The Winston Fletcher Fiction Prize, now in its third year, was created in memory of one of advertising’s greats, who was also a prolific book writer. It seeks to encourage and recognise great writing amongst the advertising and related marketing community. Some of the greatest writers in history started their careers in advertising, writing work for household brands before writing some of the world's literary classics, and the Prize seeks to unearth the next. This year the brief was to further extend the reach of the competition, beyond the UK into the English-speaking advertising and marketing community, for a budget of just £10k.
The idea was to encourage more in the industry to enter the competition. We sent books directly to some of the world's most notable advertising copywriters, creative directors and notable marketing journalists, who were also eligible to participate. But these were books with a difference. Inside they were completely blank, apart from a simple line of encouragement on the first page, which read: "So, what's your next chapter?" To personalise each book, we featured individually designed dust jackets, each one of them featuring a beautiful design related to the piece of work they were most synonymous with. To reach the rest of the industry we then used the book designs as posters that were distributed to ad agencies and marketing businesses, and they also featured as advertising in industry magazines and their sites.