The “Quit in Style” campaign features a site (www.quitinstyle.com) that hosts initial content created by directors in London, LA, New York and Sydney. This body of work will grow as other young creatives upload their ideas to the site.
The site is an extension of an idea from Droga5 to create a new category for this year's YoungGun Awards, called “Craft in Quitting”, which rewards young creatives' skill and creativity in navigating the choppy waters of work-placements and freelance gigs that invariably make up the early years of a creative career in advertising.
The category requires creatives to submit work they've created specifically around the ‘Quit in Style' theme, and is open to anyone with an axe to grind against their employers - regardless of whether they work in advertising.
The idea fittingly came from Droga5's youngest team, Ben Smith and Neil McGuirk, in response to a brief from YGAward co-founder Kristian Barnes to develop a call-for-entries campaign that would be even more specific to young creatives:
“Over the last seven years, YGAward has grown massively and now competes in credibility and scale of entries with a lot of the more established shows. We are very conscious of wanting to keep the spirit and tone of the show true to the original premise, regardless of how wide it now reaches, and asked the guys at Droga5 to think of a non-advertising way of pushing the show's iconoclastic mantra further. Essentially they came back with a product idea, which in our case is the show itself, and the idea for the site and campaign grew naturally from there.”
The project was overseen and directed by Droga5 Sydney's creative heads, Matty Burton and Cameron Blackley, who have designed the campaign as a launchpad for young creatives and directors to host their own content, which will ultimately be judged within the newly created “Craft in Quitting” category and will go on to win a specially made Matt Black Bullet at this year's YGAward.
As Burton explains, although the tone of the campaign is outrageous, the idea behind it is firmly based in reality: “Some of us are still young enough to remember the lashing we got as juniors coming up through the business. It's a bit of a rites of passage thing, like army boot camp, but with less sleep and more beatings! Quit in Style is designed to become a sort of secret ‘Fight Club' for junior creatives, where they can meet to compare war stories and more importantly ideas of getting one over on their slave master CDs before they move on to the next challenge. It's basically a tool-box for the underdogs.”
Blackley thinks the content they've pulled together will grow fast once young creatives start to get involved:
“We've created over 25 films, thanks to collaborating with directors from as far away as HungryMan in New York and greatguns in Los Angeles, but I think it's just the beginning. Juniors are nothing if not crafty, and when they realise they can become infamous as well as win a specially made Matt Black Bullet through this thing, I reckon they won't need too much encouragement to pull out the camcorder.”
The YGAward call-to-entries campaign includes web, print, poster and direct marketing.
Entries to the 2008 YGAward close on Friday, October 17 2008. This year's jury chairman is the outgoing JWT worldwide creative director Craig Davis. Winners and finalists will be announced on Monday 8 December.
For more, go to www.quitinstyle.com and www.ygaward.com.
