Vale Alan Wooding – a selfless creative director who freely gave his time to help junior creatives

Many in the industry will be saddened to hear of the passing of influential Australian creative director Alan Wooding, who died recently from a lung infection and pneumonia, aged 69.

Wooding (together with long-time creative partner Andrew Nairn) appeared on the very first cover of Campaign Brief in June 1987. Wooding is on the right.

Wooding was a selfless creative director who freely gave his time to help junior creatives. He had a good eye for spotting talented people like giving David Droga his first job fresh from AWARD School, as he did for Siimon Reynolds and Paul Bernasconi. Reynolds would later form Omon, in turn hiring Droga and Bernasconi. He also took Danny Searle from a production job into the creative department and hired junior Scott Waterhouse from the UK.

Early in this career Wooding launched Bankcard in Australia when he was with JWT; he launched Audi cars in Australia through DDB (his favourite Audi ad appeared in CB’s Millennium Book – pictured below); at Leonardi & Curtis Sydney he created the first real creative campaign for Freedom Furniture which built the busines to a size where the three partners sold and became millionaires.

As FCB creative director he helped win the Garuda Indonesia account internationally creating work in Australia that appeared worldwide. He was creative director on the successful launch of Dynamo liquid using Sir Les Patterson and the launch of Dynamo concertrate using TV series Mother & Son. It was the first time Colgate and soap powders from any company had ever won awards in Australia.

Wooding started Wooding Nairn & Brown in the early 90’s with partners Andrew Nairn and Craig Brown. Among it clients was The Athletes Foot shoe store account. The agency worked with the owner of the company to develop a creative strategy that was so successful WNB was awarded the global account and the agency established an office in the USA. Only two other Aussie shops – Mojo and Omon – had done so prior to that time.

Wooding was never one to mix socially in the ad community and always prefered others to get the credit. He believed in the value of awards but would always say the people that  really mattered were the consumers – they were the ones with the money – advertising’s job was to get them to part with it.

Condolences to his wife Beverley and children Amy and Lucy.