Wheathill is a splendiferous entertainment agency based between London and the South West. They really are a bit special, providing everything from slinky, jazzy piano talent to entertain HRH and a certain Barack Obama, to gorgeous girls who dressing up as horny, buzzing bumble bees!

A collaborative affair with Paul Mills of Good Morning Please, it’s been a true delight.

Lovely Rona Smith (and sister co-founder Heather Hoyle) have been fantastic clients, giving us plenty of creative licence to deliver a responsive, refreshingly different website with all the bells and whistles. We do their social too.

Involvement

• Planning & strategy
• Concept
• Copy
• Social strategy & delivery
• A spot of creative direction here and there
• Project management
• Making A LOT of  tea

Once client permissions are granted, I’ll have some of my most exciting work to date to share with you, including:

• How to improve on a DMA award winner for Tourism Ireland (Indicia)
• A Great Cover Up with Very.co.uk (Indicia)
• Fashion that fits and flatters for isme (Indicia)
• Nesting inspiration for a number of well-known brands
• A swathe of delightful DestinationSkin
• A whopping great piece information architecture, planning and creative strategy for Sheffield Uni
• A launch website and identity work with the talented types over at Creative Common
• Charitable things involving Ross Kemp with the lovely people at Fanatic Design

If you just can’t wait, give me a shout and we’ll have a chat and a show’n'tell over a cup of coffee. Back to the usual free-range schedule now, available for weddings, words and bah-mitzvahs…

Concept, creative direction and design: Justin Ballantine (CD) and team ThirtyThree (Bristol)

Digital copywriting: RBTL

Concepts: Darren Mower at Indicia / RBTL

Art Direction: Darren Mower at Indicia / Marcus Finnemore freelance creative

Copy: RBTL

That said, you might have come from over there to download a lovely poster. If so, the links below should bring up a high-res PDF of each:

Keep Venue Carrying On_Pink

Keep Venue Carrying On_Red

A Keep Calm_FP-1

I saw you venue_Black

I saw you venue_Pink

Keep Calm_OFFICIAL

Venue SUBSCRIBE

Design by Russ Bromley at Proctors, and the team at Venue (Keep Calm).

UPDATE…

Venue is saved! Over 3,000 joined the Facebook group within a week, sharing with friends to stop their favourite local mag closing down.

RBTL involvement? Setting up and running Facebook page, Twitter activity, photo campaign, poster campaign (all unofficial versions).

Agency: Proctor & Stevenson
Design: Russell Bromley
Concept & copy: RBTL

CIMA – the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants – is the world’s largest professional body of management accountants. Exemplary in its field, CIMA is the most relevant accountancy qualification for business, as graduates gain a head for business as well as an eye for figures.

Yichao Yang A4 press advert

Proctor & Stevenson was invited to pitch for its international employer/student marketing account, and I was involved from the very first meeting.

The brief

CIMA was keen to use case studies to explain its offering, using alumni success as an inspiring example of the ROI the qualification provides for both employers and students.  However, there were issues of international content generation and production to contend with, alongside cultural sensitivities to consider.

Working under CD Mike Cain, I led a team of designers, helping to put together a range of creative approaches to workshop with the CIMA stakeholders from student, employer and brand marketing teams. We explored a range of visual treatments and copy directions – from safe to challenging – making sure everyone was happy the campaign was going in the right direction.

Creative approach

We proposed demonstrating the value Chartered Management Accountants bring to the workplace. A new photographic style, ‘Lightplay’ was introduced and a new business-focused approach to copy, under the line ‘CIMA. Where business + finance meet’

Case studies have moved away from personal journey to highlight the bottom-line benefit a CIMA qualification or employee brings to business. Though campaign creative is predominately delivered in English  – as a high level of English language proficiency is required to study with CIMA – translation was considered and colloquialisms avoided so second-language readers got straight to the point.

Results?

Victoria Penman, Head of Brand at CIMA, was delighted:

“This was a difficult brief to fulfil and the design needed to work hard – creating something that works globally is always a challenge. We wanted a dynamic, inspiring creative that demonstrated in hard facts the value CIMA-qualified people can add.

We’re delighted with the results. It translates visually extremely well and we’ve had excellent feedback from our international colleagues. What I am most pleased about was how they’ve taken our existing brand identity and breathed new life into. No rebrand necessary, just a fresh approach!”

Allison Kirkby press and banner adverts

And a delighted client wasn’t the only great result. The campaign website landing page has received a total of 55,386 unique page views.

And Yichao Yang and Allison Kirkby case studies received 3,732 unique views.

 Overall, the Pan Asia/Pan MEA campaign delivered over 2.4million impressions and 5,000 clicks, achieving a CTR of 0.24% – doubling the benchmark CTR used in the media planning stage of 0.10% – 0.12%.

Yichao Yang press and banner adverts

The Business Standard website in India had 1642 clicks (0.22% CTR) and the Money Control website had 1,668 clicks (0.21% CTR).

 Finally, advertising in The Economist again over-performed, achieving a huge 4,308 impressions, and CTR of 0.35%.

Agency: Proctor & Stevenson
Design: Bryan Miles | Chris Giles | Grant Davidson | Sue Woodhead | Luke Waterman
Concept & copy: RBTL

Gallery

The #CRtweetup – part of the London Design Festival – was by all accounts a roaring success. From the freeform concept table (with its never-ending group scamp) to the LEGO® challenge (building dream houses in the Pawson exhibition), there was plenty to see and do. Attendees scrabbled for LEGO® blocks to create masterpieces and win a Tower Bridge kit, free drinks flowed, and Moleskine handed out event-exclusive notebooks to invitees. The twitterfeed from the event sums up the atmosphere to perfection:

@Laura_Barnard “Finding LEGO bits in your pockets after #crtweetup is a bit like finding sand in your shoes after the seaside”

@stuartwitts: “I went to the @CreativeReview #crtweetup and all I got was a Moleskine, a bag of LEGO, free drinks & hours of fun with some new friends ”

However, the highlight of the evening for many was the #CRTweetup exhibition, as attendees were invited to bring personal work to hang in a Design Museum exhibition – a creative’s dream come true!

So what did we take to ’show and tell’? A collaborative ‘#fightthefail Twistory’: a crowd-sourced narrative written in real-time on the way to the event. See the results – and read the story behind the Twistory itself – at GoodMorningPlease.

When you work with words or pictures, you’ll be familiar with that sinking feeling when creative comes back covered in red pen or drowned in a sea of tracked changes. And as a client – whether you use agencies or an internal department – you’re lucky if you’ve never received creative work that’s left you first questioning your own sanity, before wondering what the creative team was thinking.

Yet active collaboration, constructive criticism and a relationship with the freedom to express opinions are absolutely vital if the project – be it advert, email, brochure or brand – is to work as hard as possible.

Why are amends good news?

A combination of tight timescales and a team that doesn’t really understand the brief can result in a project that just doesn’t cut it. That’s why the amends process is an integral part of making work ‘work harder’.

Carte blanche to amend, amend, amend? Far from it. But a very good reason to take onboard other perspectives. As a writer, designer or marketeer, you’ll sometimes need to acquiesce that you haven’t hit the mark – regardless of how justified you felt in your original decision, or how passionate you feel about a concept. But it’s a two-way street…

The death of a thousand cuts

If knowing – and admitting – when you’ve gone off on a bit of a tangent is tricky for creatives, then relinquishing control and admitting a surprising solution is right must be the equivalent if you’re reviewing work.

Sometimes you’ve got to trust that even if an idea doesn’t appeal to you personally, if it’s on-brief and on-brand, it might just be perfect. No need to stamp your ownership on the project by changing the odd word, moving the headline over or suggesting extra versions with different imagery.

Show and tell

It’s amazing the difference talking face-to-face makes when you’re reviewing work. So make the time to meet in person.

Presenting? If you’re in creative, and can’t present directly to client, showcase work to your account management team with the same enthusiasm – gain buy-in and they’ll go out and sell with confidence.

Impossible to present face-to-face? Write rationales to support work. Rationales needn’t be essays, but if the idea is likely to meet challenges, address them. Explain your thinking. Turn possible reservations into points for discussion, and with a little luck, big ideas will escape understood and unscathed.

Commissioning? Personally may not be keen on pictures of children, contracting ‘you will’ to ‘you’ll’ or the colour purple, but remember, unless you fall smack bang in the middle of the target audience, the work wasn’t designed or written to appeal to you.

Consider your brief. Remember your brand. Try and put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Then – and only then – get out that red pen. You might just save the campaign that makes you a mint.

The problem, not the solution

Done all of that and it’s still not right? Then there’s a problem you need to work together fix. Because at the end of the day, everyone wants the same thing: an unforgettable campaign to deliver real results.

If you’re making criticism of work, make it constructive. Point out what is working and why, and then focus on where the problem lies. It’s important, that bit. The word problem. Problem, not mistake. Problem, not solution. Don’t expect your agency – or creative department – to be psychic. And don’t feel you need to offer solutions. Just point out what’s not working and explain why. Then your team can go away and come back with an execution that really hits the mark.

Creative? Though John Lahr said ‘criticism is a life without risk’ – and he wasn’t wrong – there’s a time and a place to get precious. This isn’t it. Remember that you don’t know the product or service half as well as those who market it day-to-day, so it’s highly likely something vital has been missed. It’s common sense, and you’ll already know it, but in listening to and working with your client, you’ll produce a more hardworking, fit-for-purpose end result.

Knowing when to say no

Hopefully it doesn’t happen often, but there will be occasions when an idea just doesn’t work. Taking a step back and admitting as much – whether it’s become so diluted through amends impact is lost or because it wasn’t right in the first place – is hard. And that’s when someone has to be brave, raise a head above the parapet and question whether it’s time to start afresh.

(OP at Proctor&Stevenson)

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