President’s Award-winner Kim Gehrig’s work acts both for the brief and for the world

Every year, D&AD’s President hand picks an industry hero to give them the President’s Award. These are creatives whose outstanding contributions to the industry have been nothing short of inspirational. This year, sitting President Naresh Ramchandani chose director Kim Gehrig, who is represented by Somesuch.

As well known for her technical prowess as she is for the combination of honesty and wit she brings to her work, Gehrig is no stranger to awards. Her accolades include Cannes Lions, BTAA Arrows and a UKMVA music video award, but Gehrig noted the ‘poetry’ of her President’s Award win during her acceptance speech, because her first-ever accolade – one that helped her land her first job at Mother – was a D&AD Pencil.

The Australian-born director studied at Central St Martins and, after her time as a creative at Mother, started directing music videos. Amongst others, she made the video for Mark Ronson feat Wiley’s, Cash in My Pocket and Calvin Harris’ The Girls. “Music is very important in my work and that probably comes in part from starting in music videos,” Gehrig says. “I love to use music to drive a feeling. In my early days as a music video director I met the editor Tom Lindsay and he saved a few projects for me through his sublime editing. We have worked together ever since. We found a common love of musical editing and embedding sound design into our musical sequences. I think collaborating with Tom has been one of the fundamental influences on my work and continues to be so.”

Music that hits the right note with audiences can be seen throughout Gehrig’s later work, and in arguably her most well-loved commercial campaigns This Girl Can for Sport England, which inspired British women to get moving, and Libresse’s Viva La Vulva, for which she commissioned artists to design and animate singing vulvas. Gehrig says, “Viva was a very collaborative film. The hardest part of the piece was finding the right music. Once we found that, my mission was to get as many vulvas to sing along. That really was the fun bit… However, getting all the lips to move in perfect sync with the track was hard. Like many of my projects it was a long edit which was continually refined over several months.”

Championing women seems to come effortlessly to Gehrig. Speaking about Viva La Vulva, which won a Black Pencil in 2019, she says, “The very ending of the film, where I interviewed women of various ages, was very important to me as well. I wanted to make sure that what was a totally bonkers film was grounded in the truth about how women feel… and the best way I knew how to do it was to talk to them in a very direct way.”

In This Girl Can too, Gehrig manages to connect with women in a real way, capturing the uplifting feeling of what it’s like to exercise (without caring about your cellulite or how you look) perfectly. She says, “It was in a Zumba class in Manchester that I really found the soul of the film. It was an exercise class that a group of women did religiously for two hours every Tuesday. The high they felt from this class was almost spiritual. They told me they felt alive. After filming their workout, I wanted all women to know that they could feel like that if they just got out and exercised.”

It’s Gehrig’s ability to speak to these emotions that sets her apart and makes her such an evocative director. The secret to this she says is simple – she chooses the projects that inherently have a message that she believes in, which makes it easy for her to work hard and deliver something that resonates. Gehrig says, “I think advertising is a very powerful medium and it struck me a while ago that if you could harness the way advertising connects with mass audiences and delivers social messages it would be a great way to create positive change. Over the last few years I have chosen to work on several projects that I felt could do this. Viva La Vulva is probably the one that did this best. I remember that before it even launched the film was leaked on social media and before we knew it people had shared it all around the world.”

Though mostly directing commercials in recent years, Gehrig does sometimes go back to her music video roots, and one of her works, the energetic video for Chaka Khan’s Sugar, shows some of the technical prowess for which she’s become known. “I love finding a technique or visual language to best bring ideas to life and hopefully make them more remarkable in doing so.” she says, adding, “I think Chaka Khan is technically sublime in terms of the edit. We spent endless hours looping footage and syncing to musical cues.”

Gehrig’s love for choreography can be seen in Sugar, and can be traced back to older pieces of work. She says, “An older piece of work, Honda Stepping was incredibly technical in terms of the movement and how we brought all the dance between dancers and the car together. We spent six weeks rehearsing a 60-second commercial which is kind of insane.”

In everything she does, there is also an undertone of humour, and of not taking serious subjects too seriously. Speaking of the powerful way in which she connects with audiences, Gehrig says, “I always try to keep a gentle wit in my work. It is very deliberate as I find that humour can take the pretension out of what could otherwise be a serious subject. I think when we can laugh at ourselves we are generally more self aware. I always try to take the edge of a serious point so that the audience will listen and hopefully be entertained rather than feel like they are being lectured to.”

Next up, we’ll see Gehrig make the move to the small screen. She’s currently working on her first TV project, which is “all under wraps for now… but intense and exciting!”