How crocodile hunter Steve Irwin sparked this Creative's passion for advertising

Just three weeks into their roles with St. Luke's Jord Morris along with his copywriter partner, Danny Jones tailgated on Boris Johnson's scandal for the Popcorn Brand Butterkist.

The campaign, a rebrand of the 'Go Grab a Butterkist' brand platform, garnered eight national news titles and 50,000 organic Twitter impressions. It also bagged a Gold, Silver and Bronze at the Creative Circle Awards.

Their more recent work for Dole Sunshine, Nutritional Ink, has also been a real award winner. The outdoor campaign used posters printed with ink containing more nutritional value than many of the junk food snacks consumed daily around the world.

It won a Graphite pencil at the D&AD awards, two Golds at the Creative Circle Awards, and a Silver for Health at The Clio Awards.

Having worked in the industry for seven years Morris also has a big passion for mentoring talent who are trying to break into advertising.

We ask Morris what helped sparked his creativity.

Jord Morris: My creative hero is Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter, zoologist, conservationist, actor, and family man.

I watched a lot of Steve growing up. If you’re not familiar with him or need reminding - it’s worth five minutes to watch this. It was hard to switch it off with his energy being so infectious. Along with the effort he put into everything, whether he was saving crocs from potentially threatening farmers or even just rebuilding parts of the zoo. I loved the adventure he’d take you on. You felt like you were right there with him, saving the crocs and tailing the snakes.

What I looked up to in Steve was his pure passion for what he did. From a young age, seeing someone have this much love for their job made me realise a couple of things. One, that there’s a job out there somewhere which is your complete calling. And two, if you don’t happen to find that job, then put all your passion in any way because that’s the way you’ll become like Steve.

Another reason I loved Steve was because he made me question society. In advertising terms, he’d seen the problem, too many of these creatures are being killed. The insight was people's fear of crocs, snakes, and spiders. People didn’t understand them. So it was his task to solve this problem by showing how we can love these animals.

He put himself out there. And he put himself through a lot to show how kind we can be to these creatures. If you haven’t seen it, check out the video where he’s live in a TV studio doing an interview with a snake around his head. Live on camera, the snake bites his neck, so he gets the TV camera to zoom in closer to help him see where the snake's head is. As he starts unraveling the snake, it releases its bite. What's amazing is how calm he was and then he apologised to the presenter for it happening. He knew that in order to get people to love these animals, he had to love them no matter what.

It made me question people's behaviours. My parents had always been scared of spiders. But why were they scared of these small and innocent beings that were just trying to find a place to stay warm? How can the majority of the population despise them too? I still think there’s a massive branding issue with spiders, snakes, and even pigeons. Why are people scared of pigeons?

One final point, I think Steve touched a chord with a lot of people because of how kind he was. He loved his mates, family, friends, animals, dog Sui, TV presenters - literally everyone and everything he came into contact with he had love for.

Everything he did was with a smile. If a snake reacted quicker than he was and bit him, he didn't get annoyed at the snake, he was annoyed at himself for not being more on the ball. He was always looking to improve and help the most amount of beings possible. I think that’s one of the big traits I’ve taken into my life. Do everything with a smile, no matter what is thrown your way. Never blame anything or anyone else for what went wrong, look within yourself as to how you could have improved the situation, how you could have handled it better. If you always strive to be the best person you can, you’ll do great things.

Jord Morris is a creative at St. Luke's