Book Crits - Round 1

Any advertising student will relate to feeling slightly intimidated by going to big agencies and having a book crit. But after our first round of crits (with our new book - below) I can safely say, there’s nothing to worry about. The amount you learn in that short space of time far outweighs any sort of anxiousness you may have had. Besides most teams will do all they can to help you, after all, they were once in our shoes.

We started the day with Andy and Christian at DDB. We thought we’d jump in at the deep end and test our book at, let’s face it, one of the best agencies in the World. We got to Paddington station an hour early, spent 20 minutes finding the offices, then had 40 minutes to spare. We didn’t want to be too early so we basically sat on a bench by a bus stop for half an hour absolutely freezing. After nearly catching hypothermia we finally went in and met Andy and Christian. Nerves were gone and our learning caps were on. That’s the one thing I’d say about crits, learn as much as you can, write it all down and most of all – listen. Andy was dealing with some sort of disagreement in the creative department so we listened to Christian. He was brilliant. Honest, constructive, everything you want from a crit. There were some things he liked and others he didn’t, the most important thing was he asked us to come back after we’ve made some changes (another thing to add to the ever growing to-do list).

After DDB, it was a short trip over to see Steve and Matt at AIS. We won an hour with the 2 creative directors on twitter (we were their 1000^th follower). Now to be perfectly honest we were shitting ourselves. It’s not often you meet 1 of the owners of an agency AND it’s creative director. They took us for coffee round the corner from the agency and we proceeded to have the most surreal 60 minutes of our professional lives (so far). Ollie and I felt like we were chatting them up – Ollie was speaking to Matt about rugby and I was chatting to Steve about Coventry City FC where my friend played just months ago. After chatting about all sorts of things we got down to business and presented them with our book. Things got even better and we felt liked they took a shining to us, we were getting great feedback on our work and Ollie kicked me under the table as if to say, “can you believe this”. Truth was, I couldn’t. Everything seemed to be like some sort of dream, with everything going our way. Steve and Matt were impressed by us and have invited us back again, so we’ll be working hard to get our book in shape for another round of crits in the next few weeks.

Next we were onto Ogilvy, and their rather plush offices, to see Steve and Serge with some other students from Lincoln. They’d set us the challenge of advertising Toyota (Yeh, they've got a strange sense of humor). Ollie and I thought we’d take a risk and do something we knew nobody else would do. I’d say the risk paid off, we got good feedback but for me it was important that nobody else had the same idea as us. That’s another thing we’ve learnt recently. You’ve got to produce unexpected stuff; the aim is to make people say, “I’d never thought of it like that before.”

So all in all, it was a really successful trip. We’ll be cracking on with D&AD this week then re-doing more work for our book and hopefully back to London for more feedback, it’s quite addictive actually, I'd never thought of it like that before.