WTF?
A campaign about campaigns, where I sit down with top creatives.
What was the insight of the campaign?
The nugget in the idea is that mothers, generally speaking, do a whole lot of work – unpaid work. They are often overworked and underrecognised for the work they actually put into raising kids. We are all indebted to them. That was the insight at the root of this idea.
The thing with mothers is that they are constantly doing that our whole lives. So really, this idea was to recognise the unpaid labour of mothers through the vessel of a receipt. It's also to make people aware of it – hey, we actually owe our mothers a lot. The reality is we can't even pay them back for it. It's an unpayable debt. It's a lifetime of work.
We played with quantities. For example, a quantity of nine months carried you, as in pregnancy. We wiped your tears 500 times. We wrote over 100 different items, but we narrowed it down to 40. It also ended up in chronological order, from birth to childhood, adolescence, teenage years, and then adulthood.
We even double-checked the numbers. With something like the tooth fairy, we checked how many teeth kids lose, and it turned out to be 20, so the quantity was 20. We literally sat there and thought about how many times a mother would have changed a nappy. We thought through every single number and every single item. The amount column was all zeros. It cost nothing. You paid nothing for it.
Was the brief to specifically create an installation, or did the idea evolve that way?
The idea came first, and then we thought, you know what, it would be cool if we could print out a massive receipt.
There was a conversation with the guys at Melbourne Central who said they could only give us four metres. Then Chris was like, can we go longer? We emailed them and asked if we could go higher. They emailed us an hour later and said, you know what, we just found out you can actually go up to 10 metres.
It was an idea we became really passionate about, so we had to do it on our own and do it really fast. We wrote it, designed it, made the film in-house, and ended up printing it and making phone calls all within a couple of days.
It was a bit of a fight, but we got there. Sometimes when you have a good idea, you have to do everything yourself. You can't wait around for people to give you the green light. You've just got to make it, make the phone calls, start making it, and not wait for anyone.
How do you know when you have come up with a golden idea?
I think when it comes to advertising, there are certain truths in life that are just so true. If you can tap into a truth or insight and speak to it in a really emotional, funny, or entertaining way, that's when you know you're onto something gold.
If we want to talk about this campaign specifically, the insight was clear, and the vessel gave people an emotional reaction. There was a bit of energy in the room that felt unique, and you don't always feel that.
Where do your best ideas usually come from?
The best ideas often come from going out into the world and actually living life. Go to the pub, chat to your mates, watch good movies, listen to good music, and look at good art.
These things are what spark in your head when you get a brief in front of you. You have this wealth of stories, information, and references in your brain that you can draw from and use.
What was your specific role in this campaign?
I was the creative director and the creative. So I was working with my partner at the time, Dan Borghesi. He was a copywriter and I was the art director. We were also creative directors on the project.
What did the brainstorming phase for this campaign actually look like?
It was a bit rushed. It was a last minute thing from Minderoo. They saw something at INC, which essentially is multiple kinds of talks. They saw an activation that was done about plastic pollution, they were talking about it, and we wanted to do something similar in Paris, which was INC 2. All up, from INC 1 to INC 2 was three months, so when we got briefed there was only probably two months.
We had a two week window, and were like, we’re going to have to start presenting ideas back to them so then there is still enough time to make and execute it. Sometimes a tight deadline like that is good. If the deadline is really extended there’s more opinions, second guessing, and people sit with things, fall out of love with something, where I find that sometimes the short deadlines, as stressful as it is, can help. People are forced to make decisions, it can kind of speed things up - make a decision, move on, make a decision, move on – rather than asking too many people, too many opinions, because they feel like they need to contribute something so they don’t make a decision, and then the creative can get dulled down, the edges get taken off things.
Was the idea uncovered quickly or slowly?
It was relatively quick, we only had a two week creative brainstorming process. They were all based around facts or research and stats that we found around plastic. We found that was the most horrific thing, but the original brief was to do a sculpture or something that had a presence on the ground. The Plastic Forecast didn’t really have a physical presence, it had a digital, online presence, so we had to convince the client that we could still have a big impact even though there wasn’t necessarily a thing for people to look at. That’s why we got weather reporters involved, and had digital trucks with billboards driving around Paris with the forecast.
The science we found to base the idea off was pre-written journals. We worked with the Minderoo scientists to check that, to find out the percentage of rain in Paris. There was back and forth between us to do the numbers and in the end they went with quite a conservative report, but it was still impactful enough.
How did you find translating the ads from English to French?
We were brainstorming and writing in English, and then we were lucky we had a couple of French speakers in the agency so we would always kind of default to them – “Hey, is this going to translate okay?” They could give us a rough read and then we would send it off to people to properly translate it. Thankfully all the agencies and people we were dealing with in Paris spoke English, so it wasn’t too much of an issue.
How do you get unstuck creatively?
Sometimes I feel you need to be a bit stuck. I think sometimes you need to be a bit bored and in a position where, “I don’t know how I’m gonna solve this,” and that’s when the better ideas start coming. It’s like when you’re at a dead end and start writing ridiculous ideas, almost trying to take a bit of the pressure off, not having to write something that’s right. I think if you’re trying, you put a lot of pressure on yourself and are trying to write the solution, rather than just writing something that you think is interesting.
My approach is that you’ve gotta get stuck, get to the point where you’re stuck. Sometimes your first or second idea is actually pretty good, but normally getting to that point where you’re kind of a bit stuck and staying stuck – don’t get out your phone and start scrolling, just stay in that moment. If you can stay there for 20-30 minutes , your brain starts joining the dots a little bit and piecing things together.