Talking with New Talent: Jeppe and Simone

Simone> We met in ad school in Copenhagen and are actually quite similar in the way we work – both ‘half and half’ art director and copywriter. So you could argue that together we make one decent copywriter and one decent art director. Or that we don’t really fit into those boxes, which is why we usually just say we’re ‘creative problem solvers’.

 

Jeppe> We do compliment each other though. Simone is definitely the strategic one and I don’t make any sense half the time…

S> We both sort of stumbled into it. I thought I was going to be a sociologist and Jeppe was en route to business school before he accidentally took a lucky u-turn.

 

J> Neither of us were particularly creative kids and I don’t think creativity is necessarily something that just develops either. I think it’s something you learn, just like math or any other skill. You teach your brain to think in a certain way; to entertain the logic of stupid thoughts. “Tide cleans clothes, so every clean piece of clothing is an ad for Tide”. It’s stupidly simple logic, but such a brilliant campaign.

 

S> When humour becomes too calculated it stops being fun to write. And when it’s not fun to write, it often ends up very unfunny - at least for us. So we try not to think too much and just write something that makes us laugh... and then cross our fingers that other people will find it funny too.

S> We don’t, really. We’re both quite adamant. Usually there’s a reason we disagree, and it’s probably because there’s something wrong with that work in the first place, so we take one step back and try and fix that… Or one of us just caves in at some point. 

J> We once heard this story about when David Golding saw ‘The Long Wait’ for the first time, his reaction wasn’t “Fuck, that’s good” but “Fuck, what are we going to do next year?” We like that mentality, so we’ll say: we have a project for Adidas coming out soon – hopefully it will be that.

J> Great! But Nicklas Bendtner was also a very promising striker once. The pressure is on now. No one wants to be ‘most promising’ and then never heard of again.

 

J> Good question. I think quite often the answer might be inside the box. You just need to use whatever’s in there differently to create something new. Someone clever once said that the problem is the solution, so we tend to stay close to the problem.

 

S> I usually look at anything but advertising - follow the news, read a tweet once in a while, go see an exhibition. Jeppe always stays very up to date on new campaigns too, but none of us worry too much about being trendy. We’d rather be smart, funny or surprising.

S> Usually we try and attack a problem from an unexpected angle. Say something that’s never been said about the product before. Promote it in an unexpected place. Sell it to a totally different audience.

 

J> But Skittles was a bit different. We were essentially making a campaign to make people aware of an already existing campaign, so we kept the core thought really simple and had fun with the scenarios. For me it’s the slightly-off executions that make it work. 

 

J> At one point, very very soon, everyone should make some shape of work for Extinction Rebellion.

 

S> What I would love to make more of, and what we try and consistently push for, is work that doesn’t behave like advertising. Our strength isn’t necessarily crafting a script, but coming up with unexpected solutions to problems – in whichever shape or form.