SCABs

Stand out, by @Goodworkmyboy

Søren Birk

By Søren Birk

 

Stand out

 

When you look up the word “outstanding” in the dictionary it says that it means: “clearly very much better than what is usual”.

 

A Swedish Danish team is the easy way to go

After I teamed up with Elin, Bryan came over and had a chat with us about his views on our teams. We told him that we believed in a Danish Swedish team which was inspired by last year Adam & Mathias. Bryan wasnt that happy about it and gave us the challenge. We had to prove that we could stand out from the crowd and surprise him because he thought it was the obvious and easy way to go.

 

After Bryan’s speech, which apparently made an impression, I began to ask myself how I or we as a team could stand out and make interesting, different and memorable work.

 

Many thoughts and questions ran through my head and I began to focus on pushing the work in the direction of being outstanding. Why do what everybody else are doing? Why should agencies hire people who do the same as themselves? Marc keeps telling us that we need to stand so much out and be better than existing creatives that we can steal their jobs.

 

Give a shit

Weeks later Bryan came by again and asked how it we were doing on the brief. We began to explain to him our thoughts and ended up telling him our SMP, Give a shit. I could tell that we surprised him positively and that it definitely wasn’t what he expected from us. We had apparently made such an impression on him that we afterwards were asked from others what our idea was, because he had told them we had a good idea. Both Elin and I felt we had something that was different and could stand out if we did it right.

 

Book and name

But it was not enough to stand out with a single piece of work. If the agencies are hiring creatives that stands out why make a book that looks like everyone else’s? How can a cd remember my black a3 book compared to all the other black a3 books? Why have a team name that looks like everyone else like “surname & surname”? Elin’s suggestions for our team name is “Jarlstrom & Birk” but who can remember that compared to “Ogilstrom & Bernbirk”?

 

Outstanding work and people

To create outstanding work it’s important for me to define what outstanding work is. What can I remember? What do i finds outstanding?

 

  • One copy song
  • jay-z Decoded
  • Dollarshaveclub

 

and who do I find outstanding? Who do I want beat? Who I will be better than both the creative and personal level?

 

  • Steve Henry
  • John Jessep
  • Peter Metcalfe  Associate Creative Director Ogilvy Paris
  • Laurent Simon  Creative Director at Adam&Eve DDB

 

It is definitely not a new thing to stand out and make it different from others. A good proof is BBH’s work on Levis’s with the line “When the world zigs, zag”, which subsequently turned into be their mantra.
When the world zigs and somebody zag, go straight” – Me

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