Behind the Wheel with Sean Thompson
The Global CCO at Arnold Amsterdam talks about work with brains and balls, changing the face of automotive advertising and drawing inspiration from the Red Light District.
Behind the Wheel with Sean Thompson
The Chief Creative Officer at Arnold Amsterdam talks about
work with 'brains and balls,' changing the face of automotive
advertising and drawing inspiration from the Red Light District.
By Anthony Vagnoni
It was an innocent ride through an infamous neighborhood that gave the creatives at Arnold Amsterdam a clever idea for an ad.
So says Sean Thompson, Chief Creative Officer of Arnold Worldwide in Amsterdam, who also serves as Global Creative Director on the agency's Volvo account. Thompson's been working in Amsterdam for the past six years, most of them spent at 180; he joined Arnold last year, the first hire after it opened its Amsterdam office.
In addition to serving as the global hub for all things Volvo – the agency just picked up the brand's account in China, and has opened an office in Shanghai to handle it – Arnold Amsterdam also handles regional work for the apparel chain Stüssy, along with Lee Jeans, Dell and Ocean Spray.
Thompson bikes to his office every day, passing through what the Briton calls the two sides of Amsterdam's personality – its quaint, picturesque suburbs, where level-headed sensibility seems the order of the day, and the city's infamous Red Light District, that world-renowned pit of hedonistic shenanigans. And this simple act helped plant an idea for Stüssy. The retail apparel brand came to Arnold with a clear problem - it needed to increase its fans on Facebook and engage with their audience. On seeing their vast new collection, something clicked.
Out of this came the Stüssy "Strip for Likes" campaign, in which a fetching young model appeared on the brand's FB page wearing just about everything they make. Bundled up like a snowman, the deal was that she'd peel one item off for each person who 'liked' the brand.
Needless to say, in no time she was down to her underwear, as word of the gambit had raced across the digital ether, boosting awareness faster than a teenage boy's libido. Stüssy's FB likes soared by 30,000 percent, and the story got picked up (and in some cases condemned) in trade and consumer media around the world.
SourceEcreative recently spoke to Thompson about a variety of topics, from the importance of working with both your head and your gut to reinventing automotive advertising to the influence that being in Amsterdam has on the office and its work.
Thompson got his start at the legendary London agency Collett Dickenson Pearce. He won a competition while at college that had as its prize a weeks' work experience at an ad agency. The week stretched into months, and he was eventually hired as a junior copywriter. Later, while at Wieden + Kennedy, he was part of the creative team responsible for Honda's "Grrr" spot, the animated tale of clean diesel engines that swept the awards shows in 2004 and was dubbed "The Ad of the Decade" by Adweek magazine in 2009.
Thompson has also created award-winning for Nike and Sony PlayStation, as well as co-directed the adidas global "Impossible is Nothing" campaign in 2007.
Although he started as a writer, Thompson eventually switched roles and worked as an AD for a number of years. "I thoroughly enjoyed being an art director," he recalls, "but began to feel that writing was really where it was at, because it got you closer to the idea." He considers copywriting to be the best introduction to the ad business, "as it really teaches you the craft," but notes that these days "people kind of need to be multitaskers - you need to be able to do it all."
This is particularly true in an era of increasingly long-form narrative and storytelling wrapped around brand messages, he notes. In an age where the influence of the writer/director role from features and the writer/producer role from episodic TV is being felt more and more in advertising, Thompson says "you need to be able to create more than just a beautiful execution to stand out. There's got to be a great concept behind everything."
So how does being in Amsterdam influence the agency's ability to come up with great concepts? Thompson says it does so in lots of ways. Arnold has a corporate philosophy that states that "great work works," Thompson says; in Amsterdam, they've given it a local twist: "We create work that works, by using a combination of brains and balls." The city's oddly compelling dichotomy– its quaintness factor balanced with its tolerance for over-the-top behavior – tends to mirror that outlook, he notes.
"We try and take that – the mix of Dutch sensibility and its openness to crazy ideas – and apply it to the way we work," Thompson points out. "Yes, you need that smart, strategic thinking, he says, but you also need a bit of balls, a spark of energy and edge that helps give ideas greater traction and a bit of heat. That's what makes people want to share things and pass them on."
Thompson subscribes to the old advertising adage that "the effort has to equal the reward – that is, consumers need to get just as much out of an ad as they're willing to put in," he says. They need some kind of payoff for paying attention, whether it's a smile, an emotion, something to share, to talk about with friends, whatever. "It's as relevant today as it ever was," says Thompson of this approach.
And just as the way consumers engage with ads has changed, so has the way ads themselves are concepted and produced. Thompson says Arnold has embraced that shift, even with a client as big and iconic as Volvo.
"Our approach to the brand is that the work needs to be a big brand production or a quick hit, but nowhere in between," he notes. "So we may go out and shoot on 35 with a top Hollywood director and use all the best lenses, or we may go out and shoot a video ourselves, working with small digital cameras and young talent to keep the costs down."
The agency is careful to maintain high quality standards regardless of which end of the production spectrum they're working on, he adds; for example, everything is graded to give it a soft, filmic look, even the content shot on D5s or REDs. And having shot with many of the industry's top directors, as well as having directed a few things himself, Thompson is highly impressed with the capabilities of the new capture systems. "What you can get out of these systems is just incredible," he says. "What they've done is give us the option to do so many more new things. We can shoot quickly and get work out there faster, which makes us more nimble."
Despite the scaling down of production techniques, there's still room for the high-gloss job, particularly in the automotive category, he continues. "What we're doing with Volvo is keeping things real. It's about capturing the look and feel of real metal in the photography." Yes, he agrees, there's a trend in car work to simply render vehicles digitally, to get around the expense and logistics of automotive production, but the way he looks at it, there's something lost in the process.
"I think there are times when you can tell that you're looking at a computer-generated car in a car ad," he states. "They look too perfect, like they've just landed from outer space. The shadows are wrong, the lighting's not quite right, the angles are off. A car is a big purchase, and it matters, so I think you want to get as close to the metal as you can."
Thompson says while there's a time and place for CG cars, there's also a need to buttress the quality of the vehicles themselves with big, sweeping productions that reflect the premium nature of the products themselves. "You're still going to want to transport the car to some interesting locations and spend the time to get a really beautiful shot," he says.
That said, the agency has done a number of projects for Volvo that are unusual for a car company in terms of their approach. For example, they've commissioned several animated pieces that capture a sense of whimsy yet still make points about the brand. Two of them, "Sloths" and "Bird on Wire," produced by London's Not to Scale, were shortlisted for this year's Rushes SoHo Short Film Festival. (You can also check out "Magnets" and "Cookies.")
And then there was the updated V40 introduction earlier this year, billed by the brand as the world's first social car launch. Since the model represents more of an individual choice for consumers than the usual predictable European hatchback, Thompson says, the creative team wanted to invite 'you' the individual to the normally-exclusive press launch.
As a result, the model was unveiled at the Geneva Auto Show in an event broadcast on Skype; the public was able to comment and ask questions via Facebook and Twitter. "We wanted to invite the whole world to participate in this," says Thompson, who calls the unveiling of new cars with gorgeous fashion models pulling back silk curtains kind of archaic. (Check out a video case study of the launch here.)
"We think this will change how car companies look at introducing new models," he comments. "It's what being in touch with social means; it's being close to consumers and getting them more involved and engaged. And we think that's where a lot of our talents lie."
Volvo was bought last year by China's Geely, which has big plans to expand the product line and grow the Volvo nameplate in its home market, hence the recent opening of an Arnold office in Shanghai. Thompson says that bodes well for the work coming out of Amsterdam. "We're all part of this global network here at Arnold, and there are obvious synergies between our work here and in the US and what we'll be doing in Asia," he says. So far, the approach seems to be working – since Arnold Amsterdam took the lead on global advertising for the brand, sales are up over 20 percent worldwide.
The year promises to be a busy one for the ad industry – a hotly contested election in the US and the Summer Olympics games will have tongues wagging about advertising, although for very different reasons. If Thompson were to find himself on the jury in Cannes next year, what would he like to be able to see when he looks at the work produced globally this year?
"That's an interesting question," he says. "With all the new technology that's out there, we in advertising can be a bit spoiled sometimes. For example, you can often see brands jumping on new technology or new media trends without a really good reason for doing so, and I think that's wrong. While you need to be different, you also need to be relevant. What I really like to see are great ideas, not just sponsored bits of new technology. I think that's what defines great advertising.
"If I were in the jury room, I'd look for work that was groundbreaking in terms of ideas. Then I'd look for how it pushed the media, and perhaps how clever it was in its use of technology. That's what's exciting about being in advertising right now. There's this massive awakening, as we're starting to take notice of so many new things. As a result, there are that many more opportunities for brands to engage consumers. It's like everything has changed and nothing has changed – we still need ideas, we just have more options for sharing them."
For Thompson, it comes back to that equation of the effort equaling the reward; for him, it's the sweet spot where relevance meets acceptance. "You want to get to that place where you give something back to people - you make them smile, or give them something to share, and in the process they don't feel like they're being sold to and they love what you're doing. There's a real art and science to achieving that. And if you can pull it off, then we're all happy."
Published 31 May, 2012
