Executive Creative Director
Deutsch LA
1) Brands demanding more digital content – faster and for less money. This year was a tipping point. The metrics are telling clients they simply can’t get the impressions they want via television anymore. TV is still powerful, but for youth brands, in particular, reach is a real challenge. On Taco Bell and Dr Pepper, we’re doing more content, like promoted ads on Facebook and Twitter than ever before. In fact, on Taco Bell, there wasn’t a single assignment where this kind of content wasn’t a deliverable.
2) We’re building out our in-house production department (Steelhead) at Deutsch LA, giving us the ability to produce more content, faster. And we’ve had to shift our thinking to understand how advertising has to behave in these very different environments like Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter. These are radically different canvases, each with different rules, different attention spans and wholly different best practices.
The kids we’re hiring now, simply live and breathe this stuff and see opportunities in this space that I think only digital natives can see. For example, Ken Slater and Andy Pearson, two of our Taco Bell CDs, heard there was going to be a taco emoji and seized on it by inventing the “Taco Emoji Engine”. It rewarded Taco Bell fans for tweeting the new taco emoji + any other emoji with a funny animation or gif from Taco Bell. In the end, we made over 700 original gifs and animations. And this is how we continue to engage and entertain Taco Bell’s fans, despite the fact that they’re watching less TV than ever.
3) Our Breakfast Defectors campaign for Taco Bell. We did a 3-minute film called the “Routine Republic”, which portrayed McDonalds as a bleak breakfast empire, complete with sinister clown police, kiddle-land ballpit moats and, of course, the same old bland breakfast sandwiches. The film had Hollywood film-like scale and director, Michael Spiccia, really killed it. It was the kind of effort you might expect from a video game brand, but it was for a fast food company, which made it very ambitious. To pull it off, we shot in Budapest over four days, in the middle of winter. This posed some challenges as the film concludes with the heroes escaping to a warm, sunny, green Californian hillside Spanish town which was metaphor for Taco Bell. It rained the day we shot that particular scene, but somehow it all worked out.
4) Make more stuff – better and faster. Oh, and for cheaper.
After 20 Years of Acting, Megan Park Finds Her Groove In The Director’s Chair On “My Old Ass”
Megan Park feels a little bad that her movie is making so many people cry. It's not just a single tear either — more like full body sobs.
She didn't set out to make a tearjerker with "My Old Ass," now streaming on Prime Video. She just wanted to tell a story about a young woman in conversation with her older self. The film is quite funny (the dialogue between 18-year-old and almost 40-year-old Elliott happens because of a mushroom trip that includes a Justin Bieber cover), but it packs an emotional punch, too.
Writing, Park said, is often her way of working through things. When she put pen to paper on "My Old Ass," she was a new mom and staying in her childhood bedroom during the pandemic. One night, she and her whole nuclear family slept under the same roof. She didn't know it then, but it would be the last time, and she started wondering what it would be like to have known that.
In the film, older Elliott ( Aubrey Plaza ) advises younger Elliott ( Maisy Stella ) to not be so eager to leave her provincial town, her younger brothers and her parents and to slow down and appreciate things as they are. She also tells her to stay away from a guy named Chad who she meets the next day and discovers that, unfortunately, he's quite cute.
At 38, Park is just getting started as a filmmaker. Her first, "The Fallout," in which Jenna Ortega plays a teen in the aftermath of a school shooting, had one of those pandemic releases that didn't even feel real. But it did get the attention of Margot Robbie 's production company LuckyChap Entertainment, who reached out to Park to see what other ideas she had brewing.
"They were very instrumental in encouraging me to go with it," Park said. "They're just really even-keeled, good people, which makes... Read More