This first appeared in the AdNews May 2019 magazine. Support AdNews by subscribing here.
The creative contingent of adland is the beating heart of the industry. To fully embrace this, and with a mission to create awesome and inspiring covers, each month AdNews hand-picks an agency to work its magic.
To reflect this issue’s feature that looks at industry bodies within advertising, media and marketing, we asked Ogilvy to take on the challenge. After seeing a trio of great concepts, including a Game of Thrones reference and a more confronting image of an out of shape body, in the end we were all aligned and soup won out.
AdNews editorial consultant Pippa Chambers spoke with Ogilvy to find out about the process of creating the cover.
What were your initial thoughts on the industry bodies feature brief at hand?
The conversation initially centred around whether we had a collective (agency) point of view on the industry bodies. Was it positive, negative or neutral? Turned out that we were all aligned.
Post first brief chat, what went through your mind(s) and what were the next steps you took as a team?
The next step was to draft a brief and put it into the creative department. The creatives were excited to do a magazine cover as it’s not something you get to do every day, so quite a few jumped on board.
How did you know you’d landed on the best concept?
We were looking for something simple and graphic, a striking image that cut to the heart of the issue. After sifting through all the contenders we narrowed it down to a shortlist of three.
Who from the team was largely involved and what were their roles?
We had a fairly small and nimble core team; suit, planner and CD, but sought counsel on the brief and final creative from the exec team.
What were the biggest hurdles to making this a reality? Any challenges?
One of the biggest challenges was visualising the industry bodies. These are largely faceless organisations, identified only by their acronyms so the challenge was to conjure up one simple image that could represent all these different organisations. We also wanted to avoid visual analogies.
Tell us about the actual creation techniques. How did it come together?
This was a fairly simple shoot. We were looking to make the image very graphic, with the bright red soup standing out against a plain black background. We sourced dark slate for the bench top, a plain white bowl, tomato soup and alphabet pasta. Matt Zammit was our photographer with retouching by Ashley Risstrom.
Precision needed
Biggest challenge with the whole process? Did anything keep you up at night?
No, we had plenty of soup to keep us calm and well fed.
Best bit about the process?
Seeing all the different ways creatives attacked the brief, and getting to work on a print and to do a magazine cover that has a reasonably long shelf life.
Credits:
Writer: Steve Madgwick
Art Director: Steve Babbage
Senior production manager: Ashley Risstrom
Photographer: Matt Zammit
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