The brief for the Amazon Christmas ad was "We don't want to sell anything. We just want to do something that makes the public feel more positive about Amazon."

Well, 2016 had been a tough year, a year in which political rhetoric had served to highlight the differences between us all.  So I thought, what better than to try and find some common ground between two people of different backgrounds, while meeting over a cup of tea? 

The dodgy knees bit was borne out of my own experience of a recent cartilage injury and a need for some gardening kneepads.

Well done to the whole team at Joint for getting all the different religious groups on board and the ad up and running, to Daniel at HLA for finding us a real Vicar and an Imam, and in particular to director Simon Ratigan for managing to get a great performance out of them. The ad has since gone viral and been seen countless millions of times around the world -  it was a lovely moment when I visited a small town in Malaysia recently and someone mentioned to me that they'd seen the ad. 

We filmed this over two days in a pine forest north of Copenhagen with Blink’s Martin Krejci. It was a technically difficult shoot because we were determined to capture as much of Mads’s transformation in camera as possible. A team of puppeteers were flown in from Prague (to manipulate our hero’s clothing and give it a suitably relaxed look) along with an owl and a squirrel.

The two animals were kept under careful supervision for most of the shoot - the squirrel was determined to disappear off up a 100ft tree, while the owl looked upon the squirrel as his version of shoot food.

These little stories each feature a point in a customer's life when they managed to make the best of a situation with a mortgage, a business loan, or just an app from from Lloyds Bank.

I've always loved the technique of storytelling with stills, so that formed the backbone of the idea, but with a bit of live action and some moving gifs thrown in to spice things up. 

Some of the storylines were based on my own first hand experiences of living at home or having an incredibly busy family life, other storylines were based on actual Lloyds Bank business case studies.

Our director Sam Brown at Rogue was a great collaborator and once a storyline had been fleshed out, we'd all sit around together with producer James Howland working out how the images were going to flow.  The ads were edited by James Rosen at Final Cut and Ellie Johnson at Speade and our agency producer was Jody Allison.

Mads Mikkelsen takes us on another tour around the streets of Denmark in an ad for the global launch of Carlsberg Pilsner, directed by Blink’s Martin Krejci. This time he reflects on what can be achieved with a positive outlook - a philosophy on life that’s very Danish.

We shot this at a number of interesting locations, including the world’s oldest amusement park, just north of Copenhagen and the beautifully decorated bar at the Royal Danish Theatre.

This ad for the Range Rover Sport was essentially a big special effects job on quite a tight budget. Thankfully the whole concept of a car being created inside the Hadron Collider was beautifully realised by director Johnny Green at Hungry Man.

Post work was started at The Mill and finished at Glassworks. The ad won a Gold at BTAA, two Gold Clios, was shortlisted at Cannes, and was Luerzer's Archive 'Spot Of The Week'.

The ghd "Twisted Fairytales" campaign ran for four years, with TV, print and digital campaigns shot by Floria Sigismondi, David LaChapelle, Ellen Von Unwerth and Tim Bret-Day.

The campaign started with a press execution which featured Rapunzel straightening her extremely long locks, and it all went on from there to include versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Red Riding Hood. 

With "At The Stroke Of Midnight", a retelling of the Cinderella story, ghd sold out of their Christmas gift box almost as quickly as the ad went on air.  

Although I think the "Twisted Fairytales" campaign started to lose a little of its focus with the Katy Perry work, I've included a couple of the early "Sleeping Beauty" ads she did for us. I still think they're David LaChapelle's best shots of her.

Our director, Stacy Wall came up with the smart move of casting a real movie location scout in this 60' commercial for the Land Rover Discovery. Tall, very loud, and with a vice-like handshake, Patrick Ranahan was perfect for the part. Stacy also discussed with us the idea that we might also use a real director. "Someone larger than life, someone like Joe Pytka", he suggested.  In the end we settled for a British actor working in L.A., who actually reminded us of Mark Roalfe, our ECD. 

The shoot was incredible - it took place over four days in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles and the desert around Owens Valley and Lone Pine (where John Ford shot many a classic western). I remember on day three seeing about ten location trucks and a whole army of technicians and film crew parked against a mountain backdrop, and thinking to myself, "now this is why I came into advertising!"

The editor was Lisa Gunning at Whitehouse. 

I was lucky enough to work on three big Stella Artois campaigns at Lowe, the first of which featured "expensive" objects used as upmarket bottle openers for this "Reassuringly Expensive" lager.

The second was a quirky campaign which the client asked us for because apparently many of their special Stella glasses were being stolen from bars and pubs.

The third was a collaboration with Lowe's Head of Art, Steve Dunn, and used found images of agricultural communities from the turn of the century.

The "Expensive Objects" campaign, shot by Coppi Barbieri, picked up two gold pencils at the One Show.

The first three ads were a spec campaign which was eventually sold by a great account handler at Rainey Kelly called Clare Shaw.

Clare had invited the client into the agency to discuss another project and when the meeting ended she told him that he absolutely had to see a campaign that a team had on their office wall. He walked in, took a look at the ads, then bought them on the spot. If only our job was always this easy. Thanks Clare. 

The fourth ad "The Best Tool For The Job" was a one-off execution which was created in order to sell the versatility of the Defender to a number of different audiences: builders, farmers, DIY enthusiasts, people with a love of the great outdoors.  The ads won silvers at the Campaign Big Awards and Creative Circle.

Diesel were slightly uneasy bedfellows with our agency Lowe, and after just two collections we parted company. But during the short time we were together the agency turned out five great campaigns for Diesel Jeans. I may be biased but this (the Global launch campaign for jeans) was the best one, shot by the brilliant Erwin Olaf.

Our client Maurizio told us that at Diesel they had a saying, "You're more in danger of boring us than shocking us." Which meant we had carte blanche to make the work as OTT as possible.

The resulting ads were definitely controversial and garnered quite a few column inches around the world, from Brazil to L.A., the UK and Europe. 

And we were particularly proud that our saucy old lady made the front cover of Creative Review.

This was a poster campaign for the "Taking Liberties" exhibition at the British Library. The exhibition was all about the hard-fought struggle for British freedoms and rights from the Magna Carta to the present day. The illustrator, Anthony Burrill and I attended the launch party at the British Library where Gordon Brown gave a speech about the importance of fighting for our liberties and was roundly heckled by the activist Peter Tatchell.

The first time we saw this footage of a burning Christmas tree we thought the speed with which the inferno erupted from this innocuous looking tree was absolutely terrifying. The clip had such a raw, visceral power. All it really needed to turn it into a powerful piece of advertising was an end title -"Please remember to turn off your Christmas lights. It only takes a minute." And an ironic piece of Christmas music.

"It only takes a minute" is still being used as part of the Fire Kills "Smoke Alarm" advertising.

You can read more about the Christmas campaign on the gov.uk website: here

The ad won a silver at BTAA.

Our head of new business approached us with an opportunity to "do something creative" with a pop up shop that had been offered to Rainey Kelly for one week on Chalk Farm Road in Camden.

Two ideas were pitched internally - the first was to sell art, t-shirts, crafts and other stuff created by talented agency staff at the shop, and donate the proceeds to charity. The second idea was to create a mini ad agency to help Camden businesses, everyone from Mini cab companies to hairdressers. Luckily the second idea won through.

Here are three of the campaigns we did for local businesses: Camden Locks hairdressers, Nicholas Cameras, and Pierogi Dumplings.

One of my favourite ideas that didn't get presented was the "Doner Card" - a loyalty card for a local kebab shop, styled after the NHS's organ donor cards.

The Pop Up Shop won the Paul Arden Award at the Campaign Big Awards. 

I remember thinking the Vauxhall Omega strategy (written by Alison Hoad) was really fresh and original: "A car that has been designed to minimize stress".  

But I also remember our ECD Paul Weinberger handing us the brief with the words "This is a great brief - now don't fuck it up."

Thankfully, I think we delivered, even though the client wasn't convinced at first and the campaign took some selling. (Where was the obligatory photograph of the car for instance?) But that was one of the great things about working at Lowes, if the agency loved the work, the 'suits' persevered and kept selling until the client gave in. The Omega account handler at this time, and the person who deserves most of the credit for getting this campaign up and running, was Liz Little.

The campaign won pencils at D&AD for writing.

Weetabix wanted a campaign that showed they weren't just a breakfast cereal. High in fibre and low in calories, a couple of these wholewheat biscuits could be sustenance for a night out, part of a diet or the way to a healthier heart. The campaign was shot with a documentary feel by Nick Meek.

This was one of the most enjoyable campaigns I worked on at Lowe. Olympus were sponsoring the Magnum photographer Chris Steele-Perkins, who'd recently returned from Afghanistan. The Taliban were fighting the remnants of the Mujahideen and the country was engulfed in a civil war. At the time (around five years before 9-11) there wasn't much interest in the media for photo essays about Afghanistan and I think Chris said that his pictures had been turned down by many of the national newspapers. This campaign for the Olympus OM4-Ti was, as he saw it, a way of getting some of his pictures finally published. The series of diary pages based on interviews with Steele-Perkins, ran in The Independent, British Journal of Photography and GQ and won numerous awards.

The idea of Open Art Surgery came about when my wife, who is a London GP thought her waiting room could do with some brightening up. A local painter, Sophie Levi, was approached and the first Open Art Surgery was born. 

Artists can show paintings, prints sculptures or even poetry, and exhibit their work in the waiting area and consulting rooms.

The first surgery to benefit was Primrose Hill Surgery in NW London, and it is hoped that more artists and more surgeries will participate in this.

The Open Art Surgery logo was kindly designed by Neil Craddock.

This was a heritage campaign created for Stella Artois, which ran globally. The ads came about after a good old-fashioned "factory visit" (well, a Stella brewery visit actually) in Leuven, Belgium.

The first part of the tour involved taste testing about 20 types of beer. (At around 10am.) Then I learnt how  to pour the beer into the distinctive chalice glasses and, finally, how cut the head correctly. The resulting ads were beautifully shot by Sophie Broadbridge, a young photographer who was recommended by the very talented Gary Wallis, Lowe's head of art buying. 

This campaign, which ran in the Times Literary Supplement, took poems, songs and even a recipe, and gave them a little "Land Rover" twist, injecting them with a bit more drama and adventure than thier original authors had intended. 

The ads were shortlisted for a Campaign Press award for writing.

This was a campaign for the Olympus OM3-Ti, an all-manual camera with a mechanical shutter. Which is as far as you can get from a point-and-shoot camera.

This marked a continuation of our partnership with the Magnum photojournalist Chris Steele-Perkins. Using the strapline "Taking a picture should be anything but automatic" the ads were a series of meditations on photojournalism, posing questions about the morality of capturing moments of strife or terror on film. The ads won D&AD and One Show Pencils for writing.

This campaign for Sure For Men anti-perspirant was all about helping combat "Emotional Sweat", in different situations. The ads, which were created for an audience of young men ( readers of GQ Magazine) feature some of the situations where you might end up drenching your shirt*. 

The ads were printed in letterpress type by the amazing Alan Kitching and were included in the Press section of D&AD the following year.

*After the ads had been running a while, I remember being shown a letter of complaint from the Turkish Embassy, who felt the "Being Frisked At A Turkish Airport" line misrepresented their country. Sorry. I must have watched Alan Parker's Midnight Express one too many times.

Virgin Atlantic needed a poster to run globally to promote London as a destination during the 2012 Olympics. What better image to use than the iconic Union Flag but illustrated in typical irreverent Virgin style? The ad was shot by Tim Bret-Day and retouched by Lee Stuart. 

In New York's Union Square the poster was brought to life using real guardsmen and flight attendants during the Olympics. Our 2012 flag was also used extensively across Virgin Atlantic's promotional material and as their Facebook timeline cover image.

This was also intended to be a digital collage with a customisable Union flag that the public could add to online, using pictures of their favourite bits of London. But alas this never saw the light of day. 

A selection of ads that were created for the Rex Cinema, a restored art deco cinema in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire.

As I recall this campaign to warn men of the implications of being caught kerb crawling was created and sold to the client in the space of a few hours. The previous campaign had been rejected at the 11th hour by the then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith for being too denigratory to women, so there was very little time to make anything and a "type-only" solution was requested.

The campaign, comprised of local press ads and beer mats in pubs, won a Silver at The Campaign Big Awards.

The brief for the "With You All the Way" campaign was to show that the Bank of Scotland was here for all the important moments of your life.

Alessandro Gottardo created the illustrations for the print campaign and gave the animated TV work its distinctive look. The animation was directed by Kim Burdon at Hibbert Ralph, and voiced by actor Dougray Scott.

This was the launch campaign for Smirnoff Flavours, a "Complex Flavoured Vodka". The ads were screenprinted by Tony Campbell with different layers and images to emphasise the multi-level character of the drink. We picked some iconic images to represent the different flavours, including Che Guevera, Huggy Bear and Rigsby from 'Rising Damp'.

There are a couple of footnotes to this campaign.  Firstly the photographer of the Che Guevara image, Alberto Korda (pictured below)  took our company and the picture agency to court and ended up winning his rights to the photograph back. 

And secondly our 'Che' ad was included in to the touring exhibition "Che Guevara: Revolutionary and Icon" which meant our ad was on display in L.A., Mexico City, New York and the V&A in London.

I came up with the idea for a series of retro-style local postcards purely as a personal project - I just needed some cards to mail out to friends and family after having a staycation in London one summer.  

After a while though, I decided to start selling the cards to my local shops. Some of the shops weren't interested, or said they'd only take one or two to test the water, but the lady who ran the bookshop was very supportive and put in a big order for them right from the outset, so I knew I wasn't wasting my time. To date I've sold over 2000 cards, which isn't bad for an area with around 5000 houses. And the local councillor called to ask if he could feature one of the cards on his homepage.

Below are a couple of other designs that I have in the pipeline. 

This was a major global print and digital campaign which showcased the level of service and destinations, while placing a focus on the iconic Virgin Atlantic cabin staff. 

The campaign was heavily influenced by surrealism, and owes more than a nod to Max Ernst, Magritte and Dali, amongst others. 

It was lovingly shot by Tim-Bret Day and beautifully retouched by Lee Stuart.