shots 159: E is for Editors

shots editors through the ages, from founder Paul Kemp-Robertson to current captain Danny Edwards, reflect on the title’s journey from 60-minute video cassette blending Vogue with AdAge, to its growth into the multimedia organ of excellence you now enjoy

Paul Kemp-Robertson

1990-1998

Once upon a time, in a converted chocolate factory on the banks of a murky canal in West London, an impoverished Goldsmiths graduate being paid £50 a week stuffed 1,000 VHS cassettes into 1,000 jiffy bags and licked 1,000 stamps. Then the mail van arrived and shots was officially a ‘thing’. Like all good fairytales, the intern (me) eventually became the editor, overseeing the transition from shots as ‘the creative video programme’ to the glossy magazine and digital resource you’re familiar with today.

shots started in those strange, sepia days before the World Wide Web. A time when fax machines and telephone boxes roamed the earth and when ‘being social’ meant moving your lips and letting words come out.

If you worked in advertising and wanted to see the latest, most creative work from around the world you had to either save up your pocket money and go to Cannes or tolerate the visit of yet another winsome directors’ rep armed with a Prada holdall brimming with U-matic tapes and more false promises than a liposuction clinic. When shots came along it felt like a saviour. Ahead of its time, it was as if the yet-to-be born web had got jiggy with a DVD, resulting in an hour-long video cassette, designed as a kind of television show made for creative directors.

Dreamt up by Will Gompertz (now the BBC’s arts editor) and Gee Thomson (my partner at Contagious) the mission behind shots was to be the creative oracle of adland – someone once described it as the love child of Vogue and AdAge.

This was no humble compilation reel. We wanted to feature only the most innovative, ambitious, amazingly crafted creative work and post production wizardry. The founders assembled a panel of industry experts to help select content for the first three issues. I thought the bloke from Saatchi & Saatchi was an investment banker, which explains why I only got the ‘unofficial helper’ job. After that, we were on our own.

We didn’t care about playing politics and nor did we fear putting noses out of joint. We were six people wedged into an office space designed for two, and all we cared about was identifying what we thought were the best-crafted ads and music videos on the planet and sharing them, like secret racing tips, with our subscribers.

The hallowed magazine that you hold in your hands today actually began life as a glorified credits booklet, wedged into the shots VHS case. Then Gee taught himself [page layout software] Quark XPress and I qualified as editor on the grounds that my dad was a sports journalist and we started to make something that was, in retrospect, only one notch above a student newspaper.

It was only after shots had been sold to the behemoth Pearson Publishing, a couple of years later, that we suddenly had the backing to fulfill our ambitions and make something that matched the scale and quality of the work we celebrated in the pages and on the reel.

The mid-90s was a genuinely interesting time for the ad industry. Yes, I know that nowadays, you could practically recreate Lord Of The Rings on a Mac in your bedroom but the early days of shots coincided with a purple patch for visual FX, thanks to advances in 3D software. Effects-heavy movies like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park felt like the Hollywood equivalent of landing on the moon, and pretty soon Madison Avenue was muscling in on the action, with emerging studios like Pixar and Industrial Light & Magic laying out the red carpet for big-budget brands.

Many big-name directors like Michael Bay, David Fincher, Jonathan Glazer, Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze were cutting their teeth on commercials and it was a privilege to be able to interview them for shots, even though I realised when playing the tape back at my desk the next day that 90 per cent of Jonze’s responses were lies, feints and fantasies.

Plus ça change…

Paul Kemp-Robertson

Co-founder & editorial director, Contagious

Jane Austin

1998-1999

My time at shots was for me a Golden Age of TV ads where budgets were as unrestrained and unfettered as imaginations.

It was pre-digital, pre-procurement and a time when the word ‘global’ meant something physical not digital. I joined shots after three years as an editor at Campaign, which was a weekly, fast, newsy, and – at the time – a very London-centric publication. Conversely shots was a bi-monthly magazine and video that offered the luxury of time to process opinion. But I had no idea how frigging huge it was. Also, I initially failed to understand how passionately [people] felt about the brand; I had many directors berating me for not including their work and I narrowly ducked a flying honey pot at breakfast in Cannes from an advertiser who was livid that I wouldn’t put his ad on the cover, even after turning down a new kitchen.

As for the work, Surfer defined the time and changed everything. There was more ambition and audacity as evidenced by the casting of a middle-aged man rather than an aspirational surfer dude.

The two pre-eminent forces – Glazer and Gondry – earned their reputations for an excess of talent and imagination rather than behaviour. Remember that 90s Linda Evangelista quote about supermodels not getting out of bed for less than £10k per day? Well, at the time many directors wouldn’t get out of a bed for less than a sashimi platter, a massage, a nosebag of cocaine and a helicopter.

There were many directors who didn’t want to be pigeonholed by a style and were consistently excellent, especially in Europe. Kleinman, Ledwidge, Bond, Budgen, Rob Sanders and Chris Palmer. Even Tony Kaye was making good stuff on a regular basis – when he wasn’t kidnapping actors off Bacardi shoots or crapping in art galleries. The variety was delicious.

On the other side of the pond, DDB Chicago entered the vernacular with Budweiser’s Whassup and US-based directors such as the Scott brothers, David Fincher, Tarsem and Michael Bay were still helming the big-budget jobs, while Joe Pytka remained the US daddy.

There were the last of the specialist TV creative teams: Tom Carty and Walt Campbell, Kim Papworth and Tony Davidson, Linus Karlsson and Paul Malmstrom, Mark Waites and Robert Saville and many more. David Droga cemented his reputation as his creative department at Saatchi & Saatchi groaned under the weight of all the gongs they won.

Naively, no one knew what was to come and made TV hay while the pre-digital sun shone. The end of the millennium saw the end of an era and ‘the noughties’ became about noughts and ones. And a helicopter would now have to be argued for.

Jane Austin

Owner, Persuasion Communications

Lyndy Stout

1999-2009

One of the first moments of realising that I had the best job in the world was when a VHS arrived from Paris in 2000. It was a music video for Robbie Williams by two young creatives, Fred and Farid. A couple of us from the editorial team watched it and we screamed and laughed and screamed some more when Williams starts stripping his skin off during his dance. We called the entire office into the screening room – advertising, management, the tea boy, everyone – and that shared whoop of seeing something fresh and completely out there has been a compulsion ever since.

The worst fear, apart from choosing work that later appeared a bit lame in the showcase edit, was completely missing something that was good. Like a late night decision to hold over John West Salmon’s Bear until the next issue, which was weeks away.

Viewing creative work is so emotional, it works on a cellular level. I almost fainted with excitement when I first saw Sony Balls, or Cadbury’s Gorilla, recognising that a completely new way of communicating had been created. That surge of happiness when you discover a great piece – with a simple, strong idea that’s fabulously crafted – is addictive. 

It’s like panning for gold, always searching for that nugget which isn’t mimicry, or too derivative. It still puzzles me that during my decade at shots trillions must have been spent on making the same car ad – the car moving along a mountain road, the beautiful woman always in the passenger seat…

Nowadays I’m puzzled why there’s very little work that makes us laugh, as if humour got put into a box when the recession hit and it hasn’t been allowed out since. On the other hand it has been exciting to see how the visual language of film has evolved, and how technique and post have become integral to the telling of the story. How do they do that? It’s far cleverer than rocket science.

Ironically, as we were all about moving imagery, the magazine was the soul of shots. There was always a frisson of excitement when it would arrive smelling freshly printed, although once opened we could only see the flaws.

We loved to travel to do our stories. But like everywhere else, budgets were limited. What was I thinking when I sent Jordan [McGarry, then deputy editor, now director of Vimeo] on a trip to the States on coupons I’d collected from a newspaper? The trip took several days and went via India to get there. On my first Cannes trip in 1999 management put me up in a five-star hotel on the Croisette. It was luxurious and wonderful but I almost died of loneliness. So the following year we used the same budget for the whole team to stay in a hilariously awful place where we returned for the next decade.

Like the industry we were showcasing, working on the shots editorial team was utterly dependent on working together harmoniously. As editor I may have done my fair share of stomping over to publishers shrieking “You’ve got to be joking?!” about some decisions that I had no control over,but I can’t recall ever having a fight within the editorial team. We were always up against deadlines, and my overriding memory is of laughing. Lots.

Lyndy Stout

Editor, onepointfour.co

Danny Edwards

2009-present

I remember my interview with Lyndy and then-assistant editor, Kirsten Wharton. It was for the role of tea boy’s assistant or something, and the only question I can recall being asked is, “You will stay for at least a year won’t you? We’d like to see that commitment.”

“Of course,” I replied, thinking that a year was a very long time. That was 16 years ago.

Most people, when I tell them I’ve worked at the same place for that amount of time, look at me like I’ve just told them the moon landings are not only fake, but the moon itself is an artificial construct and we’re actually living in a huge glass dome, à la The Truman Show. But taking that first role was the best career decision I could have made.

From publishing assistant (no, me neither. Basically, tea boy’s assistant), to editorial assistant, researcher, staff writer, assistant editor and finally, in 2009, editor, life at shots has never been dull. I was there for that initial screening of Robbie Williams’ Rock DJ, which Lyndy mentions, and the sense of joy at unearthing something that creates that reaction was, and is, infectious. From there I have been lucky enough to meet with, talk to and learn from a whole host of creative people from the agency, production and post worlds. When I began my life at shots I felt like a young interloper with a lot to learn; now I feel like a much older interloper, still with a lot to learn.

My 16 years have seen many changes: geographical (from Clerkenwell, to Camden, to Moorgate and now Shoreditch); ownership (the behemoth that was Emap, now called Top Right Group, to a smaller but perfectly formed – most of the time – Media Business Insight); staff (too numerous to mention but many are dotted through the industry still, shots’ previous editors among them).

Of course, shots has had to change with the times, too. The internet is a far more potent force now than in 1990, or even when I started out in 1999, and, editorially, we have had to expand our focus and adapt our practices. But that’s what makes it interesting. The advertising industry itself has evolved so much in the past decade that every year, if not every issue, brings a new challenge and a new topic to look into.

But not everything has changed – shots’ founding principle of unearthing, sharing and examining great creative work from across the globe, as well as the people behind it, remains at our core and we like to think we’re still pretty good at it. The editorial teams, all of them, across the years, have been assiduous in their task of seeking out creative ingenuity and shining a light on it and long may that continue.