Mike & Ben

Interview with Jon Plackett, Senior Creative at BETC London

2012-01-11T10:37:00.002Z

Our interview this week (note - interviews aren't necessarily weekly, it's still a small office!) is with Jonathan Plackett, senior creative at BETC London who specialises in digital hocus pocus. Before making the move to swinging' Soho, Jonny worked at Albion for 6 years where he created lots of famous digital work, most notably 'Slap Nick Griffin', which ended up recording around 90 million slaps across his flabby, hateful chops during its brief existence.

Background

How long have you been working in advertising?

About 7 years.

Where did you get your first job and how long did you have to do the rounds on placements?

I did placements at Mother, W+K, St Lukes, Grand union and probably a few others. We (I had a partner back then) were mainly working on pitches, so working all night and getting fed take away pizza- which was good because we couldn’t afford much food. We got a job at Albion after about a year but it didn’t seem that long.

Getting hired

What’s the best piece of advice you were ever given?

Stop asking for placements and ask for a job.

…and the worst?

Anything to do with working for free.

What do you think is the main thing that differentiates the really successful creatives from their peers?

Lots of people have great ideas so I think probably stubbornness is a big part of it. The people who do well tend to not take no for an answer. I don’t think you have to be rude or arrogant, just persistent.

The book

What do you think are the key ingredients of a good student book?

Just make sure every time you turn a page there’s something new and interesting. If you can predict what’s coming it gets boring quickly and you’ll lose people’s interest.

Really what you’re after is getting the person doing the crit excited so they remember you and start coming up with useful ideas to help you.

How can you avoid being told your book is ‘too studenty’?

Lots of books have good strategies but not much effort in execution. Avoid the curse of doing the same ad 3 times. Try imagining you got given the strategy you’re working on by someone else so you can’t rest on it. Now you have to add something extra in the execution.

How important are print ads? Could every campaign be improved by the addition of a good print ad?

I think the idea of this media vs that media is a bit of a dated argument. It just comes down to what you want to be doing. You’ll get a job doing the kind of work that’s in your book so if you love doing print ads, put them in your book.

What stood out about the best grad/junior portfolio you’ve seen?

I like it when people have tried out ideas for real. So if they’ve made a film or a website or something.

Any other tips to help make a book the best it can be?

Same again- make something! Anyone doing book crits has seen hundreds of sketches of thoughts and ideas, so they’ll appreciate you getting off your arse (it still has to be a good idea though).

Awards

How important are student awards like YCN and D&AD? What happens if I don’t win one?

I don’t know really, I didn’t win any.

Craft – digital

You’ve got a strong technical knowledge, for example of html code. How did you learn all that stuff?

I liked programming when I was at school, just really basic stuff but then didn’t do any more with it until about 3 years ago. At that point I made a decision to start learning again. I had a lot of digital ideas that were a bit experimental and couldn’t get clients to buy them, so I decided to figure it out myself.

Don’t aim too small. I find the best way to learn is to have an idea you desperately want to make. It has to be exciting enough that it will keep you motivated when it all gets really, really confusing and you want to smash your laptop. This will happen often and will likely never end. It last happened to me a few days ago.

How much do you think that’s helped you in your career so far?

It’s easily the most important decision I made. All the work I’m most proud of I did all or a large part of the technical bit.

I’m pretty good at coming up with digital ideas but I don’t know any code. Does that mean I can’t be a digital creative?

No- but it would help. Ultimately the more unique you can make yourself, the more you’re worth to an agency and the more freedom you’ll have to make the kind of work you like. It doesn’t have to be coding, just learn to do something else that goes well with the thinking part.

Do you think the best advertising is generally digital, traditional or integrated?

I just like great ideas in any media. As far as media goes I like it when it’s used in an unusual way. That’s the same for digital- the best websites don’t feel like websites. The best banners don’t behave like banners.

What’s your favourite digital campaign and why? You’re allowed to say your own.

Whopper Sacrifice. It took a very smart social and technical realisation to come up with it. It was a facebook app that gave you a free burger if you deleted 10 friends, (who it then told what you’d done so it went crazily viral very quickly). Facebook ended up shutting it down.

Interview with Clive Pickering, Head of Copy at BETC London

2012-01-04T11:53:00.005Z

It being 2012 now, we’ve decided to stop living in the past and introduce a new element to this blog.

We realised that we have access to people with loads of that knowledge and experience stuff you hear so much about. We’ll be asking them some questions and posting the answers here.

The first of these interviews is with Clive, our Head of Copy. A copywriter with decades of experience at the top agencies in the UK and beyond, Clive’s formidable CV is peppered with Creative Director positions and accolades that include the most awarded print ad of all time. Clive’s taken the time out to answer some of the questions we wish we’d known the answer to a year ago.

Background

How long have you been working in advertising?

Coming up to 30 years. Jesus, is it really that long?

Where did you get your first job?

It was at a business-to-business agency called First City Advertising, mostly doing ads to sell building products to builders. One of my first campaigns was for Vencel Resil Expanded Polystyrene wall insulation. I didn’t win many awards for that one.

Book

How many campaigns should my book have in it?

A few years ago the standard answer to this was 8 to 10 campaigns of 3 or 4 press ads or posters each, with the odd TV script thrown in.

But now there are so many other exciting places to put ads and ways to extend a campaign into other forms of communication – I think you can probably get away with fewer campaigns provided you show a wide spread of really good examples of how broadly each can stretch.

Some agencies like to see work outside advertising as well as [or even instead of] advertising work. I suppose I’m a bit old-fashioned, but while I don’t mind seeing a bit of other stuff you’ve done, and it could help to differentiate you from other teams, I would want 90% of the book to be advertising.

How big should my book be and what kind of case should it be in? Does it matter?

It doesn’t matter greatly to me. I want to see ideas rather than anything with a highly-polished finish. Viewing it on a computer screen is fine – having your own website is probably the best way to do it. Even production company and photographers’ reps show their work on ipads now – I don’t think you need a big case full of hard copies.

Feedback on student work is often that it’s too ‘studenty’, but as students it’s pretty tough to differentiate! Are there any brands or type of ad it’s best to avoid to save your book from that label?

I don’t think ‘studenty’ is necessarily about brands or types of ad really. It’s more about the thinking. Something that is flashy and funny or clever without really considering how it talks to the people it’s aimed at would be ‘studenty’, I think.

How important are print ads? A lot of the time students are told to think bigger and to do ads outside of traditional media, while the other school of thought says that print is the simplest expression of a good idea and that you don’t need big, integrated campaigns. What’s your view?

It’s a great discipline to try to create a roadside poster or two for your campaign. It’s worth doing even if it doesn’t end up in your book, because it will help you hone your thinking. It will make you distil the idea down to its simplest form, and help you to see whether the idea works or not. That said, you should also try to show how it stretches into a broad spread of media, as mentioned above.

What common mistakes do you see in student/grad books?

Ideas that are about looking clever, rather than about selling stuff to real customers.

What stood out about the portfolio of the last grad/junior team you hired?

It was full of ideas that had been thought through in terms of talking to the people who would buy the product. It even had campaigns that created new uses and new customers for products.

Any other tips to help make a book the best it can be?

Creative Directors generally have less than no time to look at your work. So make it very simple for them to see each idea and understand it. If it is in any way hard to understand what the idea is, there is a chance that they will simply turn off or turn the page.

Awards

A lot of importance is placed on the D&AD and YCN student awards briefs. If I don’t win one, will I still get a placement?

Yes. Obviously it’s good to win one, but it is people who stand out from the crowd who get placements – and part of that could be having products and briefs in your book that are not the same as everyone else has.

How important are awards generally in the industry?

For your personal career, awards can be important as a way to show the level you have reached in the business. There is no real ‘career-ladder’ in creative departments [unlike Account Handling for example, where you become an Account Exec, then an Account Manager and then an Account Director]. Winning awards helps to show people that you have moved onward and upward. That said, there are far too many awards schemes around, and a lot of them are not very highly respected.

In the business in general, awards [at least the more respected ones] serve a purpose in encouraging creatives and agencies to go beyond the standard response to the brief. It’s easy enough to do a fairly solid, professional job on a brief and go no further. Awards help push us all towards new and more exciting solutions – which in the end means more noticeable [and therefore more effective] advertising.

Placements

Are placements paid?

They should be. Not necessarily highly paid, but they should be at least the minimum wage and hopefully cover your transport costs too.

How do I get one?

Get your work in front of as many people as you can in the agencies you admire most. Phone if possible [e-mails are easy to ignore]. Impress with the quality of your work and your willingness to listen and work hard. Use anyone you already know in the business to get contact details.

Is it common to do lots of placements before anyone hires you?

Yes, quite common. It can be that someone gets a first placement at an agency that they are perfectly suited to and that happens to be hiring. But that is rare.

It’s even quite a good thing to have several placements, because that way you get to see how different agencies work and can judge which is right for you.

Is it okay to be going for book crits in the day while you’re still on placement?

If you can, I would go before work, at lunchtime or in the evening. In theory it shouldn’t be a problem [agencies should understand that you need to get a broad range of feedback] but there is a danger that people will think you’re more intent on getting out of the agency than working for them.

How do I turn a placement into a job?

It’s tricky. To some extent stars have to align – the agency has to be ready to hire, and you have to get on well with everyone involved in the decision. You can increase your chances by showing readiness to work hard, even after normal hours, to listen and learn and by showing initiative [so if you don’t have a brief to work on, do a topical ad on one of the agency’s clients or come up with an idea for a potential new client for the agency].

Copywriting

I'm pretty good with words, but my spelling and grammar is iffy. Does that matter?

Spellcheck should help sort out the spelling. Grammar is harder. Read copy out loud, preferably to someone else, and see if your meaning is clear. Write the way you speak, and you shouldn’t go too far wrong. Grammar in ads isn’t quite the same as in English classes anyway – as you can see from the fact that I’m not writing in sentences here.

I’m a screenwriter/novelist/biographer/I got good marks in my dissertation, so surely copywriting for advertising should be a walk in the park, shouldn’t it?

It could help. If you’re any good at these things you should be able to get yourself into the head of the person you are aiming your ad at, which is a huge advantage. But you do have to remember what advertising is for [to sell things] – if you become too arty about it, you are liable to confuse the people you are trying to talk to, rather than communicate with them.

Is it important to be good at both art direction and copywriting?

It’s good to understand both of them, but you don’t need to have specialist skills in both. There are a lot of teams and individuals who claim to be equally good at both, but, with some exceptions, they tend to be a bit ‘jack of all trades’. I think it is a good idea to plump for one or the other and become really good at it. But the most important skill is to come up with ideas that use both visuals and writing, so you need a certain aptitude for both.

How can I get better at copywriting? Are there any books you recommend?

It’s not a book, but I found ‘Art and Copy’, a film about the great post-Madmen era creatives in America, inspirational. In writing copy you need to express ideas quickly and strongly. I find reading novels by writers who are brilliant at this helpful – Alan Paton’s ‘Cry the Beloved Country’, Karen Blixen’s ‘Out of Africa’, Norman Maclean’s ‘A River Runs Through it’. Among people writing directly about advertising, Dave Trott’s blog is full of common sense and knowledge acquired over a long and illustrious career.

Who’s your favourite copywriter and why?

In terms of pure writing, there is a certain style of headline and turn of phrase that I love, that Americans do so much better than we do. Over here, only Sean Doyle does a similar thing – he has a natural, colloquial turn of phrase that years of training could never achieve. But there are plenty of other great concept-creating writers around – Adam Tucker is one I greatly admire.

Happy New Year

2012-01-03T10:40:00.000Z

We were busy last year. Finishing our degree, moving to London and spending six months on placement at BETC contributed to the feeling that an awful lot happened. It really wasn't long ago that we were freshers and life was more about pizza boxes and pyjamas than having an actual boss and paying actual bills. On reflection it’s also been pretty brilliant and we've taken a lot of risks that haven't backfired, so far at least.

So if you’re starting that same transitional year, completing your time at uni and then popping out, screaming, into the jobs market, covered in figurative amniotic fluid and crying literal tears, may your 2012 be bewildering, terrifying and spectacularly rewarding.

Happy New Year.

Why you such a tease?

2011-11-28T10:36:00.002Z

In Saturday Night Fever, Tony Menero (or as you might know him 'John Travolta') once said to Stephanie 'Why are you such a cock-tease?' to which Stephanie replied 'Don't you call me no goddam cock-tease!'" which is probably fair enough. But I'll come back to that.

We're happily on placement at BETC at the moment but as Ben said last week we can't expect that to be the case forever, so we're just getting back into the swing of regular book crits. We're enjoying it too, getting ourselves about a bit and meeting very nice people who are willing to just give away tonnes of their precious time without us even having slip £50 notes into our handshakes. That's probably for the best, what with our dangerously feeble financial position.

So while enjoying being back 'on the scene' it's also a nice time to take stock and think about the lessons you've learned along the way, which is where we come back to Tony Monero and his potty mouth.

Before BETC we were going to crits regularly at one particular agency and getting fairly positive feedback. There was never quite an offer of a placement as such but it was made pretty clear early on that our book was being looked at with a placement in mind. So, once we'd been there a few times we started feeling positive about our chances.

We were still in uni at this point but if ever friends or family asked how our chances of a placement were looking I'd shrug modestly and say something humble like 'well it's going well but you just never know' whilst somewhere in the back of my mind was some idiot's voice, surely not mine, saying 'you know this one's in the bag though, don't you?'

So off we went to the agency for another meeting, eyes wide and tails suitably bushy. We were told that our book needed some work, fair enough, but also that there wasn't actually a placement system in place there anyway, so goodbye and 'stay in touch' (what that means deserves a blog post in itself…)

Ouch.

But you said…

Obviously neither of us reacted like Tony Monero because that sort of behaviour elicits Stephanie's kind of reaction, or in this case security is called. Or the dogs, or the bees.

We did feel a bit hard done by, and that's pointless in itself. Situations do change and it's daft to take things like that personally.

It's also another great reminder of the necessity of disloyalty. Pinning all of your hopes on one creative opportunity or placement is generally a terrible idea. You might get lucky or you might not, either way it's really important to give yourself the best chance possible by spreading your bets.

So here's more misplaced loyalty, this time to the tenuous Saturday Night Fever reference. If Mr Travolta had been playing the game right he'd have said 'Ok Stephanie, thanks for your time' and then called Sandy off Grease to say he could make dinner after all.

Mike x

D'you like dead stuff that sings?

2011-11-25T09:52:00.002Z

Our music video wot we came up with is out. Enjoy!

'Back In The Day'

The Erratic Man

Directed by James Copeman

Our first time in Campaign.

2011-11-24T16:31:00.000Z

Our ad for Micycle was covered in the back page of today's edition of Campaign. Granted it's a modest space in the arse-end of the magazine, but who are we to sniff at a bit of publicity?

Managing placement life is hard.

2011-11-17T23:58:00.000Z

Mike and I have been on placement at BETC now for 5 months. I have absolutely no idea where the time's gone, but we're coming to the protracted end of it in December. As such, we've been busy trying to arrange our next move.

Thing is, we're cutting it pretty fine. It's funny how short our memories can be; just a little while ago, we were spamming every agency in London that we liked (and often didn't) for feedback on our book and advice on what we need to do to get a foot in the door. We had said "yes" to a house in the Docklands area with some friends before leaving Uni and we knew that if we didn't get someone to take us on very soon, we'd have committed to a place in the most expensive city in the country that we couldn't afford to live in.

Mike found this story of a naval captain that sailed his small army to war (details etc escape me at present). They hid out overnight on the shores of the country they were attacking and awoke the next morning to discover that all their ships were on fire -- shit! It turned out that the culprit was actually the captain - now his army had absolutely no way of retreating. They had the option to win the war or die a horrible, horrible death. Apparently they won, which was reassuring.

The difference with us is that there are only two of us, nothing is currently on fire and we don't own guns or anything as wicked as that. So, we had no alternative but to get a placement as quickly as possible. We decided to arrange crits and come to London as often as we could in the closing stages of our third year at Glos, a result of the fear. We had to see how our book (and us as people) were received by the big-timers and know what level we needed to get up to before we had an out-of-pocket landlord banging on our door, clutching a blunt, swingable object like a cricket bat or sack of doorknobs.

Doing these crits and events like YCC's Unite were invaluable lessons, as they give you a broader range of perspectives on what people in the industry are looking for in a book, or a team, than you'll ever get from the advice that university gives you. That's not to say the advice you're given there isn't valuable, it really is, but it doesn't hurt to hear three or four other people's views. We learnt very quickly that it was important to get the idea of every campaign in your book across straight away, in as simple a summation of it as possible. Often this means kicking each campaign off with a print ad, so the person reviewing your work 'gets' it quickly, but it could just as easily be something ambient or a new product or something else. Whatever it comes across best in, to be honest.

Thanks to the general feedback we'd received, we knew the industry wanted our book to be 'quicker', so a couple of 'quick' print campaigns replaced some that seemed to need painstakingly long explanations. It was actually one of these print ads that caught the eye of our current Creative Director and landed us our placement at BETC. This was the only thing that made the premature move to London brave and not really fucking stupid.

But 5 months later, we're back in the same position of imminently empty pockets. And despite the urgency on our part to go and see as many agencies as we feasibly can to get a new gig sorted for January, most of the relevant people are all pretty busy with, you know, their jobs and stuff. Who'd have thought? Further to that, being on placement makes meetings pretty iffy to arrange conveniently for everyone - it's not as if you can swan off to East London for an hour in the middle of every day when somebody is paying you (albeit minimally) to be working for them.

After a couple of conversations with some BETC folk, it became clear that placement teams are sort of expected to go off and get crits. It's the way the system works, and the top dogs haven't all forgotten how difficult it can be.

The main thing we realised, with the mighty power of hindsight, is that we should have been doing this months ago, trying to arrange things a while in advance. Seems obvious now, and we've sort of known all along that we should have been seeing other agencies, but there was always a reason; we're too tired from working long hours to improve the book, and it wasn't quite ready to show them yet, and if we just e-mail this person and see when they're available next month then we can definitely do some work over the weekends to get ready, but - Oh! The football's on and we've worked hard all week, and actually it'd be quite nice to squeeze in a bit of time for real life and friends so it might be nice to just not work instead. There always seemed to be a reason that our book wasn't quite ready to show to other agencies yet and to be honest that might be the case forever. It's important to know that it's not a thing you finish, it's a thing that's always evolving. So we're trying to show around what we've got for the moment and hopefully within the next few weeks we'll have more of an idea of where we'll be in January.

Otherwise, we'll be spending our final wages on canned food and a reinforced front door to keep out any cricket bat-toting landlords with a thirst for the blood of the poor.

Ben x

I just unlocked the 'Flogging a Dead Horse' badge on Foursquare!

2011-10-14T14:53:00.000+01:00

Fifty for Fifty

2011-10-14T11:27:00.001+01:00

Seen Creature London's Fifty for Fifty competition? They're asking folks to design a new £50 note, with the best winning a real-life £50 note. It's open 'til 1st November if you fancy doing one.

Here's my (Ben, FYI) entry: the more amazinger, entirely new and improved Fifty S.

Mike & Ben start a blog

2011-10-14T11:23:00.000+01:00

We've had our own individual ones in the past but in the spirit of making life easier for ourselves, we've decided to join forces on the blogosphere too.

Expect this thing to be occasionally inundated with stuff we've done or like.

Happy Friday,

Ben x