Sometimes you have a campaign that people either love or hate. The reactions to this campaign varied so much that at one point I even considered leaving it out of my book. At Saatchi New York they all hate it. But… at Mother New York they love it. On adsoftheworld.com I nearly got death threats for making this campaign. But on newcreatives.com it became ‘best of’. And when I came back to Hamburg my headmaster Niklas and some creative directors from Jung von Matt love it. The reason that I kept it in is because I still love it, no matter what anybody else says. Is it stubborn? Well, it’s good to listen to opinions of experienced creative directors, but in the end you cannot satisfy anybody so then you have to go for ideas that you believe in yourself.

And there’s a big story behind it. I made this campaign with Andres Maldonado at the first assignment for our class at Saatchi Stockholm. Our teacher Adam Kerj picked this 360-idea out of 15 campaigns that we made for Lego. We kept working on this campaign during the whole quarter. It took us so much work that we didn’t make anything else for this class.

First of all we had to think of 3x50 ideas of what to do with just three Lego bricks. So Andres got his old Lego from the attic and we just started playing with it. Every time we had another creation we made a photograph of it and we named every file after what it’s supposed to be. And it became more difficult to come up with new ideas every time. In the end we were sitting in a coffee bar to come up with the last creations. You have to do weird stuff for the Miami Ad School sometimes, but I’m surprised that nobody called the lunatic asylum when they saw two fairly grown-up men playing with three Lego bricks and making pictures of them. These photographs were just examples. Later on a friend of Andres, who is a photographer, photographed all of the creations again in a studio. Andres once forgot one of the three bricks. So in the middle of the night I had to go to the other side of Stockholm to bring them. It must have looked like a dealing drugs at the station, but it was three Lego-bricks that we exchanged.

This campaign was spread on so many websites with (by mistake) the name of Saatchi Stockholm under it, that the Swedish agency got a phonecall from the client about it. There’s even an article about the campaign published in a French magazine.

UPDATE: this campaign is nominated for the Luerzers Archive Student of the Year Award.