McCann London Helps CREAM 'Transplant' Talent in Collaboration with The Talent Business

Every year a different advertising agency hosts CREAM, the annual portfolio show of emerging talent run by The Talent Business and judged by adland’s leaders. It showcases just 20 of the best creative portfolios from around the world. This year McCann London hosted the event in their shiny new offices in Liverpool Street.  

McCann was tasked with coming up with a theme to promote and structure the event around, with no boundaries set except that it had to promote up and coming talent. The creative team, Rory Peyton Jones and Elliot Lee came up with the idea of 'The Talent Transplant' - taking the best talent coming into the advertising industry and transplanting it directly into the world’s top agencies. 

To bring The Talent Transplant to life the team explored questions around where creativity comes from. Is it the same for everyone? It seemed the only way to truly know was to look inwards. Literally. The designers, Matt Bryce and Lauryn Raymond, found some beautiful MRI scans with amazing bright neon colours and knew they were onto something good. 

"Getting an MRI scan done was tricky, we had to get medical signoff for a full body “peace of mind” scan and find a willing volunteer to lie still in the MRI chamber while hundreds of scans were taken. CCO Lolly Thompson bravely ventured into the scanner and we took pictures of all his insides, looking for where his creativity comes from," says the team. 

"We then turned all the body parts into a graphical language for the event branding. Everything was inspired by the visual world of the medical industry, utilising medical typography, layouts and MRI user interface. We replicated the bright colours of medical gadolinium dye using gorgeous giclee printing to create a set of posters that were so beautiful that a few of them “went missing” at the end of the night. In a booklet featuring the students’ work we asked the winning creatives where in their bodies creativity comes from, with some of their answers ranging from teeth, to legs, to a weird purple muscle.  

"Creativity is a super power, something that science can explore, but can’t explain. So, here’s to another year of 20 of the best creative teams and solos hungry to create culturally relevant, and game changing work."