Vans presents “These Projects Are Ads for Creativity”, the California-based brand’s campaign focused on art in its purest form. 

Vans celebrates diversity and creativity by valuing individual talent by encouraging artists to express themselves and create drawings, sculptures, music videos, custom shoes, digital animations and more.

Instead of following the conventional approach of an advertising campaign, Vans has invested its resources to support creativity, giving the artists involved the chance to bring their ideas to life in the vast sleeps that art can include. A path of discovery using a digital hub at vans.eu/offthewall that will continue to collect art projects and expand throughout 2021. 

With its “These Projects Are Ads for Creativity” campaign, Vans is putting artists and their stories in the spotlight: whether it’s the colorful paintings of San Francisco-based Rewina Beshue, that explore themes of time, space and reality, Annabell Lee‘s vibrant painted pillows that reflect her bold personality, the darkroom-developed work of Los Angeles-based photographer Anthony Acosta or the disciplined woodworking practice of Hong Kong-based Start From Zero, through their achievements artists convey a wide range of creative interpretations, representing an equally wide global community of artists. It is through their works presented together that a collective beacon of creativity is manifested.

Also offering their own form of creative expression are London-based artists Alex Jenkins and Eloise Dörr. An illustrator and cartoonist, Alex Jenkins often explores critical topics filtered through a colorful and satirical lens. For this project, he brought one of his characters to life through a nearly seven-foot-tall fiberglass sculpture. Eloise Dörr is a skateboarder and artist whose work often features skateboarding characters – sometimes large, sometimes small, and sometimes somewhere in between. For her project, she chose to create a painting on a triptych of skateboards.

“Instead of creating an ad about creativity, we wanted to use this campaign as a vehicle to really showcase creativity in all its forms. So we simply allowed creatives from around the world to create something”, said Rob Teague, Global Executive Creative Director at Vans. “Drawings, paintings, music, sculptures, video montages, skate spots, crazy animations, weird surfboards and things we didn’t expect. Contrary to traditional advertising, we, as a brand, wanted to get out of the way and make room for a diverse community of people and their different ways of expressing themselves. That’s what Vans wants to do: not just talk about creative expression, but actively support it through products, platforms and campaigns”.

You can learn more about the themes of the “These Projects Are Ads for Creativity” campaign here while if you want to share your story and participate, use #OffTheWall on social media.