Adam Slater + Cam McMillan Spikes Diary: Day 3

Adam Slater, copywriter at cummins&partners, Melbourne and Cam McMillan, art director at BWM, Melbourne are a team competing in the Print category of the Young Spikes competition. Here they give a rundown of their first day, exclusive to CB.

There’s a certain irony in missing the Spikes seminar on  ‘how to get the best out of young creatives’ while you and your partner take turns working on the floor of a hotel bathroom, allowing the other to catch 20 minutes of sleep in the bedroom without the tapping of keyboards and frequent swearing waking them up.

I’m sure that, had we been present at the talk, we would have heard something like ‘treat them fairly, listen to their ideas and make sure they have a ping pong table’. But as it turned out, all we really needed to keep motivated on our 48-hour challenge was a cool brief, some blackout curtains and the overwhelming sense of impending doom.

In an agency, young creatives can often be guilty of hiding behind a good Creative Director. After all, they’re always there to tell us what’s good, what needs work and where we can shove our idea that can only be shot with swimwear models in the Maldives.

Which is what makes creative competitions like Cannes Young Lions and Young Spikes such terrifying, yet rewarding experiences. Stepping back from your own work, backing up your idea with a solid strategy and actually making the hard decisions are all things that good creatives should be able to do. And what better way to learn these skills by taking away the safety net of home, putting you in a strange place and leaving you to go completely and utterly insane -before against all odds, ultimately producing and presenting a piece of work that is a true reflection of you and your partner’s creative abilities.

Speaking of abilities, we caught a really cool lecture today from Jorge Calleja of the Martin Agency, who spoke about how an innovative creative pairing of a musician/copywriter and an artist/animator were employed to help the agency pitch for the highly coveted Oreo account. The result was a extraordinary visual and musically led campaign that not only felt fresh, but totally captured the sense of ‘wonder’ that Oreo had asked for in the brief.

It got us thinking about our own partnership, and whether my keen eyesight, and Cam’s background in computer science meant that we might one day be called upon to create ads that were extremely complex, but also able be seen from quite long distance away.

Another interesting, pretty terrifying takeout from this talk was how Martin essentially came to Oreo with a fully-produced animated campaign, right from the first meeting – an incredibly bold approach that has the potential to destroy any free time agency staff have left to cling to. 

Now that the young Spikes challenge is complete, we’re relishing chance to be exploring more of the city and taking in all that the festival, and Singapore has to offer. Whether it’s enjoying free ice cream in the Google-cube, laughing at hungover people who have fallen asleep in the film tent or seeing how much of the city we can cover just by walking through malls and underground shopping centres – we’re having no trouble finding ways to pass the time before it all wraps up at tomorrow night’s Award Ceremony.

Oh, and as a side note to festival organisers: Why don’t they hold an ‘old lions’ competition? I know a few people who would pay to see that…