Adrian Elton Creative, the force behind viral campaigns and political satire including the now famous Clive Palmer Ikea ad, has officially turned 20.
Elton, a regular contributor to AdNews and a winner of the AdNews Cover of the Year award for his work on the May/June 2020 magazine, says two decades is a bit on the scary side.
The journey started years before when he was the kid at school who could draw just about anything, using his skills to amuse classmates.
This set up an enduring dynamic: People asking him to make things they couldn't make themselves.
Some of those classmates are still clients, he told AdNews during a wide ranging interview.
“While most of my work these days is advertising centric, it wasn’t a straight path into the advertising world,” he says.
Despite Year 10 work experience at McCann Erickson, I also did work experience at Australia’s oldest and most famous architectural practice, Bates Smart, and ended up studying interior design at RMIT.
“Graduating with one of the top projects in my year, I segued smoothly into the architectural industry and highlights from across this time included working at Davenport Campbell on the redevelopment of the historic bluestone Victorian Army Barracks in St.Kilda Road, as well as working as part of a team at Metier 3 designing Country Road stores around Australia, New Zealand and South East Asia,” he says.
Instead, he made a beeline for Swinburne, joining friends who were studying graphic design.
“These were my people, my tribe,” he says.
“And I felt privileged to be part of the last cohort of students to experience dark room photography and screen printing classes. Even though those skills were almost instantly redundant, it was enlightening to have had that glimpse into the window of the way things had been done since the modern advent of graphic design.”
After Swinburne he landed a role at PriceWaterhouseCoopers as an in-house designer, an experience he describes as terminally beige.
“It was a thrill to move onwards and upwards to IBM’s e-commerce department, where there was unhinged excitement about the prospect of a future with internet enabled fridges,” he says.
“From there I nabbed a dream position with the Eclipse Group (later becoming Deloitte Digital) as a multimedia designer. During this time I was designing CD ROMs (remember those shiny drink coasters?) as well as Flash presentations and websites.
“Impressively, my timing was perfectly synchronised for the dot com crash. I took it as a personal achievement that I survived five waves of redundancies before the digital tsunami finally caught up with me.
“As there were no related jobs in the aftermath, I decided to drill down to where my true talents lay and enrolled in the highly esteemed News Limited Award School which was a profound revelation after two design degrees.
“There I met my friend and mentor Philip Taffs, who was at that point working at MOJO. He really helped shape my advertising sensibility and affection for the big idea.
“For two years I got to work on some pretty serious accounts from Renault, to Heinz, to Melbourne Airport; and got to create everything from outdoor, print, TVC scripts and radio.
“Two years on though, I had clients nipping at my heels and I figured that surely it couldn’t be that hard to run an agency of my own.”
And so the 20 year countdown began.
He loves the autonomy of creating work in his own name and on his own terms.
“And whether that’s been producing work for clients of scale, like Australia Post or for start-ups taking their first foundling steps, it’s consistently been the greatest privilege to have had those direct relationships with clients, unfiltered by the usual layers of account service that so typically separates the creatives from the decision makers,” he says..
“All that said, I’ve always maintained fruitful and invigorating relationships with agencies who frequently bring me in for top level ideation, whether that’s for pitches, campaigns or branding projects.
“And while I love working on projects for my own clients, and savour the process, from the first discussions, right through to saving out the finished art, it’s also incredibly satisfying developing the initial concepts for agencies before stepping back and letting their talented teams bring them to life.”
He’s also been able to take on projects across a slew of disciplines that wouldn’t happen in any other role.
“Outside of the usual advertising and design projects, I’ve been commissioned to write a puppet show (what the hell do I know about puppets?), have photographed stars on the red carpet for MIFF (Melbourne International Film Festival), worked on original music at Abbey Road Studios in London, and have even done a spot of cameo acting in a Seth Rogen TV series called Preacher.
“While I’ve been working from the home front since our youngest was born in 2017, I originally started out working from a spare office in a stockbroking firm in Collins Street before subletting with the Merchantwise Group in Prahran for ten years.“From there I moved in with brand agency Disegno in Southbank and was their consulting creative strategist for three years before shifting back home. And when ‘working from home’ arrived in earnest, care of COVID, I found myself well ahead of that curve and didn’t have to buy a solitary staple.”
While fundamentally a solo operator, he frequently collaborates with his good friend Grant Krupp, whom he describes as a gun copywriter.
“While I can happily do the ideation on my own, it’s more about the joy of seeing how our thoughts collide and where they can springboard from there. Kind of like the electricity of musicians jamming and improvising on a theme. From there I take those thumbnail scrawlings and massage them into something you can actually present to a client.”
Elton’s business model: Get projects - do projects - keep clients happy - rinse and repeat.
Q - Why don’t you conform and wear a black t-shirt like other creatives? Are you some sort of maverick?
While I admittedly have one or two black band tees stuffed somewhere in the back of my closet, my overall aesthetic sensibility was forged in the mystic and psychedelic cauldron of The Beatles’ Sgt Peppers and Magical Mystery Tour; together with a generous dash of Terry Gilliam’s lurid Monty Python animation. But to be transparent, while I may not typically wear black tees, I do habitually wear a baseball cap, and what might loosely be described as a hipster (not 'chasidic') beard. In combination with the thick horn rimmed glasses - it suggests that I'm probably every part the other ‘creative’ cliche. Looks like we've both been maverick rolled!
Q - I notice a sharp sense of humour which gets barbed when you want to make a political or social conscience point. Where does that come from?
Where does my barbed sense of humour come from? I think there's literally a PHD thesis in breaking this stuff down - not suggesting with respect to me - but in terms of understanding the function of the comedic response. Fundamentally, I think humour is a way of processing adversity and refusing to let it have the last laugh. And when it comes to those who wield undue power - and worse when they’re flagrantly taking the piss - then I feel bidden to use my platform to amplify, expose, pillory and mock the emperor’s new clothes.
In terms of my own comic sensibility, I was born in London and although I grew up in Melbourne, I always had an affinity for British humour. From Tony Hancock, to The Goodies, to the Pythons, right through to Black Books and Spaced. From absurd pathos and high jinks, right through to the sharpest of razor sharp wit and satire. It’s percolated year after year ensuring a certain inevitability that those influences would seep back into the work, albeit in a severely diluted form.
Q - Is advertising ethical?
If those advertising - and those creating and producing the ads - aren't lying about, or misrepresenting the product that they’re selling, or the message that they’re conveying - (assuming that the product or message themselves aren’t toxic) then why would it be unethical? Advertising is fundamentally just people telling other people, "Hey, I’ve got this thing I think you might like, or should know about". While there are self-evidently broader societal dimensions to advertising, (which both reflects and simultaneously shapes culture), advertising is the visible tip of the iceberg in terms of the underlying biases and societal 'norms' that we can often only truly discern with the benefit of hindsight. It’s also important to recognise that advertising isn't only about shifting palette stacks of sugar. It can be used in powerful ways to convey important social messages, whether that's about the importance of driving within the speed limit, or health imperatives across COVID, etc… A cohesive and harmonious society certainly benefits when there are people who are capable of messaging for the greater good.
Q - What type of person is ideal for advertising? Getting near to that: would you tell your young self to try another job?
While there are all of the account side ‘business’ roles in the advertising industry, from a creative point of view, I think advertising would be a snug and satisfying fit for anyone who has a natural instinct for reflecting on the things that are going on around them, and who feels moved to sum those things up in creative ways that advance a point of view or a clearly articulated opinion. While straight up creative skills are fantastic, advertising calls on writers and art directors who can channel those skills in the service of being persuasive, motivating or inspiring. At this level, only being able to produce a pretty picture is rarely enough.
In terms of alternate careers, if I had my time over, part of me would have probably enjoyed being an intellectual property lawyer as I find the whole philosophical dimension to how we value and demarcate creativity pretty fascinating. As a writer I’m also fascinated by language and our ability to use it in formidably precise ways, whether that’s dissecting arguments, or writing compelling strategy. One of my tangential “career” highlights was beating a former Supreme Court judge in a comedy debate. He clearly didn’t realise who he was up against. *jokes*
But snapping out of that ridiculous stupor, being creative, and getting to play at the epicentre of creativity is far more satisfying than any of the deliberation around it.
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