Liz Derham on what communications agencies want from creatives
What’s your role and what do you do? How does that fit in with what freuds does as an agency?
I’m a director at freuds, working primarily in its consumer division. Having run the international team for five years, I now work across a range of UK-oriented and international business – what gets me excited is great live event activity, smart brand/content partnerships with purpose at their core, interesting human stories and emotive brand publishing.
As a whole, freuds creates, curates or edits powerful narratives for its clients that define products, causes and individuals. We use stories, told through words, film and images, to make connections with an audience.
What kinds of creatives do you work with? Any well-known ones?
Freuds has an in-house creative team that works across the whole spectrum of client work, but we also work with external creatives to provide more specialised services for our content production. Given the breadth of clients, we use external photographers and film-makers every day.
Well-known ones? Personally, I have worked with the photographers Rankin and David LaChapelle, and more recently, Gavin Bond. Public art group Greyworld also created an amazing art installation of a giant sun for freuds in Trafalgar Square as part of Tropicana’s Brighter Mornings campaign.
What do you look for in a creative? What works well?
Any campaign we create is only as good as its assets, so we want to work with creatives who will help us brilliant assets that are built specifically to engage our target audience. Any chosen creative is bringing their expertise to the campaign; we want the halo effect that they will bring to the project – whether it’s, for example, brilliant film direction, innovative post production and special effects, or art creation.
We have chosen that creative for their previous body of work and want them to apply their skill and imagination to our client campaign, being open to incorporate the needs, but without losing their ‘signature style’ or undermining their creative integrity.
And what works less well?
Ultimately we are co-creating assets for a specific client when we work with an external creative, so we need to keep the client’s objectives in mind. The collaborative process has to be just that – a collaboration between the creative, freuds and our client; it can never become a vanity project for a creative who is hoping to use a client’s budget to create something for their own portfolio, with little regard for the client’s needs.
Any notable/exciting projects you’re allowed to mention?
Being the PR/comms agency for London 2012 was a freuds highlight – the volume of different content executions we were able to undertake for both LOCOG (London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) and some of the London 2012 sponsors with whom we worked – the car company MINI, for example.
In March the #WithSyria campaign gained amazing international traction with freuds’ idea to use of a Banksy ‘Young Girl’ painting. Currently we are working on a pioneering music festival, Zero G Colony (ZGC), which will combine music, space travel and future thinking. Held at Spaceport in New Mexico in 2015, the climax of ZGC will see Lady Gaga perform the first ever gig in space, on board a Virgin Galactic SpaceShip Two spacecraft.
Visit Content Cloud to sign up as a creator, or commission the content your business needs
