Having worked in his native Germany, in Amsterdam and now in Shanghai, the successful executive creative director of Wieden and Kenney, Frank Hahn, spoke in Taipei last Saturday on how to find unique inspiration instead of following advertising trends. He gave the Taipei Times an exclusive interview afterwards.
After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Braunschweig, Germany, Hahn began his career as an art director and creative director at various advertising agencies across Germany. But it was his work experience in Amsterdam that turned a new page in his life.
“Going to W[ieden] and K[ennedy] Amsterdam was mind-opening — I worked with the best talents from all over Europe in one spot,” he said. “And we worked hard — but we partied harder.”
The mixture of different cultures, talent and creative minds helped Hahn to see the “firework” of creativity, as he describes it.
After Amsterdam, he became head of a Wieden and Kennedy office in Shanghai.
After beginning with only 15 employees, he now has a full-time team of 100 working in the office.
In his first visit to Taiwan, Hahn observed something about local advertising.
“I like the TV works more than I like the print ones,” he said. “Because TV works are just more [up to] international standards than the print works.”
While saying that local TV commercials were more attractive to him, Hahn said he didn’t feel there was a cultural gap just because he was a Westerner.
“After all, I’ve stayed in China for two-and-a-half years now,” he said.
However, he believed that “just having advertisements tailor-made for a market doesn’t make it a great ad.”
Instead, a good advertising designer should add some international spice to local elements when creating an ad catered to a specific client or audience, he said.
“I’m not ignorant of local sentiment,” he said. “But I understand where a campaign is like another campaign, like another campaign, like another campaign, or it’s slightly different.”
“You want to make an identity — the product is different, the client is different, so you have to give each of your clients its own identity and get inspired by new things,” he said.
Observing life in Shanghai and taking pictures is one of his ways of finding inspiration, Hahn said.
“I photographed an amazingly relaxed dentist molding a denture in the middle of the street. Or a park filled up with wedding couples trying to find their hideaway spot for the picture of the most important day of their lives — only [with] the photographers desperately trying to find an angle to cut out the other couples. Or the pajama people on the streets in Shanghai — a unique example of social behavior in contrast to an amazingly modern China,” he said.
“These are simple life stories on the street. But that’s where the best stories, compositions or colors are hiding,” Hahn said.
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