“Lazy Student” to Loeries Young Creative of the Year: Geir Wilson’s “Baptism of Fire”
Loeries Young Creative of the Year 2025, Geir Wilson, didn’t always want to be a copywriter. Sharing his story so far with LBB in the afterglow of the award win, he recalls his former aspirations as a chef, a National Geographic photographer, an actor, and even, for a time, Bear Grylls.
As is often the case with creatives, the invisible thread that joined all these disparate dreams was storytelling – “except maybe the last one,” Geir quips. The creative streak runs in his blood. “I come from a family of artists on my mom’s side: painters, sculptors, carpenters, the works,” Geir reveals. “I grew up in a home where every surface that could house a piece of art, did. My parents made a point of showing us things that would make me go ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’, which made me want to make things that make other people do that.”
The opportunity to make things is now Geir’s favourite part of what he does as a middleweight copywriter at South African indie, Halo. “Nothing beats the feeling of seeing your work in the wild and seeing how people react to it. Even when the work doesn’t end up going live, the process of making it is just as good. That moment when the hairs stand up on the back of your neck and you know you’ve created something special is like a drug to me, whether it gets approved or not,” he enthuses.
It was an adamant university lecturer – Mandy Speechly – that opened Geir’s eyes to this sort of career. A self-described “lazy student” on a creative brand communications BA course, it was Mandy who saw his potential and “lit a fire under [his] ass until [he] saw it too.” Geir remembers, “I wised up to how cool this advertising thing could be in the last year of my degree and started working my ass off.”
Determined to land his first agency gig, he was so bold as to chase after national chief creative director of Old Friends Young Talent (OFyt), Chris Gotz, following a talk he’d given during Geir’s final semester, to ask if his agency was hiring new writers. The bravery paid off, with Geir signing his first contract before he’d even handed in his final assignments.
The challenge now was to prepare for his first gig, and Geir pored over every advertising book he could get his hands on. He credits ‘Hey Whipple, Squeeze This’, ‘Hegarty on Advertising’, ‘D&AD. The Copy Book’, ‘Junior’, and ‘A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters’ as pivotal for understanding how to write well and generate good ideas.
Probed about his first professional project, Geir cringes. It was a series of broadsheet headlines for discount chain, The Crazy Store. “I arrived at the first review with a batch of lines that were trying to be conceptual and hard-working. They were doing neither,” he winces. “After more rounds of reviews than anyone should have for a broadsheet ever, I managed to get ‘Van Gogh crazy for 50% off art supplies at The Crazy Store’ approved by my creative director. I still cringe when I think about it.
When Geir went on to join the small team at Halo, the only other copywriter left shortly after. The opportunity for Geir to step up and really put his learning into practice presented itself. “I had briefs landing in my lap that I would have killed for just months before, and lots of them,” says Geir. “It was a baptism of fire, but I was just happy to be getting my money’s worth out of all the books I bought.”
“The project that made me feel like I had finally landed in adland was a brand voice brief for Deanston Distillery,” Geir reminisces. “They’re only 65, their distillery resides in a defunct cotton mill, and consequently, their entire distilling process, and the end product, is a little bit unorthodox, which makes them an unruly teenager in the whisky world.” Tasked with capturing that unusual story, the team came up with an OOH campaign that would go on to earn Geir a D&AD shortlist for Writing for Design. “Getting that kind of recognition so early in my career felt like the universe was telling me I was in the right place.”
Geir also counts the cheeky ‘Out of Office’ out of home campaign for digital insurance company, Pineapple, as another career highlight. Rolled out in December, when Johannesburg’s residents flee for vacation and leave it a ghost town, Halo and Pineapple matched their plans with a shareable stunt that saw the brand’s 100+ billboards around the city plastered over with OOO messages and mini billboards sent on holiday to tourist hotspots. They were even featured in lo-fi social content showing them living their best out-of-office lives
It’s this kind of “silly work” that excites Geir about the industry, and he welcomes the return of playful advertising that reminds him of what he enjoyed growing up from brands like Vodacom and Nando’s. “Obviously, there are brands that have purpose woven into their essence, and that serious work makes sense for them,” Geir clarifies. “But I don’t think a jar of mayonnaise needs to change the world.”
Greatness is what Geir’s set his sights on – and the Loeries has given him its vote of confidence with the recent award win. “I want to make work that people compare to their favourite art and entertainment, not other ads.” At the same time, he acknowledges that to get there, he’ll first have to reach that “critical mass of shit ideas” that must be churned out before the brilliant ones start flowing. And that the ‘I wish I did that’ work only arrives about 200 ideas after the first ‘good’ idea. It’s challenging, “but it’s a muscle that takes time to develop.”
Clearly, Geir doesn’t shy away from hard work. He recoils at the thought of lazy copy. “‘Run your way’, ‘Eat your way’, ‘Drive your way’ et cetera, et cetera. There are so many amazing words and endless orders to arrange them in. If you get the privilege to make something that will be put in front of millions of eyeballs, and you’re going to shove it down their throat at every given opportunity, the least you can do is put some real love and care behind it.”
The heart that humans put into their work is what assures Geir that AI cannot replace copywriters. Having fed thousands of lines from the world’s best into ChatGPT, and prompted it countless different ways to emulate that brilliance, the bot just can’t seem to crack it.
“Don’t get me wrong, AI is an incredibly powerful tool that you’d be silly not to be using, but I just don’t think it can come up with ideas, or write scripts, or design, or make films the way the real craftspeople of our industry do,” he comments. “The types of stories that compel people to feel things and buy things need to connect with them, and we connect with people through sharing our souls. There is no amount of training data that can recreate the human experience, or the years of experience it takes to become a master of your craft.” He looks up to and sees a fellow advocate in copywriter Vikki Ross, shouting out her Pinterest board, ‘Lines I don’t reckon AI could write’.
Nils Leonard provides another source of inspiration for Geir, who calls him “hard not to love.” He adds, “The work coming out of Uncommon is almost always bonkers good. I don’t think there is a creative in the world that wouldn’t give their left leg to work there. I’m obsessed with the fact that he’s created an agency where they don’t wait for clients to approve the ideas they want to make; if they want to do something, they do it.”
Geir wishes that more budding creatives like him had the chance to learn from such a calibre of people, though he’s personally lucky to have access to generous guidance and attention at Halo. “Because of shrinking project timelines and increased workloads, I don’t think senior agency folk have the time to teach craft to juniors anymore,” he observes. “I’ve heard stories of writers being sent on bootcamps with legendary directors, and designers learning how to set type by hand. That just doesn’t happen today. When I speak to my industry peers, it seems very few, if any of them, are getting the kind of mentorship that shaped the current industry legends.”
When Geir does switch off from work, he continues to nurture his creative spark by escaping into stories on the silver screen or in books, and pursuing his passion for photography. The latter is something he avoids overanalysing or pushing the way he does with his writing, instead relishing the freedom that comes with doing something for oneself alone. It’s one way in which he maintains a healthy relationship with creativity, so he can remember the fun of it that makes his day job worthwhile.
He offers his final reflections: “I had a tough time with my mental health in high school and uni, and I think a lot of that is because my childhood sense of wonder and play was squeezed out of me by those institutions. So, I really want to make it up to childhood me for all the years he wasn’t having such a good time. I’m now in a position where my job is stupid fun, and if it isn’t, I’m doing something wrong. I am so lucky to be in an industry where being curious and playful is a part of the job description.”
