30 from 30. The people who have helped shape the industry and Campaign Brief: Mike Edmonds

June 9 2014, 3:50 pm | BY Martin Trevaskis | 4 Comments

MikeEdmonds_1989_BLOG.jpgFor Campaign Brief WA’s 30th anniversary, over the thirty days of June we’re looking back on 30 people who helped shape the industry and us.

 

For our 10th anniversary edition, a colleague of Mike Edmonds wrote: How can one adequately compose an appreciation of a talent, which has yet to reach its maturity? Where the achievements of the past are but a foretaste of the future potential.

Truer words were never written. At that stage Edmonds was already one of Perth’s most awarded and respected creatives, and had made a major impact on the local industry creatively.

Edmonds got his initial break into the industry with Peter Bevan, who hired him as an 18 year-old in 1978 from Boans’ advertising department. In 1984 – the same year Campaign Brief started –  he moved to Jenkin Morgan Aitken as junior writer. His star quickly rose at JMA, then as CD of JMA Ogilvy & Mather, and continued to shine even more brightly over 10 years at 303. If his career had stopped there, he would still deserve a place on this list.

But he then spent a couple of years at Marketforce where, as well as producing some strong work, he met planner Ronnie Duncan. The pair left Marketforce and in mid-2004 and started Meerkats – the most successful and significant new Perth agency of the past decade.

Throughout his whole career, Edmonds has thought independently and intelligently about the industry and Campaign Brief has enjoyed the fruits of those mental labours.

He was a regular contributor in the early 90s with his ‘Edmonds for the Defense’ columns, providing insightful interrogations of some of the conventional wisdoms of advertising. In 2001, he wrote a brilliant article for us about his West Fellowship trip. Looking back, you can see the beginnings of ideas that he would put into practice at Meerkats. And this year, in the May edition of Campaign Brief WA magazine, he gave extensive, generous answers to our questions about the evolution of Meerkats. It demonstrated that even after three decades, Edmonds continues to think deeply about the industry and the role of agencies.

It would be easy to make a case for Mike Edmonds as the most influential person in the WA industry over the past 30 years, firstly as a creative and latterly as an agency owner. In both guises, he has been a visionary.