Poster number 3: Old guy

Sometimes you just need to be really really patient with showing work you've made at the Miami Ad School. When you make your new work public, everybody can see your idea so everybody can steal it. Stef & Yona, a very creative young team from Holland, found that out when they put an idea for the One Show-competition on their blog too soon (see http://www.stef-yona.blogspot.com/ ).

By the way, the NRDC-case could have been a bizar coincidence. But this incident made me even more careful with showing new ideas. The Shelter campaign above was already made last quarter. It was originally made for the D&AD Student competition and the deadline was yesterday. So I had to wait more than three months to put this work on my blog, aarchh!

My art director Alex Carls and I had this idea already in the beginning of the quarter. After that we kept finetuning it for two full months. We searched photographs, made our own photographs, made new layouts, wrote headlines, did reshoots, wrote more headlines and every week we showed different versions of our ads to our teachers at Jung von Matt. It was like polishing a raw diamond. But we both knew right from the start that this idea was worth sweating for.

We were right. The campaign already won a big silver star at the school's exhibition. The work is not only on the desk of D&AD-judges, but it has been sent to the Clio awards as well. So anyone who thinks of using a similar idea must be out of his mind.

I always assume creatives are too proud to copy work from others. That they always want to think of their own ideas. I think that counts for most creatives, but unfortunately there are always exceptions. Look at the following ad: http://www.neilfrench.com/oddment/slide/1.html . This ad has been made in the time when a two color-printer was still an awesome invention. Dutch readers among us will probably remember an ADCN copy award winner of a couple of years ago that looks suspiciously like this one. Would Neil French know that a recycled version of his idea won a prestigious prize in Holland?