D&AD Student Pencils / Placement

I've been neglecting this blog a great deal lately, but with good reason. I've had a very busy couple of weeks, on placement at AMV BBDO. More of that later, but big news first.

Olly and I won a D&AD student award for our "EA Peace Day" idea in the Open Brief category. And then we won the award for D&AD Students Of The Year! Here we are with 50% of our awards...

Needless to say we're over the moon, but of course it's as much about the opportunities it opens up as the actual awards. So we're very much hoping to get placements as good as the one we just had, because AMV's system should really be the benchmark.

First of all, they have a system in place - you're looked after by someone outside the Creative department, which actually works wonders. This means that you're not constantly hassling busy creatives for briefs or help - instead, you're making phone calls to Account Managers, Planners, Project Managers - all of whom are invariably happy to help.

There are the little things, too, like the fact that they create an email address for you, and put you on the agency-wide and creative mailing groups. This means that from day one, you actually get emails - and even if they're just telling you that some left an iPhone in the 3rd floor ladies', they still make you feel part of the organisation.

Oh, and they pay placement teams, and there's free porridge before 9am. What more could you want?

More D&AD Reflection

I should start this post with an apology, because lately I've been relentlessly spamming the social networks with news of mine and Olly's D&AD Student Award nomination for our Peace One Day project. I think one has to be a fairly shameless self-promoter when getting into this industry, but the downside is that those who know you well can get a bit sick of it all. So to those people, sorry.

I also feel sorry for a team from Sunderland, who had almost exactly the same idea as us - you can view it here - but didn't win a nomination (though they're going to the BBH Barn shortly, so their story has a happy ending).

I wanted to work out why our version of the idea won out - not to gloat, but to understand, so the success can be repeated. I think the answer is simply that we worked harder at ours. We tested our thinking and our strategy at every stage, and we pushed our ideas as far as they could go, asking advice at every turn.

As a result, you find the little differences. Our method for getting people to play football is probably more technically realistic, as we found out that simply switching to a sports simulation engine within Battlefield 3 would have been extraordinarily difficult to code. The person who told me this also suggested using Electronic Arts, as they produced major videogames in both war and football - a fact which led us to the "pEAce day" logo, a useful stroke of luck.

Our research also led us to develop a realistic user journey, that took into account likely scepticism on the part of gamers, and therefore harnessed in-game advertising opportunities and created incentives for them to participate. Throughout, we were determined that the idea would fit into peoples' lives and habits, rather than expect them to take a leap into the unknown.

And that's it, really. It turns out that hard work counts as much as a good idea. And on that bombshell, I'm going to bed.

A couple of awesome D&AD winners

"D&AD winners never sell anything". That's the most common complaint about awards like these, and in some cases, it's fair comment. But on the other hand, these are the Design & Art Direction awards, and for those more interested in success, there's always the IPA Effectiveness Awards.

So, here are a couple of stunning pieces of craft. First of all, in the packaging category, the Shanghai 1910 special edition Johnnie Walker bottles by Love Creative. It's not rocket science why these won - yes, they're on brand, but any two-bit agency can make something look a bit Chinese. Not everyone can make it look as sumptuous and classy as this though - the perfect representation of a masterful, premium brand (click to enlarge).

Then, in the music videos, is "Simple Math" by Manchester Orchestra (who are American and not an orchestra) and directed by The Daniels. It won a yellow pencil for special effects, but for me the video was so full of depth and emotional weight that it deserved to take a bigger prize.

No embedding. Go here to watch it on Vimeo and get it fullscreen.

Other nominated videos, like this fun one for Is Tropical, may have a more memorable central concept. But as a marriage of music and images, it's just about unbeatable.

It's in the way you instantly know you're looking at the singer as a child and his Father. It's in the great acting job by all 4 main characters. It's in the way that you can watch the video 5 times and still see a new symbol tying together each strand of the plot. And it's in the way the editing is exactly in time with the music - not just in a simplistic "dramatic thing happens on big chord" way, but in subtle changes of pace and energy.

Great stuff - and it wasn't even the team's only nomination.