WHO WE ARE

The Emergency Creative Department is an international collective of multi-disciplined creative advertising people.

Established by two global executive creative directors.

DANNY HIGGINS

Tore had put this picture here as a place holder. But I thought I’d keep it for a little while. It is an older picture from 2006, of a younger me, taken by Gregory Yeo, the art director of the shoot we were on at the time, who always had a camera in his hands. I’m still as ruggedly handsome, but greyer these days.  I have fond memories of that week, there, in Manhattan. This was the first day of a three day shoot for SK-II, the Unilever skin care brand. We were shooting with Cate Blanchett, who was the face of the SK-II brand then, and Regan Cameron, photographer, who was Cate’s choice.

It was February and cold. Looking at the picture reminds me of how cold it was. And this would have been a 10am coffee break or a lunchbreak. We are shooting in one of the warehouses at Chelsea Wharf. Number 5, I think. The Hudson River is behind me or to the side of me, in this shot - where Captain Sullenberger, a few years later, landed that plane.

I had flown in from Sydney the night before. It was a long flight. SYD/LAX/JFK. I got to the shoot at about 9am and Cate Blanchett had been there from 7am in makeup - although she didn’t like a lot of make up and didn’t need it. I only mention this because at 11pm that evening me and the Singapore crew - who made all this happen - were down in the depths of the Brooklyn Theatre, in Cate’s dressing room, with her still having plenty of wonderful  gracious energy left, for us, after she had come off stage, where she had been playing Hedda Gabler - I knew the Ibsen  play well, because I had ‘done’ (British terminology), literature at university, and I had loved it when I first read it and read the rest of Ibsen afterwards. John Hurt popped in (RIP) and was congratulatory and Hugo Weaving popped in too, who I thought had been an amazing presence on stage. But mostly I was just amazed at Cate Blanchett. That kind of energy. A hard, demanding day, full of long hours, where she found time to play mummy too - her two sons, she only had two then, turned up on the shoot after school with a nanny. That  day we had part of a fuselage of a plane in the studio for a shot for an SK-II product that you would use when flying, a face moisturiser, and she put her two young sons in the seats behind her, out of shot, and as Regan Cameron started clicking his camera, she told them to buckle up.

After dropping out of doing real jobs in my 20s, I have been a copywriter, creative director and international executive creative director for many years now, in jobs I have loved and others I couldn’t wait to get out of.

We’ve just started up and are pitching for business. Give us a call.

TORE CLAESSON

Tore’s background as an ECD at agencies such as Ogilvy, based in Singapore and Tokyo in Asia, and many years in New York, in addition to Anderson & Lembke/McCann, New York and Amsterdam, means he has unique experience of the ins and outs of cross-culture communication. He has worked on brands across many industries. IBM, SAP, Volvo, BMW, Martell, Chivas Regal, Phillips, Microsoft, Ericsson, to name but a few.