Awards can make careers.

Last night in the bath, after scrolling through 47 LinkedIn posts from Cannes, I started reading New Yorker cartoonist and very funny genius, Asher Perlman’s, new book - ‘Well, This is Me’ and came across this.

And I just laughed. And laughed and laughed and laughed. With comedy, they say timing is everything.

Now I’m not anti-awards, and this is not an anti-awards post, I’ve won awards and I’m still a sucker for awards, but sometimes it’s also worth acknowledging them for what they are - which Asher has done very well here. Everyone who has just won a ton of metal in the French Riviera should celebrate their success and I’ve seen some incredible work pick up. In our business, awards can make careers, and creatives have that drummed into them from day one. But awards are fleeting, and they’re not the only way. The other way, and dare I say it a potentially more enduring and personally rewarding way, is to make stuff that permeates culture. Stuff that people actually see in the real world. Stuff people voluntarily engage with and share with their friends and talk about at the bar. And get hung in a museum. Wait, what? I’ll get to that in a bit.

And that stuff doesn’t always need a brief. I’ve made lots of this stuff over the years, but let me regale you with a story from the deep dark depths of the ‘most locked down city in the world’ during the 2020 pandemic.

It’s a long story, so I’ll attempt to give you the abridged version. (Buy me a beer and I’ll give you the director’s cut.)

In July of 2020, after dodging COVID for what seemed like an impressive period, the city of Melbourne, Australia, got hit by a second wave. And things were looking grim. The state govt ordered a ‘lockdown’ of the city to attempt to stop the spread of the virus to the regional towns and centres outside of the capital. The reason for this, is that like most places, a lot of Melburnians had family and friends and holiday houses all over the state. And the natural reaction from some was to immediately flee the city for the sticks. The big issue with this, due to the centralisation of resources, was that the regional towns of Victoria would not have the infrastructure to handle an outbreak. TV, radio, and social media, was abound with terrified residents of regional Victoria expressing fear that crowds from Melbourne breaking the lockdown order would spread the virus to their town.

There were communications campaigns launched at the time to try to counter this, and raise the conversation, but they hit about as hard as a wet towel. The message wasn’t getting through.

My good friend and creative partner at the time, Guillermo Carvajal, and I, were discussing this issue online one night. Probably after a bottle of wine, on a Wednesday night, because you know, lockdown. And we thought that the important missed message here isn’t the one ‘from the government’. It’s from the people of these towns. We then joked about how regional towns always have funny postcards advertising themselves. And maybe they should send these postcards to Melbourne, not inviting people to visit, but to ‘stay the fuck away’. Then we laughed. Then we stopped laughing. Because… maybe that wasn’t such a stupid idea.

So, we made it. Quite honestly, in a couple of hours. I furiously wrote some stupid headlines, he frantically started comping together some artwork, and we posted them to Facebook. Now, we didn’t plan for this to be much more than a meme, to be perfectly honest. Everyone was exhausted with the fear mongering of the time, so we wanted to find a more lighthearted way to give regional Victorians a voice. And this is what we did.

So, as I said, we posted them to Facebook and went to bed.

And woke up to this.

It went viral. Thermonuclear viral. ‘Media camped outside our houses’ viral. To be honest, given my mental state at the time, it was all too much. We did TV interviews, newspaper interviews, radio interviews, and let me tell you - that was an eye opener. I won’t go into detail, but my view of modern media and journalism was very heavily shaped by my experiences. And while there were some genuine people we dealt with, they were the exception to the rule. So, if you find yourself in a situation like this, watch yourself. Especially with the more conservative sensationalist media platforms. (All they care about is their own personal grift, not the story.)

My inbox looked like this:

Every town wanted one. We were absolutely inundated. We considered making more, but we simply couldn’t keep up. The other constant request was merch. Specifically, ‘tea towels’. It seems regional Victorians fucking LOVE tea towels. So that’s what we did. We quickly set up a range of t-shirts, posters, stickers, and yes, tea towels, for people to purchase. They were sold in the hundreds, which was mind boggling, with all proceeds donated to Lifeline.

(A major retailer must have also ‘cottoned on’ and made these. Not for Lifeline though, just for their own profit. Their lawyers tell me it’s a ‘coincidence’, but I’ll let you be the judge.)

The whole thing was an exhausting whirlwind. We’d made a few memes and posted them to Facebook and created a a media storm. But, with a media budget of zero, achieved what the ‘official’ channels couldn’t. A proper conversation. From memory, there wasn’t a single mainstream media platform that didn’t cover it.

But then, once the dust settled, and lockdown was lifted, we suddenly felt like we still had unfinished business. Now we needed to support these towns by getting people back out there. So, beyond personally hitting the road and travelling the state, we made a follow up series.

Again, the people of regional Vic loved it. And it felt like we maybe brought some closure to whole crazy rollercoaster ride.

But then something even crazier happened.

We were contacted by the Melbourne Museum and State Library of Victoria. They wanted to acquire the artwork for their permanent collections. Apparently, our stupid Facebook memes were now considered a significant part of history, and needed to be archived. I don’t understand entirely what this all means, but the museum wanted to keep them for use in any historical exhibitions about the pandemic for the next 100 years.

So, that was a very long winded story following a cartoon about awards I read in the bath last night, but here’s the point. Win awards, celebrate them, promote that you won them, and use them to build your career. But don’t just chase awards. Because it’s not the only way. You’re a creative. You don’t need permission to create. You can create whatever you want, whenever you want, and make something that sends a tiny ripple across culture that might last longer than an award.

Maybe you can make something that lives in a museum for 100 years.

(And maybe I’m biased, but I reckon that’s a bit cooler than a trophy.)

Good luck.