The latest episode of The Irish Marketing Podcast has dropped and this week we feature an interview with the award-winning Mark Shanley, one of the most successful creative directors woking in London today.
Shanley talks about how he got into advertising in first place and how his dad, Ciaran and a school teacher may have played a significant role.
Shanley also discussed why there is no shortcut when it comes to creative work, just volume and grind He also admits that there’s no reliable system or methodology. The only consistent approach he’s found is generating a huge number of ideas (a hundred or more) to find the few worth sharing, and being self-aware enough to recognise when early ideas are just echoes of things you’ve already seen.
Shanley also says that creative direction is a completely different skill to being a creative. Moving into management requires skills — people leadership, client relationships, hiring — that years of copywriting or art direction simply don’t prepare you for. HE also credits learning on the job at Wieden+Kennedy and watching strong creative directors closely, then gradually developing his own approach.
He also says that the job is fundamentally about making ads people don’t hate as people actively dislike advertising and therein lies the central challenge of advertising.
Finally, he discusses the highly acclaimed “The “Nothing Beats a Londoner” which he worked on for Nike. A 16-month production involving ~250 real Londoners plus major celebrities, the campaign succeeded because of an unusually patient client, a dedicated team working on nothing else, contracted talent that didn’t eat the budget, and crucially, explicit “permission to fail” from leadership — which freed the team to swing for something original rather than settling for something safe.
The Irish Marketing Podcast is brought to you by the teams at IMJ/Adworld and Timpot Productions and is hosted by Daryl Moorhouse.
