Erik Vervroegen says budget, time constraints and burnt out creatives prompted his best work

Erik Vervroegen, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners San Francisco’s ECD on the Commonwealth Bank account, said some of his best work came from overcoming challenges of not enough money, tight deadlines and half-baked suggestions from burnt out creatives. 

One of the keynote speakers at Circus, which is being held in Sydney this week, Vervroegen is the most awarded creative in the world over the last decade with over 70 Cannes Lions. He’s heading up this year’s AWARD jury and has previously led agencies in South Africa, Paris and New York.

About 500 people attended the opening day of Circus, which will run until Friday. The finalists for AWARD are also on show.

“How many of you in this room has ever received the perfect brief?” he asked. “A single-minded disruptive creative one sentence brief from a client who is in love with you with a $10 million budget and a six month timeline? I guess the answer – I doubt it.Usually we have no time and no money, usually we have impossible briefs andexpectations or a pissed off creative because he didn’t get the perfect brief.I was thinking recently that most of the best work I have done was born out ofthese conditions. The ingredients weren’t all there but somehow somethingpretty good came through anyway. Maybe working with these constraints isn’tsuch a bad thing after all. Maybe it’s just a case of the more problems youhave the more creative you have to be.”

Some of his campaigns that overcame budget constraints included an Amnesty International TVC showing some of the world’s worst abusers of human rights, a guerrilla campaign for stain remover K2R that ran on the streets in Paris for the same budget it would have taken to buy one newspaper ad and a McDonald’s poster campaign usingrecycled McDonald’s campaigns to defend the fast food giant’s recyclingpractices.

He also mentions a campaign for Doctors of the World designed to help homeless people in Paris make it through the winter that raised 700,000 Euros in just three days.

“They really had no money and no media space so we focused on what they did have – ten thousand volunteers. We waited until the weather had dropped below freezing and at six am one morning we turned the streets of Paris into a huge cemetery,” he said.

Then there was the Nissan car launch with a budget of ‘sweet fuckall’ for which TBWA created the Qashgai Car Games based on a fictional sport where driversperformed incredible skateboard-like stunts in their Qashqaias, which spreadaround the world with 16 million views.

Vervroegen also shared how they’d overcome ‘impossible briefs’ such as the following request from Bic. “Show the close-up of a guy, make it so close we can see precisely how soft his cheeks are and make him touch his cheek. Also the last ad was the close-up shot of a guy touching his cheek. We want exactly the same thing, but this time we want results. The last ad didn’t work, it was boring.”

 And the powerful Amnesty International ‘Signatures’ spot via TBWA\Paris was briefed as requiring a close-up shot of a hand signing a petition and in the background they wanted to show the harshness of torture and execution but they didn’t want it to look tooviolent. Everything the agency showed Amnesty was rejected for being tooviolent so they turned to animation for a powerful three-minute spot.

But the most annoying and challenging problem of all, he said, is burnt-out-creatives, sharing first efforts on briefs for clients such as Playstation, which went on to result in work such as the famous ‘Rebirth’ for Playstation 2 by TBWA\Paris which won the 2003 Grand Prix at Cannes in print.

Circling back to the challenge of no money, Vervroegen talked about the French-based AIDES, who he first met eight years ago.

“I couldn’t believe how ambitious they were. They looked at me and said nobody knows us, we have no money, we have no way to advertise but we want to the leading AIDS prevention organization in Europe. At the time they were the lowest ranked preventionorganization in France. But the one thing they had was balls.”

The approach was to target the advertising industry because they needed help from photographers, production houses and directors, media, etc, to get the message out there via the incentive of working on award-winning work. Starting with shock tactics,they started attracting the help they needed, and today AIDES is the leading HIV prevention organization in Europe and has set the world standard in advertising in raising awareness of the disease.