The latest in our 5 Questions series sees Smarts’ Creative Director, Will Holloway, discuss team talks, goal posts and when competition winners go AWOL…
1. If you could go back and relive one day in your career, which would it be?
A couple of years ago I came up with a campaign for NOW, where we brought to life a fictional storyline from the show Succession, by launching a ‘take over’ of Hearts in Edinburgh by Waystar Royco – just like Roman Roy did in the show. I got to fly up to Hearts’ stadium and direct a photoshoot with real Hearts players wearing the shirts I designed with the Waystar Royco logo on the front. I got to give the players a pre-photoshoot team talk (ok, creative briefing) inside the dressing room, which I’m sure was just as bad as Roman’s in the show. But it was a dream come true to have real players wearing a custom shirt that I’d created – even if on the day there was so much to get done that I didn’t get to truly enjoy the moment.
2. …Now tell us about the day that still gives you nightmares.
As a fresh faced AE I once had to escort some competition winners to the midnight opening of a GAME store so that they could be the first people in the UK to pick up a copy of a new game. All the competition winners arrived at the hotel on time except for one who had got ‘lost’ on the way. I found him in Cambridge Circus slumped over a bin… and this was before the night had even started. Let’s just say that he’d ‘overindulged’ himself, and this continued throughout the evening (we stopped buying him booze but he kept sourcing his own ‘refreshments’).
His behaviour got worse and worse to the extent that he was asked to leave the branch of Bill’s we were eating in on Brewer Street (he must be the only person in human history to be banned from all Bill’s restaurants). That evening was the worst night of my career by a long shot.
3. Who gave you the piece of advice you still live by – and what was it?
My mum once told me that ‘You have to write letters to receive them’. At the time she was talking about real letters because I used to get sad that I never got any post when I was a kid, but I think it’s a really useful way to look at life and communication in general. If you don’t make an effort to reach out to other people then you can’t expect anything in return.
4. What piece of work done by someone else are you truly jealous of?
There’s one campaign that’s been imprinted on my brain since I first saw it in Shoot Magazine when I was a kid and it’s a campaign by Umbro called ‘Goal Posts’. It’s incredibly simple – photographs of real life things that look like goalposts – but the execution is amazing and the insight is universal: when you’re a football-mad kid, the world is full of potential goal-posts (trees, vans, bollards). When I see two perfectly positioned trees next to each other in the park or height restriction gates in car parks, I still think of this ad even 25 years later.
5. What’s your advice to someone getting into the comms industry for the first time?
Bring your interests to work with you. The best way to stand out from the crowd is knowing who you are, what interests you and using these things to make your work better. You can’t feign passion for something, you either have it or you don’t. The best creatives all have other passions away from their work – whether it football shirt design, music, photography, painting pints of Guinness – whatever it might be. Passion sells creative work better than shiny slides or stats ever can and work inspired by our personal passions is the best work you can do.