To commemorate its 50th anniversary which comes upon us in December, SHOOT continues a special series of features that will run through 2010 in which industry notables reflect on the changes they’ve seen over the decades, as well as the essential dynamics that have endured. These folks–from different sectors of the business–will additionally share their vision and aspirations for the future.
Thus far we have tapped into the insights of such leading players as Lee Clow of Media Arts, TBWA Worldwide; Rich Silverstein, of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners; former Interpublic Group CEO Phil Geier; Robert Greenberg of R/GA; director Bob Giraldi of Giraldi Media; editor/filmmaker Larry Bridges of Red Car; and Stephen Dickstein, global president of production house The Sweet Shop.
Now we garner feedback from three notable directors: Joe Pytka of PYTKA, Bryan Buckley of Hungry Man, and the celebrated Joe Sedelmaier who last year earned the New York Festivals Lifetime Achievement Award.
Pytka has won the DGA Award as best commercial director of the year a record high three times. He has been nominated for the DGA honor 15 times, a tally which also tops all spot directors in the history of the competition.
Pytka’s DGA wins have been earned on the basis of such classic spots as Henry Weinhard’s “Chuckwagon,” Nike’s “The Bo Show” and Hallmark’s “Dance Card.” Pytka also earned distinction for having directed HBO’s “Chimps,” the first commercial to win a primetime Emmy Award.
Buckley too has been recognized by the DGA, earning the coveted award once while being nominated three times.
Buckley’s DGA-recognized entries included the notable Monster.com spot “When I Grow Up,” and E*Trade’s “Monkey.” Among his more recent endeavors is last year’s Emmy-nominated “Airport Lounge” for American Express, and the JCPenney web short Beware of the Doghouse.
And Sedelmaier is simply a legend for his offbeat sense of ad humor, yielding classic, groundbreaking work for the likes of FedEx, Burger King (“Where’s The Beef?”) and Alaska Airlines.
Here are their observations:
Joe Pytka Reflecting on the most profound changes in the industry over the years, director Joe Pytka of PYTKA cited “the corporatization of ad agencies” as being high on his list. “Agencies used to be more entrepreneurial,” he said. “In the day, agencies were led by great minds–David Ogilvy, Phil Dusenberry, Hal Riney, Lee Clow. Now it seems like many of them have been replaced by corporate monsters.”
Pytka recollected, “Phil Dusenberry insisted on great work. He wanted every commercial to play like a great movie, a vintage Technicolor film. Hal Riney had a sense of fables. Ed McCabe had a tremendous irony to his work. He had a caustic pen and wrote beautifully. Who has replaced them? I don’t think corporate America wants true replacements. These men were iconoclasts who did things their way. The corporate mentality doesn’t want those kinds of independent people and thinkers.”
Pytka further recalled legendary advertising creative Carl Ally who ideally wanted to maintain five great clients–and if one left, he would seek out and find the right replacement. “Carl Ally had as many going in the door as out to keep a balance and ensure that he could do the best possible creative job for them,” said Pytka. “That philosophy has since been cast aside as the advertising agencies that have become giant corporations instead seek only growth and sheer volume, without any regard for what that does to creative performance. They want their fifteen percent annual growth no matter what, not caring as to how that will affect creative balance and harmony.”
As the Golden Age creatives have retired or passed on (though the aforementioned Clow is still going strong), the industry has in the process pretty much lost advertising talent with the clout, observed Pytka, “to look a client in the eye and say, ‘This is what it is’…There was a great David Ogilvy story where he is about to make a presentation to a client. He was one of several there to pitch for the business. The client informs him that after ten minutes, a bell will ring, at which point he must stop the presentation no matter what. Ogilvy said that a great deal of work was put into the presentation, and that it needs more than ten minutes for him to do full justice to it. So David simply tells the client, ‘You might as well ring the bell now,’ and then he walks out the door.”
Much creative today, assessed Pytka, lacks originality. He conjectured that perhaps part of the problem is that “people coming into advertising have studied advertising to a fault. That contributes to a lot of work being incredibly derivative. The creative is not coming from outside experience. Hal Riney came from outside the advertising world and brought his life experience to advertising. It’s like the great screenwriters of Hollywood in the 1940s–many of them were immigrant Jewish men who escaped fascism in Europe. Their lives had great political and social content and meaning. They told great stories with moral values and wisdom.”
Riney’s creative instincts weren’t rooted in traditional advertising industry thinking. As an example, Pytka cited the classic, successful Bartles & Jaymes wine cooler campaign.
“Riney and Ernest Gallo went with two old curmudgeons as spokesmen for a young adult beverage,” related Pytka. “The campaign was a hit in the youth market but it took Riney’s instincts to realize he had something special.”
Today Pytka sees something else special–the potential presented by new media outlets. Storytelling opportunities are no longer confined to :30 and :60 formats.
Still, Pytka wonders why this potential hasn’t been mined. “The Internet is a form of free media, the only real expenses you incur being for production. You can put long-form material on the Internet, movies for young people, content that can tell stories and inspire people. But I don’t see much high quality content being produced.”
With the opportunity to create content that elevates intellect and the human spirit, said Pytka, “what we are seeing instead are fart jokes,” among other forms of lowest common denominator humor. It’s difficult to explain, he observed, why the bar is being lowered when we’re afforded an unprecedented chance to raise it.
Bryan Buckley “The riskiest thing you can do is play it safe,” said the late, legendary creative director Bill Bernbach. And decades later, Bryan Buckley cites this quote because he believes it has finally taken hold and been taken to heart by most clients.
“I see clients trying to push things as best they know how,” assessed Buckley. “That doesn’t mean everyone is going to do it successfully but clearly the idea of being complacent has come to an end. That era is, I think, finally over.”
Hastening the end to that era, noted Buckley, is the fierce competition among advertisers to get noticed, and the power wielded by consumers to tune into whatever content, message and/or brand they want.
“You have to entertain people, provide value to viewers in order to be able to hold an audience,” affirmed Buckley. “Name any brand and you see the change, sometimes quite dramatic, in their approach. Procter & Gamble may have the same strategic foundation but their content is quite different from what it was ten years ago.”
Yet with change comes at times an even greater need to adhere to some essential constants.
“You need to tell stories, to study, develop and have characters that people can relate to. Character is still essentially the centerpiece of anything I get involved with,” said Buckley. “Whether it’s a big visual effects piece or two people in a room, the human factor is vital. It’s an intangible that hasn’t changed one bit–except that now it’s easier to go against stereotypes, and to get interesting casting and characters on the screen.”
Another change has also paradoxically underscored the continuing value of mass media, observed Buckley, who noted that while audiences have become fragmented across multiple choices and platforms, that has made those television events able to draw large viewership all the more coveted and invaluable.
“This year’s Super Bowl telecast set a record for number of viewers which is astounding these days,” noted Buckley. “It’s like having the coldest winter in the midst of global warming. But sports and major events like the Academy Awards are kind of like the last frontiers, reminders of the power of being able to reach a mass audience. Television can still be a force, and in the case of the Super Bowl it’s a force that’s enhanced by the web, the blogging, the different polls, the post-game analysis of all the commercials. Apple’s ‘1984’ and other great classic Super Bowl commercials continue to be looked at. Apple gets that spot looked at online every year during the Super Bowl as people start to compare it with the current Super Bowl commercials. It’s a buzz-generating public conversation centered on advertising.”
The web is also inviting for Buckley on another level, as reflected in Hungry Man’s own channel (www.HungryManTV.com).
“You can expand beyond the :30 and :60 format, and it’s provided our company’s directors with an essential kind of release for creativity and experimentation. The question is how do you turn this into a successful business model. It’s a matter of sorting that side out but you know you have to continue to be involved and experiment–our directors, agency creatives have been able to strut their stuff beyond thirty seconds on our website and across the Internet generally. It provides room for different types of thinking.”
And while he and others grapple with how to commoditize this original web content, Buckley said that the company’s channel has helped to brand Hungry Man.
“People have a better sense of Hungry Man and what its people can do because of our web content. It’s helping our directors creatively within the company and as a recruiting tool for outside talent.”
One of the early pieces of content on Hungry Man TV was a series of Undercover Cheerleader shorts for which a pilot was developed with the G4 network but a hoped for TV series never came to fruition.
Buckley recalled that the pitfalls of commercial television–including restrictions on what could be presented–entered into the picture. “It’s all part of the learning curve,” he said, expressing confidence, though, that web content can be the springboard for such fare as TV shows, telefilms and theatrical features.
Joe Sedelmaier
One can only wonder what work Joe Sedelmaier would generate in today’s advertising landscape, mining the potential of the Internet, being able to go well beyond :30 and :60 time frames, and having the creative latitude enjoyed by web and cable practitioners that was only dreamed of back when the only game in town was network television.
The wonderment comes based on the breakthrough work Sedelmaier was able to realize within those confines, heralding a new kind and new age of comedy, poking fun at conventional contrived advertising and putting clients like startup FedEx and Alaska Airlines on the map.
He was creating buzz before buzz became a buzzword, turning out work that remains part of pop culture to this day such as senior citizen Clara Peller’s spirited “Where’s The Beef?” proclamation for Wendy’s, and “Fast Talker” for Federal Express.
Yet Sedelmaier isn’t one who pines for the good old days.
“I have people tell me, ‘You lived in the Golden era.’ But the fact is that we had the same hassles back then. And if you look at today compared to then, you still have some good work, some bad work, and a lot of mediocre work. The quality from bad to good and how much you have of each hasn’t changed all that much.”
No matter the era, he observed, “It all starts at the top. You need the Lee Clows, the Carl Allys, the John Kellys, the Vince Fagans, and then others will follow their lead.
“I think of John Kelly, the marketing manager at Alaska Airlines, who was right there on the set with us all the time. John gave us the freedom to be funny and to do the very best advertising we thought was possible. He eventually became the president of Alaska Airlines.
“I think of ad agency creative people like Carl Ally and Emil Gargano [Ally & Gargano]–along with the client’s marketing director Vince Fagan–who made the Federal Express work possible, back when the dominant notion was that humor wouldn’t work, that people would only remember the joke but not the product. That was a pile of crap and guys like Carl, Emil and Vince destroyed the myth that funny doesn’t sell. You could make fun of businessmen–and businessmen would laugh because they thought that guy wasn’t them. But there’s a key distinction to be made. It’s not just the joke, it’s the storytelling that gets you to the joke. Good comedy is all in the telling.”
Sedelmaier, who stopped directing commercials some 11 years ago, has remained active, helming the short OpenMinds which was a 2003 Sundance Film Festival selection, and teaming with his producer Marsie Wallach on a new DVD retrospective of his spots and shorts.
Sedelmaier is also slated to serve as a judge on the Grand Jury for this year’s New York Festivals International Advertising Awards. This comes one year after he received the New York Festivals’ Lifetime Achievement Award. (Also earning the Lifetime honor last year was lauded ad man Neil French, a former WPP creative director and a pioneer in Asian advertising, who too is on the 2010 New York Festivals International Awards Grand Jury).
As for his take on today’s filmmaking landscape, Sedelmaier marvels at the amazing leap that technology has taken in recent years.
“Technology got me into the business a little over forty years ago,” he recalled. “You had the Mitchell camera, enormous, unwieldy lights, the cost was prohibitive trying to enter the marketplace and being able to do something professional.
“But then the Arriflex camera came, you didn’t need a massive sound truck anymore, and I was able,” related Sedelmaier, “to start my film production company in Chicago in 1967 for about $30,000.”
Fast forward to today and the cost of entry has become even more affordable, opening the door for new voices to be heard.., which is a healthy dynamic, Sedelmaier affirmed.
“Digital has allowed new talent to break in, enabling them to show what they can do. Innovations like the digital cameras, Final Cut Pro, have opened up opportunities and access. To me what’s important,” noted Sedelmaier, “is that young filmmakers can now experiment and grow because they can afford to fail.”
Click here to read Part I of this series. Hear from…
Lee Clow, chief creative officer/global director, Media Arts, TBWA Worldwide, and chairman, TBWA/Media Arts Lab
Bob Giraldi, award-winning director, Giraldi Media
Larry Bridges, director/editor & founder, Red Car
Robert Greenberg, chairman/CEO/global chief creative officer, R/GA
Click here to read Part II of this series. Hear from…
Rich Silverstein, co-chairman/creative director, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco
Stephen Dickstein, global president/managing partner, The Sweet Shop
Phil Geier, former Interpublic Group CEO and current chairman, The Geier Group, New York
Click here to read Part IV of this series. Hear from…
Dan Wieden, founder and CEO, Wieden+Kennedy
Susan Credle. chief creative officer, Leo Burnett North America
Noan Murro, award-winning director Noam Murro, Biscuit Filmworks, Los Angeles
Click here to read Part V of this series. Hear from…
Tony Granger, global chief creative officer, Young & Rubicam
Kevin Roddy, chief creative officer, Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), NY
Kristi VandenBosch, CEO, Publicis & Hal Riney
Click here to read Part VI of this series. Hear from…
David Lubars, chairman/chief creative officer, BBDO North America
Jon Kamen, chairman & CEO, @radical.media
Stefan Sonnenfeld. president/managing director, Company 3 & oversees features and commercials business, Ascent Media’s Creative Services
