5th February 2009
A few weeks ago, work won the overall “Work of the Year” award at the 2009 Recruitment Advertising Awards. It’s a great example of the way we can help a recruitment team deliver the business requirements within a limited budget in an unusual and innovative way – achieving massive publicity along the way. The creative team, April Bryce and Andy Stone, explain how.
April: It all started with a pretty normal brief. NDGP – the National Graduate Development Programme – asked us to produce some profiles for their website, but they wanted our suggestions on how to go about it. We came up with the idea of auditioning a number of potential candidates for profiles, and then picking two or three to do something really interesting with, rather than the normal dozen.
Andy: We set up the interviews, and the first guy in, Josh, was telling us about this project he’d worked on to do with communal bin areas – it doesn’t sound promising, but it was really interesting and he’d done a really good job on it. Straight away, I started thinking about an animation approach, because we’d need to show all the options they looked at, and I could see that sequence in my head almost immediately.
April: After meeting Josh at the interview, and liaising on email I felt we built up a bit of a rapport. That was great, because I understood his passion for the project and I could write a script that he’d be comfortable working with. We put the animation concept to the client quite quickly, and NGDP were completely behind the idea straight away.
Andy: They had total faith in us to pick the right approach – and if you can’t produce a good piece of work with that kind of client backing, you never will. It’s not easy to explain a video concept before you’ve worked up a storyboard and script, so it really took a leap of faith for them to let us get on with it. They were delighted when they saw the final outcome.
April: And that’s really personally pleasing, when someone’s shown that belief in you. I’m currently working out of work’s New York office for three months on a secondment, and couldn’t go to the Awards night last week, so Andy had to represent both of us.
Andy: Competition was really tough in the audio-visual category – I was even taking on my Creative Director – so although I was hoping to win an award, I didn’t really expect to. I loved it, but then when it’s something you’ve worked that hard on, you’re going to. After we won the category award, Malcolm and Claire from NGDP were so delighted, and we all started to celebrate then – forgetting about the ‘Work of the Year’ possibility. I was really stunned when they announced we’d won the overall prize, but then immediately everyone was cheering and Malcolm and Claire gave me a hug – it’s a great feeling.
April: It’s not often you get this much freedom to do something new, and looking back, I’m really happy that it paid off for NGDP…
Andy: …especially when they were competing with employers like Jaguar, Shell or the SIS. But what I’m most pleased about is that it was the right answer for the original brief, not just an attractive video.
See for yourself by visiting http://www.ngdp.co.uk/government and clicking on “Josh’s video”. And if you’ve got a project that could use some fresh thinking, contact Tom Chesterton on 020 7492 0041.
