You can’t accuse Marc Lineveldt of taking the easy option.
Early in 2006, he was happily ensconced in Team Y&R’s Dubai headquarters, working for a big agency with a reputation for prizing creativity. He was offered the job of creative director of Fortune Promoseven, also a giant of Middle East advertising but one with a reputation for producing work that was neither inspired nor inspiring.
Such a move wouldn’t be a particularly attractive proposition to most creatives with Cannes at the back of their minds, but Lineveldt took up the challenge. “You need to move on at some point,” Lineveldt says. “And work on other brands in other cultures, and maybe teach some of the stuff you’ve learned and find a different way of doing it.”
The transition between cultures wasn’t made any smoother by a “misunderstanding” last year over the transfer of Lineveldt’s visa sponsorship from Team Y&R to FP7. Lineveldt ended up spending a day in a jail cell while the situation was sorted out.
A year later, he’s remarkably forgiving about that affair – and focused on the ongoing task of boosting FP7’s creative standing. “It’s been interesting,” he says, with more than a hint of understatement. “I try to be a catalyst and preach the benefits of doing great work. ... Fortunately, it’s not all me. The one thing the McCann network, which we’re part of, possibly wasn’t most well-known for was creativity: razor-sharp ideas and changing the way people look at advertising. It made a decision to change that reputation and do better work.”
When Lineveldt and his new team came on board, agency execs boasted of a “new FP7” that would bring home metal from Cannes this year. Unfortunately this didn’t happen. Like all regional agencies , they returned empty-handed.
But transforming an agency culture is a gradual process, not simply a matter of bringing in a few new faces. “I think it’s all starting to fit together quite nicely here,” Lineveldt says. “It’s a long-term mission to slowly but surely up the game.”
MAKING A DIFFERENCE
The agency’s campaign for Sony’s Cybershot digital camera is a good example of how Lineveldt’s influence made FP7 more creative when it comes to big brand advertising. The campaign’s copywriter and art director were both hired by Lineveldt.
Lineveldt and copywriter Vincent Fichard worked together in South Africa, and then for two years at Team Y&R in Dubai. Lineveldt had no hesitation in hiring him for FP7. “Vince is the king conceptualizer,” he says. “First and foremost he’s an ideas guy – and then he happens to be a copywriter as well.”
Art director Matthew Jones had never worked in advertising before Lineveldt hired him. “I hired Matt from a graphic design background,” Lineveldt explains. “He was doing some freelance over here, and he just sent us a really cool, interesting poster. We met up and I offered him a job.”
When the team started work on the Cybershot campaign, they immediately set themselves a target: To do something different from all other digital camera ads.
That meant avoiding the common, product-focused campaigns that tend to stress pixel rates and how slim the cameras are, usually with a high quality, and very cheesy, image. “When choosing a camera, most people aren’t that professional,” Lineveldt says. “They really just want to be allowed to have a little bit of fun and entertainment.”
A WORD PAINTS A THOUSAND PICTURES
In the end, they found the best way to avoid using clichéd images was simply to avoid using any images at all. Instead, the campaign – which began with print ads, before progressing to point-of-sale material – features descriptions of pictures, rather than the pictures themselves. “Rain in Dubai,” for example. Or “Funny looking car.”
The copy is placed on a colored box against a white background so it looks like a picture frame. The pictures described aren’t just portrait shots and landscapes either. “We wanted to show that you could take action shots, as well as just single shots,” says Jones. So you get “Neil jumping from his bedroom window straight into the neighbor’s pool,” with each word in its own individual frame. In the bottom right-hand corner of each ad is a shot of the camera along with the tagline: “Pictures are best taken.”
“This is a camera you can have in your pocket all the time,” Fichard says. “You can take it everywhere. But we wanted the campaign to be about something bigger than the camera itself, something about photography. It’s really about something that happens all the time: You see something and wish you had a camera. It’s as simple as that.”
“It ended up being more about having a camera on you at the relevant times,” adds Jones. “When you see a great shot but you don’t have your camera on you, it’s lost.”
The campaign relies on Lineveldt’s belief that talking about situations, rather than product qualities, results in consumers forging a stronger emotional connection to the brand.
“These are real-life truths,” he says. “When you’re talking to people out there in a magazine and you hit them with a moment that they remember from their life, or a situation when they wished they had a camera, I think you connect with a memory stronger than when you talk about the intrinsics.”
TALKING FONTS
The ads look sparse, with plenty of white space and minimal copy, but Jones says the colors and fonts of the campaign convey a message too.
“Even though we’ve pared it right down to barely anything, we are saying quite a lot with the choice of typeface, the way it’s laid out and the colors we use,” he says. “If you look at the tagline text, it’s Helvetica. That feels very modern and digital, but the rest of the text is set in Caslon, which is more of an emotional looking face.”
Jones says the font appealed to him for its use of ligatures, or connected typographical characters, which give it an old-fashioned, storybook feel. “When type was set classically, certain characters would be connected with ligatures like that, so they didn’t fill in when they were printed. And that adds to the fairy-tale look, like we’re reading a story to you.”
The colors, too, were the result of much deliberation. “It might look a bit boring to some people, but the idea is there’s something missing,” Fichard says. “We wanted it very neutral. If it was too bright, you might get the wrong message.”
Jones tried to get a mix of the colors that might be in the image, had it actually been taken, rather than described. So, “Rain in Dubai” is presented on a dull, sandy background. And “Neil jumping…” has “a lot of flesh.”
CAMPAIGN PLANS
You might assume that the Cybershot ads would’ve been a tough one to sell to Sony, since they are so far removed from what is expected of a digital camera campaign. But the client went for it right away. “I think he was surprised. But the cool thing about the client is that he’s young – so he got the idea,” Fichard says. “The products in that range are all pretty much the same and we needed to get people closer to the emotion in the work. So he got it and he really likes it.”
The team were so happy with the campaign that they looked to extend it beyond print into point-of-sale. Here, again, they took an unexpected approach. “Usually, for in-store, you just take the print ad and do it bigger,” says Fichard. “But we ended up doing a book.”
It’s a classy looking giveaway. A plain black, cloth-bound hardback with around 50 executions of the same idea as the original print campaign. “It’s a picture book without any pictures,” Jones says. “So you’re using your imagination, which is really nice.”
The book meant plenty of extra work for Fichard, who exhausted most of his holiday memories when writing the ads. Not that he’s complaining. “It did take a bit of time, but hey … I’ll definitely remember this piece of work,” he says.
“The book meant we could have a bit more fun,” Lineveldt says. “It gives a little bit of freedom that an ad doesn’t give you – you’ve got to restrict yourself to being more mainstream when you go into publications. As you can see, some of those couldn’t be turned into ads.” We assume he’s referring to the “Great tits” double-page spread.
Basing a campaign on a “big idea” like this one gives it potential for expansion – far more so than if they'd done a standard “intrinsic ad” based merely on product qualities. All three say they are keen to take the concept to radio and TV.
“There’s something very original about it. I don’t know if it’s the sharpest idea ever, but at least it’s not the formula,” says Fichard. “It’s something strange. It’s one of those big ideas you can do a lot with.”
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On the record
Marc Lineveldt, creative director, Fortune Promoseven, Dubai
On peaks and troughs
The best thing [about this job] is I really don’t know what it’s going to be like tomorrow. There’s an amazing possibility of greatness – that feeling that collectively we’re possibly going to do some really good things. I don’t know what they are yet, or how we’re going to get there. But it’s that feeling.
The worst thing is all the details. The reality of business that gets in the way of ideas. Things you haven’t seen before are difficult to grasp, for anyone. And that gets in the way, but it’s the nature of big business.
On agency-to-agency moves
My thought is that it’s nice for people to be able to move around. If people feel they’re able to move around hassle-free, they’re not just going to move for the sake of it. Wouldn’t it be better for the industry, if there’s a good person stuck somewhere, that he didn’t have to just work out his contract and go home, but could move to another agency?
On Dubai’s advertising renaissance
When I arrived in 2003, Dubai had a reputation as a place you could go and earn money, and not really be challenged. You could take your foot off the gas. There were South Africans I knew of who’d been to Dubai. They came back and hadn’t done much, but they’d pay cash for a new house when they got back.
That’s changing. Now, if you’re going to succeed here, you have to be willing to work hard, you have to be passionate, you have to be good. So people who’ve arrived under the misled preconceptions have to leave because they get found out. So it’s nicely poised now to become a new force in the world.
On the Sam Ahmed advertising school
I got a call from Sam Ahmed [then creative director] at Team Y&R when I was at Ogilvy Cape Town. He got me on the phone and he sounded really interesting. His brief to me was to come and help Team to get to the next level. He felt they were the best in Dubai, but they hadn’t won at Cannes yet. And he wanted to get to that level. So that was a lovely brief to have.
Sam spoke the language I was used to. He didn’t say, “I want to pay you a lot of money,” or “I want you to look after a big client.” It wasn’t that kind of thing. It was “I really want you to come and help us to produce great work.” He turned out to be a really inspiring guy. Sam’s the John Hunt of the Middle East.
It was kind of a school of advertising. Lots of good people working here came here through him. They don’t work for Team anymore, but they picked up a bit of that culture. He’d done something amazing here: He’d got power to the creative department.