Who do you think has got the best reel in London ?
It’s a subjective question, of course, and maybe everybody would have different views on it.
And that may be one reason why creative awards are so much a part of our industry.
Although in my view they are totally antithetical to what is genuinely creative. What creative awards do is allow people who don’t know what creativity is, to try and evaluate it. “Our agency in New Zealand has more points on the Guano Report than our agency in
Buenos Aires. Fire the CD in Argentina, and give the CD in Auckland a tax-deductible pat on the back.”
But let’s go back to the question again. Every time a client puts a pitch list together, they are presumably making this decision – assuming that they are genuinely looking for exciting new work, and not just going through the process as a smoke-screen to hide terrible sales figures that are a result of something completely unassociated with the performance of their previous agency.
(Well, it could happen. Unlikely, I know.)
For me, and this could change at any second if I suddenly come across somebody new, the best reel in London at the minute belongs to 4 Creative.
They did the 4 logo idents, which knocked everybody’s eyes out when they first came out. They did the Honda live parachute jump, which took everybody’s breath away when it aired. They did the films with famous people answering questions which you had to guess the question for. (On their website is the one asking celebs what their favourite swear word is. It’s eye-wateringly good.)
And they’ve done a huge range of films and posters and online initiatives and books and events to publicise Channel 4 programmes. They’re all good – and how rare is that on a reel – and some of them are so good they make you change your mind about a programme you’ve already made your mind up about.
They’ve got a spot for SyFy which will blow your socks off, they did the Allan-Carr-as-a-4-year-old films, they did the sensational Skins promos, they make Jamie Oliver funnier than he ever is in his programmes or the Sainsbury’s ads, and they did a promo about Britain’s Forgotten Children which will give me nightmares for weeks to come.
If I’m honest, I don’t think they do work in other media that’s as powerful as their promo work – but then again, as I’ve said, that’s a high bar to jump over.
I went and spoke to Tom Tagholm, the CD there, to find out if there were any secret formulas to producing this level of work so regularly. And I think there are at least two interesting thoughts here.
One is that they allow people to experiment – and to make mistakes. They do stuff, chuck it away and start again. For me, that’s the very essence of creativity.
Two was the sense that in the early days they genuinely didn’t care what the rest of the industry thought of them.
Tom was (in his own estimation) a not-very-successful writer, doing mainly below-the-line at Bates Dorlands eight years ago. Even answering the ad in the back of Campaign to work at the then-unheard-of 4 Creative seemed like career suicide.
When we launched HHCL, it was similar. For about 3 years, we got slagged off every week in Campaign. The turning point probably came when Maxell Tapes suddenly started winning awards and the industry went overnight from “you’re sh*t” to “you’re brilliant”. Although one unfortunate guy doing Private View got the timing slightly wrong and slagged off Maxell tapes something rotten – before it went on to win every award given out that year.
But at HHCL it was thankfully too late and we didn’t care about awards by then. And it’s been the same for 4 Creative. They’ve won tons of awards now, which sit gathering dust in a meeting room that looks like your spare room.
So. Look out. The people who are going to be at the very top of this industry in about 4 years’ time almost certainly aren’t the well-respected middle-weights in acronymously-named group agencies, who have a respectable handful of silver doorstops.
They’re the people who got fired last year, or who got so bored by what they were doing that they left and took a chance doing something completely different.
The outsiders.
And that is exactly as it should be in a creative industry.
