London: Tidballs; A Spring In Their Step

No, you’re not seeing double. It’s not a Photoshop trick either. The TBWALondon creative team of Steve and Nick Tidball are twins. They are a very interesting pair but, in a strange way, their being twins is actually the least interesting thing about them.

Yes, they look the same – though when we meet Steve has longer hair and a bushier beard, which makes my life easier – but they don’t finish each other’s sentences all the time. They didn’t mention any telepathic link or secret twin language, either. They are though, both extremely clever and extremely passionate and, depending on your view of extreme sports, either tremendously brave or utterly stupid. But we’ll get to that.

Getting to influence shit

The pair’s route into the advertising business is an unusual one, but the more you talk to them, the more you realise that the industry is a perfect fit. Nick – the elder by 12 minutes – is a qualified architect. He studied for six years at the auspicious Bartlett School of Architecture in London, being taught by “The Beatles of the architecture world”. But, despite completing his studies, he then decided that it wasn’t a career path that he wanted to follow. “The way you studied [architecture] was very different to the way you practiced it,” he says. “[and] when you go into practice you don’t make it until you’re 60, and you don’t get to really influence shit until you’re 60, and that wasn’t right.”

Influencing shit is a common topic in our conversation. The Tidballs are extremely focussed and determined that projects they work on aren’t simply ones of vanity that might strike a chord within the industry that go largely unnoticed by the wider world; they want the work they produce to mean something, to impact on people and have wider context. Steve studied art history and was almost lured into the world of academia but while studying he saw Guinness Surfer “and it stopped a room full of 200 guys watching a Champions League game, and I thought ‘I don’t know who did that, what it is or how it was done but I need to create things like that, things that stop people’”.

So academia took a back seat for the same reasons that architecture fell by the wayside for Nick. “I felt academia was so narrow and I wanted to go into a thing where you could talk to the world,” says Steve. “If you had a good enough point of view enough people would listen, Red Bull’s Stratos being a brilliant example. If you create something clean enough and beautiful enough the world will watch.”

An advertising seed had already been sewn in the brothers’ minds after seeing a TV show about the commercials industry, deciding that was what they wanted to do. Once Steve finished his studies he found out who made Surfer and joined AMV BBDO as a graduate account manager. “I didn’t know anything about the industry and thought that if you worked for an agency you got to come up with ideas for ads. After a few days I realised I was there to do photocopying and arrange meetings,” he laughs.

Six months down the line Nick joined his brother at AMV, but not long after they left. “Well, we got fired, actually,” deadpans Nick. It turns out the pair somehow managed to get “quite a big campaign” starring Armando Iannucci and Johnny Vegas on air without the creative heads knowing. “AMV was, like, 600 people back then and so it went under the radar of the creative director, and the powers that be at the agency never saw it. There was a bit of an outcry,” explains Steve.

Figuring out advertising

From there the pair got a placement at Grey and worked so hard that within four weeks they were taken on as a creative team. They say their time there was formative, working with people such as Dave Alberts, Joe Staples, and Dylan Williams. “It was an amazing bunch of people,” the pair say.

They joined Grey when they were 22 years old and from there moved around a lot, trying – they say – to figure advertising out. “I think it took us a long time to work out advertising,” explains Steve, “and I think one of the reasons was it was going through a cultural shift. On the one hand you could see all these guys who loved their TV and print and then you could see this desire on the other hand for a new way of behaving, but no one had quite articulated what that was. We were drawn to this second one because it felt more interesting. YouTube was taking off and you had all these new platforms and people were just trying to get to grips with what they were. So that was the thing we were drawn to but there weren’t enough precedents to really start shaping it [and] for a while we got trapped in the TV and print world, which wasn’t where we were comfortable. But now you have this explosion of brand behaviour, of media-neutral conceptual work, we’re in our element because it’s where we fit; it’s kind of what we trained to do.”

Now 34, the Tidballs arrived at TBWA in 2009 when creative director Mark Hunter invited them to work on adidas and the forthcoming 2012 London Olympics. Before Hunter contacted them they had been out of advertising for a year concentrating on their own business, Vollebak, a high-end design brand for extreme sports. The pair are avid sportsmen – ultra-marathons, iron man competitions, triathlons and adventure racing are all in a day’s work for them. Their love of such events has seen them run through the Amazon on 80-mile-per-day treks and even saw them – both of them, at the same time – declared dead when a race marshall thought he saw them plummet off a 200-foot cliff during a competition. “Yeah,” laughs Nick, “they sent stretcher-bearers down to get our bodies and told our dad ‘I think there might be a problem with your boys’.” Sport is integral to their existence and their creativity, with both stating that they have their best ideas after doing physical exercise. “We don’t do drugs. We don’t smoke. We don’t drink. We do sport, and what we like is some of the states that your brain achieves during extreme sport,” says Steve.

Last year, that sporting influence saw them work on a project for which they are currently most well known, the adidas campaign Jump With D Rose. Derrick Martell Rose is a basketball player for the NBA’s Chicago Bulls and adidas wanted to promote him and, by extension, themselves to London’s urban youth when he paid a visit to London last year. It was a unique challenge, the pair thought. “We wondered how we were actually going to talk to these kids,” says Nick. “We knew we had such an interesting audience there: they’re not online, their TV viewing is utterly sporadic, the radio stations they listen to are illegal and their social media channels are sometimes physical – like chicken shops – and another one, BBM [BlackBerry Messenger], is a closed loop that you can’t actually crack into. So how do you tell them about something?”

Spreading the word-of-mouth

What they did was think laterally. The campaign concept was a pop-up store in Hackney in which you could win a pair of adidas shoes if you could jump 10 feet [the height of a basketball hoop] and grab the shoes from a ledge – and the shop would be open for two hours on one day in July last year. To attract people to the event Steve and Nick placed ads in chicken shops and on pirate radio, visited the area to generate word-of-mouth awareness and gave out what were essentially business cards that doubled as invites to the event – which soon became social currency among Hackney’s youth. And, of course, there was the possibility of winning some free adidas trainers.

The event was a huge success. They expected to see around 500 people turn up but nearly 3,000 arrived at the allotted time, some queuing for hours before the event began in true British fashion. “I think,” says Steve, “because we gave [the kids] so much they gave us lots back. Because this is a group of people who are very used to being stopped by the police, who are used to being kicked out of school, some of whose parents might not care, who basically are a forgotten generation, and we went to them and said, ‘We’re going to turn you into stars and you’re going to look really cool in front of your mates and in front of the world’. And one of the most rewarding things for us is the kids watched the YouTube video which, while it didn’t get millions of hits because there was no budget behind it, went to 370,000 in seven days, basically from that social circle in Hackney.”

The biggest challenge was to get people to the event to make it a reality. That appealed to Steve’s strategic brain, but the physical store itself was a challenge for Nick’s architectural acumen. “My challenge, architecturally, was that we didn’t have a lot of money and we had to make a pop-up store with walls that would take kids running and jumping at them with three tonnes of force, and shelves that weren’t going to rip down when they hung off them.”

The campaign won the Gold of Golds at this year’s Creative Circle Awards but something the pair is even prouder of is the fact that, after the London event, kids around the globe wanted their own Jump Store. “That statistic matters more than anything else,” says Nick. “Within 24 hours of releasing the YouTube video kids from more than 30 countries had asked for an adidas Jump Store to open where they lived.”

The pair is now working with adidas, and other clients, on more campaigns that harness the physical representation of a brand. “I think physical representations of brands are very interesting,” says Nick. “When Walt Disney built Disneyland [people thought] that was nuts, and everyone said it was Disney’s folly and that he was going to lose all his money. Because Disneyland didn’t exist, he just said, ‘I’m going to build this physical land’. And then you had Steve Jobs come along and go, ‘Right, I’m not going to build these crappy out-of-town tech centres, I’m going to build a monolith to modernity in the heart of the city’. And the Apple Stores are their best marketing tool.”

Keeping it in the real world

The brothers’ plans include furthering the relationships between brands and physical projections [they’re currently working on a high-end project for Hilton Hotels], and they’re also going to be rebooting Vollebak in a year’s time, though they also say they’ll be staying in the advertising industry this time and working on the two things together. “We think the two have a lot of benefit from one another,” they say.

When told this issue is our London Special and asked what their feelings about the creative landscape of the city is at the moment, they’re unequivocal in their praise. “I think there is a growing trend among clients in their willingness and desire to engage with emerging platforms, which is fantastic,” states Steve, “and it definitely gives agencies opportunities to do more modern work. I think it’s then up to the agencies to provide work that is good enough in those channels.”

“It’s like football,” adds Nick. “London is still the Premier League. The agencies here are still some of the biggest clubs in the world, you know?”

“Hang on,” interrupts Steve. “Don’t use the football thing. We’re pitching it around adventure sports and you use a fucking football analogy. That’s so off-message.” An argument. At last. I mean, come on, they are still brothers.