The home office in Los Angeles has attracted worldwide attention with its iPod spots for Apple, while the Ball Park Franks campaign featuring Frank "the Grillmaster" has shifted the way we look at hot dogs. San Francisco’s basketball-oriented spots for adidas are putting the brand into territory previously reserved for Nike, and the offbeat work for FOX Sports Net is likely to continue its award-winning ways. And in the breakthrough performance of the year, the New York office has shed its unremarkable standing with high-profile spots for Nextel, Skittles and Absolut.
"This is the first time in a long time—maybe ever—that you’ve got not one or two but three Chiat/Day offices all firing on all cylinders," says Rob Schwartz, executive creative director at the Los Angeles office. "If you look around this year, all three offices are doing great stuff. It’s a range of work. It’s not all of one ilk—it’s not all comedy, or all epic, or all heartfelt. It’s different clients, different genres, different styles, united by all being terrific."
Lee Clow, chairman/chief creative officer of TBWA Worldwide, concurs and takes pride in that assessment, but what gives him the most satisfaction is seeing an agency that has grown under his stewardship still able to produce work that has all the trademarks of a creative boutique. "As we grew up, we got a number of these accolades, and I always felt like the degree of difficulty continued to increase as we became a bigger and bigger agency," he says. "Now we’re number eight in the world. We’re huge. To do the kind of work that gets recognized is almost more rewarding when we’re as big as we are, when most agencies succumb to the ‘we’re big and now we’re going to be boring and have the same color carpeting in every lobby’ kind of thing."
Clow, a legendary figure in the industry and the recipient of a Clio Lifetime Achievement Award earlier this year, is clearly a big part of that success through his input as the top creative, the daily example he sets and the agency culture he has shaped. "When we started getting bigger, we didn’t want to become a big, formal agency," he explains. "We started creating workspace that was more egalitarian and more community-like. Whether there are five hundred people in L.A. or sixty in San Francisco, everybody is part of the dynamic of the agency, a culture where everybody feels they’re not just cogs in a machine but part of something fun and special. Whenever we do some good work, we invite and expect everybody to share in it and be proud of it, to go out and tell their friends, ‘Look what I just did,’ even if they’re just a traffic person or a media buyer."
Clow has sought to export the culture of the Los Angeles office to San Francisco and New York, and at the same time pursue two seemingly divergent goals—to develop a shared pride in all the work, and to encourage a friendly competition between the three offices. "I keep throwing down that gauntlet," he says. "For years, it was always, L.A. is Chiat/ Day and the other offices aren’t. I keep saying, ‘I want you guys to kick L.A.’s ass. We may have some of the bigger, more interesting accounts, but your job is to kick our ass.’ I encourage competition and being our own competition. At the same time, we’ve learned to be pretty collaborative when we need to be. We’re still sharing the same passion."
N.Y. Breaks Through
The first step last year in turning the New York office around was to bring in John Hunt, the South African founder of TBWA/Hunt/Lascaris in Johannesburg, who had just been named TBWA worldwide creative director. "The New York office had had somewhat of a checkered past," relates Hunt. "To be in New York and not to have much of a show reel—which is what I found when I arrived—didn’t seem a great way to build the profile of an agency."
A big step was landing Nextel. "We were enormously lucky to get in Nextel—a client that is very hard and demanding, and wanted to stand out in the telco industry," Hunt says. "When we won the business, they said, ‘We’ve chosen Chiat/Day because we think you’re the guys who will challenge us the most.’ That’s a wonderful brief to get."
At the end of last year, Hunt brought in Gerry Graf, an executive creative director at BBDO New York, to run the New York office of TBWA/Chiat/Day as executive creative director. "Once we won Nextel, New York really started to be its own place," Graf says. "They knew they had something great. I think there wasn’t a lot of support around the New York office before that."
To Graf, Nextel is also the creative highlight of the year. "It’s our biggest client and we’re lucky because there’s a theory that your largest client dictates the tone of the agency," he remarks. "They have a really specific strategy. It seems like every other ad on TV is a cell phone ad, and they’re saying the same thing. It was nice to have this one company saying something different. The spots are about action, about getting things done."
This year, the Nextel work culminated with "Dance Party," directed by Jim Jenkins of bicoastal/international Hungry Man, and "Eavesdrop," helmed by Bryan Buckley, also of Hungry Man. In "Dance Party," a couple of office workers are goofily dancing to Salt-N-Pepa’s "Push It," while a third coworker mans a boom box. A fourth exec rushes in, worried about some shipments. Without missing a beat, the dancers turn off the music, confirm through their cell phones that all the bases are covered, and return to their dancing.
"Eavesdrop," also directed by Buckley, takes advantage of Nextel’s sponsorship of NASCAR racing to promote a Nextel feature: the phones are capable of eavesdropping on communications between pit crews and drivers during a race. The tagline on both spots is "Nextel. Done."
When Masterfoods brought its Skittles account over from BBDO, the news didn’t create immediate excitement at Chiat/Day. In fact, Graf recalls that while at BBDO, he was less than thrilled when Skittles was mentioned as possibly coming into his group. But after arriving at Chiat/Day, "there was a four- or five-month period of creative development," Graf says, "and it turned into something great."
The first flight of spots, directed by Ulf Johansson of Smith & Jones Films, North Hollywood, used quirky humor, such as that in "Nest," which shows a middle-aged man waiting in a huge mountainside nest to be fed Skittles by a mother eagle. "Now when a Skittles assignment comes in, everybody wants to work on it," Graf says. "And it’s a sign that your agency is respected when someone the caliber of Ulf wants to come over to do work for you."
The Absolut Raspberri spots extended the creative horizon for New York. "[Group creative director] Patrick O’Neill did a great job on Absolut Raspberri, giving us a different look," Graf says. The spots—the first U.S. TV ads for Absolut—were directed by graffiti artist David Ellis, and produced by bicoastal Go Film. The three spots feature members of the New York art collective The Barnstormers painting over giant Absolut bottles in time-lapse photography to a soundtrack by British artist Killa Kela. "It’s great that we have that work," notes Graf. "It wasn’t a huge budget, but we were able to pull in three great modern artists who wanted to work on it. It gives us a broader look. We’re not just the funny agency, we’re the conceptual agency now."
San Francisco Is
"Unstoppable"
Executive creative director Chuck McBride runs the San Francisco office and takes pride in the awards it has earned in recent years, but what stands out for him this year is the overall performance of the agency. "The work for adidas is really starting to break through and people are noticing it, and we continue to do really good stuff with FOX, but what I’m the most proud of this year is that all three offices contributed," he says.
The global adidas work, such as the "Impossible is Nothing" spots—"Laila," "Long Run" and "Nadia"—is handled jointly by TBWA Worldwide and 180, Amsterdam. The San Francisco office has created several recent basketball-themed spots. In "Carry," directed by Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks, Los Angeles, Kevin Garnett of the Minnesota Timberwolves stays light on his feet, walking down a city street in his silver and white "KG" model shoes as dozens of bystanders climb or jump onto his shoulders. In the background, Etta James belts out "He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands."
"Unstoppable," directed by Brian Beletic of bicoastal Smuggler, features Houston Rockets forward Tracy McGrady in his T-MAC 4 shoes closing in on the basket as a tiny army of helicopters and tanks tries to hold him back.
The goal is to ramp up the adidas brand in a field dominated by Nike. "Our job was to carve out a unique space within the basketball category using adidas athletes and a certain style of commercial, with a very strong attachment to ‘Impossible is Nothing,’ " McBride says, explaining that the "Just Do It" tag was so important to Nike, an account he worked on during a stint at Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, Ore.
"Our challenge is to distinguish [adidas] as its own brand instead of just another player in the category, and I think it’s starting to work," McBride continues. "A lot of kids seem to be excited about the work and the athletes. The products are selling really well. I think we’ve moved the brand meter in the right direction."
The office is also moving FOX Sports Net in the direction of basketball with a new campaign, "Your Basketball Companion," directed by Baker Smith of harvest, Santa Monica, which touts the network’s regional sports coverage. The companion is a talking basketball, complete with an animated mouth voiced by Robert Downey Jr. "It’s a ball that’s kind of like your pal," McBride observes. "It talks to you, it helps you through you personal relationships."
L.A. Keeps Up The
Good Work
Like some of its previous work for Apple, TBWA/Chiat/Day’s spots for the iPod digital music player have transcended advertising to become part of pop culture. Rolling Stone and other consumer magazines have taken note of the fact that Bono and U2 used an iPod spot to debut "Vertigo," a tune off their latest album, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Mark Romanek of bicoastal Anonymous Content directed the spot, called "The Band." It continues in the vein of earlier iPod work: the deceptively simple black silhouettes dancing to various genres of music against colored backgrounds. Dave Meyers, of bicoastal/ international @radical.media, directed the bulk of the iPod spots, including "Sterio Rock," "Break Dance" and "Rock Refresh."
Clow takes a hands-on role when it comes to the Apple account. "In terms of my personal career, it’s the account that defines the most fun I’ve ever had in the business," he says. "Apple’s always been an amazing opportunity for the agency because we’re usually dealing with products that are changing everything. We launched Macintosh in 1984 and it changed everything. Now iPod’s going to figure out a way for digital music to become the norm, and our CDs and music collections are going to change drastically."
Clow maintains a close working relationship with Apple co-founder/ CEO Steve Jobs, and attributes the success of the agency’s work to the fact that the two companies are perfectly in tune with each other. "I think Steve [knows that this agency] totally understands who Apple is and what they’re trying to do," Clow says. "We don’t have to explain that to each other in a brief all the time."
When it comes to developing spots for the office’s clients, Schwartz says that he and Clow first look for the "disruptive" idea. "That’s the thing that’s going to be remarked on, going to be noticeable, that people are going to talk about," he elaborates. "With Ball Park Franks, the convention of the category was little weenies for little people. Everybody was talking kids and hot dogs. We had a big disruptive idea, which was ‘Why don’t we talk to real men who eat meat?’ "
The spots feature Frank, a portly guy at an outdoor grill, a real man who takes his frankfurters very seriously. While with some campaigns the creatives look to the producer to suggest possible directors, Schwartz knew he wanted Joe Pytka of PYTKA, Venice, Calif., for the "Grillmaster" work. "There was an honesty and straightforwardness to Frank, but it also needed to be a little off center," Schwartz says. "There’s an honesty about Pytka’s work, but it’s kind of a quirky honesty, so we knew from day one that Pytka was the man for the job. We also wanted a collaborator and an inventor. When you work with Joe, you’re going to be writing a lot of stuff on set. He’s a good filter. You’ll come up with five scripts and he’ll say, ‘These four suck and this one’s marginal.’ "
For Nissan’s "The Cove," directed by Nick Lewin of bicoastal Crossroads Films, the disruptive idea was the misdirection—two guys in a Murano SUV with kayaks on the roof appear to be leaving San Francisco for a bit of white water adventure. But their trip ends up in the San Francisco Bay, where they’re in the water and ready to catch one of Barry Bonds’ many homeruns. "The idea was you don’t have to go off-road to have an SUV adventure," Schwartz says.
The Outlook
If there is any downside to being a successful spot-producing agency like TBWA/Chiat/Day, it is that some people may perceive the shop as not being interested in new, nontraditional media. "That’s very frustrating to me," Clow shares, "because we have always loved new media ideas—ways of putting brands on the map that don’t rely on the classic thirty-second TV spot only. We’ve done Web stuff for Sony PlayStation and Nissan for years."
Clow also cites the print package for Apple’s "Think Different" campaign a few years ago, and even reaches back to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when the agency was doing oversized outdoor work for Nike that almost trumped the fact that Reebok was the official shoe of the games. "When I work for Apple, I have involvement in package design and the development of the Apple stores," Clow adds. "I’ve always believed that all things are media, and brands are made up of all the touch points that end up being how consumers feel a brand."
To address that belief, Clow is working on developing a new entity for the agency, but he isn’t offering many details yet. "I’m trying to evolve the architecture next year, particularly in California, to create some ways of working and attacking all media that will make us very agile and very creative," he says. "I still believe that California is kind of the global epicenter of the conversion of all media arts, and I believe our business is about all of that stuff. We’ve got a lot of the tools already, but it’s a way of reorganizing it."
The agency already has an interactive arm, TBWA/Tequila, headed up by Jason Kuperman, director of brand content, which has created integrated campaigns for Absolut and Nextel. It also tested the water with TiVo late last year, running repurposed content for the Nissan 350Z on the TiVo Showcase, a dedicated area of the system where viewers can watch movie previews, entertainment promotions and advertiser messages.
Forays into other media don’t mean that the agency is letting up on the TV spot business. Mars Inc. recently moved its Whiskas cat food and Pedigree dog food brands over to the agency. "We’re shooting some stuff with Jake Scott [of bicoastal RSA USA] right now that goes to a really beautiful place for a pet food," Clow says. "It’s amazing and surprising, about the love of dogs."
Graf is working with Nextel on a broad-reaching campaign for next year. "We’re developing the campaign and we haven’t even considered TV yet," he says. "We’re saying, ‘If Nextel is about getting real things done, we should get real things done,’ and we are moving into much more than just doing a funny spot. And I have a great relationship with Mars—they’ve given us Starburst and a couple of other accounts, so there’s going to be a lot more coming out next year."
In San Francisco, McBride is looking forward to new work for new client Pay By Touch, an alternative to credit cards based on fingerprint technology. "We won a few new pieces of business," he reports. "We’re in the process right now of doing some new branding work for the Starz movie service. We’ve done some work this year for Ask Jeeves, the Internet search engine, and we’re getting onto a brand mission for them as well. Everybody is coming around to the ‘let’s build a brand’ idea and that’s really great."
One question about the future that remains unanswered is how much longer Clow, now in his 60s, will stay in the business. He’s not giving any clues. "I just stay intense about the work and hopefully it’s rubbing off," he says. "I’m expecting and hoping that this next generation will come at it with as much desire as I did, and it’s starting to bear that kind of fruit. I love what I do. I’m going to keep going in until somebody tells me they need my office."a
