CB Q&A with Special’s Tom Martin and Julian Schreiber: “Do good work, don’t be a dickhead”
Campaign Brief recently caught up with Tom Martin (left) and Julian Schreiber (right), partners and CCOs at Special Australia and partners at Special USA and London. As creative leaders, Martin and Schreiber’s daily task is to judge what it takes for an idea to be truly unique, what it takes for an idea to really resonate with people and deliver effective results in the face of the world’s cold commercial realities. CB takes a closer look…
Campaign Brief: You are quite the power couple, how do you find working together?
Tom Martin + Jules Schreiber: How can you not like being called a power couple? It immediately conjures imagery of Beyonce and Jay-Z, Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez… Hobbs and Shaw. There are blatant and enormous advantages to it that we notice all the time. For example, there’s often a conversation in agencies on what work and what clients can the creative leader focus on to ensure they’re great. There are two of us, which means we have twice the energy, twice the reserves and twice the attention span to impact the work. A much less discussed side effect is that we believe it constantly trains us to be collaborative. If we have to be able to navigate, negotiate, listen, be patient and make it work with each other every day, it makes it feel very natural to just do all the same things and collaborate with everyone else around us. Occasionally we do bang heads, but there’s such a foundation of respect, and understanding that it’s always coming from the right place – that more often than not it results in better answers and clarity on what we’re meant to be doing. A former co-worker once said it also made us seem relentless, as when one of us got tired or fatigued, the other would tag in and step up.
CB: What drives you?
TM + JS: Honestly, we share a common drive to decide our own futures which is why we run our own agency with our amazing partners at Special (shout out to Lindsey Evans, Cade Heyde, Bec Stambanis & Dave Hartmann). We also share the two core beliefs that (1) we should be useful and (2) creativity pays the bills. Being creatively useful seems to have made working in this industry really fulfilling for us. And there’s just a lot of joy in pulling off something that no one including ourselves was sure was possible. There’s also a lot of joy in watching the impact work has on people when you do something really good and really powerful. We live in a world where everyone is a media channel, everyone is some sort of marketer, so you find out pretty quickly if you’ve made a dent in people’s busy and distracted lives.
CB: What work are you most proud of?
TM + JS: Rather than talk about work, we’d rather talk about our relationships as they’re what we’re extremely proud of. This isn’t going to shock anyone by saying this, but you simply can’t make people do what they don’t want to do. So that means as creatives we really work at creating relationships based on respect and trust like the ones we have with Uber, Virgin, Pepsi, ANZ and Bonds, just to name a few. We often find ourselves having very intense and beautifully blunt conversations about what’s humming and what isn’t. Clients are also experts in their brands and there’s so much of that expertise that should be tapped into to create amazing things together. We very openly talk about how to get the best out of each other because we know that’s what decides the output we make together.
CB: Tell us about taking “Tonight I’ll be Eating” to multiple markets…
TM + JS: We didn’t really see it coming. If you’d told us five years ago that we’d be operating in six different markets, we probably wouldn’t have believed you. But unexpectedly, COVID lifted the lid on everything for us. The minute the world went on screen, sure it came with a whole lot of cultural and creative (life!) challenges, but it also seemed to strip away all the artifice from our industry, and we were just judged by what we were capable of. It meant as long as we showed up in those little boxes on the black screen at the right time with the right work we were in with a shot. At the time, zoom made it permissible for us to pitch for Uber Eats in markets well beyond APAC. And ‘Tonight I’ll be Eating’ (TIBE) was innately built to be culturally adaptable, meaning you could effortlessly execute it using local talent and insight. But the twist was that with the exception of the United States and maybe Canada, a good local TIBE can really only be understood by locals. It immediately forced us to find like-minded partners on the ground who were deeply embedded in the local culture. And that quickly became the foundation of our expansion as a network into other countries.
CB: What traits do you look for when you’re deciding who’s right and “special” for Special?
TM + JS: We have a pretty basic personal philosophy about people that has always married in our minds perfectly with Special’s core tenets of being Open, Brave & Kind. In a nutshell, it’s always been “Do good work, don’t be a dickhead”. And that’s a pretty basic belief that talent isn’t an excuse for bad temperament. This job is hard on any given day, and the people you do it with can make it incredibly inspiring, fun and a laugh, even in the middle of absolute craziness. The other thing that we always default back to is this almost pathological desire to make what we do be useful. We just gravitate to people who come from a place of common sense and who want to muck in and solve things. Who set ego aside and just like seeing great things get done.
CB: What’s something people may not know about you?
TM + JS: Julian is a legally heritage listed human being (this is a true but complicated fact tied to a tin shack in a national park). Tom’s great great great great grandmother sewed the Eureka flag for the Eureka Stockade in 1854.
