SCABs

If it’s not porn, it’s not Pencil winning – By @dj_sbex

By Sophie Becker

If it’s not porn, it’s not Pencil winning

 

 

Neither of my D&AD briefs involve vaginas and/or penises. And this makes me nervous.

 

Somehow hedgehogs and disability don’t get the heart racing quite like dirty talk and menstruation masturbation.

 

Have I sold myself short? Should I be referencing genitalia in every piece of arbitrary communication I produce? Perhaps that’s the way to carve your name in ad land.

 

After all, Sex Sells. Or actually, are we just trying to sell sex? I’m uncertain at this point.

 

Everyone’s cracking up. And although I kind of like it in a weird, twisted way, I can’t help but notice how the most cracked of us are those working on the Durex & Case For Her briefs.

 

When you first read them, these are without a doubt the ones that stand out. You start to lose yourself in the prospect of unleashing the power of sexual liberation and destroying cultural taboos. Who doesn’t want to end the stigma of menstruation or bring about a global behavioural shift that could change the lives of so many?

 

A White Pencil appears before your very eyes. Or so you think.

 

But once you get under their skin, they’re far less penetrable than the other briefs (I think).

 

In my opinion the best bit about being a creative is taking a brief and making it interesting and fun. The duller the brief, the better. When the good stuff is already written into the product, or when the cultural problem is already defined, there’s not much room for us to flex our creative muscles.

 

I love linking the product to a real world problem. In these two briefs, the product is the real world problem.

 

When a brief’s already so “big”, how can you push your ideas to make them even bigger? How can you “challenge the brief”? It’s hard.

 

It’s even harder to stand out.

 

You know where porn would really stand out? Microsoft Surface. Maybe a little bit of Facebook Workspace. I’d love to see that.

 

But with the Durex brief, the cliches of porn and bad innuendos are lurking around every corner. When sex is the subject, there’s less leeway for originality. This is made worse by the immensity of the restrictions on this category. It’s been narrowed at both ends leaving only a small middle ground. The fear is that everybody’s found their way there and you don’t own it.

 

I was a coward and dropped both briefs for want of less culturally-charged pastures.

 

I’m glad so many tenacious souls have stuck at it. How else would we have facilitated numerous conversation with middle aged straight men about masturbating on your period? D&AD season would be quite dull without the stand-out quotes that pervade the studio daily. For example, “Do you want to see my vagina?” “So are you going to make a porno then?” No one blinks an eyelid now.

 

The best bits about the struggle of Durex and The Case For Her is, that once you’ve pushed through to that sweet spot between originality and addressing the brief, you’ve smashed it. I massively admire those who have persevered. From walking around the room, I’m astounded at the incredible ideas I’ve heard. I’m seriously excited to see these vids next Thursday.

 

So who knows, maybe porn really is the way to pencil. We’ll just have to wait and see.

 

 

The copy scores 73.8 in the Flesch Reading Ease test

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