M&C Saatchi Open House

The advertising agency M&C Saatchi launched their Open House programme completely for free to make the advertising industry more accessible. Having to spend more time inside during the pandemic, I was quick to jump on this opportunity and apply for the course.

Over eight weeks, M&C Saatchi runs a weekly webinar detailing a different part of their operations. Most webinars also have tasks alongside them and the course has the opportunity to complete an entire brief with the knowledge that I gain over the two months.

The weeks subjects are broken down as follows:

1. Introduction
2. Brand Strategy
3. Creative
4. Making Things
5. Customer Experience
6. Passion Marketing
7. Media & Technology
8. Storytelling

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2. Brand Strategy

I found this week interesting. They followed a great format which explained their process of clarifying a nebulous problem into a useful insight. Good insights should be clear, to the point, and provide clear direction for the Creative team to use when brainstorming.

The task for this week was to come up with a useful insight for Tourism Australia, who is trying to encourage UK holiday-makers to book trips for next year after a very rough year of fires, floods, locust swarms, and then COVID-19. The following considerations were provided to keep in mind:

• UK travelers typically take 9-12 months to consider an Australian trip before going.
• Australia is a well-loved travel destination and is on most people's Top 5 travel spots.
• All that makes Australia great is still there: beaches, outback, people, and drinks.
• Tourism Australia's brand line is "There's nothing like Australia."

After some experimentation, I came to the following insight:

• After a year like no other, find peace in a place like no other. Australia awaits.

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3. Creative

Continuing with the brief for Tourism Australia, we were asked to create an image-led outdoor poster advert from the following key thought: "In 2021, leave 2020 nine thousand miles away."

I wanted to avoid using the key thought verbatim in my copy but make it clear that my design and headline naturally follow on from the prompt.

As a graphic designer, I often think visually. In order to give my visual brainstorming some direction, I wanted to set out the goals that I wanted my advert to achieve:

• Use Australian symbols so my audience easily associates the advert with Australia.
• Create a vibrant, emotionally-stimulating poster that motivates my audience to get up and go.
• Visually represent the passage of time between the present and their future holiday.

Some of these goals were ambitious — I wasn't quite sure how I would achieve the latter two — so I did some further research to try and get my mind flowing. I looked up old Tourism Australia adverts to see if there were any common themes or visual elements that I could replicate to match their visual context. I really liked this particular campaign, which has a consistent visual language that comes across as vibrant and active – definitely something I wanted to try and replicate for my advert.

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After a lot of brainstorming, I finally landed on a concept that I really liked and felt like it satisfied my goals. Here's the advert that I ended up designing:

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This advert is simple and to the point. With the headline, which was inspired by the key thought, I'm trying to connect directly with a pretty common human desire right now: the urge to just start anew and leave the mess behind.

The visual layout and colours that I used for my advert imitate some of what I saw in the Tourism Australia campaign above, hopefully providing context for any passersby and making the association with Tourism Australia easy for those who are already familiar with their advertising.

When I was faced with the challenge of representing fast, forward motion in a still picture, I couldn't really have asked for a much better symbol than Australia's national bird: the emu. The passage of time was also something that I tried to achieve by juxtaposing the cloudy, grey UK with the summery blue sky in Australia. By positioning one leg still on the ground in the UK, I try and appeal to the stir-crazy advert viewers and suggest that booking a trip to Australia will give them something to look forward to.

I debated adding a more specific call-to-action in sub-copy but decided that this advert should remain image-led and focus on eliciting an emotional response in holiday-makers that they'll remember when deciding where to spend their next vacation.

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