CREATIVITY IS INTELLIGENCE HAVING FUN

Creativity is intelligence having fun

– Albert Einstein

Duncan Barry interviews Duncan Bone, group creative director BMW China at TBWA\Worldwide, on the high-end brands his team deals with and the drastic changes in the advertising industry.

As a creative director who worked in London and now China, you work with top companies such as BMW, Adidas, Dior, Ford, Google, Nike, Honda, Sony and others. I would imagine such companies have very high expectations and seek creatives who think out of the box. When engaging in a media or advertising campaign, what is the drill, do you brainstorm ideas as a team or do you emerge with the idea yourself?

We work as a team, so ideas grow collectively. My role requires me to be able to pick and nurture the right ones and learn to do this with multiple teams (creative and art directors, strategists, planners, producers

and freelancers) on multiple projects daily. Experience enables you to do this, and personally, a love for design, typography, film and new technology helped secure my role within a very competitive industry.

Different studios tackle briefs in their own way depending on the scale and nature of the project and the team. In most cases, we would start with meeting the client to pick up and understand the brief. Then the strategists and planners lay the foundations of the project and create a detailed internal summary based on the client’s requirements, and their knowledge of the specific client and what needs to be delivered. Only then

Duncan Bone

will we sit with the full creative team for the brainstorming to take place. Regular checks take place along the way to ensure we are on track to create work that is not only original and engaging but still fully respects the brand and the original brief.

Moving from London to Beijing hasn't changed this process much. TBWA is a large international company with a network of people across the globe. The work we do here focuses on campaigns for China for international clients such as BMW, Adidas and Apple and other campaigns for other markets including South Korea and Japan.

Advertising has changed drastically and is now mainly online. If you were to compare traditional advertising to the new modern way, what’s that one thing that remained?

The idea. Narrative and storytelling are crucial, no matter what the medium is. Great design and comprehensive digital executions still need a strong idea behind them. Looking at some of the best work out of Cannes helps to strengthen this notion and gives us and the industry faith in what can be achieved within existing and emerging formats.

Can you tell us what your first major piece of work comprised of and who was it for, and which was your most fulfilling?

When I first arrived in London back in 2001, I worked for a company called Random Media. Within a few months, we secured projects with Sony PlayStation, and eventually, these lead to a young director called Carl Eric Rinsch (47 Ronin) contacting us to do work for Tony Scott’s film ‘Spy Game’, starring Robert Redford and Brad Pitt. I was responsible for the global online marketing and designed a website which pushed what could have been done technically online.

the advertising industry in the UK is facing various issues at the moment… due to the decision to leave Europe, which caused the budget holders of a large pool of international clients to be excessively cautious

A few years later, Ridley Scott started work on his latest project. He said to Carl: “I want a ‘moving’ website like my brother's!”, and we were contacted to design the global online marketing for Matchstick Men. I had direct access to the stars and the director himself. My idea was to create an extended behind the scenes world with interviews and details of the story plus loads of bonus material which you could only find on this site.

All projects have their own importance and personal attachment. But the ones I value most are the personal ones I manage to work on in the little spare time I have. Mainly my films, and projects for personal clients that I worked on through my own studio, and film posters for films such as ‘A Single Shot’, ‘The Last Photograph’ and ‘Home’, to ‘ANIMA’ - the short fashion film I made for Louboutin and The London Design Museum.

Campaign ad for the Barbican Duchamp season

What is the essence of creativity, in your opinion?

That’s a big question. Einstein apparently said that ‘creativity is intelligence having fun’. And as much of a cliché as it may sound, it is true. Most of the people I know are in creative advertising roles because they love chasing the big idea. I have yet to meet a creative person who works in advertising because they love selling products. Advertising is a platform which allows you to continuously push yourself to create posters, films, campaigns and digital ideas for a living - at a constant fast pace. The necessity to be consistently creative is the ‘essence’ to our creativity. Advertising is the facilitator that keeps us hooked.

Home film poster design

Do you always manage to grasp what the client brief is all about, even when it’s something that doesn’t personally interest you or have no knowledge about it whatsoever?

Having some form of interest in the subject does help. Nonetheless, you have to be ready to dive into any campaign with the same passion, no matter who or what it is for. The common ingredient here is unearthing the answer to the big idea and doing something unique on a national or global level.

My work on the Barbican’s Marcel Duchamp campaign a few years ago is a perfect example. I knew the man’s legacy but still had to spend weeks, if not months, studying him and everything he stood for. We set up calls with his estate, and also tracked down the son of a man who had spent time with Duchamp himself as he crossed from Paris to New York by sea. We spoke on the phone, and he was so helpful and happy for us to use some of the documentary footage he had at hand, which become part of our online campaign.

We were an unknown two-man studio at the time, but this approach led to work which was true to the artist and his cause and to us winning the pitch. We beat some of the UK’s leading agencies in the process and created a compelling campaign which is still one of my favourite pieces of work.

What main challenges is the industry facing right now?

From my experience, the advertising industry in the UK is facing various issues at the moment, somewhat due to the decision to leave Europe, which caused the budget holders of a large pool of international clients to be excessively cautious. Who can blame them? No one wants to be held accountable for signing large amounts of money on a campaign in a country that doesn’t know what’s around the corner.

The market is now saturated with new talent, old talent, small boutique agencies, and old school agencies that are expected to do ten times more work for the same amount of money. An industry that asked for print and tv and possibly cinema ads, now expects all of that plus social media content, web, interactive experiences, apps and more. Even if the budgets are separate; agencies want all the pie, so they are ready to do more for less in fear of losing out to a future that is more digital-focused.

A creative agency has the dilemma of finetuning its original craft or risk becoming a shop that caters for everything and everyone, and if not careful, dilute its core offering.

Dior Homme summer 2019 launch