Der Standard: longevity in advertising or about my first campaign ever

since all my current projects are in the making and I can not publish anything yet, I decided that this post is going to be a little different. I will go back in time and write about the first campaign I did as an art director. when I started my first full time job in advertising in 2007 I was very humble and motivated to make the best out of every brief. I wanted to sit down with clients and help them to sell shit in a honest and creative way. very simple, very straight forward. always with walter in the back of my mind.

soon I realized that pitching, to actually win accounts and clients, was a whole different reality. a reality where you get little information on an A4 called brief, with hardly any insight and then you try to come up with the „most creative“ campaign ever. you get a couple of weeks to find the answer for any medium and you realize, that the client does not really want something that has longevity, because they already have other plans in 3-6 months. (still wondering how that fits the fact that people need quite a bit to picked something up, to get their attention and to touch them or move them to action)

the client also is not involved in the pitch process a lot of times and therefor a lot of thoughts and ideas stay hypothesis. it is hard to really connect the dots. everybody starts fishing for inspiration and ideas and all of a sudden the main thing - the customer who uses or buys the product - is of no interest anymore. at least that is what I experienced a lot in Austria's advertising world over the last 10 years. it’s all about pushing creative ideas instead of really helping the client (and their clients) making life more easy, interesting or whatever is needed. so I am not really a fan of pitching these days. I believe in true partnerships with clients, I believe in insights that come out of the brands core and research and strategy that help to form ideas that have a human centered concept.

so one of the first pitches I was working on with Himmer, Buchheim & Partner was DER STANDARD. a well known Austrian newspaper I appreciated and still appreciate a lot. so I was really excited. they had had a campaign forever and wanted something new. kind of. because the brief was actually to keep one main thing from the last campaign: people „wearing“ the newspaper on their heads as a symbol of: „proving backbone through intelligence“ - so here I was, all prepped to come up with something new, forced to work within a frame. all members of the team had quite a hard time to work around and with this specification. but the client was 100% sure, that this metaphor was well known and will speak to loyal readers and future customers. this time they sat down and explained all their insights to us. so eva buchheim, tobias federal and me decided to keep it simple but smart. to make the best out of it and to create a honest campaign about insights, thought processes, opinions and smartness of the readers.

we knew we might not win creative awards with this idea, but we found a system to tell stories within a visual frame. we illustrated the head and visualized different mindsets, topic and ideas. the thing was: no newspaper in Austria had ever illustrated their whole campaign by that time. so visually speaking, we did something completely new but we also trusted the clients insight and believe concerning the „newspaper-head“. and it was a good thing. the campaign not just worked well form a business perspective and spoke to the customers, it got one of the longest, most beloved running brand campaigns I have ever done and seen. The campaign only got revisited and changed in 2015. so for 8 years this system got filled with new ideas, stayed true to the brand and even won awards. the look stayed fresh for a long time and I am still proud of my first baby.