Impact BBDO’s creative director Tres Colacion on the making of The Blank Edition which won grand prix of the year at Ad Stars

At the recent Ad Stars 2019 Festival in Busan, South Korea, Impact BBDO Dubai won Grand Prix of the Year and a $10,000 prize for ‘The Blank Edition’. Campaign Brief sat down with creative director Tres Colacion to find out more.

To send a message to Lebanese politicians, Impact BBDO Dubai convinced its client, An-Nahar, to print an entirely blank edition of its newspaper, inviting the people of Lebanon to write their own headlines.

Colacion has been running the Mars account for Impact BBDO in Dubai for the past two years and is now relocating to Los Angeles along with creative partner, Giancarlo Rodas, to join Grey West.

The Blank Edition just won $10,000 at Ad Stars … how will you spend the prize money?!

It’s really amazing that Ad Stars can hold a festival without entry fees AND give a cash prize. So respect for that. I don’t believe we’ve ever won a cash prize before and really did not anticipate winning this so as of now there is no concrete plan on what to do with it. We’ll discuss a few different plans/initiatives internally and then decide on what to do.

How did the campaign come about?
Lebanon has an extremely complex power sharing system that is the result of a very diverse populace and numerous internal conflicts. This has led to a lot of corruption and nepotism that regularly results in the Lebanese people getting short-changed by their elected representatives.

An Nahar, our client, is the nation’s leading independent newspaper. Its former editor-in-chief Gebran Tueini was actually assassinated in 2005 for his outspokenness. So it’s an institution with a long history of standing up for what’s right. The paper was tired of printing the same excuses week after week and came to us wanting to break through the clutter.

How did you persuade the client to take the leap and print a blank edition, and what were their concerns?
The situation in Lebanon is not different from that all over the world. The printed press is in a difficult situation. Not only do they need to deliver the hard-hitting journalism that they built their name on, but they need to navigate a world full of free “news”, paywalls and social media.

Obviously, printing a blank newspaper, including advertisements, is something that is going to have an effect on the bottom line and in times like these publishers are usually less inclined to rock the boat with advertisers. I say usually because Nayla Tueni, the paper’s editor-in-chief, didn’t flinch. She got the idea ⁠— the intention ⁠— instantly, and from there we worked together to ensure that we achieved the desired intention.

Why was this campaign so close to your heart?

It’s a project that’s really close to our hearts because it is something that we believe stands on the right side of history. It’s apolitical, and it has scale. It’s more than just a creative idea, it’s a tool for publishers and people the world over. Another Lebanese newspaper has already printed a “blank edition”. It’s amazing to see people adopt it and make it their own.

Can you explain your strategy for taking The Blank Edition into the digital/social realm to help it spread?

We’re really interested in the intersection between the traditional and “new” media spaces. From very early on we knew that we wanted to do something that lent itself to spreading quickly and that obviously meant social. Today everyone is a creator, a publisher. In your pocket you have all the tools you need to create content to push to the world. The front page of a national newspaper is such an iconic physical space that we knew that people would want to use it to express themselves. And that iconic physical paper and the ability to quickly create content was the perfect invitation to engage with the newspaper.

Can you tell me about the agency’s success over the past year: What are you doing differently?

It’s really been a wild year for Impact BBDO. We’ve gone through a lot of changes in the last 24 months — from creative leadership to a change in MD — and I think these kinds of situations create opportunities for people to get behind good work. We made an active decision that we wanted to use this year to really leave our mark. There’s a really right crew of people here (from creative to accounts to strategy) that just buckled down and took it upon themselves to achieve this goal. We worked together — I think we had like 5 campaigns awarded at Cannes this year, all of which essentially share the same crew.

When you’re not working in Los Angeles, New York or London you need to work differently to stand out. We don’t have the same budgets or access to resources as many other agencies. We chose to do work that is provocative because by nature it elicits an opinion. If people have an opinion about your work, good or bad, I think you’re already ahead of so much of the work that we’re exposed to every day.

You’ve been at Impact BBDO Dubai since 2017. Can you tell us a little about the creative scene in Dubai?

I came to Dubai a little over two years ago from London to join Impact BBDO. Dubai is a place where you have to pave your own way, that’s something that really suits my partner Giancarlo Rodas and myself. We come from the school of DIY and love to get our hands dirty. We really love being in the center of this part of the world. Our inspiration doesn’t necessarily come from Dubai as a place, but more from the people that we meet. Everyone is from somewhere else and there’s something really refreshing about that.

As a creative scene it’s very tight knit. We have friends at every agency and, although we go hard against each other at our local show, we always try to back each other on the international scene. Last year we celebrated TBWA\RAAD’s amazing performance at Cannes and this year they were the first to congratulate us when we won the region’s first Grand Prix. It’s a great vibe.

What led you to a career in advertising?

I’ve had kind of an unorthodox journey. I’m from Los Angeles and studied International Relations with an emphasis in the Middle East. When I was 20 I travelled to Beirut to study Arabic and kind of just never really went back. I started throwing parties and eventually opened a nightclub with a few friends.

Through the party scene, I met a pair of ex-JWT creatives who had just opened their own agency called Interesting Times. I really had no idea about a “career in advertising” or what the job entailed, but I was sick of waking up at 2pm everyday and the next thing I know I was interviewing for a job as a copywriter. My “portfolio” was literally a collection of Facebook event pages and pictures of nights I’d done. But they hired me anyway and for that I’m eternally grateful.

I stayed there for about five years and left as an ACD leading on Cadillac. I spent some time freelancing in London, writing a television pilot and watching a lot of Football before taking this job in Dubai about 2 years ago.

My partner, Giancarlo Rodas, and I are moving to the US in October to take on a new challenge at Grey West in Los Angeles. We have the amazing opportunity to work with Rodrigo Jatene and Rafael Gonzaga (Corruption Detector, Colour of Corruption). We’re very excited to continue making famous, culture-bending work. For myself personally, it’s a dream homecoming after over 10 years abroad.

I love creativity because it’s taken me to literally every corner of the world. I’m just a kid from Los Angeles and somehow through a collection of amazing people, I’ve got to see the world. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.