At next month’s Creative Arts Emmy ceremony in Los Angeles, the winner of the primetime commercial Emmy Award will be announced and honored. This time around, six spots are in the running for TV’s highest honor. Normally there are five nominated spots but a tie in judges’ votes for the fifth slot yielded a sixth nomination.
Three of the nominated entries were 2015 Super Bowl commercials: Budweiser’s “Lost Dog” directed by Jake Scott of RSA Films For Anomaly, New York; Nissan’s “With Dad” directed by Lance Acord of Park Pictures for TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles; and Snickers’ “Brady Bunch” helmed by Jim Jenkins of O Positive for BBDO New York.
The other half of this year’s field of nominated ads consists of: Adobe’s “Dream On” from Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, directed by Mike Landry and Brady Baltezore of the agency’s in-house eLevel studio; Always’ “#LikeAGirl” directed by Lauren Greenfield of Chelsea Pictures for Leo Burnett, Toronto, Chicago and London; and Gatorade’s “Made In New York” directed by Henry-Alex Rubin of Smuggler for TBWA\Chiat\Day LA.
In keeping with what’s become an annual tradition, SHOOT connected by John Leverence, sr. VP of awards at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, for an entertainment industry perspective on the nominated commercials.
The Creative Arts Emmy Awards ceremony is slated for Saturday, Sept. 12, at the Microsoft Theater at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles.
SHOOT: Do you see any themes or trends in this year’s field of nominated commercials?
Leverence: I will begin with a combination–Adobe and Snickers. They are just masterpieces of digital manipulation and integration. Adobe [celebrating 25 years of Photoshop] was particularly interesting with what I’d call three parallel columns. You have the narrative driven by the lyrics of the Aerosmith song [“Dream On”]. There was also a kind of parallelism between the song and the images you’d see. And the third column would be all those little inserts with what an Adobe Photoshop screen looks like.
The lyric “sing for the laughter” shows us a goofy Shrek, a baby with a mustache, for instance. The images also show us standing on the shoulders of professional applications with images from Lord of the Rings, How To Tame Your Dragon, a title card for Gone Girl, The images show that Photoshop is a big league deal, a significant part of the entertainment workplace. There are also surreal images, putting viewers on a sort of trip. It’s a great job of pacing music with images, paying homage to the extraordinary digital power and manipulation of this particular software program.
Snickers meanwhile is a case of brilliant digital integration. Danny Trejo and later Steve Buscemi are put into the Brady Bunch world, all in a wonderfully comic way.
As for another theme or connection, I saw the pattern of a perilous journey–first in Budweiser with the adorable lost puppy making its way home, almost eaten by a wolf towards the end. The Budweiser ad very much reminded me of War Horse, Steven Spielberg’s film where a perilous journey starts out on a farm, takes us through a war, and then the man and the horse come back and end up at home together. It’s a happy ending, a circular narrative path that’s also in this commercial. We start at the stable, a safe place where things are good. Accidentally the puppy gets into a trailer. We see the perilous countryside with the fog rolling in, the wolf coming into view, the heroic rescue of the dog–with the horse and the puppy ultimately reunited.
In the Nissan spot, the dad has a horrible accident on the racetrack and makes his way back home from there.
Even Derek Jeter walking to Yankee Stadium in the Gatorade commercial alludes to a journey. Although he’s on his victory lap, we hear the Sinatra song [“My Way”] about taking his lumps and going on. And the end of the commercial is very much like a Lou Gehrig farewell scene. He takes off his cap before an adoring Yankees crowd and feels like he’s the luckiest man on Earth.
SHOOT: A song, Harry Chapin’s “Cats In The Cradle,” is also a big part of Nissan’s “With Dad.”
Leverence: We see the birth of the boy, the father’s steady progression with his profession, running stock cars on a track in the middle of nowhere to ultimately Formula One racing. When he wins that big Formula One race, he looks into the camera with his wife watching him on TV. There’s this look of recognition between them. He’s done it, shelving his helmet, stopping the narrative of the Chapin song before it finishes with a different ending. When you hear that song at the beginning, there’s an expectation as to where the narrative will go in terms of the father-son relationship. But we find out that the Dad wasn’t going to go down that same path–the song stops before we get to that point. It was very cleverly done.
SHOOT: What’s your take on “#LikeAGirl”?
Leverence: We have five commercials and one PSA in “#LikeAGirl.” I like the way it’s set up as kind of a cold call audition where we see the stigma of running like a girl, throwing like a girl. We are informed that in puberty a girl’s self-esteem drops but it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of looking at someone trying to walk or run a goofy way, we have an actual girl saying that doing things like a girl means doing it as best you can. We see her running aggressively, doing her best. It’s a stunning piece with an inspiring message.
SHOOT: This is a strong field of nominated commercials. How do you assess commercialmaking in general as an art form?
Leverence: Boardwalk Empire is a saga, like a Tolstoy novel. Commercials are like Flannery O’Connor short stories, short fiction that is art unto itself. We have a great collection of nominated commercials this year. It’s wonderful that the Academy has the opportunity to recognize them.
