The energy carried well into Day 1 of Cairns Crocodiles, where advertising veteran Jane Evans spoke about the creative journey behind the iconic James Squire brand to a packed house at Hemingway’s Brewery. In this op-ed, Leah Morris reflects on the session and unpacks the key messages and creative lessons behind it.
I’m Leah Morris, creative director and founder of Mavens, an industry movement to champion gender equality through communications.
We’re a proud industry partner of Cairns Crocodiles, where I teamed up with B&T Lifetime Achievement winner Jane Evans and her community of matriarchs, the 7th Tribe, to bring her important message to Cairns.
That message is that patriarchy is not normal. In fact, the patriarchy as we know it represents just 1.3 percent of human history. Evans has been on a journey to unpick why, and a pint of it brews down to…
Beer.
Winning James Squire
“1996 was the first time I was thrown out of the advertising industry,” Evans told the room full of curious advertising, media and marketing professionals.
“I’d practically won every single award known to mankind and ran AWARD school, and I was taken out by a headhunter with Jane Caro when told there would never be a female Creative Director in Sydney. The boys had all decided that was not going to happen so we might as well give up.”
It wouldn’t be the first time Evans paid the price for being “too good”. I could see her story resonating as almost every woman (and some minorities) began visibility leaning in, staring at the 63-year-old truthspeaker with intense interest and appreciation.
“So I bought a massive warehouse and decided to give myself the title, and build my own agency. While I was renovating the warehouse, I got the dream job. I worked freelance at Principles as Jack Vaughn’s Art Director. Our first brief was from Lion Nathan to create a premium beer brand.”
“I still have all the original sketches of my very first designs,” Evans said, flicking through several hand-drawn scamps from 1997. “They rejected it.”
But Chuck Hahn found the presentation and knew it was the future of beer. He gave the account to Evans’ new agency.
Three simple rules
There were three golden rules that guided the team (which included Evans and a team of brewers at the Malt Shovel Brewery) through their creative success on the James Squire account.
1. “Do the complete opposite of everything the big guys do”
Jane’s idea to provide James Squire t-shirts designed for women bar staff saw a massive lift in brand awareness, as every other brand only made baggy mens’ fits.
2. “Masters of our crafts”
“We respected each other’s craft”, Evans said, gesturing to her slides showing beautifully executed long copy ads from 1999. Her striking art direction leaned into the colonial storytelling, a yellowed parchment background with hand-etched illustrations of a cat-o-nine-tails, a dead rooster, a pistol, a gravestone, a dairy cow.
“We all knew that we were craftspeople and so I didn’t tell them how to brew beer and they didn’t tell me how to do advertising.”
3. “Front-stabbing.”
“If the client didn’t like it, they’d say they didn’t like it. I could either fight if I believed in it, or go, “Yeah, f**k it. Let’s do something else. All of this, ‘Oh, can we change this? Can we do that?’ None of that.”
“It was like: ‘Do you like it? Fight for it. If you can’t fight for it, f**k it. We’ll do something else.”
Speaking to audience members after the talk, many agreed this kind of relationship – where ‘front stabbing’ was not only permitted but encouraged – was where their best work happened, too.
Unpicking history
Following these helpful lessons, Evans’ talk turned to ancient history. Specifically, 35,000-11,000 BCE.
“Women invented beer, and this is most important because beer allowed us to settle. We no longer had to be hunter gatherers. We could stay in one place. We could brew beer. We could make water potable… Beer led to agriculture. Agriculture led to excess. Excess
led to trade.“
“Women ruled the first cities and there was a temple in the middle of every city to the Goddess which was not a religious temple like it is now. It was the civic center. It was the center of trade, health and law.”
“And women led tech – the loom was the mainframe computer of the time. It was an incredible piece of technology. The women that used it had to keep 10,000 commands in their head to be able to create the textiles.”
“Then men built copper f**king balls that they could put onto a leather sling and go and steal everything. And that created empire.”
Evans fast-forwards to 1400 B CE.
“Women would brew with a great big cauldron. They would have a cat to look after the grain. And when they went to market, they wore a great big black pointy hat to say, ‘Here I am. Buy my beer.’ And so we basically lost the whole of our industry because we were burned at the stake.”
Sound like the gospel of a mad woman? Jane admits it does, but the research behind this story is all available for you to read in her new book, and it’s far from delusional. Get in touch with Mavens for early access, and don’t miss Jane Evans at INNOCEAN Australia on May 21 and HERO Melbourne on May 28.
About Jane Evans
B&T Lifetime Achievement Award winner, founder, author, keynote speaker, matriarch, futurist and myth buster.
Jane Evans has always been radical.
She created the first ad to show a divorced couple. The first to show a couple living together. The first where men did housework – and did it well. She launched James Squire, Australia’s first craft beer, and gave us the Tim Tam Genie, a campaign that is still running more than 30 years later.
When she ‘aged out’ of the advertising industry, she began campaigning fearlessly for midlife women. Through the Uninvisibility campaign, the Visible Start programme to get women back into the workforce, and her bestselling book Invisible to Invaluable: Unleashing the Power of Midlife Women, written with Carol Russell, she changed the narrative around age, value and visibility.
Now she uses all her skills to build community and create new narratives. She has launched and explained every major tech advancement since the dawn of computing, so she is used to translating what’s coming next. And her uncanny knack for predicting the future has proved correct time and time again.
Which is why she set up the 7th Tribe. She saw what was heading our way. She also saw the solution. The world needs a powerful matriarchy to balance the patriarchal madness that seems to be everywhere right now. She has created a platform where matriarchs can gather, learn and take action — and she is taking to stages worldwide to tell a story of what the world could be like if it were designed as it should be.
For all of us.
