The Work That Made Me: Jeremy Willmott

Jeremy> I grew up in the UK in the 80s so my brain is full of jingles. They randomly pop into my brain at inopportune moments at which point I find them on YouTube and send them to my sister so we can reminisce. It’s a cluttered mess up there…

“A finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat” in one corner.

“If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our Club” in another.

But there was one obscure ad for Lloyds bank that’s so fiendishly clever I can still remember the phone number to this day. It’s 0800 710 723.

How do I remember this and no other phone number except my own? Well because they created a story about a princess called Atundra who needed saving from a two headed dragon by a prince. He cried “Oh” (0), “Atundra” (800) and then proceeded to cut the dragon’s heads off… “Sever One, Oh, Sever Two…. Free” (710 723). Genius.

Jeremy> I was running a restaurant in Bermuda when 'Subservient Chicken' came out in 2004. It blew my mind like it did (I’m sure) for everyone else that saw it at the time. I realised that I needed a change from hospitality and campaigns like this definitely influenced my career choices. I retrained as a Flash designer and moved back to London where I snuck into the industry via the design department with no formal education in advertising. 

'Subservient Chicken' was hugely influential at the time. No one had done anything like it before and it really pushed the technology of the time to its limits (YouTube launched a year later!). The idea lived on for years in people’s minds and I even got to pay homage (aka copy it) for Microsoft in a campaign called 'Free Your Buddy', a kind of online escape room for a Microsoft buddy character. 

Jeremy> I’m a bit of a film nerd so I’m forever revisiting old movies and especially ones I loved as a child. I recently got to see 'Back To The Future' again on the big screen and was mesmerised by the visual storytelling of the opening scene, a skilful one-shot that gives you the perfect amount of exposition to set up the story.

We pan across a wall of various ticking clocks; we stop briefly on a newspaper article about a burnt down mansion; we see framed pictures of Thomas Eddison, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein; a coffee machine, missing its jug, spurts hot water onto a sizzling hot plate; a news story on TV lets us know that some plutonium has been stolen; a toaster keeps burning the toast; a robot arm fills a dog bowl that’s overflowing with dog food (the dog bowl reads ‘Einstein’); we see a kid’s feet as the door opens and they call out “Hey Doc, anybody home?” before replacing the key under the mat and kicking their skateboard under a bench where a yellow box with a sticker that reads ‘Plutonium. Handle with care.’ lies. 

We get asked all the time to use VO or write dialogue to explain what’s going on in our ads so it’s good to remind ourselves that there’s so much more to storytelling than just saying what’s happening. If you love this too it’s worth checking out Robert Zemeckis’ other genius opening sequence and the first ten minutes or so of ‘Death Becomes Her’… comedy gold. 

Jeremy> I was busting with pride working on my first commercial project in London. Somehow they let me loose on the Canon account and had me build my very first set of Flash banners for them.

The concept was that if you wait the perfect shot will reveal itself. In one banner users could control time with a slider to go from day to night to reveal a gorgeous blue hour photo moment. In the other banner you waited until the rain had stopped before taking the perfect reflection photo in a puddle. We squeezed so much out of 30 kb in those days and I’m still incredibly proud of that work to this day.

Jeremy> I get so incredibly irked seeing fossil fuel advertising on my TV and in billboards around the city. I would never work on something that is so instrumental in damaging our environment. At Paper Moose, we have an ethical charter that means I’ll never have to worry about working on accounts like that, but more so we’re also working with organisations who are actively trying to shut down fossil fuel advertising in Australia at the federal level, because enough is enough.

Jeremy> I remember when I saw the Sony Bravia Bouncing Balls ad for the first time that I truly fathomed what people meant when they talked about ‘craft’. I could watch this ad over and over. It’s such a simple idea that perfectly expresses the line ‘Color like no other’. And when they followed this up with Paint, I reckon every ad human in the world had a pang of jealousy like me

Jeremy> I was working as a senior interactive designer on the Mercedes Benz account which meant we also got to work on their Smart car brand. The agency put an open brief out to the agency and I jumped at the chance. I teamed myself up with one of the gun creative developers and we conceived of an app that would help Smart car drivers Get Lost.

The car can only carry two people so it’s the perfect couple's car, and this app was a way for them to have a random day out. It was a nightmare to make back then in 2011 but the client loved it and so did I because it marked a serious step change for me. I had gotten a taste for what being a creative meant and I wanted more. 

Jeremy> Gosh there’s definitely a few but the one that really stands out is when Norman Cook a.k.a. Fatboy Slim said yes to us using “Right Here, Right Now” in a reworked version of the song to sell solar financing for a company called Brighte. Yep you got it… “Brighte here, Brighte now”.

Jeremy> In my London advertising days I volunteered in the marketing team at GMFA (Gay Men Fighting Aids) and we created some really important work targeting the UK queer community with safe sex messages. I’m really proud of 99% of the work we put out but there is one campaign we did that makes me cringe.

The concept revolved around the idea of a physical HIV detector that you could whip out to check if someone was HIV+ before sleeping with them. Of course budgets were non-existent but still I think we could’ve done slightly better than the colander, ski mask and stack of wires that we came up with. It was giving off serious 80s Doctor Who vibes…shudders. 

Jeremy> We recently launched a new campaign for Australian Ethical featuring epic wildlife photography and the line ‘When you prosper, we all thrive’ and I gotta say seeing that out in the wild was something special. While most brands in this space use fear marketing with a doom and gloom message we led with optimism and hope and that’s something I reckon we can all do with a bit more of right now.