A trip to D&AD

As a class we took a trip to london to meet D&AD for a briefing on the new briefs out for students 2011. We where told to meet in Brick Lane, London to the head quarters of LBI. Unfortunatly as there was a lot of traffic on the way to london we where a tad late but nicely of them they waited for us. After a delayed start, they started off introducing them selfs, at this discussion we had three industry professionals present Jodie from Laminar, Ivan from Brothers and Sisters and Jon a copywriter at LBI. They started talking to us about the new blood graduate academy they to newly graduated students, they showed us what we could experience and sold it to us, I was very interesting in this.  

Two of the industry professionals took it turns to talk through with us on how they personally get inspired in there work. Here are some notes I took for there advice that I found helpful, Jodie: take in a brief, don't get to caught up into what you need to produce. who are you focusing the brief to?        Jon: Don't be to self critical, change your environment. Look at more then the obvious! Experience what the brief offers. 

After the group where split into groups of four, I was with five other creatives most of which i hadn't met before. We where given one the briefs to discuss on how we would approach and resolve it. The brief was a new one for the 2011, On how spotify wants to be more interactive with facebook. As a group we made two mind maps of all our ideas, we where told to focus on one work to focus our creative ideas toward. The brief wanted us to tackle the issue that spotify is on facebook but it hasn't been very successful as yet, how to make it approachable to users though clever advertising. 

Our ideas where based on the idea of the sharing of music being the main attraction combining facebook and spotify, we came up with the idea of a Music Magpie, with the idea that most of the time you steal ideas off your friends and how it could be a way of introducing people to new music would be main object of attraction.  

We then had a lead spokes women to voice our ideas, they didn't come across to clearly as we did have a lot of ideas on the sheet which where voiced over our main idea... for some reason. We had positive feed back and told that we should of narrowed our ideas, which we did, but wheren't made apparent. 

I very much enjoyed the day, it taught me a lot in how to approach a brief and i found it exciting and refreshing meeting new creatives. They gave us a D&AD book to keep which was a lovely.