Brand New World, winner of the 2006 Best Video Campaign OMMA Award for the long form videos it created for Splenda, is a leading developer of broadband video ads. Much of the agency’s success can be attributed to Alan Schulman, the chief creative officer, who co-founded the agency with Alan Feldenkris. Schulman drew on a creative background at major agencies and consulting firms to launch an agency that would focus on branding and creative solutions for advanced media. He discusses the founding of the agency, some of its new work and the growth of broadband video advertising with iSPOT.
iSPOT: Please provide some background on Brand New World and your role in founding it.
Schulman: I had worked as creative director at FCB in Chicago and I left for Pittard Sullivan, which was the largest motion graphics company in the world. I left there for the FutureBrand Co., a division of McCann Erickson, a branding consultancy for media and entertainment companies, where we did on air and online branding. Then I was moved over to McCann Erickson as interactive creative director. I did that for a year, then I saw the opportunity that digital media was fast approaching and broadband speeds were increasing. My former colleague Alan Feldenkris, who ran the McDonalds business at DDB Chicago, had always talked about opening our own shop and we said what if we founded an agency that was specifically focused on creative for emerging media platforms. We’re probably going to have to do some stupid stuff, like banners and buttons. But we saw video was going to move and shooting would move in the online space. We said there would be clients out front and ready to say, ‘Well, I’ve got this big agency shooting my TV commercials and I have this interactive shop producing banners. Do I really need two agencies? Can I go someplace where they can take the digital knowledge and merge it with the traditional skill sets?’
So we founded our position as a creative solution for emerging media. It’s online. It’s wireless. It’s digital signage out of home. Instead of taking a beautifully shot :30 and cutting it down to :15, we said that’s not the optimal way to use online. The best way is to create customized :10s and :15s. The tools exist for commercials to be created in a desktop environment and many are very graphically driven. It’s telling stories in shorter forms. So we decided to be an agency specializing in short and long form. Not a production company but an agency.
We launched in ’04 and knew it was a matter of time before content would be unleashed from a linear environment to a non-linear environment. We work with many large agencies who are the caretakers of the big TV campaigns. We didn’t have the conception about getting the accounts, we were in the business to be the first mover on new ad units and deployment, the creative and storytelling skills have to be different. We borrowed from the model of broadcast design firms and tell stories in short and long form. A lot of agencies don’t do this work because they don’t think it’s sexy enough. But I said as a creative director, after making commercials for 15 years, I want to develop a visual identity for online media, a more holistic type of experience than the traditional TV campaign.
iSPOT: After achieving so much success with the Splenda campaign, what’s next?
Schulman: We’re continuing with Johnson & Johnson. We’re about to premiere another set of webisodes for a pharma brand, Topamax. It’s based on the work we did for Splenda. They said, should we take a look at how we’re approaching production. If the idea is to create once and deploy on many platforms, maybe we should try it on pharma brands as well as consumer. It hasn’t premiered yet, but it’s coming soon. On the broadcast side, we just did a series of :15s for Teletoon, the Canadian cable television network specializing in animated programs. They have a night block of shows called The Detour and we created a series of :15s that are crazy and off the wall. They run online as well as on TV. And we’re working on a major campaign for The Nature Conservancy. It’s a multi-media campaign that will include TV commercials or PSAs that run online, on the green environmentally friendly sites.
All the new campaigns were created with an eye towards making compelling short form video for deployment both online and on air. The role of video in today’s era is to multiplatform.
iSPOT: On the agency side of the industry, how do you convince clients to use broadband and devote more of their budgets to it?
Schulman: Time is the most precious commodity. Looking at TV viewership, some clients are saying I’m still going to spend the majority on TV but in certain target audiences I’m going to go deeper and longer and find places to reach them online. Typically media people go in and say we can reach this target very effectively online on affinity sites. And more sites are taking video now. So they’re increasing their spend in video areas and asking themselves do I shoot a separate campaign or do I just cut down TV commercials. With our agency they get the opportunity to see what it would look like if we created advertising that is brand focused or content focused or pure entertainment. There’s a number of ways you can look at broadband video as not just an extension of TV. A lot of advertisers are looking and saying the metrics are good and better than TV Nielsens and they’re looking at creating spots that run with certain content because the contextual relevancy is important and can be done cheaper than TV :30s. When you show this to clients and they see the potential, they get excited.
The wind’s at our backs in terms of clients waking up to the idea of different types of messages. It’s good for production, because it means more advertising will be produced for the broadband environment in different lengths. Agencies are geared up to it and we’ll see an increase in projects and budgets. The agencies that are still caught up in traditional campaigns will lose the business because the work will go to someone else.
iSPOT: You’re working for a variety of clients now. Does this mean the use of broadband is becoming more widespread?
Schulman: The answer is an unequivocal yes. But the whole search thing is a distraction. So many advertisers think they have to get in the search game if they’re a national brand. Clients are spending millions differentiating their brands and they’re relying on paid text links. It’s competing with broadband for mind share of the client. Companies that spend on search don’t know about the more creative assets of broadband video.
