Behind the Scenes at Eurobest with Jury President Cheyney Robinson

Eurobest, also referred to as ‘The European Festival of Creativity’, is an annual event which celebrates and rewards creative excellence in creative communications, advertising and related fields in Europe.

This year, Chief Experience Officer for Isobar EMEA & APAC, Cheyney Robinson, was President of Interactive, Mobile and Digital Craft. So Isobar caught up with Cheyney to find out more about her background, experience as President and what work inspired her most.

Q> You were the President of the Interactive, Mobile and Digital Awards Jury at Eurobest this year, what were you hoping to see in the submissions?

CR> Of course, we were looking for brilliant European creative work that delivered tangible results. But as the winning entries will be seen as the seminal work of 2016, we felt that the work should connect to trends in wider culture, capturing the zeitgeist of our times. Work that feels timely is inevitably more powerful.

Q> Your background is in Graphic Design. How do you think it informs your thinking when judging work?

CR> I’m a classically trained typographer and designer so I’m always on the lookout for impeccable craft. That said, beautiful work that doesn’t fundamentally solve a brand, consumer or business challenge is unlikely to be awarded. Experience has shown me that it is the combination of the two that moves people to think or behave differently, and that’s fundamentally what we want to do when we work in the creative industries.

Q> What was the jury room experience like?

CR> Wow. Where do I begin? It was a rollercoaster, lots of fun and lots of thrills… laughter, heated discussion, amazement – even tears! Nothing scary, some of the work was just incredibly moving. Just imagine, ten opinionated and outspoken creatives in a windowless basement room for three days to rank the shortlisted items (from over 1200 entries) and come to a consensus on what we believed were representative of Europe’s best work! It felt like a big responsibility, but we all found it immensely rewarding and I made some wonderful new friends on the way.

Q>  What work stuck out to you from last year’s Eurobest award winners? Why?

CR> Last year’s work had very strong marketing communication campaigns, including Imagination Machine and Ballatine’s space glass. As we now live in an experience-led economy, I was interested to see if Experience and Product Design would emerge in the submissions.

Q> What work did you see that truly inspired you in this year’s Eurobest jury? Why?

CR> I saw a lot of work that was inspiring, but because there was SO much incredible work, it was important to define as a jury what was deemed “good” versus “great”. We all felt that great work is informed by keen audience insight and is executed beautifully – these are the basics. But I believe that truly exceptional work should make you think, feel and act.

I felt that the entry that best illustrated provocative thinking was“The Next Rembrandt” . This campaign (featuring a Rembrandt artwork created entirely by machine learning) was particularly poignant as it provoked discussions around creativity in an era of AI: artisan versus digital creativity via artificial intelligence. This felt especially pertinent this year as the first piece of work created by AI was launched in June by McCann – so in judging this work we asked ourselves, would Creative Directors become irrelevant if computers became more intelligent and autonomous? In the industry, as in the wider economy, there has been a lot of fear driving these discussions and this entry showed us that digital creativity could not be generated by any other means than artificial intelligence with human insight, making the idea the most creative artifact.

The campaign that inspired the most empathy and feeling was “This was Louise’s Phone”. This work was a deeply moving elegy for a 16-year-old Belgian girl named Louise who committed suicide in 2014 after being subject to relentless cyberbullying. The experience was made from the curation of the real text messages Louise received – an endless, escalating litany of cruel and threatening messages. The resulting work, a site depicting an installation of 600 balloons, showed a text or message Louise received on her phone and with narration from Louise’s father about his daughter’s experience. Inevitably this work was inherently emotional, but the careful unfolding of the story via the site made the site all the more moving.

The campaign that we felt worked as an effective call to action was “Check it Before It’s Removed” a breast cancer awareness social media campaign that was intended to be shared AND censored. This campaign shared images of the banned naked breast to inject a sense of urgency -  and share the image before it was removed, and with clear purpose, to check your breasts.  We loved this work on the jury because it touted community rules on social platforms to instigate sharing and provoke action. It served as a reminder that as creative while we design with constraints, our ideas can be limitless. 

Q> Rome is a city with a steep aesthetic heritage, have you visited before? What are your memories of it?

CR> Rome is an absolutely beautiful city, with ruins at every turn. It’s history spans more than two and a half thousand years and you can still feel the influence of the Italian Renaissance on the world today.

Whilst I was there, it struck me that there are many parallels between architecture and design, and that the Vitruvian principles of architecture are also core to the design of experiences.  “Strength” in this context is something well-made, something of high craft. “Functionality”, or utility, denotes that design must be purposeful, that it serves a need. “Beauty”, is designing experiences that are delightful as well as inherently handsome. This comparison was humbling, reminding me of how Experience Designers were originally referred to as Information Architects, and that the shared timeless values between architecture and design are still relevant today.