Dani Coyle on art directing for Burberry, the death of “social-first”, and TikTok toast

Dani Coyle doesn’t see herself as a “social media creative”. Not because the visual artist wants to distance herself from social media – far from it, it was through creating content on TikTok and Instagram that she formed relationships with clients like Balenciaga and Burberry. It’s because of the pervasiveness of the technology (or could you even class it as a medium?).

“The term social-first is already archaic,” she says. “My team and I make work that is consumed on social media – but everything is consumed on social media in 2024. Everything needs to be made with social in mind, and brands and agencies that don’t recognise this will fall behind.”

Luckily for Dani, social media is intertwined with her creative process. An artist and art director, Dani currently works at Burberry as global creative lead, focusing specifically on Burberry's social touchpoints. But long before that, she got her start as a graduate fresh out of art school experimenting with Instagram Stories. “I came out of my undergrad at the Kingston School of Art when Instagram Stories were becoming a priority for businesses. So straight away, and almost accidentally, I started creating short-form videos, and I never really stopped.”

The challenge for most creatives who produce work under this format is the same: social media demands lots of short content as well as long, meaning you need a near-constant stream of ideas under your belt to keep pace. It’s something Pablo Rochat has spoken about before, how to not run out of jokes. For Dani, the concept for a video “really depends on the starting point”. Case in point: Burberry toast.

“We knew that food and fashion do really well on TikTok, so that seemed like a really obvious one when the team discovered toast art creators,” she tells us. From this jump-off point, Dani and her team got the idea to recreate Burberry check with jam spreads. “We tried at first with actual jams and that was just a mess. The final video is actually strips of hard jelly arranged into a check, fused together with a blow torch and then a thick layer of clear jelly on top to give it that lovely jammy texture. For that one it took so much experimentation and rounds of testing across several weeks to get it right. Sometimes, it takes a lot of work for something to appear effortless!”

There are a lot of variables in creating this work. While a slice of toast might take weeks to perfect, others come together in a flash. During lockdown, for example, Dani created a stream of videos for Balenciaga while staying at her mum’s house in Swindon; each took no longer than an hour to pull together. Sometimes Dani will be responding to a brief around a collection or product, “sometimes it’s a trend or visual trick”, she says.

One thing that is consistent, however, and what helps make videos stand out amongst the clamour, is tone of voice. “It boils down to making something that is at once commercial and unexpected. I want the viewer to get to the end of the video and not even realise they watched an ad.”