Interview with Gemma Butler

Gemma made art installations before she teamed up with Gav Gordon-Rogers to make music videos. They later moved into advertising full-time, learned the term "trigger the crave” and in 2002 joined glue London where they were digitised, hosted and accessed around the world without even realising how it had all happened.

Gemma’s work has been recognised on multiple occasions at the best regarded UK and international awards shows including The One Show, Cannes, and D&AD. She’s a freelance Creative Director and is still attempting to trigger the crave.

How did you end up working in Advertising?

Making art installations and music videos have never been an especially reliable way to make a living. They were creatively exciting and fulfilling – a group of people coming together over a few days and nights to produce a beautiful short film. Gav directed and I built the sets for Belle and Sebastian, Paul McCartney and the early days of Snow Patrol.  But 99% of the money would tend to go into the production. So Gav and I started writing ads together on the side. With our backgrounds in film-making and conceptual art, we both loved big ideas, telling stories and the craft of making something come to life from a few scribbles on a page.

We moved to London because it was new and exciting. But it wasn’t easy at the beginning and we ended up stomping these streets with our hacked-together book, meeting CD’s and trying to improve our spec ads along the way.

We freelanced at above-the-line agencies like Karmarama and TBWA, until meeting Mark Cridge at the small start-up agency glue London. It felt like a natural fit as we were always trying to do things slightly differently. Often we were turned away by the big ad agencies because of it. Our book wasn’t exactly traditional, and being a bit geeky too we felt there was loads of potential to be had in the digital space. It was a great move and we learned a lot there.

You’ve worked on some pretty incredible clients. What have been your favourite projects to work on and why?

We really enjoyed working with Radio 1. We worked closely with the tech team at Agency Republic to make the world’s first branded widget. It was 2005 and MySpace was the hot new place online for music fans. We made a tool that enabled them to create their own unique Musicube tower and paste it into their MySpace page. Each Musicube was colourful, interactive, and showed all their friends what sort of music they were into: their ‘musical dna’. It also prompted users to listen again via the in-built iPlayer function. It was a great project to work on because our client was taking a huge risk and he was really into it, working closely with us on the development of the idea and the functionality. No-one knew if the whole thing would work as it had never been done before. It was proper nerve-wracking innovation. Thankfully it worked seamlessly and was a massive success and our client was rewarded with BBC’s internal award for Most Innovative Campaign. We went on to produce loads of other pieces of work for Radio 1.

What are the fundamentals of a good Client/Agency relationship?

A client who is brave and has the guts to believe in the idea. Someone who is up for taking a punt, otherwise we’ll stay in the loop of ‘seen it all before’. A client who likes to stay close to the project and who doesn’t change things at the last minute!

Campaign once made a list of the 10 best digital pieces of the last decade, incredibly you had 2 in there. How do you keep up with what’s on the horizon for digital?

It’s a bit exhausting trying to keep up with it all as everything changes so fast. You could spend all day reading articles on Mashable and Twitter – but then you don’t get anything done! My parents send me interesting articles from the papers haha and my children are good at showing me what all the Vloggers are up to!

Any particular brands caught your eye recently?

I was lucky to judge the One Show Awards this year. We were 3 days in a dark room in the Bermuda Triangle where we saw the most amazing work from all over the world. One piece that stood out was from an Australian charity ‘Headspace’ that is attempting to tackle teenage online bullying. The case study film is a bit over the top, but we all know it’s very hard for children nowadays growing up in the spotlight of social media.  

They’ve created a tool and as you type, any negativity you are writing is scored out as part of the message. It’s reminding the bully that perhaps in the heat of the moment they shouldn’t send that hurtful message.

What blogs/websites/magazines do you subscribe to/keep tabs on, if any?

A mix of arty Nowness, Boooooooom and BBC Science and Technology ‘Focus’ magazine.

If you could give your 16 year old self one piece of career advice, what would it be?

I’d love to be 16 again! I’d stick to doing what I enjoy and try to get really good at it – rather than worry about the marks.

Gemma is speaking at our Inspiring Creativity event on Sep 7

Gemma on Linkedin