Page 28 - AdNews Magazine May-June 2022

Investigation
And the pandemic has damp- ened this process, kept people inside, cramping style, closing pathways of understanding.
“I think the pandemic has impacted one thing on a mass scale, and that's culture,” says Spirkovski.
“As humans we're social crea- tures, we're meant to be together. Our senses all react to each other. We're designed to react to pheromones and moods and all sorts of stuff.
“And when we can't see and touch and smell each other, it's a problem because then we don't necessarily know what's going on. So we feel disconnected because we can't feel it.
“I think that's been the biggest struggle, which we as people have in this business, and everywhere, been impacted by it. And our cul- ture has suffered because we've lost the banter, getting out there, in per- son anyway, and sniffing the cul- tural airways.”
Spirkovski struggled with the pandemic restrictions. Didn't cre- ative people need to be in a room together, to help them and sup- port them? “I didn't think it was possible to make great ideas work- ing from home.”
But he was wrong. “I started see- ing great work coming through the pipe and I was watching my team’s chitter-chattering. Normally they'd sit across from each other, and now they're doing the same thing, but on a screen. They adapted.
“The world of ideas hasn't stopped. They are in fact getting better and better. We've adapted to the challenges of production, as you can see from ads like LandCruiser. That was made right in the heart of the pandemic and shot in Victoria, even though we wanted to shoot it all around Australia.
“It was still made and made really, really well with the chal- lenges that everyone faced. And that is just an indication how we can still make big pieces of com- munications and highly enter- taining work from our local town or from even a screen. I've sat and watched productions happen in front of me on a split screen, on my computer from home. I've heard of directors directing from
“A lot of big agencies will
have a massive awakening ... they realised that you can actually trust creatives.”
Tom Martin, Special Group
the UK or the US an ad in Australia, and it works. It's not perfect, but it works.”
Julian Schreiber and Tom Martin, partners and CCOs at Special Group Australia, have spent their careers working in cafes.
Tom Martin: “Even when we were creatives in an agency, we pretty much used to spend all our days in the city at a cafe in Melbourne called Journal (which I went back to the other day and the guy hugged me because we literally spent every day there for years).
“I don't think we've ever been in a position where we expected creatives to be sitting at their desk. We never had this thing where we thought, ‘Oh God, what's everyone doing now that we can't actually see them in the space?’
“We always did have that trust, but I do think a lot of big agencies will have a massive awakening ... they realised that you can actually trust creatives.”
Julian Schreiber: “Something that we're all contending with is that it's really easy to be 100% present in real life or 100% on Zoom but it's really hard to have half, half where some people are on Zoom and some people are not on Zoom.
“That's really challenging because it's almost like you understand the ground rules of this style of communication right now. Because we're all like taking turns and we're all on screen and talking to each other.
“But if you have like six people who are in a room and then you have three people who are on Zoom, those six people are having a really engaged, dynamic conversation about creativity and you very quickly become a passenger on screen and it's really important to figure out.