Page 31 - AdNews Magazine May-June 2022

Investigation
is definitely built on the premise of people shadowing other people to learn. And I think that the COVID world has made that very hard. It's very hard to shadow people when you're in this removed from reality situation. I think that there's going to be a window of time where everyone has to step in and do some pretty hardcore mentoring to drag people back up.”
The creatives who are natural extroverts do better in an online world. They speak up and make sure they are heard.
Tom Martin: “But I do think there's a lot of more introverted creators and creators that are a bit more in their own head that probably did struggle with this world because you have to have the confidence to speak in this vacuum, which is not the easiest thing to do.”
Julian Schreiber: “Creativity has changed obviously in the last two years in the way it's operating. I think that probably the good side of it is that the same kind of thinking that went into coming up with all the creative solutions to the client problems and all that sort of stuff pretty quickly got turned to like, how do we actually still function to do crea- tivity in the biz overall?
“Everyone started adapting and trying stuff and changing stuff and leaning on systems that were probably nice to have before, like Zoom, and making them just absolutely normal and working out things like remote versions of doing shoots and working out what all the protocols were for that. And everyone moved pretty quickly.
“Early on in the pandemic, it was accelerated by the fact that people didn't really know what was going to happen with their business.
“There was a moment where we were doing a pitch for Horticulture Australia, where we did a pitch, wrote the work and actually went into production and made the ad all in the space of three weeks. And that was only possible because everyone had figured out how to come up with ideas together on Zoom, do an entire pitch on Zoom, and then go and do production and actually shoot an ad on Zoom.”
“I didn't think it was possible to make great ideas working from home.”
Mike Spirkovski.
Deloitte Digital’s pandemic commercial.
Tom Martin: “I don't want to say this because you don't want to bene- fit anything to COVID, but the move to being online and the move to Zoom has actually helped our busi- ness quite a lot in the last two years.
“It allowed us to grow. It allowed us to move into other mar- kets where we couldn't otherwise because we weren't there, but sud- denly just moved online. We grew in Melbourne and we grew in LA.
“The struggle is that a lot of what we do is all based on the inci- dental conversations and chats and as a creative, you distract yourself and then you come to work, you come to ideas through distraction and chatting and inter- esting conversations. All that vanished.
“Creativity is actually maintain- ing relationships with each other. And how do you make sure that we have a relationship beyond just critiquing work all the time? That's the thing Jules and I have probably struggled with the most. We've spent two years where our only relationship with most creatives is
www.adnews.com.au | May - June 2022 31