Kim Papworth & Tony Davidson - case study of a creative team

Kim Papworth & Tony Davidson are joint creative directors of Wieden + Kennedy London.

As of last year, they were making partners of W+K Worldwide making them the first partners in a global ad agency network in 13 years. Quite a high accolade when measured against Dan Wieden words:

"If you want to be a partner at W&K you've got to be some kind of saint and some kind of crazy. No one exemplifies that more profoundly than Tony and Kim. They have raised the bar, broken rules, lifted hearts and shocked the world," (Guardian Online. 2009. [Accessed 24/11/2010]).


Kim started out as a mushroom farmer before leaving his fungi-ridden days for art college which led to a junior copywriting position at BMP. As for Tony, although his past is not quite as intriguing, he excelled at art and went on to study Design and Communication Media at Manchester Polytechnic before meeting Kim at BMP circa-1985. They are now both famed for their string of mould-breaking work for Honda including 'The Cog' and 'Hate something/Change something'. They also take credit for a body of Nike's work including the 'Run London' campaign, the iconic 'St Wayne' poster and over-seeing the recent 'Write The Future' campaign. Additional clients under the belt are VW, Adidas and Levi Jeans.







...On creative flow

According to Davidson, "it's a weird thing, a Yin/Yang balance. Kim is the quiet more observant one. A people watcher. Whereas I'm the bull in the china shop." He adds, "Kim's dyslexic and can't really write, and I'm not a great art director. But somehow it works." Davidson later comments that him and Papworth share the same values and same way of thinking. "When Kim and I were younger, we were award-driven and probably thought less about the product than we do now. But revolutionizing a brand is way bigger than any award." As their work for Honda proves, it's possible to have both. (Boards Magazine. 2004. [Accessed on 24/11/2010])

I couldn't find a quote from Papworth about their creative relationship so I guess he really is the quiet one. But in terms of creating ads he claims, "The client gives us the stuff we really need to know: for example, he'll come and relate to us exactly what an engineer at Honda has said about a particular car." (Harrison, S. 2009. pg. 49).

Their same way of thinking is clear, as Davidson's view on the importance of the client is that, "The DNA of the company is in its founders. Stick that culture on the walls around you and try to become that company emotionally. It stops you writing ads," (Times Online. 2008. [Accessed on 24/11/2010]).



For creativity as a whole, Davidson sticks to his three rules:

• Collect everything (hence his passion for scrapbooks and flea-markets)
• Surround yourself with inspiring things and inspiring people
• Get out of the office.

                                                                    (Times Online. 2008. [Accessed on 24/11/2010])


...On being creative directors

Having worked together in a variety of agencies with W+K proving to be their longest and most rewarding stint, what knowledge and experience have the team taken forward into their role as Creative Directors of the London offices and worldwide partners?

Davidson has the view that, “The temptation for creative directors is to take all the best briefs, but if you do that you are not allowing others to learn. The trick is to hire people who are better than you," (Times Online. 2008. [Accessed on 24/11/2010]).



Papworth's philisophy still holds creativity at it's heart: "Forget the theory that an agency has to have its pile of pooh. Why can't you be 100% creative?" (Boards Magazine. 2004. [Accessed on 24/11/2010]). He says the big kick is discovering the power of the brand's voice. If no one believes him, they need to go and take a look at how distinctive and well positioned Honda's voice is in relation to the rest of the car industry.

'Mutual pushing is the way they work. They're hands-on with their creatives but from the start at W+K, resolved not to write ads themselves. "We aren't the best writers or art directors," says Davidson. "But we've done both so we know the way to make people grow and develop is to push, let them express themselves." Their job is to make sure it's right for the brand.' 

                                         (Boards Magazine. 2004. [Accessed on 24/11/2010])

Sources:

• Boards Magazine. Cut The Shit. 2004. [Accessed on 24/11/2010] http://www.boardsmag.com/articles/magazine/20040901/papworthdavidson.html
• Guardian Media Online. Wieden + Kennedy name new partners. 2009. [Accessed on 24/11/2010] http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/mar/16/wieden-kennedy-names-partners
• Times Online. Advertising creative Tony Davidson's search for inspiration. 2008. [Accessed on 24/11/2010] http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/career_and_jobs/article4944062.ece
• Harrison, S. How to do better creative work. 2009. Pearson Education LTD. Gosport, GB

A life of Heinz

After watching Crash with the class a week ago, I left the theater with a funny feeling.

The monologues towards the end of the play encompassed both capitalist and communist views of the economic meltdown. As far from being on the banker's side that I am, he did speak some sense. I remember a bit where he said of society, something like... 


...nothing stopped you buying up the world did it. You were more than happy to go out trying on new dresses, sitting in new cars and wearing new jewelery, not giving a fuck about anyone else. And then as soon as the good times stop, when someone's got to face the music, you all want someone to blame. And you turn to us, and expect an apology, as though we're the crash. You my friends are the crash. We're all the crash.

The most prominent ideal dissected by the production seemed to be the question: What does money mean? For example, at one point there is a discussion between the banker and his artist friend about value. The banker makes a statement that there is no true way to distinguish the value of someones work.

We can never say if someone deserves what they earn, they simply earn what they can get.

Inevitably the question of 'what it money worth?' looms closer. How is it that a homeless person, merely grateful for his health, can be happier than someone with a personal fortune of millions?

After watching the play, I got 'the urge'. You know the the urge that I'm sure everyone occurs at some point during their life: The urge to just burn all of my material possessions, start wearing skatty tye-dye t-shirts, start eating grass and feeding off love and dance.

It made me question the whole industry that I aspire to go into. If possessions are in fact meaningless, then what am I doing dedicating my life to generating ideas in order to sell everyday products that no one really needs anyway?

I started to picture a horrible existence... In years to come, I'd win a pitch for the Heinz account. I'd go out with the agency and celebrate with champagne and the leggy account girls.
   But take a step back, and what kind of existence is that  -  the privilege of selling beans and sauce to people who quite frankly, could easily cope in a world without?

And so what if it's the best beans and sauce. The pinnacle of my career would have come down to securing the privilege of giving a voice to one of the many tins of beans in a supermarket aisle. And I wanted to be someone significant??


At this point I got the shudders, quickly realised I was getting too deep and then tried to remind myself that giving a voice to beans would actually be quite fun. Still...

How social is social media?

Seth Godin might be a name that rings a bell.

I recognised the name upon reading it, but didn't know where from or why.

Turns out he was the author of Permission Marketing (1999), which proved to be "an all out attack on what he called 'interruption marketing', or all that traditional offline creative work" (Harrison, S. 2009. pg. 11). His argument being that society's gradual departure from the real world into Cybersphere, means that a spawning of technologically empowered consumers will sought only to let the messages into their life that they wish to receive. To put it bluntly, any form of offline marketing was a dying art.

But before getting carried away with thinking that every message we want to broadcast needs to have a Facebook group and around-the-clock Twitter feed, let look at some of the facts:

Social networking

Research conducted by Forrester Techno-graphics found that only 25 per cent of the total number of UK internet users use social networking sites once a month or more. The remaining 75 per cent use them either once a month or not at all. The majority of those using social networking sites on a daily basis are aged 16-24 and predominantly students, therefore, in the interests of media planners, pretty tight for cash.

Blogging

IPA-sponsored research (pub. Jan 2009) shows that of the UK's online consumers, a mere 2.8 per cent bother to blog. Only 8.8 per cent read them and only 3.7 per cent comment. So even though I feel my personal blog is caught like a rabbit in the headlights amidst the Blogging motorway, maybe I should stop thinking 'everyone has a blog so why bother...' when in reality most people don't. I should also be less concerned with whether people read what I write - especially when so few read them anyway  - and just be pleased that I do have something to show the people who want to read what I write.

Forums

In the same IPA-sponsored research, a lowly 6.5 per cent of UK online consumers contribute to online chat rooms and discussion forums. Again, a tiny fraction.


This goes to show two things.

1) That there is still an incredibly large un-digital market out there for what are known as the 'massive passives'. In fact, according to a book called Groundswell (Li, C. Burnoff, J. 2008) even within the digital community 53 per cent of these are still regarded as massive passives.

2) Regardless of the medium used, the most successful pieces of work always have a strong idea at their core. Alix Pennycuick, the new creative director of Publicis Modem (Publicis' digital arm) underlines this notion in Campaign magazine's 'Digital Essays' (pub. 2009),

"It's the same challenge we have always faced: how to capture the public's imagination in the first place ... We need to forget ATL and BTL, online or offline and remember that, above anything else, it is the quality and creativity of the content that creates breakthrough experiences today."

Sources:

• Harrison, S. How to do better creative work. 2009. Pearson Education LTD. Gosport, GB.
• Li, C. & Burnoff, J. Groundswell. 2008. Harvard Business School Press. US.

How to write a newspaper ad...

I'm currently working my way through Creative Strategy in Advertising (Jewler, A. & Drewniany, B. 2005).

The Newspaper Association of America set top advertising creatives the task of creating their own newspaper ad. The content being how they think a newspaper ad should be written.

The responses included in this book are that of Luke Sullivan (author of Hey Whipple, Squeeze This), Jeff Goodby (creative director & co-chairman of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners) and Lee Clow (creative director & chairman of TBWA Worldwide).

It's incredible just how much of their personality can be grasped from each response.

So here they are... very different, very unique and very interesting.

Collaborative Creativity

When we talk about collaborative creativity with regard to advertising, there are two separate areas: One being the creative collaboration between Copywriter and Art Director. The other being internal collaboration between creatives, account handlers and media planners.

The partnership between copywriter & art director is a longstanding tradition in the advertising industry and a wealth of research supports the notion that two heads are better than one. In the digital age however, it seems that the potential for collaboration can be extended far beyond a mere two heads.
   'Giant Hydra' www.gianthydra.com, conceived in 2008, acts as a platform for mass collaboration between advertising agencies across the globe. The idea is based upon Metcalfe's Law that 'the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users'. Basically, creatives are able to create a profile with samples of their work, which others can browse through. Agencies are then able to set projects and hand-pick the creatives that they wish to be involved. Ideas are shared, discussed, furthered and when executed, each creative that was involved is financially rewarded. This enables the volume and perspective of ideas concerning the given brief to dramatically increase well beyond what would have ever been capable of one creative team. Not to mention speeding up the process of idea generation; ideal for agencies bogged down with several ongoing briefs or agencies with limited time/resources.



Ideas such as this have massive implications on how we should be working across art schools/colleges/universities and across a range of diciplines. It is important for us as art students to note the wealth of creative minds and disciplines that we have at our fingertips. As aspiring advertisers, we're aware that the industry thrives on originality and innovation, so we should be looking further than the confines of our studio. If effective collaboration is possible between advertising students, then what potential does interdisciplinary collaboration hold? If word is spread well enough then maybe this simple Facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=132871126762443) can start interdisciplinary collaborations within the college, helping each of us to build a strong contact book before graduating. If this is how it works in industry, why not start now?

For agencies to function, they depend on a structure. The structure of creatives/accounts/planners/directors has always existed, yet in years gone by it has, at times, become more of a heirarchy. In an article entitled Creativity and the Art of Collaboration (Campaign, 30/04/2010), a 'Fortress Creative Department' philosophy is described where creative people were physically and mentally excluded from the rest of the agency and gave the "double-barrelled upper-class twits in client service a really hard time". As Andrew Cracknell, writer of the article, comments, "If you're kept apart from the people whose role can occasionally come into conflict with yours, then that very isolation can fuel the antagonism" which suggests why it's not surprising to see so many agencies integrating departments with open plan studios. Brand New in Leeds, for example, is a converted warehouse where the only rooms separated from the main studio are the toilets, editing suite and kitchen. In the time I spent there over the summer I constantly had account handlers shouting over my head across the room to the other departments. I really buzzed off as this style of open collaboration as I felt a real part of the team and had an awareness of what was going on around me, so it's odd to think that agencies havn't always operated in this way.

A type of collaboration that appears to be becoming ever more apparent in agencies, is with the client themselves. The Campaign article states that both Mother and HHCL are pioneers of this method, but Cracknell shows his concern in that, "these project groups are only as strong as their most vociferous members - and he who pays the piper calls the tune". Put simply, the client becomes ever more powerful in the quality of the work. In my eyes, this is bad news. I agree that client should be involved in the progression of the work so that they take some ownership of the idea and, in turn, it should be easier to get work through the barrier of acceptance. And although Mother seem to have escaped thus far, I can't help but picture the potentially damaging effect on creativity that client-agency collaboration may have.

Steve Henry (co-founder of HHCL) claims,"Creative Directors used to be the people who made a difference. Now they're just people who can be wheeled out for pitches to make small talk". I'm all for collaboration, but if this is the case, I think I'd prefer to remain as a Creative.

Modern Panopticism

Today marked our first critical studies lecture about 'Surveillance and Society'.

Michel Foucault's theory of 'Panopticism' - a permanent state of surveillance - is something that we as a society are readily aware of, but aren't as familiar with the effect it has upon our behaviour.

We've all heard the statistics, "the average city dweller is caught on camera at least 300 times a day" but this is only one form of surveillance. Social networking, gyms with display glass windows, open-plan bars/pubs are all designed with panoptic undertones which change our motivations and therefore control our behaviour.

The internet is an uncontrollable device of panoptic control. With every website we visit being archived and institutional databases monitoring our desktop files, the lecture instantly reminded me of the AOL 'What do you think?' (2006) commercials, which provoked debate about whether the internet was a good thing or a bad thing.

Only last week, my Dad was telling me about using Google Street view in order to locate a house he was contracted to do a drainage survey. He said he'd zoomed in the the front door in order to see the house number, but felt very uncomfortable in doing so, as you could see through the front window into house. He said he felt incredibly intrusive and perverse as it felt like he was secretly spying on the lives of the residents. We began to discuss how amazing Google Earth actually is, but how it's equally a criminal paradise.

This good/bad debate is captured perfectly in the following ads. Showing the inspirational power of mass communication, as well as the disasterously corrupt consequences it can have.

Aol - The internet is a GOOD thing



Aol - The internet is a BAD thing

The Basics of Design - Creative Strategy in Advertising

I'm working my way through a dead helpful book at the moment called Creative Strategy in Advertising by Jewler, A & Drewniany, B.

Throughout the course, we've been told a few bits and pieces about art direction. But more often than not, we've been told that you learn by looking at award winning work, disecting why it works visually and then ingraining the techniques into your mind. I've found however, that Chapter 7: Designing to Communicate has given me the basic principles of design that wasn't consiously aware of beforehand. Some techniques (i.e. proportion - 'Golden Mean') link to those that I've previously learned in Photography (i.e Rule-of-Three).

The following are a few examples of techniques that I could apply when analysing the aethetics and art direction in future case studies.

Negative Space - the space that isn't filled.
A border of negative space should be left unless purposeful.
Lots of negative space creates a feeling of 'exclusivity'.

Gestalt - the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts.
Our eyes are drawn to these patterns, so we respond in predictable ways.
When an item is dissimilar to the objects around it, it commands attention.


Balance - Symmetrical balance can be static - something advertisers seek to avoid.
Things that are bottom-heavy   ...reader tempted to turn the page.
Things that are top-heavy   ...reader discouraged from continuing.
Text is considered the lightest element of a layout.
Heavier = darker, bigger, thicker

Rhythm - Created through repetition and consistency across a campaign.
E.g. headline, visual, logo, endline all in the same format/size.

Movement - our eyes naturally move in a Z shape across a page.
Shape and direction of images should guide the eyes through an ad.