Jones Knowles Ritchie Creative Heavyweights Talk Branding
Top creative minds from JKR reflect on a year of rapid learning and big wins. Tosh Hall, Global CCO, Lisa Smith, Executive Creative Director, and Candice Juniper, Head of Brand Experience discuss the practicalities of working as a truly global creative agency through a pandemic, where boardroom pitches were swapped for the intimacy of client’s homes (via Zoom), and new digital tools were tapped to recreate the whiteboard creative session.
Jones Knowles Ritchie gained recognition in the 2020 D&AD awards for stand-out work with the highest ranked client of the year Burger King with 'Join the Meltdown', which sought to reduce the brand’s plastic usage by removing plastic toys from BK’s kids’ meals. And in overall Network rankings – when ranking networks by discipline – the most awarded design network went to Jones Knowles Ritchie.
“We operate as a global agency more than we ever have before,” says Smith, detailing the strategic approaches and collaborative tools they’ve found to facilitate new ways of working; while Hall identifies a lack of the “random acts of awesomeness” that can take place in an agency – those moments of creative serendipity and spontaneity of being together – as a hurdle to landing those true aha moments.
As for the future, Juniper points to 2020’s seismic events rendering trend prediction futile. Instead, she offers this advice: “Try to find something that’s timeless” and then work out how to make it relevant. “The timeless truths should be the things that we should think about,” she says.
Discover over 1,000 pieces of the world’s best creativity, behind the work interviews, panel discussions, theme reports, and more in the 2020 D&AD Annual.
