How to create award-winning advertising campaigns

Whether you’re a creator or a client, creating OK work that gets the metrics or ticks the right box can often become the norm. And in time-poor, budget-tight situations, creating great work can slip down the list of priorities.

While there are no short-cuts to great work, Rosie Arnold has managed to overcome expected and unexpected hurdles during her 33-year career as a top advertising creative. Now, Rosie has joined the roster of D&AD Masterclass leaders, where she provides creative advertising workshops in London. Here, she shares four key tips on making award-winning ad campaigns, taken from her D&AD Masterclass.

1. Get the brief right​
Increasingly, I’ve seen that the briefs aren’t right. I urge you to get involved from the start. If the brief isn’t right, question and interrogate your client until you find out what the key business problem is. Good briefs are at the heart of great work and your work will always be judged against the brief, so make sure you are armed with clarity from the get go.

2. Uncover fresh insight
Whether you’re tasked with making mainstream beer cool again or advertising a paper catalogue in a digital world, make sure you dig deep enough to uncover fresh insight. A perfect example of this is the Libresse Red Fit campaign which smashed convention by openly showing blood in an ad for women’s sanitary products. Bodyform’s Bloodnormal was the culmination of this journey; a revolutionary, category shifting piece of creative work that came from a good brief, fresh insights, and a brave client.

3. Avoid buckaroo
I’m going to give you a trip down to my childhood here with Buckaroo. Buckaroo is a saddle stacking game where you stack as much as you can onto the plastic mule. When it starts kicking, the game is over. I’m tempted to buy this game and send it to all agencies around town because all the little tweak this requests adds extra load to an idea, eventually causing it to buckle under the pressure. So, this is a message to all creatives, keep things simple and avoid the buckaroo effect.

4. If you love your idea, don’t compromise it
To get to really inspirational creative work, you need a core team of visionaries who really own and fight for the idea. You can risk killing your idea if you compromise and let go of small things that you think may not make a difference. I take inspiration from the great film Director Stanley Kubrick, who truly owned the films he created. Yes, he worked with a big group of people – specialists and experts in what they do - but he was the keystone in the process, owning the vision. I encourage you all to stick to your guns, to have a vision, and to push either with charm or argument for your idea. 

If you’re a senior creative, account manager, or in-house creative seeking Masterclasses in London, join Rosie's one-day creative short course, Making Great Work: Moving Beyond Mediocre to learn new skills, inspire great ideas, and learn how to make award-winning creative campaigns.