The Work That Made Me with Ant Melder
Ant Melder is co-founder and creative partner of independent creative agency, Cocogun. Prior to co- founding Cocogun alongside Chiquita King in 2019, he held creative leadership roles at network agencies in London and Sydney, including M&C Saatchi, DDB and Havas.
He’s created provocative, culture-impacting work, winning a bunch of awards along the way, most notably the 2023 Anti-Slavery Australia Freedom award for Cocogun’s contribution to fighting modern slavery. A passionate champion for diversity in the advertising industry, Ant hosts Brown Riot podcast, celebrating diverse creative and business leaders, and is a co-founder of the #Onlyoneintheroom collective.
LBB> The ad/music video from my childhood that stays with me…
Ant> I’m from London, so there are many candidates for this accolade, from the golden age of UK advertising in the 80s.
Brilliant ideas, unforgettable slogans and jingles that stuck in my head for decades. Just One Cornetto, Kia Ora Too Orangey For Crows, All because the lady loves Milk Tray, Ferrero Rocher’s The Ambassador’s Party, Um Bongo, Hello Tosh Gotta Toshiba, the list goes on and on (just like Ariston!). The one that stays with me the most is J.R. Hartley’s epic and heartwarming search for ‘Fly Fishing, with the help of Yellow Pages.
LBB> The ad/music video/game/web platform that made me want to get into the industry…
Ant> Back in the mists of time, the teenage Ant Melder opened a copy of The Face magazine and was confronted by a blood red double-page spread that appeared to be part ad, part agitprop punch in the metaphorical face and part teenage manifesto for living.
At the time, I’d recently watched Julien Temple’s The Great Rock n Roll Swindle, in which Malcolm Maclaren had implored young people to “Forget about music and concentrate on creating generation gaps”. And I was inspired by Vivienne Westwood’s slogan-daubed fashion, notably the shirt with BE REASONABLE DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE across the front.
So the collage of some boring twat diligently mowing the lawn of his middle class suburban semi, with the phrase CUT THIS OUT AND STICK IT UP YOUR ARSE dropped on top of it alongside a Pepe Jeans logo seriously hit home for me. My visceral reaction was, If this is an ad, I wanna be in advertising.
LBB> The creative work (film/album/game/ad/album/book/poem etc) that I keep revisiting…
Ant> Books have always been incredibly important and special to me. And I’m a firm believer that to be a writer, you need to be a reader. The one I always come back to is Money by Martin Amis. I’ve been a massive Amis fan since forever and this was the one where he brought his unique gifts for tone of voice and style together with a powerful underlying message about the way the modern world works, in the form of a devastating but hilarious tragi-comedy of manners.
As creatives we often hear about the need to ‘find your voice’. Money is a great example of a writer with a unique, singular, brilliantly consistent voice, one that swings between proper tea-spitting LOLs and crushing, heartbreaking lows, often in the course of the same sentence.
It’s a fucking funny but tragic masterclass of picaresque anti-capitalism, with the grim but probably true moral that, “Each life is a game of chess that went to hell on the seventh move, and now the flukey play is cramped and slow, a dream of constraint and cross-purpose, with each move forced, all pieces pinned and skewered and zugzwanged…but here and there we see these figures who appear to run on the true lines, and they are terrible examples. They’re rich, usually.”
LBB> My first professional project…
Ant> It definitely wasn’t professional, but when I was 17 I launched a crudely cut n pasted Situationist-themed gonzo fanzine called NO FUTURE, which I printed on the work photocopier while everyone was down the pub at lunchtime. Inspired by the French philosopher Guy Debord, the Sex Pistols, Hunter S Thompson, Bret Easton Ellis and Public Enemy, it grew in cult popularity to the point where I was posting out thousands of copies of each issue.
The amazing lesson I learned as a passionately creative (and slightly unhinged!) teenager is that when you put authentic, unfiltered ideas out into the world, they’ll be polarising but they’ll find and resonate deeply with their audience.
LBB> The piece of work (ad/music video/ platform…) that made me so angry that I vowed to never make anything like *that*…
Ant> How mind-meltingly, toe-curlingly, soul-crushingly, space-time continuum destroyingly bad is this Diet Coke ad? Putting aside the super-weird passive-aggressive reverse psychology strategy, isn’t the celebration of athleisure-wear and the bit where she encourages us to “Yurt it up!” the cringiest thing in the history of humankind?!
LBB> The piece of work (ad/music video/ platform…) that still makes me jealous…
Ant> Whenever anyone drops that (very true) old chestnut that we’re doing advertising not art, I direct them to VW ‘Milky Way’, the exception that proves the rule. A masterpiece of beautifully restrained narrative, it’s a story worthy of a great independent movie, told in a lean 60 seconds. Set to one of the most achingly poignant pieces of music of all time, Nick Drake’s Pink Moon.
LBB> The creative project that changed my career…
Ant> I think of my career in two halves: BC and AC - Before Cocogun and After Cocogun. The (co)founding of a brand spanking new independent creative agency in 2019 revitalised and re-energised me in so many ways.
The piece of work that set out our intent to use audacious creativity to have a positive impact on the world was Human Mart for Anti-Slavery Australia. A collaboration with the Glue Society to raise awareness of modern slavery, we created a supermarket selling over 70 products, each named after and representing a victim of slavery. We crafted the fuck out of it, with everything from the products, merchandising displays, POS, catalogues and staff uniforms all considered.
The day we launched Human Mart, it felt like Cocogun was properly off and running.
LBB> The work that I’m proudest of…
Ant> It’s not ‘work’ in the sense of a campaign, but the Cocogun team and I are all super proud of the Cocogun Creative Scholarship For Indigenous Students. We launched it in partnership with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) a few years ago and it’s been a career highlight. It’s so special to be able to help students start out their creative lives and, as one of them said, “It feels like right now is the beginning of a connection rather than an end point.”
LBB> I was involved in this and it makes me cringe…
Ant> Well, cringe, but in a good way. In 2015, I co-created a life-saving porn film for the Blue Ball Foundation, alongside the leading porn production company Digital Playground. Hidden within the Westeros-themed epic Game of Balls was a reminder to men to check themselves for signs of testicular cancer, and a real life demonstration from actress Eva Lovia on her co-star. The shoot was an eye-opener to say the least, and there are endless debates to be had around the ethics of porn.
But testicular cancer is the most prevalent cancer among young men, and can be fatal if not treated. And Game of Balls has now been viewed over 100 million times - that’s a lot of young men getting this very important message at exactly the right moment to do a self-check. So this work makes me cringe a bit, but in a very proud way.
LBB> The recent project I was involved in that excited me the most…
Ant> Stella is a female-focused insurance company committed to levelling the playing field in business and broader society. Knowing full well that wallpaper advertising’s not going to inspire anyone to change their mind, behaviour or insurance provider, we knew we had to do something disruptive and provocative.
Starting from the truth that the language we use influences the way we see the world, we coined the term ‘IT TAKES BOOBS’ as a new way to describe bravery. And created a campaign that celebrated that bravery.
