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LBB editorial contacts

Regular editorial features

Members' interview series

Editorial calendar & seasonal features

THE LBB EDITORIAL TEAM

Laura Swinton (editor in chief, brands & global) laura@lbbonline.com

EMEA

Alex Reeves (EMEA editor & deputy editor) alex@lbbonline.com

Nisna Mahtani (EMEA reporter: MEA & DACH) nisna@lbbonline.com

Zoe Antonov (EMEA reporter: UK, CEE) zoe@lbbonline.com

AMERICAS

Addison Capper (Americas editor) addison@lbbonline.com

Ben Conway (Americas reporter) ben@lbbonline.com

Josh Won Neufeldt (Canada reporter) josh@lbbonline.com

APAC & ANZ

Casey Martin (APAC/ANZ reporter) casey@lbbonline.com

Tom Loudon (APAC/ANZ reporter) toml@lbbonline.com

Please send all press releases to the content team at newsdesk@lbbonline.com and if your company is a member of LBB they will be published. You can find a guide for how to structure and write press releases here. If you don't have the time or resources to write your own articles, speak to our sales team about upgrading to a premium membership.

If you are a managed package member, you can send all work for the archive to the library team at archive@lbbonline.com

These are features that LBB's Editorial Team runs throughout the year. For the most part, there’s no hard and fast calendar, these are features that we run on an ongoing basis and editorially we’ll be trying to balance out international representation and industry sectors and overall diversity. It’s worth mentioning that particularly for features like 5 Minutes and The Directors we are keen to use the platform to showcase female and marginalised talent. We also spontaneously do plenty of off-the-cuff interviews and stories that don’t conform to any formula. Inclusion in these features is not guaranteed. See 'Members Interviews' for series’ with guaranteed coverage. Please download the specifications for pitches by clicking on the title of the feature.

5 Minutes with... Interviews with the top people in the international advertising, marketing and creative industries

Ad Astra - A rallying call for creativity, Ad Astra features are in-depth profile pieces about the leading lights of global advertising. This feature is currently limited to global chief creative officers and must be pitched to laura@lbbonline.com.

Behind the Work - Behind the scenes on some of the most exciting creative campaigns. These can be traditional film campaigns but also digital projects, experiences, and category-defying activations too. What we care about is the insight, creative and production stories.

Brand Insight - Stories and interviews with marketers about their brand’s recent direction and future plans. This tends to be broader than just one campaign. We are open to stories where we speak to both the marketer and agency about work they’ve done together but the marketer/client must be involved in the interview.

Dream Teams - Trust and teamwork are at the heart of creativity and the industry is bursting with incredible partnerships. We want to profile and showcase the tightest twosomes in the business – how you met, why you work together so well, and what you’ve learned from each other – and advice for people navigating their own working relationships. This can be art director/copywriter pairs, directors and editors; MDs and ECDs; experience designers and creatives; character designers and animators…ultimately, it’s all about those enduring professional collaborations and friendships.

Film Club - Production companies do more than just commercials and often their really creative short film projects get overlooked, so Film Club is a place to talk about new shorts.

Firebrands - Brilliant work just isn’t possible without brilliant marketers - but so often they’re left out of the creative conversation. We’ll be meeting leading marketers to find out about the journey they’ve been on with their brand, how they work with their partners, and their views and visions around the topics and trends bubbling up ahead of them.

High Five - A fun listicle series where creatives, strategists, directors and producers share their top five campaigns from a particular market or segment. It could be ‘5 Funniest Ads from Thailand’ or 5 Best Music Videos from March’ - it’s a great way to help educate the rest of the industry about what’s happening creatively. Be warned, you’re only allowed to pick one of your own projects though!

Into the Library - ‘Into the Library with…’ is a trip down memory lane with the most exciting directors working in commercial production and music video, and leading adland creative directors. We’re looking for these top creative talents to share 7-10 jobs that have meant the most to them in their career, from early experiments to bombastic blockbusters and everything in between. If possible, it would be great to get a mix of old and new, and one or two wildcards mixed in with the more famous pieces. One of our journalists will interview the director, talking about each piece in chronological order to find out what it is that makes them so memorable. This interview can be done as a call or via email, with the director choosing their favourite pieces and writing up their reasons for choosing them - please pitch to the editorial team if you’d like to put someone forward.

Making Music - Making music is a series where we talk to the composers, producers and supervisors of some of the best new and classic commercial soundtracks.

Trends & Insight - Stories with a bit more depth that don’t conform to any template.

Uprising - Spotlights on the up-and-coming junior and mid-level industry talent making amazing work and shaking up the future. One of the most popular features on the site when it comes to traffic!

The Vanguard - This is a new series where we sit down with the CEOs leading the world’s biggest agency networks and holding companies to find out about how they became the leaders they are, what it means to rally thousands through a fast-changing industry, what clients need and where they see the industry going.

These features are designed to put the power in your hands. You can platform your talent and work whenever you like. And the great news is, we've devised the concept and format for these feature interviews already, so all you need to do is pick your talent, choose a relevant feature for their job role and get them to fill in their answers.

To take part, simply download the brief and questions by clicking on the titles below in bold. When you or your talent have answered, email the document and any images or videos you'd like included in the article to newsdesk@lbbonline.com for publishing.

There's no strict guidelines on schedule. We leave that down to you - but one hot tip to get more views and clicks is to spread the publishing out over regular intervals.

ALL DISCIPLINES AND COMPANY TYPES

Essential List - A fun listicle piece about the kit, culture and cuisine that keeps the industry’s creative folk going!

My Biggest Lesson - This is where experienced ad folk and production people can share the pearls of wisdom that have shaped their career and can help those making their way to avoid the same pitfalls.

My Creative Hero - This piece explores the creative inspirations behind the industry’s talent. This usually means non-advertising creative heroes, allowing participants to explore their broader influences.

The Work That Made Me - The best way to understand a person’s career is to look at the work that made them. Their first campaign. The campaign that someone else did that made them jealous. The campaign that taught them some painful but useful lessons. The work that they’re proudest of. This is also a great feature as it’s a chance to share older work and work from different markets that readers around the world may not have seen before.

Thought Leaders - This is our channel for opinion pieces. We find that pieces that are closely aligned with newsy or timely topics perform particularly well, whether it’s a big sporting event or a hit new Netflix show that everyone is talking about. We’ve mapped out a few events that we think will prove to be talking points to get you started.

BUSINESS & LEADERSHIP

Bossing It - Leadership doesn’t come easy and everyone has their own views about what makes an effective leader. In this series of regular features we interview leaders, founders and entrepreneurs and creative management about their journey towards leadership and their own lessons and insights. Specifically for CEOs, COOs, MDs, Founders, EPs.

The New New Business - The creative industry wouldn’t be able to create without the people bringing in business and closing sales. As the industry evolves, so too is new business and sales. We want to speak to the people making the gears of the industry turn, whether they’re at agency, production, post, tech or media platform, to share their insights with those struggling to close the deal.

DE&I: Accelerating Change - We want to interview the industry’s DE&I leads to find out about their perspective and how the wider industry can take responsibility for transforming the industry for the better.

AGENCIES

Are You Experienced? - Experiential advertising is one of the hardest to write about - after all, you had to be there, right? One of the most intimate, engaging and visceral forms of marketing rarely gets its chance to shine. That’s why we want to give creatives, strategists and producers working in the experiential space the chance to really dig into the magic that they weave. This member interview series is all about giving you the space to talk about an experience you helped to create, to discuss the challenges involved and make it feel more real for readers who didn’t manage to get hands on with it.

Creativity Squared - A creative profile with a difference – psychologists have distilled creativity down to four factors, and we’ll be exploring those with copywriters, art directors and creative directors to get a 360° view of who they are and how they work.

Magic Numbers - Data-driven creativity is something that brands and agencies all over the world are investing in and banking on - but what does that really mean, what are the best practices and potential blindspots? This feature is for brand and agency data experts.

Problem Solved - This is a new feature about agency projects that go beyond campaign work and use creativity to solve business problems. These can include digital transformation project, product development, employee engagement initiatives, ecommerce platforms and behaviour change initiatives.

Planning for the Best - The intellectuals of the industry, planners arm their creative colleagues with the human insights and hard data to make sure their ideas are founded in truth. We want to celebrate the planners and strategists and pick into their processes and thoughts about the evolving discipline.

The Art of Account Management - A piece for account managers/execs to discuss the subtle art of bringing clients, creatives and everything else together.

Creative Marketing - We’re looking to talk to innovative and creative marketers who are the drivers behind brilliant work, to find out how they think about and enable great creativity.

What the Flack - A series profiling the communications industries’ communicators, the PR and comms leads and agency Chief Marketing officers.

MEDIA

Social Butterflies - There are few areas of the advertising and marketing industry more fast-paced than social media. Between the big personalities at the helm of the platforms to the rapid adoption of new tech and formats to the always-on barrage of hot takes and spicy discourse. This new series is for the social media creatives, strategists and producers - as well as those working at the social platforms themselves - to share their insights from the freshest frontier of tech and creativity.

Media Matters - Without media, an idea is just an abstract thing with no audience. It’s the engine of the industry - and one that is changing rapidly. We want to catch up with leading media planners to find out a bit about how the field has changed and their take on some of the current hot-button topics.

FILM & CONTENT PRODUCTION

Camera Obscura: Production Obsessions - This is a piece for anyone involved in craft and production, from directors to animators, compositors to composers, cinematographers to sound designers. We want you to nerd out about an element of your craft that you are absolutely obsessed with. It could be a particular kind of camera lens or shooting format. It could be aspect ratios. It could be a particular tool that feels like it’s become your right hand. It could be a part of the process that you just always find incredibly fun.

The Directors - This feature allows directors to go beyond their reel to talk about their thoughts about the business of directing and how they like to work, giving potential clients and collaborators a clearer idea about their problem solving and working styles.

Meet Your Makers - Interviews with producers specifically aimed at production, post and service companies all about the business of content and commercial production, insights into an evolving industry and some career advice for those making their way.

Production & Technology - This is an interview series for producers with a passion for technology and innovation. Here we’re diving into the technological innovations that are changing production, or at least broadening the demands on and possibilities for production.

Producing Tomorrow’s Producers - This feature is for producers, particularly those in leadership roles (EPs, senior producers, heads of production) who are keen to develop the next generation of producers, make sure that skills and expertise are passed on, while also learning from the up-and-comers of the creator economy.

Production Line - Interviews with agency and brand in-house producers talking about the challenges making work that works while navigating and integrating new channels and technologies and helping brands to solve their problems.

Sustainable Production - This is an interview series for producers with a passion for sustainability and who have been working to reduce the carbon footprint and environmental impact of their productions. It is intended to highlight best practice, share helpful pointers and also discuss some of the challenges moving forward. It’s a feature that’s appropriate for producers working in agency, production, production service, or even in-house at brand.

PHOTOGRAPHY, ANIMATION & DESIGN

Animate! - Animators are the magicians of filmmaking - to animate means, quite literally, to bring to life after all. So we want to celebrate the animators who fill our eyeballs with pure wizardry with this series of interviews.

Picture This - In which we ask a photographer to break down one of their favourite commercial photographs, revealing the story behind it. It doesn't have to be a recent project, in fact, famous/iconic advertising image would be most welcomed here!

Style Guide - This piece is for any sort of image-making artist working commercially. It could be illustrators, photographers, graphic designers or animators. It best suits those with a really distinctive flavour and style...

By Design - We want to talk to a range of the industry’s design experts about their careers and views on what ‘good’ design looks like. This series is open to everyone from UX designers, CX designers to product designers and graphic designers.

PRODUCTION SERVICE

Location Spotlight - Interviews and guides with production service specialists from around the world about inspirational locations and practical production issues.

EDITING & VFX

Finely Sliced - We speak to editors about the art of the cut and explore the knife edge between good editing… and great editing.

Making the Grade - The grade is one of the most fascinating parts of the post process so we want to talk to talented colour graders about how they practice their craft.

The VFX Factor - This feature is a place for the visual virtuosos of advertising, the VFX artists, to discuss the trends in their role: the technological advancements revolutionising the way they work, the beauty of ‘invisible’ post, and trends in craft.

MUSIC & SOUND

Sonic Boom - Sonic Boom is a series on creative and technological innovations in sound design.

Thinking in Sound - We want to delve into the minds of the industry’s fantastic music and sound specialists to show just how creative this part of the industry is. We want to really dig into what inspires you and how you approach your work, while also getting a taste of how the music and sound part of the industry is changing.

Please check out the topics we’re planning to write features about in the coming year. These are outside of our regular features (please see above), which we write all year round. Moreover we do endeavour to respond to news developments in the industry and more broadly in our features. As the year progresses, this document will be updated and expanded throughout the year. As we assign writers and develop briefs we will contact LBB members.

APRIL

Key Dates

- Ramadan 2023// Eid al-Fitr (April 21) - Middle East & Africa Ramadan Feature

- Earth Day (April 22)

Features

Creative: How to Kill the Cliche

Christmas is all wrapped up! Cutting-edge technology! Puts you in the driver’s seat! Wow, advertising really can’t get enough of cliches - despite the fact that every decent guide to writing forbids them. George Orwell said, derisorily, that cliches “have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.” So why do we still see them in advertising? Are they actually highly effective shortcuts that spark off memories in our minds or are they just… lazy writing? Given the rise of AI, easy cliches are even easier to trot off - so can we humans kill them off and start thinking for ourselves?

Submission Deadline: 12/4/2024

Writer: zoe@lbbonline.com

Leadership: ‘It’s not a principle until it costs you money’

We want to speak to founders and leaders at agencies and production companies large and small who run values- and purpose-driven businesses to find out how they navigate pressures to compromise on their principles, what it means to take the hit for what you believe in and how this has shaped their business in the long term. Have you turned down or fired a client because of a moral incompatibility? Have you had to make sacrifices to make sure junior staff got the support or equity they needed?

Submission deadline: 16/4/2024

Writer: josh@lbbonline.com

Production: Virtual Production Glows Up

Virtual production has been influencing production in film, TV and advertising since the covid-19 pandemic. Its potential to save money via bundling and to cut down on carbon emissions is taken as read, and it has also been praised for its power to unshackle creatives from the confines of domestic settings. However, years in, it’s also clear that virtual production is still a work in progress and presents certain confines of its own, resulting in a signature VP ‘look’ and, sometimes, stilted and non-dynamic action and camera moves. So we want to speak to experts in virtual production to find out how it has evolved, how they’re finding solutions for the limitations and where the future lies.

Submission deadline: 18/4/2024

Writer: addison@lbbonline.com

Editing: Cutting for Comedy

With comedic ads making a tentative comeback, it’s important to remember that the key to getting a laugh is… timing. That means that the edit has a particularly crucial role to play. We want to speak to expert editors about how they approach comedy, from the quick cut away to the too-long awkward pause.

Submission deadline: 19/4/2024

Writer: nisna@lbbonline.com

Music: Tips for Brands That Want to Turn It Up

Music is a tricky area for many marketers so we want to talk to music experts to find out how to make sure that their musical choices fly high for a piece that is specifically addressing non-experts.

Submission deadline: 22/4/2024

Writer: alex@lbbonline.com

Applied AI: Personalisation with a Point

Personalisation at scale has been touted as the marketer’s dream - and AI is making that more attainable than ever. But there’s a risk of an asset overload and does the promise of covering every base lead to a slackening of strategic discipline and over production of content that’s either low quality or doesn’t ever get in front of a consumer. We want to speak with marketers, AI experts, strategists, media planners and agency heads of production how they’re navigating the promise and temptations of endless content.

Submission deadline: 19/4/2024

Writer: ben@lbbonline.com

Brands: Beverages feature

The Social Category in an Anti-social Age

People are socialising less for a number of reasons - cost of living pressures, anxiety, at-home entertainment options. So what does this mean for the alcoholic beverage sector, one that’s built around socialising and having fun? We want to speak to marketers and agencies working in this sector to talk about the strategic challenges and creative opportunities for brands in the beverages category.

Submission deadline: 19/4/2024

Writer: laura@lbbonline.com

MAY

Features:

IRL Creativity

We want to speak to the creatives bringing imagination and delight into the real world with their immersive experiences to find out about their process and how the creative space of experiential is evolving.

Submission deadline: 14/5/24

Writer: Nisna@lbbonline.com

Creative/Leadership: The Inhouse Agencies Changing the Game

A showcase of inhouse agencies that have overhauled the perception of inhouse creativity thanks to their incredible work, sky-high creative ambitions.

Submission deadline: 15/5/24

Writer: laura@lbbonline.com

Production: New Music Video Directors About to Level Up

From Jonathan Glazer to The Daniels, many of today’s most dazzling movie directors cut their teeth in music video - and that promo world is still a hothouse for next gen creative talent. We want to showcase the up-and-coming directors who have proven themselves with culture-shaping music videos, with whom brands and agencies should be dying to work.

Submission deadline: 17/5/24

Writer: alex@lbbonline.com

VFX: CG Characters that Stay With You

We want to talk to the industry’s most experience CG animators to find out about the characters that stayed with them and why. Every submission must pick one character and explain what it is about them that made them so memorable - it may have been a particularly challenging creature or perhaps there was something about the personality about this little dude or dudette that made their way into their hears.

Submission deadline: 22/5/24

Writer: josh@lbbonline.com

Sound: Where Do the Industry’s Leading Sound Designers Go for Inspiration

Noisy nature, the lively clatter and bang of family life, the strange sounds new city, unusual acoustic spaces or serene silence - we want to find out where sound designers go to refuel and find inspiration. We’re looking for contributions of 200 words telling us about the soundscapes they like to visit and immerses themselves in when they’re not working and how they are inspired by them.

Submission deadline: 24/5/24

Writer: zoe@lbbonline.com

Media: How Does the Cookie Crumble? As Google Finally Dismantles the Cookie, How Are Brands and Media Agencies Dealing with Withdrawal?

It’s been a long time coming, but 2024 is the year that the third party cookie is finally being retired so we want to speak to media experts to find out how the transition has gone, how much of a challenge it has presented to brands and what new opportunities lie ahead in a cookie-less landscape.

Submission deadline: 17/5/24
Writer: Ben@lbbonline.com

DE&I: The Key to DE&I Initiatives That Make for Lasting Change

Submission deadline: 21/5/24
Writer: addison@lbbonline.com

JUNE

Cannes Contenders

Jury President interviews

Cannes-ed Laughter - How Will Humour Shape Cannes 2024?

With a new humour sub-category entering the award show this year, are we likely to be LOL-ing all the way to the Lions and beyond? With juries in recent years favouring sadvertising and hand-wringing, might this new category be the nudge we need to push and celebrate work with a sense of humour? And is this good for brands? We want to speak to creative leaders to find out what they're hoping to see and whether the new category will have a ripple effect beyond the award circuit.

Brands: Marketers on Awards

JULY

Key Dates

- Olympics - July 26-August 11

- San Diego Comic Con

Features

Cannes: Trends Round Up

Music: Music Supervisors and Producers on their Most Ambitious Projects

Strategy: Fandoms at the Forefront of Strategy

Gaming: Gaming and the Olympics - the Future of eSports

Olympics: What Does France’s Advertising and Marketing Community Make of the Olympics Coming to Town?

The world is heading to Paris for the Olympics and global brands are making their play. But what do the locals make of it? We want to talk to French creatives, strategists and business leaders to find out how they’re finding having the world’s biggest sporting event in town, how local brands and agencies have been acknowledging (or ignoring!) it and whether or not they’re finding any creative inspiration.

Colour: Artificial Colour

There are few areas in the production process that aren’t touched in some way by artificial intelligence. We want to speak to colourists about how AI is changing the way they work - if, indeed it is - and where they see the opportunities and limitations when it comes to AI in colour grading.

Production: Production Service Experts on their Wildest Shoots - and How They Pulled Them Off

AUGUST

Olympics Trends

Creative: Where Adland’s Leading Creatives Look for Creative Fuel That You Won’t Find on TikTok

The algo is great at serving up more of what we love but when you’re trying to create something new and influential, it’s not enough to follow the content trends. So where do successful creatives look to fill themselves with less obvious inspiration and touchpoints?

Trends: Why Sports Stars Are the Champs of Influencers

The movies star is on the wane, with very few names able to really fire up the box office. Athletes, however, really have star power. To put it into perspective, Tom Cruise has 12m Instagram followers while David Beckham has 85m. We want to find out about the changing role of the sports star in marketing and why they’re out-running stars in other sectors.

Production: Action- Packed Dynamic Direction

With the Olympics in full flow, we want to speak to directors who relish action and sports to find out how they go about capturing exceptional human exploits in creative

Editing: Emotional Editing: How Leading Editors Deal with Emotive Subject Matter

Sound: The Secret to Creative Sound Design

Media: Beyond Recoupling: New Ways to Think About Creative Media

In recent years, the conversation around bringing creativity and media closer has been getting more intense and many traditionally creative and media agencies are bringing the complementary expertise inhouse. But how can we bring these disciplines even closer together, getting creatives to play with media and media planners to bring their expertise and insight to creativity? And are there new ways to think about creativity and media that bring them even closer to greater effect?

Brands: Auto feature

Commerce: Do Brands Have a Responsibility to the Digitally Disconnected?

The drive to more digitally-driven commerce experiences brings many benefits for brands and shoppers, but when every transaction requires an app and bricks and mortar retail is shutting down, where does that leave people with no recourse to tech? And how should brands and organisations ensure that digitally disconnected communities - from people who cannot afford to go online to people who are not physically able to and certain elderly members of society aren’t cut off from the products and services they want and need?

SEPTEMBER

Creative: Creatives Playing the Game: Meeting the creatives at the forefront of gaming and advertising

Leadership: At the Wheel in Seas of Constant Change

Production: The New Production Cocktail: How Prod Cos, and Agency/Holding Co Production Studios Are Working Together

Music: What Can Gaming Teach Us About Music?

VFX: How to Get Into VFX: Advice for Ambitious Newbies

Tech & Experiential: The Innovation Behind This Year’s Most Magical Experiences

OCTOBER

Key Dates

- Halloween

- Black History Month UK

Features

Creative: Is There Still Space for Big Ideas?

Strategy: Adaptive Strategy in a Real Time World

Production: Feel the Fear: How to Pull Off High Risk Shoots

Colour: The Colour of Magic: Grading Sci Fi and Fantasy Worlds

Sound: Sound Design to Give You Goosebumps

Media: The New Social Landscape

Brands: Retail - supermarkets feature

NOVEMBER

Key Dates

- Diwali - November 1st

- US Election - November 2th

Features

Creative: TBC

Leadership: Showcase of Up-and-Coming Industry Leaders making their mark

Production: Directors Behind This Year’s Festive Ads on How to Shoot a Very Merry Christmas

Editing: TBC

Music: Jingles All the Way - Music and Christmas Advertising

Commerce: Dopamine Drops - Commerce Experiences That are Sheer Joy

DECEMBER

Key Dates

- World Disability Day - December 3rd

- Christmas - December 25th

Features

Creative: TBC

Strategy: TBC

Production: TBC

Accessibility: Are We Nearly There Yet?

Brands: Travel and tourism feature

End of Year Round Up Pieces

Look forward to 2025

John Dickins