, that if you can sort of channel that into a sentence and teach others it will make you a better creative.

B: I think the difference between a creative department and AWARD School is that you don’t have to tell your creative department why you don’t like something. You can just say nah, nah, nah, yes, but in AWARD School, that’s not valuable. You have to be able to give people a decent explanation as to why it’s not a good idea or why it is a good idea, and that makes you think about it. I think you reach a point where you know instinctively whether it’s a good idea or not, but to put that in words is quite valuable and you do that every Thursday night. So yeah, I think that there is a value to that as well and that helps you talk to your clients, too, and describe to them why your ideas are good, and why they will have an impact.

Jr: So, Kastner & Partners – you’ve got offices all around the world. Crazy.

B: It’s what they call a boutique multinational. It’s independent, owned by one guy.

Jr: So there’s not so many partners.

B: Nope, there’s Mr Kastner, and there’s two partners here in Sydney. We run it like it’s our own business. So whilst we have obviously the international connections and that’s helpful, we run our own clients here in Australia completely separately. Our second biggest account is Centro Shopping Centres. That’s driving us to grow, which is leading us to pitch for more things, and the agency is steadily growing. And that’s a really exciting phase for Kastner & Partners at the moment, and we’re hiring a lot of people.

Jr: You’re going to get lots of emails.

B: I want lots of emails. We tend to do a lot of our hiring through social networking — Facebook and Twitter, are the main ways that we find our staff. We’ve doubled in the last ten months or so, and want to do it again this year. It is an exciting process so I’ve learnt a lot about the business of advertising. I’ve worked at a lot of places; JWT, DDB, Y&R, and in big agencies business comes in, business goes out, and in the creative department you work and do the best you can. But now I realise that with my own business it’s hard to get new clients, and people are expensive, there are costs, and I’m understanding a lot more about our business and making that work as well as the creative work, and trying to do that whilst building an agency, this is really valuable stuff that you wouldn’t learn in the positions that I’ve had. It’s been a steep learning curve over the last year.

Jr: In the position you are in now your eyes have been opened to what is ‘behind the curtain’ of the ad business? What advice would you pass back down the chain to us juniors?

B: I think that having seen all the business, still the most important thing in advertising is ideas. Simple, great, ideas. And you’ll be able to sell a simple great idea to anybody, but you have to have those ideas. What I’ve noticed over the last few years is younger people coming into advertising have a bit of an attitude of, ‘Well I finished AWARD School, now, where is my job?’ And that’s wrong. Out of that huge group there is a certain number of people who have a really great work ethic, and those people do still exist but there seem to be fewer of them around. If you can make yourself irreplaceable, invaluable, then you have got a really great career in advertising. But that takes a lot of hard work. I think a lot of people are really slack and they aren’t putting in the time or the effort that it takes to make yourself valuable. The valuable people will do really well, and the people that don’t will get left behind. Hard work is really important. Those that strive for a better idea, there’s always a better idea in any situation, and the people that take the time and put in the effort to get to that better idea will do well. And the people that don’t will end up working in a… I don’t want to say this because I used to work in the business, but a bottle shop.

Jr: Sip & Save.

B: They’ll end up working in Sip & Save. And not writing their ads.

Jr: Did you get lots of mentoring at KWP! back in those days?

B: Some of the things that I now say to my AWARD School students are the things that they told me back then. I think that a classic quote that my first creative director said something very important to me that I’ve told a lot of people.. ‘When you start out in advertising, you have a lot of good ideas, you just don’t know which ones they are’. And I think that that is absolutely true, and that’s why in AWARD school I formalised the pens and paper rule only, because I think people waste too much time mac-ing up shit ideas when they should be pressing on to find great ideas.

Jr: And they’re precious about them.

B: Exactly. Whereas the people that write down a hundred ideas, there’s got to be something good in there rather than spending a whole week mac-ing up your one idea. I think if you can find someone that you trust who can help you work out which ideas are the good ideas – whether it’s your AWARD School tutor or whether it’s a CD is critical in our business, because it’s not always what you think. There have been ads that I thought was the best one and I’ve presented it and the CD has asked for more. My CD at Foster, Nunn, Loveder picked out an ad that was my first awarded ad for Volkswagen, and it probably wasn’t the one that I would have picked.

Jr: AWARD School, wow, this is like a big ad for AWARD School! So I have one more question about it – obviously it’s started up again for this year. What advice do you give for people who don’t finish in the top ten, but are still mustard keen to get out there. They’ve got a folio of stuff, but they didn’t make it to the top ten. What would you say they should do?

B: I also was lucky enough to organise LaunchPad at DDB and start up The Deep End at JWT. I have spent a lot of time talking to people who have come in who didn’t finish in the top ten in AWARD school. I think that I’ve given internships to people who came much lower. Obviously life is going to be easier for those that came in the top ten. There’s no creative director going out of their way to hire the person who came 80th. They start at the top of the list, and work their way down. I think that it’s certainly not the time for anyone to give up. When you finish AWARD school it’s the beginning of your career. You don’t put down your pad and pen, and give up. There are a lot of people who only just “get it” late in the AWARD School process. Some of them come back and do AWARD School again. Others get it, go back, and reevaluate their portfolio. I think your folio should be constantly updated. It’s not about a number, it’s not about where you are in a list, it’s about your ideas, your passion, and your work ethic. A person that came in the top ten that’s really slack, over a person who came 80th who is really passionate, has good ideas, and is willing to be directed, and willing to improve their book – I think that person is probably more valuable. Don’t give up.

Jr: I like it. It’s good.

Junior: Ok, let’s start at the beginning — what’s your background?

Mark Pollard: I was at Uni doing a couple of degrees, and when I was 19 I started making websites. While I was finishing off one of the degrees, I started working at a digital agency. I was about 20 at the time, working on Levi’s first big website in Australia. I was teaching myself how to make my own websites, and I wrote for a lot of street press like Inpress and 3D World for five years, and did a lot of radio. Then I published my own magazine, Stealth. I was always involved with, or working full time with an agency at the same time. Tribal DDB in Sydney gave me 20-30 hours a week, and then allowed me to work on my magazine at nights. I did that throughout my mid twenties, and then moved more into digital production, project management, account management, information architecture – 300 page scoping documents, for e-commerce sites and online training sites – and, finally, planning.

Jr: Wow.

M: Yeah, it’s ok. I think that now, more than ever, you have to have the experience of an all-rounder. But then I decided to specialise. I was always interested in strategy. I played chess from a young age. I went over to Leo Burnett, just freelancing as a producer because I didn’t want to go full time, and ended up working with Todd Sampson – who offered me a full time job to go into strategy. It was a bit of an experiment: give a job to a person whose adult life had grown out of the Internet, add some planning skills and see what happens.

Jr: Was the experiment a success? What did you learn there?

Well, it’s been an interesting journey – one that continues. At Leo Burnett, the things that have stuck with me most are workshop techniques (brainstorming, problem identification) and, then, in my last year, working with Scott Davis from BMF, made me get much tighter with my thinking.

Jr: Do you think many strategy planners around town have the skills you do, with digital as their background?

M: I don’t know of many. I also think that any role with the word ‘digital’ in it will disappear in the next three to five years. You’ll have a more generalist strategy role, and then you’ll have specialists in different fields. Architects, online content creators and project managers who have specialist skills. Producers – in the general sense I’ve seen the word used in Australia – will start disappearing.

Jr: So what you’re saying is digital will become the day-to-day?

M: Well, it has to. But then, what’s digital? We’re really talking screens here, right? And, as screens become ubiquitous, ‘digital’ in advertising will need to be. The problem for me is that people use ‘digital’ to talk channel when it’s actually a cultural difference – inside the agency itself, how the agency interacts with clients and so on.

Jr: Strategy seems like a hard area to break into as a junior. There’s not really an entry-level position…

M: No, there’s not. And most Planning Directors will recruit people who they think have done interesting stuff outside of advertising as the entry level. There are plenty of interesting stories about geographers, magazine publishers, schoolteachers and lawyers moving into that space because there’s a risk that if you grow up in strategy it could be a little bit tricky. You need those real life adult experiences.

Jr: If you had to give advice to young wannabe planners, what would you say?

M: I always try to convince people that planning should be simpler than some people might let on, and it’s about understanding what the real problem is. Really honing in on insights – we’re talking about insights as being an unspoken human truth. A lot of people put into briefs a lot of insights, which aren’t really insightful at all.

And then, trying to focus on lateral thought in two ways – one, in how you express words (it’s always the counter intuitive combination of words that makes things stand out); and, secondly, in non-advertising ideas. I think there will be an emerging pool of people who will focus on non-Award School type ideas, because I think our advertising industry is so based on words and pictures – and that’s a big part of creativity and people who are awesome at it are incredible – but there’s a whole world of thinking out there that you might solve a problem without doing any advertising. I think the planners that excite me are in that space as well.

Jr: How closely do you work with the creative teams through the creative process?

M: My preference is to work as close as possible, but a lot of creatives are great strategic thinkers as well. It always depends on who you are working with, and how much time is involved. Some people like playing by themselves. I try to stay as close as possible throughout but will dip in and out depending on the process and where it is.

Jr: Being a strategist you must have a few thoughts on where our business is heading – so what do you think the future will bring?

M: Our industry is competing with every other industry to get get smart people, and a lot of the other industries do a much better job at mentorship and training and bringing people through the ranks. Ad agencies are survival of the fittest.

For me I think the future creative mind will be a combination of Edward de Bono and Steven Spielberg, meets Facebook and Google. It’ll cover all sorts of areas: understanding content and information and how people access it, how people interact with each other and things online and offline.

Jr: Sounds like change is afoot — what do you think this means for juniors?

M: I wonder for how long the Art Director/Copywriter paradigm will exist. I’m interested in people that are journalists, setting up street press magazines, comedians or those who have just written something. Because everyone is going to need an additional skill. If you can write and film something, bingo!

For me it’s becoming less about advertising and more about content, utilities, communities. The business models need to adapt to allow for more of that – as do people new to the industry.

Advice: stay curious, invest personal time in researching and reading as much as possible and stay nice to deal with.

Mark has also supplied some recommended reading for those interested.
How to do account planning – a simple approach, Why strategists should make stuff and 10 strategies for a strategist’s career – right now

Would you believe R/GA, digital agency of the decade, started in the late seventies as a production company? Founded by two brothers — they created the first integrated computer-assisted production process (oh Wikipedia, you make us sound so clever)! Translation: they revolutionised motion graphics and special effects. Heck! They did the opening titles for the original Superman and have Oscars on their wall. Flash-forward twenty-something years and they’ve shaken up the fundamentals of the digital agency — creating innovative digital solutions for clients, like the fandangled-ly cool Nike+ utility.

This baseball cap-clad Aussie expat is Associate Creative Director. Paul started his career in Sydney as Production Assistant, before becoming a suit, before working his way into copywriting – all at the one agency. Then he decided it was time to ditch traditional and go digital. And where better to do that than New York City! During our recent trip to NYC, our chat to Paul in R/GA’s sunny front yard opened our eyes to the future of advertising.

Junior: Where did it all start for you? You’re a Sydney boy?

Paul Dery: I was actually born in Melbourne. I moved to Sydney when I was about 15, and then I started at M&C Saatchi as a Production Assistant. From there I made the switch to account service. Which was an excellent learning experience. All creatives should probably have a stint there, even if it is just a week. To understand what it’s like on their side of the fence, but to also understand how to sell stuff. What the client needs to hear and what helps them buy an idea. I then did AWARD School and then obviously moved into the world of Copywriting. It was a great apprenticeship though, coming through Production and Account Service. I’m very grateful for it.

Jr: Did you move over at M&C? Was that a challenge?

P: I did, it was tricky. I remember the first fight I had with a suit, and the whole department was laughing, because they were like ‘welcome’ to being a creative.

The transition was made easier as the beauty of creative work is that the proof is always in the pudding. The harder you work, and as long as your stuff keeps improving I think people quickly forget that you were the Production kid or the Account guy.

Jr: How did you do it? Did you just hound the Creative Director?

P: It’s a pretty simple rule – I think 9-5 you’re an account person, and 5-9 you’re a creative. I was really lucky. The Creative Director, Michael Andrews set me a task that every Monday he would give me a brief, and every Monday he would look at the work from the week before. We did that for six months. He said, ‘by then we’ll know. You’re either rubbish, or you’re good’. Don’t know if I was good, but six months later I had a book that was probably just good enough to get me my first job in the agency as a writer.

Jr: So you stayed there for a little while?

P: I was there for seven years in total. I did a stint for about a year in the Melbourne office too. It’s always had a history of doing good work. It was nice to have a bit of time at a smaller agency. Big and small agencies each have pros and cons and are very different places to work in, and they’re very different places to get work made. It’s good to understand both spectrums.

Jr: What stage did you decide you wanted to get a gig in New York?

P: A funny story actually, I won a green card in the green card lottery.

Jr: No way!

P: I saw a web banner promoting it. I think it’s the only banner I’ve ever clicked on. I then got an email from the US Government saying that I’d won, and I thought it was a Nigerian scam. Even as I was stepping off the plane into JFK I thought something would go wrong.

Jr: What happened when you got to New York? How did you end up at RGA?

P: R/GA is an amazing place. It’s 1000 people, for one, and it’s grown crazy fast. For me, it felt like the first place that could lead the transition the industry is going through. Advertising is changing every day, the beauty of R/GA is that you can write the future. Nobody fully understands what’s going to happen with advertising but we have a pretty good idea of how people are consuming and how they want to consume. That’s why I thought R/GA would be a great place to be. I came from a traditional background of writing TV and print ads. At this place, you’ve got to start again in terms of media. Creatively you still need the traditional idea grounded in a good truth, but if you’re not using the technology that’s being developed and on offer, then it’s totally unutilized.

Writers in traditional agencies who are writing great ads could probably be much more effective if they worked with the technology a bit harder. That’s why I joined R/GA because I thought bugger it, I’ve got to understand how this works or I could be an old dinosaur at an early age. So I jumped on board and for ages I turned up to meetings and had no idea what these people were saying. I just kept nodding. I think my favorite phrase was ‘Yup I think I saw that on TED’. It was my only get out of jail card line I could use!

Jr: How did you go about getting in if you came from such a traditional background?

P: I got really lucky. R/GA, obviously from a pure digital background were starting to broaden their horizons. So they were looking for traditional ad guys I guess. A lot of their clients were asking for video content that required a lot of script writing. It was the middle of a horrible recession, the middle of a freezing cold winter. Ignorance was bliss — I walked in and got extremely lucky.

Jr: You would have had some pretty good work under your belt coming from M&C though?

P: It was ok. I hadn’t had that many years as a copywriter. It was prolific, I worked across a lot of brands and had a lot of stuff made. Now looking back, with the account service background, whether it should have been made is another question!

Jr: Do you think that a creative would get more concepts made in Melbourne or Sydney than you would in New York?

P: I’d say there’s more of a delay in coming up with an idea and implementing it. Here at R/GA you’ve got a broad range of clients like Nike, Walmart & Mastercard. We tend to implement a lot of business changing ideas, and that takes time. Whether it’s a new platform, or a new customer service stream using Twitter, whatever it is, to turn a big client around isn’t a fast process.

Jr: That would be really cool, not just thinking in terms of ads, but also in terms of business.

P: I think that’s the enjoyable part about thinking digitally. I’m used to getting a brief where media is bought, they want TV and print, and your brain is trained to execute. Here, the media is open ended. The client want to sell something, and you’ve got to come up with a solution. It could be anything. Is it an online scavenger hunt? A Twitter contest? A Facebook Connect Video? It’s whatever you think people can consume the idea best. That was the hardest thing for my brain to get around as a creative. It’s hard enough to start with that blank page to come up with a script. It’s super hard to come up with a blank media environment.

Jr: They sound like pretty awesome briefs!

P: They’re pretty open but the planners still manage to get a lot in! Advertising is definitely going through some kind of change, I don’t know if it’s a revolution or evolution but you’re given your freedom when working with a strategy.

Jr: For those of us who are used to and have trained at traditional agencies, how does R/GA work in terms of skill sets?

P: R/GA is quite unique in regards to the fact that everyone is on an equal playing field. It combines design, copywriting, ID (interaction design), and the tech guys. There’s a suite of people all under the umbrella of creatives. Everyone has a chance to pitch an idea. Normally as a copywriter you are used to having a firmer say on ideas. Where here a great idea might come from a techie nerd guy who had this thought, and sure it doesn’t have an umbrella campaign line, but it’s an awesome use of technology that you can latch onto with a campaign. In terms of skill sets, it’s a really interesting place. R/GA came from a production and design background. When it went into an advertising realm it built websites. I think that’s why design is a strong lead at R/GA and heavily relied upon.

Jr: So you obviously don’t work in traditional two person teams anymore?

P: I don’t. There are teams, but they aren’t as common. I don’t have a partner. I kind of enjoy the freedom to roam across different accounts. You could be working with a traditional art director one minute, and then an iPhone app developer who had a good idea. It’s cool. It seems to work.

Jr: In terms of the junior kids back home in Melbourne putting their folios together, they might have scam ideas that have never run and they’re doing stuff for online/digital – is it the idea that is the most important and not to worry about the technology?

P: Absolutely. My first advice is to get a website, which most people have these days. But idea is still king, it’s not how fancy your site is. In fact, some of the best sites are just straight blogs of peoples work.
A digital book should always be like any book, idea centric. It can take us a year to implement a good idea online, so I don’t think people expect for your book to be 100% real. Hopefully the technological ideas you present can be made, but that’s less of a concern.

Jr: Sometimes it feels in Oz that if you have an idea, especially in terms of the digital stuff that you see around, they’re all variations of things that have already been done. It’s never a breakthrough original use of technology

P: I think we’re going to see the rise of the nerd in advertising. They have always been prevalent in good creativity. And they are the ones with the finger on the pulse of what’s new.

Jr: They’ve got us by the balls.

P: These guys eat and breathe new technology, and it’s so hard to keep on top of it unless you eat and breathe it too. I certainly try to do as much as I can, but these guys are a special breed. It’s great to find those guys and talk to them, because they’re the guys that are finding the new uses of technology. Something might just spark and you could end up with something that no one has ever seen before. And that’s the trick.

Jr: Where do you find inspiration other than the techie guys? It must be easy just to get sucked into the internet, and disappear into it for hours.

P: Part of the reason why I moved to New York is that it’s full of inspiration. It’s hard not to meet creative people who have other interests other than just advertising.

Jr: You definitely look offline?

P: I think so. I think that’s where the traditional background comes into play. You have other places to look for ideas, not just online. And often if you see it online it’s been done. Some guy beat you to it.

Jr: What’s the work culture like? Is it different?

P: It’s very different. We’re lucky; Australia has a great outlook on life as a people. We can always have a good laugh at ourselves. American work life is a bit stifled. Even in an ad agency in the USA there’s not the same shenanigans that you get up to back home. Which is probably a good thing, you probably get more work done!

Jr: Do you work harder here than you do at home?

P: What I found is that in America you have your role. And I think that because of the sheer number of people that if you’re good at your role, you stick to your role and you stay doing that. I think because of Australia’s size we’re all good at a lot of things. And that’s probably why Australians do pretty well when they go to America, we’ve had to wear a lot of hats. Although stereotypically not, we do have a great work ethic. Americans work hard, but I think Australians work efficiently hard. It’s a different culture, and I miss the days back home of mucking around having a good creative environment.

Jr: It must be hard when you’ve got 350 or so creatives in your department.

P: Yeah, but here at R/GA it’s a great environment to learn. It’s almost like a university campus, I find, because things change daily, and you’re always trying to learn from everyone around you. That’s where the atmosphere is different. It’s more of a learning environment as opposed to a working environment.

Jr: Do you think your account service hat is helping you in NY to sell in digital ideas to a client that might not necessarily get it?

P: I think a big difference between Australia and America is that the American client is very digitally savvy. They know what’s what. In terms of even just technically speaking, they know their stuff.

Jr: So you’re not presenting to your mum?

P: I wish! I’d get a lot more sold. She’s a big fan. Coming from account service I always said that I was a better seller than creative! It definitely helps. I used to see a lot of great creatives struggle to get their idea up, even if it was awesome, they just couldn’t make it buyable for the client. You’ve got to understand where your client is coming from. If you can help their career, they’ll inadvertently help yours. Selling is a huge part of it. Clients are consumers too. They need to be sold.

Jr: What’s the deal in the US, do creatives present?

P: It depends where you are, but yes, we still present to clients. At R/GA the producer will do the day to do client liaison. It was very foreign for me to see producers on the phone all day with clients, but that’s what happens. A thousand people strong and probably the best digital agency in the world, it’s hard to argue with the formula.

Jr: if you had to write a dummies guide, a couple of tips to digital thinking, could you think of anything off the top of your head? Have you learnt from any of your mistakes?

P: I wish I knew. I think the key thing would be that it has to be fun and entertaining. The beauty of digital is that it’s no longer broadcasting, it’s asking you to participate. So make it rewarding, or make it useful, or make it both.

Nike+ is a great example. It’s an application that gives me data on my run. So all of a sudden I couldn’t go for a run without Nike. It gave runners something really useful, and we call these, utilities. Utilities end up being a fine line between advertising and product development.

If you’re in a traditional agency, don’t fear – your skills are still more than ever needed. Everything still needs to be wrapped in a nice idea. A great bit of technology that isn’t will fail because no one will find it, thus use it.

I think for anyone wanting to move to NY for a job — do your work would be my advice. Getting a full time job in NY, is a full time job.

For eight hours a day I’d be making calls to six people who would give me six more people to see, and so on. It takes time. Do your research and give yourself enough time to have weeks where you get no leads. It took me six weeks, which I thought would be my absolute best-case scenario. I was lucky. But there were times during those six weeks where I doubted myself. One thing I will say that as Australians we often go to America and think, is my work good enough? Is it up to a global standard? And it absolutely is. The work we do back home is bloody great. And Australians do well in the states. My Chief Creative Officer, Nick Law, is an Aussie boy from Newport, NSW. And he’s a rockstar over here. Best of all he’s still incredibly Aussie, which is great. If your work is great back home, you can guarantee that it’s great here. Make the most of getting stuff made. Not that it was overly easy in Australia, but make the most of it.