Head honcho

By David MacGregor, September 7, 2006 @ midnight

Evil, we’re not sure. Genius, possibly. Creative powerhouse, for certain. Whybin\TBWA creative director Andy Blood has been busy. In April he launched his own magazine—called Blood, of course. In May Whybins took home the top award for innovative media at the Clio Awards in Miami and followed that with gold at the Cannes Lions in June. So what’s next?

Photograph by Toaki Okano/Croydon Studios

For most businesses ‘creative director’ is a strange title. How do you see your main role?

My job is to liberate the creativity within everyone who works at TBWA. I guide, enthuse and direct their creative energies. And in doing so, create great business and marketing ideas for our clients. I’m an ideas evangelist. An idealogue! I’m a firm believer in giving people permission to fail. And firmly believe that it’s better to have so many ideas that some of them are wrong, rather than too few for fear of not being right.

Your team won a Grand Clio at the Clio Awards in the US and a Cannes Gold for ‘Be the ball’. Why does a giant adidas bungee football ride capture the imagination?

Because we created a living, breathing and heart-stopping brand experience for our client, who had requested a unique adidas ‘Impossible is nothing’ experience. For those who had a go, the adidas brand would be burnt into their DNA. You can’t ask for more than that.

Was it just a stunt?

It was an audacious sales promotion. A world first. ‘Buy the ball, be the ball.’ The interruption model of advertising is in decline. We now have to give people a unique experience for them to be a part of a brand.

How do you arrive at solutions?

We run an open department where the least experienced, the juniors, compete with the most experienced, the senior talent. Having a great idea matters, not from where or from whom it comes. I’m very mercenary in that regard. I don’t give a shit where an idea comes from as long as it’s brilliant. We mentor as many students as we can. We also run TBWA’s Australasian young talent programme, ‘Young Bloods’, here in New Zealand.

How important is it to bring on new talent?

It’s essential. Over the last few years we’ve mentored kids from AUT and the AXIS Adschool. Whenever we work with Paul White or David Bell’s students we get amazing results. Right now we’ve nurtured the most highly-awarded young creative teams in New Zealand advertising. I’m very good at picking talent. (I wish I was as good at picking horses.)

You edited the Magazine Publishers’ Association showcase magazine, Blood—although ‘curated’ might be a better term. What did you learn that you might apply in your usual work?

‘Curating’ is exactly the right way to describe it. The process, I guess, was similar to curating a multimedia showcase that happened to be in a magazine. It was slightly different to what I do for our clients, because it was more personal, more self-centred, less censored.

Do you think some of the content was art for art’s sake, not work that would be viable outside the ‘lab’?

I don’t think it matters. It used to be that this year’s extreme is next year’s mainstream. I think now this week’s extreme is next week’s mainstream. I’m really looking forward to seeing what the new editors [Guy Denniston and Emmanuel Bougneres] do with the medium—and also to winning it back so I can have another crack.

Idealog has a central idea to bring together buyers and sellers of commercial creativity to stimulate the creative economy. What sorts of things can we do—as practitioners—to get things happening?

We need a place, a lab (with a bar), like a swap meet, where people overflowing with ideas hook up with engineers, producers, technology people and buyers. Where we invent things and develop ideas, uses and applications for them. Like crashing Professor Pat Pending [of Wacky Races], the Tate Modern, the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Art], Junkyard Wars, Monster Garage and MythBusters all into one.

Manchester appointing a creative director is inspired. Design and invention are what we have left. The manufacturing can be done elsewhere, where it’s low cost. Ideas and design can change our lives.

Likewise, New Zealand cities should have a creative director. Someone like Edward de Bono. I don’t see why politicians, bureaucrats, and administrators are the best people to decide on the outcomes of transport and environmental policy. We need a star chamber of lateral thinkers and visionaries.

How could you direct that energy?

We say ‘use a wild mind and a disciplined eye’. At some point you have to decide, “Enough! Of the 300 great ideas on the table we’ll now put all our energies into making five as good as they can be.” Of all the possible outcomes you have to decide what can be achieved on time and on budget to the most startling effect. I use the phrase ‘creativity is not a democracy’. Someone has to take charge.

Is it a job you’d want for yourself?

I’d love to channel the creative output of a million people. What an incredible opportunity.

Do we put enough resources into developing new ideas and innovation in New Zealand?

Someone once suggested a reality TV sketch where you take a camera and some number eight wire into the street and say: “Go on then, make something, if you’re so bloody clever.” It’s a really funny idea, but I’m less cynical than that. New Zealanders—and by that I mean all people living in New Zealand—are incredibly inventive. We don’t put enough resources into tapping that.

You write film scripts and stories. Have you been published or had a film made?

I’ve got notebooks full of products, inventions and art ideas, and a laptop chock-full of children’s stories, movies and screenplays. One of the real pleasures and benefits of being a creative director is the amazing number of like-minded collaborators you assemble along the way. Between us, we won’t rest until we’ve been published, immortalised on film or in a gallery, or in some other, yet-to-be-invented way.

Tell me about your work ethic. David Hockney says he has the words ‘get up and work’ painted along the foot of his bed. That probably explains his prolific output over the years. People often imagine creatives as ‘airy-fairy’ …

Creativity is the antithesis of ‘airy-fairy’. More often than not, ‘airy-fairy’ is the disguise of the non-creative.

I wake early, around 5am. And the synapses are firing. I have post-it notes all over the place—the evidence of strange musings at strange hours. It used to be that when I woke up the ideas I’d had in my sleep were nonsensical. These days they come fully formed. I can literally do it in my sleep. The other morning I was making coffee at about 6am when I found a note I’d written that said ‘How to build an iceberg’. Then I remembered the idea I’d had for a kid’s short story—which I will write.

However, I’m not as fortunate as Mr Hockney. I have to go to work. But as long as I can do this job, I’m very fortunate.

What are you are reading now?

Next to my bed you’ll find a drunken literary ménage a trio: Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand, Chuck Pahlanuik’s Haunted and Iain Bank’s ode to whisky, Raw Spirit. (I don’t even drink whisky, I just enjoy his passion for it.)

A Bloody business

Blood magazine, $29.95 from Mercury Subs

Reaction to Blood was not muted. Andy Blood’s eponymous, one-off magazine has been praised, pilloried, slagged off and eulogised, but it hasn’t been ignored. Mission achieved, then.

Blood may have had the most unusual brief in publishing: create a magazine and cram in all the foolish and fantastic ideas you can think up or extract from others—stories, poems, illustrations, scriptwriting, photos and ads that the client balked at. Once that’s done, pick the best contributor and hand the project on to create another one-off magazine. It was funded by the Magazine Publishers’ Association with the aim of raising interest in magazine advertising among creatives.

Creatives quickly made their interest known. “Great ideas,” said one poster on the nzcreativecircle blog, before claiming the ideas were pinched from overseas. Others have raved about the mag. A few hotheads even turned up to label Blood a scam (cue a quickly-heated debate).

But Blood is a hoot—the magazine, reinvented. I usually read magazines with a professional detachment but Blood obeys no rules and it’s the better for it. It was a long time coming—the first print run earlier this year was actually pulped—but every page has a great idea. Some pages have a dozen. Bravo.

Who’s up next? Blood has anointed Emmanuel Bougneres and Guy Denniston who will now get to create their own magazine. That might be late too, but I bet it won’t be ignored.

– Matt Cooney