D&AD Awards / Creative Circle Awards

Today Molly (just about) finished our entry for the D&AD student awards. We're feeling pretty good about it, we've had some great feedback from mentors at the school, and we've tweaked just about as much as anything will take being tweaked.

Due to D&AD rules, I'm not a liberty to show you the idea until we know whether it's won or not. But it was interesting to note that the advice was either given, or had to be taken, in two ways. Firstly, in terms of what you would do if actually approaching the client, and secondly, how you would convince an awards judge to put you through.

Which raises the question of what extent I might end up doing that as a creative professional. I'm not the first person to ask it, but it's a timely one, as the Creative Circle Awards are descending into booze-soaked chaos at the Roundhouse as we speak.

I haven't had chance to check through all their winners, largely due to their website's flashy but frustrating (ok, just plain fucking stupid) interface, but the Gold of Golds for John Lewis (by Adam&Eve) is fully deserved. And you can bet that the creatives' focus was aimed fully at the needs of the client.

But then there's work like BMB's ad for Thomson's Holidays, which won a Gold. I've critiqued it before, and the disconnect between the well-spoken, precociously articulate boy and his well-dressed family, the luxurious locations, and the instagram-y filtering on one hand, and the type of low-cost mass-market holidays that Thomsons sell on the other, still persists.

It feels like an advert the agency made for themselves, not for their client and certainly not for the audience (unless the creatives genuinely thought families watching the X-Factor were going to be captivated by a bit of cod philosophy over a piano re-working of The Pixies, in which case, can I have their jobs please?).

I have no problem winning awards. I just hope never to win an award and be ashamed of it.

Thomsons indie holidays

Set to a gentle reworking of The Pixies "Where Is My Mind", this 90 second spot from Beattie McGuinness Bungay positions Thomson Holidays as a chance to rediscover the quality time you miss throughout the rest of the year. But...

...I find it a little ill-judged. Everything about the family suggests the upper (though possibly liberal) end of the middle class spectrum. It all reeks of expensive vintage shops, 4x4s, golden retrievers, and detached houses with long-haired toddlers running around being creative. The instagram-y filters at different points of the ad don't help either.

A child voiceover is fine if they're clearly too young to have written the words given. But this boy looks just old enough to at least understand what he's saying, and the final shot where he speaks the words to the camera break the illusion of a child reading an adult's words. He just comes across like a particularly precocious privately educated swot. The meaningful, knowing look to the camera at the start only exacerbates this.

It was suggested to me that perhaps they're pitching at that end of the market - but in that case, why was the ad launched during an X-Factor live show? And why, when I google "Thomson Holidays", does it immediately give me "cheap summer and winter package holidays"?

I'd really like to know the thinking behind this, because it's a big campaign, but at the moment, I just don't see it.