Hello reader / listener, and welcome to Behind the Billboard – a podcast series that tells the stories behind some of the greatest billboards of all time. From classic old school 48 sheets to cutting edge digital installations, we’re on a mission to discover the people, processes and preposterous ideas that have brought these billboards to life.
We launched with a Pilot episode just before Xmas, to get ourselves setup on the streaming services, to be cleared by their systems and to check the appetite for our ramblings. The Pilot is basically just Hugh and Dan chatting about Outdoor, billboards and some of their experiences. But fear not, it won’t be like that for every episode…. that would get pretty dull pretty quick – They are VERY geeky and boring people. No…. the rest of the series will hero the Creatives behind some of the best billboard work of our time.
Each episode hangs from a core awesome billboard campaign. But we’re not gonna spend 45[ish] mins each episode talking about the kerning of the typography or the lighting of the photography. We want to hear from the creatives, the account guys, the client or the media owners. It’s about what went wrong as much as what went right.
We want know more about the people. How they got to work on the account, at the agency or the brief. Where they see the world moving creatively, what inspires or motivates them to be more awesome…
About the Hosts:
Dan Dawson, Chief Creative Officer, Grand Visual
Dan has dedicated his professional life to delivering best-in-class creative digital work to Outdoor advertising markets around the world. One of the original founders of Grand Visual, he has created some of the most innovative OOH ads over the last decade, winning scores of awards and was on the Outdoor Lions jury at Cannes in 2019.
Hugh Todd, Creative Director, MullenLowe
Hugh has worked at some of the world’s leading ad agencies. At BBH he created ‘Vote Gail’ for FHM, ‘the greatest stunt of the 20th century’ according to the BBC. At JWT for Baileys ‘Listen to your lips’ – an iconic poster campaign shot with Rankin. He also won a D&AD pencil for the Golden Wonder Golden Skins poster campaign, a second pencil for Amnesty ‘Departure Board’ and has sat on awards juries over the years gaining a deep knowledge of the Outdoor world.