We’re not sure what’s going on in the image we lead off with here and on the cover of issue 228. But it’s our 40th anniversary special and therefore it is party time. Enjoy yourself. 

So we thank the team at Ogilvy Singapore, who came up with a great campaign for Artotel Wanderlust, a home-from-home where tattooing sessions and exotic animals in the bathroom seem to be invited. 

We went through a lot of options in choosing this lead picture. We could write a dissertation about the thinking behind it, as we looked to summarise everything that’s happened since 1984 in one image, but you probably don’t need that.

Instead, we have some much more tasty fare to read. For a start, loosely on the party theme, we have a whole host of sparkling thoughts from around the globe for our latest Eclectic. You’re welcome to respond and give us your inspiration on the topic, too.

It being a special time, we don’t have a few big interviews but in fact drew on more than 40 conversations with leading creatives, current and vintage, as they responded to our request for suggestions of the best ads from the last four decades. The synthesis of that learning sits in our provocative 40 greatest ads selection. Of course, across the nominators many more works were suggested, all of it great work, and it was an extremely tough job to leave some out of issue 228. But we did … and now we can have our cake and eat it because we will be feeding out online here the full lists from the nominators and their reasons. It will make for a fascinating read, a real sense of creative directions, of possibilities … and a rich body of expert opinion to engage with and learn from.

You are welcome to feed back on what we have missed and what we should include. This is going to be an ongoing discussion or debate … a way of exploring what we see as creative excellence today while considering what we might learn, or discard, from the near past. 

This ‘living past’ of creativity is something our collective industry will do well to cherish, to record more clearly, as it looks to train AI in what creative excellence is and what it needs to be next.