Interview: Simon Lloyd and Christine Turner
Creative Social Blog 18 Jan 2012, 1:18 am CET
Creative Social went down to meet Christine Turner and Simon Lloyd, Creative Digital Heads at Adam & Eve. The guys have just won gold and silver for their John Lewis ‘Harmony’ campaign at the Big Awards, and have recently launched Pottermore, J.K. Rowling’s new Harry Potter website.
Christine and Simon met while at University, after working together they both felt the creative chemistry that makes a winning partnership. A meeting with Pat Dougherty & Rob Kitchen at a talent showcase led them to a position at Bates UK. Even though they enjoyed working on Royal Mail, Woolworths & Sky, six months after joining, the agency took a pretty serious nose dive and they soon found themselves out of a job. They decided to try the freelance route and landed a contract at Glue. ‘Basically we never left; we were there 5 years later. It was our introduction into digital and also an introduction to being in a really great agency at the height of its success’ Simon tells me. Here they learnt the fundamentals of great, interactive digital advertising by working with a very talented group of people. At this point they made the decision to leave the pure play digital world as they could see the industry tilting. ‘Being in a purely digital agency meant you were sometimes picking up the breadcrumbs from established ATL creative, we wanted to get to a position where we were there at the very beginning when the briefs where being created, we believe digital should be part of the mix from the off, not just an add-on or an afterthought,’ Christine explains. They made the move to Lowe where they helped set up the digital team (and for the opportunity to work with Ed Morris). It was here they experienced working at the top of the food chain with the ability to present digital along side more traditional creative. They then they met with the award winning start up agency Adam & Eve and it wasn’t long before they felt this was the right place for them. An agency that truly offered a mix of traditional and modern talent. Two years on, they have built up an integrated digital team, as well as touching much of the more traditional work that is produced.
Having worked as a creative partnership for over ten years, I wanted to ask what they think makes a good creative relationship. ‘It’s harder at the beginning, you have to prove yourself not only to your partner but also to your new boss,’ Simon explains. He feels that as you become more senior and more confident you begin to build more trust in each other. ‘You have to like each other, that’s a start’, Christine tells me, even if they have not seen eye to eye that day, being able to leave that in the office is crucial. They are both big advocates of the creative team, they feel that a single creative is hindered by not having anybody to bounce ideas off and is ultimately less employable. They don’t believe, however, that creative teams should be limited to the traditional Copywriter / Art Director set up, ‘when we started we were forced to give ourselves these titles, but we didn’t work like that’ Christine says. Simon’s view is that ‘as long as somebody takes responsibility for a certain part of the job, that’s all people are after’.
The biggest change that they have seen within the industry is the shift between digital and above the line. ‘There was always a bit of a fear of digital’ Christine tells me, ‘now people realise that the thinking is the same, it’s just a different media’. They also acknowledge that on the flip side of that there has been a real turn around in creating great, heroic TV adverts that everybody talks about, something that Adam & Eve have become well known for (their latest John Lewis ad notched up over a million hits in 3 days). They both agree that we are living in an interesting time for adverting where the really successful agencies will be the ones who not only create both, but can integrate the two. With a lot of the pure digital talent moving to the above the line agencies, it will also be interesting to see what niche digital can find.
We move on to talk about the success of the John Lewis and Pottermore campaigns. ‘They were both very different’ Simon tells me, ‘I think the John Lewis work stood out because it was really different for that particular client’. The campaign involved an interactive installation with a live performer on the South Bank (check it out here). They had worked with the client for a number of years and built a trusting relationship which allowed them to become more daring. The execution combined a number of different disciplines into one idea which they admitted was incredibly stressful, especially when you’re watching an installation being lifted into the air by a crane.
Pottermore was a completely different type of campaign. By far the biggest project they have worked on, they started over a year prior to the actual live date. Simon and Christine were the only creative team involved and worked on the marketing and advertising of the site, art direction and branding as well as the helping develop the concept of Pottermore itself. The launch campaign focused on an announcement film in which J K Rowling would reveal Pottermore to the world. They utilized the huge fan base by releasing the co-ordinates of cryptic letters on the most popular Harry Potter blogs. The task to find them all and spell out Pottermore was supposed to take 2 days, it lasted just 3 hours. At this point the holding page for the official site went live, while at the same time owls started to gather on pages all over the web. When an owl was clicked on it would take you to a YouTube page with a countdown to the launch film featuring the author. ‘It was amazing to work on something with such a huge fan base. It was a bit like Christmas, you had this wonderful thing that was wrapped up and you could pull open a bit of the paper and tease people with it’ Simon told me. The level of success can be illustrated by the amount of user generated content that was created around the campaign, with fans from all around the world posting photos and videos of their ‘Potter Parties’ leading up to the launch.
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