This year's graduates Nicky Perry & Matt Parsons have been announced as finalists for the Graeme Robertson Trust awards. Over to Nicky to tell you all about it:-
'OK, so many of you may never have heard of the Graeme Robertson Trust, but Graeme was one of Direct Marketing’s top pioneers. The trust works with the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) to act as a launchpad for creative careers, offering young talent the 'chance' they need. The trust runs an annual award competition, that's free to enter and this year it had a very sporting theme. You can read the original brief here.
'Matthew Parsons and myself teamed up to enter the competition and gave ourselves a week to complete the work. Using skills we had developed on the BA (Hons) Creative Advertising programme, we got on with interrogating the brief and finding possible solutions.
'We found the brief quite challenging: it asked for multiple medias; a competition aspect; advertising, online, direct mail and wanted participation from one million families. The brief also seemed to rely upon an advanced interest in the AVIVA UK Athletics Trial Event from the public, something Matt and I were unsure whether one million families actually had.
'To cut a long story short we created work based on the insight that when supporting athletes at the Olympics we cheer on our country's athletes, however at this event ALL the athletes are British so you wouldn't know who to support. The idea was to introduce the public to the contenders in the sport, by getting the public to support athletes from their local areas: using the concept of regional rivalry in the UK. In other words, support your local team!
Here's the final work that we produced:-
Here's the final work that we produced:-
'On 10th July we found out that we had been shortlisted and were invited to attend a portfolio event held at Publicis in London. We were asked to bring along our portfolio, unfortunately as both Matt and myself had only recently separated with past creative partners we had only old work, so we decided it would be better to create a new portfolio: brand new briefs, brand new products, all of our own. However, we had only two days in which to do it! We knuckled down and got the work done, completing our portfolio with only a couple of hours to spare!
'The morning event was very fast paced – we had book crits with four top advertising minds in a short space of time and got a lot of help with our new book. We were both pleasantly surprised how many campaigns were liked considering how quickly we had turned them around. Then on 20th July, we were informed and congratulated on being finalists of this year's competition and we were invited to the DMA Awards on December 4th where the winner will be announced.
'All in all, we have learnt to keep your ear to the ground for upcoming competitions and opportunities, and enter anything and everything you can! Because you never know...!'
Congratulations Nicky & Matt on getting so far in this highly-regarded and long running national competition (and many thanks Nicky for this write-up). We'll all be keeping our fingers crossed for you at the awards night. Good luck!
