FIVE ADS THAT MADE BRIM’S CAREER
SHELTER ‘HOUSE OF CARDS’ (2009)
Brim and former creative partner Daniel Fisher spent seven years at Leo Burnett, where they created Shelter’s award-winning “House of cards” campaign. The ads showed homes made from playing cards to warn that Britain’s property market was on the verge of collapse. Artists and designers, including Dame Vivienne Westwood, Damien Hirst and Alexander Mcqueen, created playing cards for an exhibition that were later auctioned off by Sotheby’s and sold in limited-edition packs at Harrods. The film, which featured a Radiohead track, was played at the Glastonbury Festival.
Brim recalls coming up with a flurry of ideas with Fisher. After presenting the work, their creative director Jonathan Burley said: “Do one thing at your best, then put it aside and do the next thing.”
“That was a great lesson,” Brim says. It resulted in their first appearance at Cannes, where “House of cards” won gold and silver Lions.
THE SUNDAY TIMES ‘RICH LIST’ (2012)
Brim and Fisher moved to CHI & Partners for about a year to work under Burley again. While there, they had a crack at the campaign to promote The Sunday
Times’ annual Rich List. The ads resized celebrities, including JK Rowling and the Harry Potter movie actors, the royal family and the Dragons’ Den panellists, according to their wealth.
The ads used stock footage and were “more about the idea than the money spent. They sort of looked shit but that was the point,” Brim says. Despite its lack of polish, the campaign scooped two golds at Cannes and two Grands Prix at Eurobest, where
Sir John Hegarty called the work “nearly perfect”.
HARVEY NICHOLS ‘SORRY, I SPENT IT ON MYSELF’ (2013)
In 2013, Brim and Fisher moved to A&E/DDB after receiving a call from Ben Priest, then executive creative director. It was the year after Adam & Eve merged with DDB and, at that time, the agency felt “very transactional”, Brim recalls: “There was this sense of ‘Are you DDB or are you Adam & Eve?’ and we were neither. We thought we’d work on Harvey Nichols, Volkswagen and John Lewis ads, and then assess our options.”
Brim and Fisher were just weeks into their new jobs when they got the Harvey Nichols Christmas brief. The resulting ad, a cheeky film in which people give their loved ones rubbish gifts while spending money on themselves, stood out from the festive crowd by ditching Christmas clichés.
Months later, the campaign was entered at Cannes but Brim and Fisher did not expect to win. They each had newborn babies and cancelled their flights to the south of France. But the day before the festival, they scrambled to change their plans at the last minute because the campaign had started scooping awards. The duo ended up taking home four Grands Prix among their haul.
“It took us by surprise,” Brim says. “There was a moment when I knew everything had changed. There was a real togetherness because it was bigger than anything that had happened before.”
At the time of their Cannes success, Brim had begun working on the “Monty’s Christmas” campaign for John Lewis. “That period was when I fell in love with the agency,” he says. “It started a lot of fun. When people start enjoying stuff, they do better.”
JOHN LEWIS ‘MONTY’S CHRISTMAS’ (2014)
“There’s no brief in the agency like it,” Brim says of the John Lewis Christmas campaign. “The pressure is horrific.”
At their first attempt to crack the mother of all briefs, Brim had written about 40 unsuccessful scripts with Fisher. Tammy Einav, who was then managing director, told Brim they had three more days to do it. Brim and Fisher camped out at a Mayfair pub that had a roaring fire in the summertime, where they came up with the idea of a boy and a monkey. “But then we thought: what if it was a penguin? Everybody loves penguins,” he says.
The client also loved the idea and the team signed up long-time collaborator Dougal Wilson to direct the film. The finished product, a heart-warming story about a boy and his penguin friend Monty, picked up the Cannes Film Craft Grand Prix in 2015 and Grand Prix for Creative Effectiveness in 2016. It was the most watched and talked-about Christmas ad of the season and went down as one of the retailer’s most effective and profitable campaigns.
JOHN LEWIS ‘TINY DANCER’ (2015)
John Lewis might be known for its Christmas ads but its insurance brand had a viral success in the middle of the year with “Tiny dancer”, in which a girl prances clumsily around her house to the
Elton John song. It had a different tone to the retailer’s Christmas spots.
This was one of Brim’s first ads as executive creative director, which he became that year. It was also the first ad that had no direct involvement from the agency founders. “That was fucking petrifying. You take this legacy of great work and you don’t want to fuck it up,” he says. “But when you realise you haven’t – and they say ‘well done’ – it’s a massive relief.”
“You take this legacy of great work and you don’t want to fuck it up. When you realise you haven’t, it’s a massive relief”