Dan & Joe on Mind-Doors and Thought-Cannons

Dan Ball and Joe Stone, otherwise known as ‘Dan & Joe’, are two creative silly boys who started their career at Creature London (now Modern Citizens) knowing absolutely nothing about how to even come up with ideas for advertising.

They had no book. No portfolio. No beard. Just cheap suits, a business card (true story) and a pocket full of dreams (not true).

Oh, and a Windows laptop that sounded like it was going to take off into space every time it was turned on.

Now, many years later, they are ACDs at Mr. President, have replaced the cheap suits with comfy leisurewear and oversized shirts, and still have no idea what they’re doing.

LBB> Person - What kind of creative person are you?

Dan> First sentence in, and I’ve already had an existential crisis. Applying reason to creativity is like trying to catch smoke – it’s elusive, intangible.

I think we both shirk at telling people we’re ‘creative’ because it’s so broad, it’s like someone saying they’re ‘practical’ when asked what they do for a living – you’d be stumped.

I believe everyone is creative, but not everyone has unlocked it, or worked out what tickles their creative nerve.

I was brought up on Monty Python, which definitely kickstarted a desire to consume abstract stuff – it might not be logical, but if it provokes a reaction, a feeling, if it makes you feel good, if it’s different, then it’s creative, and if you enjoy it, you’re creative, because you’ve opened your mind-door to it.

Joe> I’m the kind of creative person that, at the start of a project, doesn’t know what their brain is going to fire out at them at any given time, much to Dan’s frustration at mainly being the one on the receiving end of said thought-cannon firing line.

But we love this approach because we deliberately never judge an idea or a thought too early; giving everything a chance at first, even if it doesn’t feel on-brief, yet.

The stuff that then gets explored is a mix of the ideas that we find really interesting and know works really well for the brand and those ideas that you know “there’s something in it”, but you’re not sure what it is, yet.

Over the years we’ve learned how to identify what that ‘something’ is and work out from a strategic point of view why it works for the brand in a rational way, so that it becomes a much bigger thought and not just a one-off execution. We also never judge a brief by its brand. To us it doesn’t matter whether a company is ‘big’ or ‘small,’ making the world’s first teleportation device or loaves of bread, because we believe there is always an exciting answer to literally any brief. It’s just up to us to find it.

LBB> Product - How do you judge the creativity of a piece of work?

Dan> I think there’s a secret weapon, a superpower that needs to be nurtured in more people, and one that was passed down to us by our first boss, who we’ll just call ‘Ben Middleton’ for now… It’s called the bullshit alarm.

It sounds flippant, but in a world where we’re bombarded with creativity in so many different forms, it’s a powerful tool to weed out what is truly ‘creative’. And don’t get us wrong, we set the alarm off many times, and still continue to do so, but it only helps to make great work.

Have we seen it before? If that’s a yes, the metaphorical alarm has punctured one of your drums. Does it follow a trend, and do you just want to make it because it’s currently popular? Pop. Your other eardrum has gone. Have you made up an insight to justify your idea? The alarm is so loud, your ears are now bleeding.

But don’t worry, that alarm can be turned off really easily. That blood dried up – by being different. By striving to make an idea that is ownable by you, that is truly a product of your creative brain, uninfluenced by anything else, the alarm stays silent.

There’s nothing more exhilarating than seeing something done in a way you’ve never seen before. It’s like Vedran Rupic’s stuff for the artist Salvatore Ganacci – it’s bonkers brilliant, and it gives you the wonderful jealousy of going ‘f**k I wish I’d done that’ when creativity is used to make you rethink opinion or change how you view something, when it makes you laugh – when it’s bullshit free. That’s when it’s perfect.

Joe> Is it different, or trying to do something different, from everyone else in the space? I think that’s the biggest thing for me, overall.

Different stands out and gives you a new way of thinking about a thing or a new reason to believe in a thing. No matter how the world evolves, I believe that doing things differently (and well) will always be the key to success, especially as we live in times that seem to be increasingly dictated by trends and copying what’s popular at that time.

I’m very proud of our work for ‘the Woodsman Whisky’ because that started out with that exact thought. Every other whisky brand tends to show some sort of ‘refined gentleman’ talking in a highfalutin way about the whisky, usually whilst sitting in a brown leather chair in a brown, wooden-panelled room.

We thought, “bollocks to that… let’s do something completely different”.

Dan and I often begin with ‘what do we want to see?’ and thought, well, some beavers drinking the whisky would be fun. They live in the woods. They are nature’s hard-working doers. They were the perfect antidote to the alienation that often comes with the pompous world of whisky, and exactly what the brand stood for and needed to stand out.

LBB> Process - Tell us about how you like to make creative work

Dan> It will pain the strategy department no end if they read this, but for a legally undisclosed amount of time, we’ll leave the briefing document to one side. We’d much rather let our creative thoughts run free, unrestricted, like sheep frolicking in a field, before picking that brief back up to help herd our idea-sheep back into some sort of logical shape paddock.

If a creative is second-guessing a client, or being overly hemmed in by parameters at the very beginning of the process, you won’t get back anything surprising – it’ll make sense, and we should all be cautious about stuff making sense straight away. Of course, great ideas do eventually answer the brief, but they make you, and everyone on the project, work for it.

A great example is one of our first projects for Foot Locker, whilst on placement at Creature. I did a very bad drawing of a person wearing these neon trainers running above a puddle, but in the reflection, it was a glowing, neon green wolf.

Did it answer the brief? Not at all. It was a shit sketch of a wolf in a puddle. But there was something in it. There was a reason it was saved from the bin.

And it was this strange sketch that led to the bigger creative thought of ‘auras’ – the idea that when you put a fresh pair of sneakers on, your confidence instantly grows, brought to life in the form of a glowing animal that towers around you. And the wolf became a chest-beating gorilla. So in the end, it made a lot of sense, but it took trust in the creative process to stick with it, and believe in it.

Needless to say, it also took the right people around us to get it there – I get a bit creatively afraid without Joe. As an introvert, I don’t thrive in big open ‘creative brainstorming’ sessions. I like the intimacy of working with a few close people, really drilling down into the ideas, having the trust that whatever comes into your head, you can share it without fear of it being misunderstood or discounted straight away.

You’ve got to be on the same wavelength to get the best ideas, these are your babies, so once they leave your brain, you want them looked after.

Joe> As stated above my brain seems to fire out a load of stuff and then I just kick back and relax whilst Dan has to sift through all the nonsense to find anything worth exploring before I then completely disagree and suggest that that one thing that has tickled my brain in some way is worth exploring and that ‘there’s something in it’ and then Dan sighs and tells me why it doesn’t work and then I say, “maybe I didn’t explain it correctly; let me fire it back into your face again until you like it,” and then Dan explains yet again what the issue is and I say, “Ah, yes, you’re right… but have you thought about THIS…” and so on and so forth for all eternity.

Other than that, we watch, and look at a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with advertising, with our ‘lunchtime viewings’ – we’re currently getting through a brand-new-animated-show-I-don’t-know-if-you’ve-heard-of called ‘Bob’s Burgers’. Doing this massively helps to contribute to our internal library of references to riff off of.

LBB> Press - What external factors have shaped you and what can make or break a creative project?

Dan> Like I’ve mentioned, everyone is creative – we all have that inbuilt feature, but it needs to be ignited and cultivated. I was lucky to grow up in a creative environment; whether it was listening to music, playing instruments, watching abstract comedy shows or being encouraged to constantly doodle, something ‘creative’ was normally happening. I was even allowed to watch ‘The League Of Gentlemen’ at a definitely too young age – but it was allowed because it was different, it was weird, and it made my imagination explode.

I think absorbing as much stuff outside of the industry is really important – the outside world is so much more inspiring and interesting. We can get in an echo chamber of only looking at other ads as reference – it scares me when people are obsessed with adverts, because that’s just the end product – and at that point, it’s too late; it’s already been done. Get outside, get in the pub, chat to your neighbours, go to an exhibition about Stone Age settlements, just go be with normal people – because they’re who we’re talking to, so we need to know them – if you only hang out with people in the industry, your mind will narrow.

It’s important for agencies to understand this too – the more external influences creatives have, the more surprising and unique their ideas will be. The best ideas normally come from the most unlikely of sources (even exhibitions about Stone Age settlements).

Joe> My family has probably played the biggest role in shaping how my brain works and the things that I like. I got my love of drawing and all things arty from my mum, my love of playing music from my dad and sister, and my love of video games and all things weird from my brother. That and a love for cartoons. Creativity was celebrated in our household much more than anything academic. Every Christmas my dad would get me a bunch of books or comedy/music documentary DVDs – everything from ‘Ripping Yarns’ to ‘Dig!’ – a music documentary that I would highly recommend.

In terms of making or breaking an idea, I think that you can have the most random, unusual, out-of-the-box, never-been-seen-before execution the world has ever witnessed BUT without being able to simply justify the bigger idea behind that execution, it will only ever be seen as a random idea, and not the ‘oh my word this is pure genius, why haven’t we done this before’ idea that the brand needs. I’d also say that people buy from people, so make them feel something, don’t just sell to them. Make them laugh, make them cry, make them think, make them relate, make them go “WTF did I just watch?”, make it stay with them, and make them talk about it.