By Christine Champagne

Ask agency creatives and producers who they’re dying to work with these days, and you’ll hear The Glue Society over and over. Atop the “it” list, The Glue Society is a unique entity. Formed in Sydney by Gary Freedman and Jonathan Kneebone, who met while they were both creatives at Young & Rubicam, Sydney, the creative collective is made up of writers, designers, art directors and film directors. Offering everything from creative input to directorial services, the collective lends its talents to all sorts of projects, ranging from television commercials to print ads, books and art exhibitions.
    Churning out innovative work since its inception in 1998, The Glue Society, which is represented as directors by bicoastal/international @radical.media, became the next big thing in the advertising world in ’04 after directing a campaign of spots featuring warring chickens out of Miami’s Crispin Porter + Bogusky (CP+B) for Burger King that ultimately led to the longer-form 20-minute battle “Chickenfight,” a one-of-a-kind event broadcast live on DirecTV that had two men duking it out in chicken costumes.
    This strangely captivating event marked The Glue Society’s first foray into the world of branded content.
    “We sort of dipped a toe in the water with that one, but it wasn’t as ambitious as The Gamekillers,” Freedman enthuses.
    The Glue Society dove further into the branded content arena this year, directing The Gamekillers, a one-hour MTV dating special promoting Axe Dry deodorant. A major undertaking, the project involved carefully coordinated collaboration between Axe’s New York-based agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), MTV, @radical.media and The Glue Society itself. Freedman notes that The Glue Society became involved in the project later in the process when a concept was agreed upon, then contributed to the writing of the show, which mixed elements of reality television with fiction. For those of you who didn’t catch The Gamekillers, it found unsuspecting average guys on real dates only to have gamekillers–fictional characters such as Man with a Dog and The One Upper–attempt to ruin their love lives.
    The Gamekillers went over well with its youthful demographic likely because there wasn’t a hard sell within the program–Axe Dry wasn’t overtly featured within the show. “That was a decision driven by Axe and BBH. They wanted to create something that people enjoyed because they enjoyed it, a piece of entertainment rather than a piece of branded content,” Freedman praises.
    That said, The Gamekillers did weave a clear advertising message into its concept, Freedman says, explaining, “The whole premise of it was that the regular guy was supposed to keep his cool in the face of the gamekillers, and Axe Dry is the thing that lets you keep your cool.” (Additionally, The Glue Society directed a series of The Gamekillers-themed commercials.)
    With successful branded content efforts for Burger King and Axe now to its credit, is The Glue Society eager to score more assignments in this arena? “It’s a different way of working,” Freedman muses. “I definitely want to do it again, but like everything, you have to choose something you can get excited about, where you feel like you’ve got room to stretch and do something that you’ve not done before, and those things don’t come along that often.”
    A lot of the branded content concepts out there at this point are either based on reality or documentary formats, according to Freedman. “So from a director’s point of view, they have a certain appeal, but it’s not necessarily as broad based or diverse as the kinds of things you might be able to do if you are doing commercials.”
    Freedman continues, “What I mean is that a commercial is a very rich thing in a way, it’s a very luxurious thing because there is a lot of money being spent on a very short space of time, and you can explore quite a lot of different techniques, and you can create worlds.”
    The Glue Society is famed for the unconventional worlds and characters often showcased in its commercials. To wit: “Rodeo,” a spot for Canon via Leo Burnett, Sydney, takes viewers to a rodeo inhabited by slumbering, pixelated cowboys, while a commercial titled “Beast” for Wizard Home Loans via DCB Advertising and Communications, Melbourne, has a man living with a mortgage that appears in the form of a runty beast.
    Meanwhile, if you’ve made the award show rounds this year, you’ve likely seen “March of the Emperors,” a spot for Canal+ created by BETC Euro RSCG, Paris, in which hundreds of befuddled emperors (we’re talking the human kind) wander around a bleak, snowy landscape as if they are penguins.
    One of the most honored spots in recent awards shows (the commercial won awards at the Cannes International Advertising Festival, the Clios, and the One show among others), “March of the Emperors” has a man explaining a film he just saw to a girl. While he is in actuality describing the storyline of the feature film March of the Penguins (titled March of the Emperors in France), she pictures not penguins in the situations he is talking about but human emperors with a decidedly Napoleonic bent. Finally when she’s told that the emperors mate for hours, the Napoleon-like commanders she envisions hesitate to act on the latest plot twist. A parting super reads, “Movies are meant to be seen,” followed by the logo for Canal+, France’s cinema TV channel.
    As is the case with many assignments for them, the agency came to the table with a truly funny idea and was open to The Glue Society’s creative input, Freedman shares. With the freedom to play with the concept, The Glue Society chose to depict the emperors in the film “almost reacting to what is being said about them, doing things but not entirely sure why,” he says.
    The Glue Society is also comfortable taking an even larger creative role in projects. For example, the creative collective, working in conjunction with Sydney-based agency Host, recently created and directed a viral marketing campaign for Virgin Mobile starring a faux former soap star named Jason Donovan that tapped into the media’s and the public’s obsession with celebrity.
    Having a say in the creative process “is not a prerequisite for us,” Freedman points out. “We’re quite flexible in the way that we go about doing things. Sometimes we write and direct spots, sometimes we just come in as the director.” That was the case with “Loafer,” a spot for Virgin Mobile out of Mother, New York, that follows a band of men wearing Abe Lincoln masks who are determined to give power back to the penny. Mother had a solid idea and simply needed a director to execute it.
    Given the agency backgrounds of The Glue Society co-founders Freedman and Kneebone, one has to ask: Have they ever thought of turning The Glue Society into a full-service agency? “Over the years, we’ve had offers and opportunities to become that, and we’ve been quite conscious about resisting them,” Freedman says. “What we find exciting about the way we work is we are able to choose projects that interest us creatively. It gives us a level of freedom in what we decide to do, and we’d rather stay that way.”

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