Michael Patrick Jann is not afraid to admit he’s been watching a lot of Indian musicals lately. The director, who works out of bicoastal HKM Productions, says that he finds their no-holds-barred style liberating. Although he hasn’t featured dozens of choreographed dancers in his commercials, he has displayed a comic imagination, evidenced in spots from the popular "sock puppet" campaign for pets.com via TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco.
Jann attributes the success of the pets.com spots-"Delivery" and "Parking Lot"-to his and the agency’s thoughtful development of the basic idea of having a "spokes-thing." Jann invented a saucy sock puppet that plays a sort of roving reporter role for pets.com. Jann says he wanted a character who would have "a quirky sensibility grounded in a real person."
That real person is Michael Black, Jann’s poker buddy, former New York University classmate and co-member of The State comedy troupe. While at NYU, Jann did freelance work for MTV. He recalls the network basically saying, "’Here’s three hundred bucks. We need nine minutes of television. Here’s a camera and a car. Figure it out.’" Jann also worked on MTV’s 25th anniversary special for Rolling Stone, for which he generated three-minute video packages incorporating the magazine’s covers from its origins to the present day. Jann says that experience was "really great. It was like boot camp."
Jann and his fellow State members also starred in The State variety show, which aired on MTV for two-and-a-half years. Jann wrote, directed and acted in skits, and says his experiences directing, writing and acting taught him an important lesson: "Funny comes first. People have to laugh, so everything else needs to work in support of whatever the joke is." He also learned that this focus on the heart of the joke must be accompanied by the ability to explain how one intends to execute it. This lesson, it seems, was learned the hard way. "There’s really nothing more awful than eleven people arguing about a joke," he remarks.
New Frontier
Jann recently applied his talents to campaigns for Kellogg’s and VarsityBooks.com, an online textbook seller, both via Leo Burnett Co., Chicago. His success with pets.com invites questions about how he views the explosive growth of Web retailing. "The great thing about it for advertisers is that there’s a billion new companies, all of which want to stamp their logo into everybody’s consciousness in the most impressive and eye-catching way," explains Jann. He says he’s found it refreshing to work with dot-com clients, some of which say to his ideas, "’Yeah, let’s do that. We want to make an impression,’" rather than "’No, no, no, we don’t do that,’" as more staid and traditional companies have done.
Despite the creative free-for-all that dot-com advertising has inspired, Jann has seen a growing sophistication in Web site advertising, and it’s a development he welcomes. "Companies need someone to provide them with a distinctive on-air voice, and that’s great for me because that’s what I do."
Jann says that his favorite recent work is "High Dive" for Kellogg’s. It was a project in which he got, in his words, "accidental freedom." It seems that Kellogg’s mandated a change in the original idea after the job had been awarded, and Jann and the agency creatives had less than 24 hours to come up with a new concept to advertise its Snack ‘Ums product. After spending an evening bouncing ideas around with agency producer Sean Pinney and several others at Burnett, he decided to turn in. The next morning he woke up with a fully-formed idea. He pitched it, and everyone liked it.
The spot features an 11-year-old boy at a motel pool. He approaches the low diving board dramatically, gathering the attention of the other guests. Once on the board, he throws a handful of Snack’Ums into the air, does an elaborate dive, catches the snacks in his mouth-then belly-flops into the pool.
"High Dive" shares an accent on character with Jann’s pets.com work. The director prefers to work outward from the character, creating a full world to support a spot’s premise. With such an emphasis on character, casting is crucial, and Jann says that he tries to look beyond the normal choices to find people who will embody the characters he wants, even if they aren’t skilled actors. The boy in the Kellogg’s spot, for example, was found by a production manager Jann had sent out with a video camera to visit pools and interview kids. "It’s really an intense effort," he says of casting, "but if you’re looking for something special, you really have to throw the net out as far as it can possibly be thrown."
Jann doesn’t like being hemmed in. He recounts a recent disappointing experience where he pitched an idea over the phone to an unidentified agency, and everybody loved it. Unfortunately, the agency didn’t relate the idea to the client, who rejected the idea when they finally did hear of it. Jann responded by pitching several more ideas, but by that time he sensed that the agency was far too afraid of the client to accept them. The director essentially threw up his hands and just did what he was told. The agency and the client were satisfied with the result; Jann was not. The story led him to a point he makes frequently when talking about directing: "You have to be fluid, you have to want to make things better."
In recent work he has generally been allowed that freedom. In Jann’s view, this success has flowed in large part from his experience directing the feature film Drop Dead Gorgeous, a mockumentary about a Minnesota beauty pageant. Jann says that the film gave him an enormous amount of confidence and brought him a fuller consciousness of how to create a whole world around a premise. "Having done the movie, my spots are two hundred percent better," he says, adding that the support staff he’s put together since making the film has also been committed to "stepping up their game."
With two more feature projects in development-one about fencing, and another about a rock journalist-and bright prospects in the spot world, these are good times for Jann. "I really feel like I’m creatively starting to crest a wave," he says.c
