When asked how he feels about his company’s meteoric success, Downtown Partners DDB creative director Dan Pawych responds with a laugh: "It scares the shit out of me. We can only go downhill now."
It’s doubtful the Toronto ad shop will go downhill anytime within the foreseeable future. In less than four years, Downtown Partners has gone from Palmer Jarvis DDB’s beer account division to a freestanding agency of considerable note. Working with top-name directors in Canada and abroad, the company has taken home a slew of awards—including Gold and Silver Lions at last year’s Cannes International Advertising Festival (the only Canadian agency to do so), Clios and Bessies.
This year, Downtown Partners gained even more prominence stateside—three of its Bud Light ads were broadcast during the Super Bowl. "For us, it was a huge thing," says Pawych, who learned in December that Anheuser-Busch had selected "Parade," "Worst Nightmare" and "Strongest Man" to air during the Super Bowl. "You don’t get that kind of opportunity very often."
"Parade" and "Worst Nightmare"—both of which were directed by Frank Todaro, in a co-production between Imported Artists and bicoastal/international @radical. media, which is Todaro’s spot roost—were "controversial spots," the creative director notes. By far the most off-color of this year’s Super Bowl offerings, "Parade" features a clown in a parade who walks on his hands. He goes into a bar, asks for a Bud Light, and seemingly drinks the beer with his butt. "We actually pulled back a little bit on that one," Pawych reports, laughing. "Originally, it was a lot worse."
Still, he says, "I was really the most worried about ‘Worst Nightmare’ because of the association with females." In the spot, a guy tells his friend he’s going to meet his girlfriend’s mother. The friend’s advice: pay close attention to his girlfriend’s mother, because it’s what she’ll look like in 20 years. At first glance, the mother looks fine—but then it’s revealed that she has an enormous posterior. After the spot aired, Pawych’s anxiety was abated: "Apparently feedback came back that women loved it."
Neither commercial would have made it past a less open-minded client, according to Pawych. "They always say clients deserve the work they get, and the guys at Anheuser-Busch are great," he says.
"Strongest Man"—which was helmed by Paul Middleditch, of bicoastal HSI Productions, and produced through his Canadian roost, Industry Films, Toronto—depicts a frail old man making off with a refrigerator full of Bud Lights at a heavy lifting competition. All three spots did well with viewers. "We were happy with the way people responded," relates Pawych.
Another Middleditch-directed spot, "Fridge," also produced via Industry Films, garnered the aforementioned Gold Lion at Cannes last year. "That was a complete shock," Pawych remarks. "Not in a million years did I think we were going to win for that one."
Like the Super Bowl ads, "Fridge" has a quality that’s both humorous and irreverent: a guy drills through his neighbor’s wall to steal his Bud Light. The woman next door sees his head poking through the back wall of the refrigerator and screams in fright, which brings her husband over—he screams because the beer is missing. "Middleditch brought a lot to the party on that one," Pawych says. "He’s got an eye for comedy. So does Martin Granger [who directed the Silver Lion-winning ‘Ulterior Emotions’ through Avion Films, Toronto; Granger is repped stateside via A Band Apart, Los Angeles]. Those are guys that can really surprise you."
As a rule, Pawych likes working with spot helmers that surprise him. "I don’t like guys who shoot the boards," says the former art director. "In fact, the directors I will use again and again are the ones who make me say, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ I always look at the board as a starting point. It’s like the seed, and then from there you figure out where to grow."
About the beer
A 20-year veteran of the Canadian advertising industry, Pawych was at Bozell Palmer Bonner, Toronto, when executives from Palmer Jarvis DDB contacted him in 1999. "I had been heading up the Budweiser account, but because of a conflict at Bozell, they ended up having to give up that account," he recalls. "Palmer Jarvis gave me a call and basically offered a few of us an interesting venture where, if we’d come over, they might stand a chance in moving the whole beer business over to Palmer Jarvis."
Palmer Jarvis Downtown was formed to handle beer clients Anheuser-Busch and Labatt. "What ended up happening was we started picking up new business as well," says Pawych. "After awhile, everybody said, ‘It’d probably make a lot of sense if you guys break off and become separate.’ " The growing client list now includes Quaker, Tropicana, and Gatorade (QTG); www. beer.com; and the St. Michael’s Majors, a Canadian Junior Hockey League team.
The ad shop—which had always operated independently from Palmer Jarvis DDB—officially changed its name to Downtown Partners DDB at the end of ’01. (It is now also known as Downtown Partners, a Division of DDB Group, Canada.)
Besides Pawych, Downtown’s principals are Tony Altilia, who signed on as president/CEO last year, managing director Jeff McCrory and Andrea Isbester, who’s the group account director on QTG. "We’re fairly small still," Pawych notes. "We have at most twenty or twenty-one [staff members]."
While Pawych says the shop produces around 45 spots per year, its creative output expands far beyond TV ads. Accompanying "Ulterior Emotions"—a parody on commercials that hawk compilation CDs of music from different eras—was the release of an actual CD featuring ’70s-style songs about beer that became a hit in Canada. "At one point, we were selling more copies than Celine Dion," reports Pawych. "Ulterior Emotions" also garnered a Silver Lion at Cannes.
The agency’s clever Bud Light Institute campaign—centered on a fictional think-tank geared toward the encouragement of beer drinking—has also spawned some inspired stunts. "We had the Bud Light Institute CEO Search in newspapers here," Pawych remembers. "There was a construction site in Toronto, and we put big signs all over it that said, ‘Future home of the Bud Light Institute.’ It created a big stir."
These days, the agency is moving into a new home of its own: a larger space in downtown Toronto. As for its staff members, they’re working as hard—and as creatively—as ever. "It’s pretty competitive out there, and we’re up against a lot of the big places," says Pawych, whose current workload includes a new campaign for QTG, directed by Ian Leech out of The Partners’ Film Company, Toronto. "There’s great talent there. You have to think differently in order to break through."