Creative director for advertising and entertainment. Elliot is 1000% creative! Why do younger people not like advertising as a creative career? People are paying to avoid adverts, and using ad blockers. People are watching telly in a different way now - no longer are people sitting at the same time to watch the same scheduled show. Elliot loved the Benetton adverts when he was younger, and how it played with culture and broke the mould. Oliver Toscani was the creative director and photographer behind these adverts. Elliot was inspired by music and art, raving, parties, putting on events, making flyers, learning graphic design by mistake. Creativity in advertising is solving problems for brands. Experimenting with photocopiers. Elliot’s friend wanted to be a photographer and his focus on career inspired him - he tagged along. How rave taught Elliot sequencing, design, sampling, video etc. with a new wave of software and culture. Elliot is helping the next generation of creatives with the Platform program he established, and through the SCA Creative Mastery course he has co-authored. Making creative jobs available to more people than it traditionally had been. The importance of paid placements and reaching the right people for placements. The SCA Creative Mastery is a creative course run mostly on virtual reality headsets to make it available to all people, geography and travel are no longer a barrier to people to learn. Big up Marc Lewis from SCA who runs the course and Meta who provide the headsets. Using the Apprenticeship Levy to fund it. People learn in a different way in virtual environments than real life, it has been proven to be better for being locked in and not distracted. Do you have to move or work in a city to accelerate your creative career? Winning advertising awards. Cannes Lion chat. Ads that get made and get made well are like sperm fertilising an egg - they are the lucky ones out of thousands of ideas. Building a house is like building an idea. Making adverts is a lifetime of hope - always believing you’ll make something remarkable - and always putting the love into every project. Chatting about Jaguar’s new advert and the impact and reactions. Vying for people’s attention is harder than ever. Ads getting shouty! Brands need to have a sure sense of what their personality is - then execute against that - loads of small ideas with the same body language. In advertising you have to become an expert in random things to understand your clients’ products. Be around interesting people and interesting things will happen! Elliot’s first ad job was at D&Ad logging award entries, and by osmosis he saw the world’s best creative work. Being at D&Ad exposed Elliot to the award juries, and showed them his portfolio, which they gave brutal opinions about. The considerations in managing a creative department. Pull people up and bring people with you. Modern creatives need to be commercial savvy now. Obsess about your client’s problem as much as your solution. Also, Nick LOVES Liquid Death - send us water!

SCA Creative Mastery
Havas Platform

Are You Creative? recorded by Nick at City Sound
Edited by

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Thanks to NGDA, City Sound and Essex County Council for their support

Recorded in Chelmsford, Essex, UK