Recession looms! Dozens of new-media companies crash and burn! Joe Paper Billionaire hits the street in search of a brick-and-mortar job! The advertising industry braces itself for the disappearance of tens of millions of dollars! We’ve been inundated with dotcom gloom and doom for months. What could possibly be the upside of this story?
Well, as one of the founders of One Such Films, and as a commercial director myself, I’d argue that the dot-com era ushered in tremendous creative breakthroughs in commercial advertising. On the whole, new-media spots were irreverent, edgy and smart, and made the entire industry more comfortable with taking bolder chances. As the advertising world’s equivalent of the early 1970s revolution in American filmmaking, the late’90s represented a quantum leap in commercials in terms of visual execution and adventurous storytelling. On a purely cinematic basis, new-media advertising raised the bar and got all kinds of clients to consider taking more risks than they would have taken even a few years ago.
I’ve been wondering if the bursting of the dot-com bubble would taint this legacy of audacious advertising with a guilt-by-association sense of failure, but I don’t think so. Advertising style has been irrevocably changed. The dot-com era’s creative legacy deserves to be recognized as a blast of fresh air that’s still blowing strong.
By way of example, a couple of years ago, I was intrigued by the eerie glow of some late-night construction I’d seen on my commute home along New York’s West Side Highway. I decided to use these construction site types of work lights and generators to create a weirdly futuristic, phosphorous-like sci-fi glow for an Absolut Vodka tabletop spot I directed for the European market. A dialogue-free spot for a familiar brand, this commercial was in some ways the antithesis of dot-com advertising. Yet there was something new, something tech-y, something decidedly post-human about the spot that’s redolent of what I’ll loosely define as a dot-com advertising aesthetic.
This aesthetic extends beyond the visual sheen to which we’ve grown accustomed in commercials. While there has yet to be a truly successful television show or movie centered around the dot.com era (no matter how gifted the director, web-browsing ain’t that exciting), dot-com spots with their fleeting, attention-grabbing visual dynamic offered the perfect pop culture conduit for the new-media phenomenon. (No one can ask to examine your faulty business plan in a :30 spot.) It was all about punch and generating excitement.
Few new-media companies offered tangible products. Therefore, in promoting things that were oftentimes abstractions, it became easier to allow creatives to be true to their job description. With only an idea to sell, many new-media commercials played as either short, evocative experimental films or black-out sketch comedy routines. Dot-com ads were by turns elliptical, curious, absurdist, Brechtian, self-referential or just plain funny.
Having shot the tabletop portion of the last of Taco Bell’s hugely successful talking-Chihuahua campaign, I sense an absurdist, almost surreal sensibility at work in a Spanish-speaking dog "jonzing" for his crispy Gorditas. This represents a completely different advertising paradigm from, say, "Hey, Mikey, he likes it!"
Now that so many dot.com startups have failed, and we’ve witnessed once-mighty IPOs shrink to pennies a share, will dot.com advertising’s swaggeringly irreverent attitude be neutered? Will the advertising industry rein in some of its wilder creative tendencies?
I don’t think so. While the trickle-down theory is a faulty economic model, it does apply to the creative arts, as one generation’s innovation becomes the next generation’s baseline. The advertising industry’s quickened visual and creative pulse—fostered in part by the dot-com boom’s brief, shining moment—is real, and here to stay.
