1) While ‘mobile’ and ‘digital video’ were justifiably talked about a lot, there also has been a renewed interest in creative ideas that transcend the medium. Bigger campaign idea vs one-off activations. This is a very good thing.
2) We were definitely looking to hire diverse skill sets – to bring new expertise into the agency. And every new hire is an opportunity to do this.
3) We just broke our first big campaign for the New York Lottery – “You’d Make a Way Better Rich Person”. I love that the campaign speaks to a cultural truth, and how the idea can come to life in so many ways. We also just launched a holiday idea for Office Depot OfficeMax called “The Co-Worker Collection”. It started with a very simple digital business idea, but became way more.
Thomas Murphy Co-Chief Creative Officer McCann New York
When Lucy Walker debuted her harrowing documentary about California wildfires, "Bring Your Own Brigade," at Sundance in 2021, it was during peak COVID. Not the best time for a film on a wholly different scourge.
"It was really hard," the Oscar-nominated filmmaker says now. "I didn't blame people for not wanting to watch a film about the fires in the middle of the pandemic, because it was just too much horror."
And so the film, though acclaimed — it was named one of the 10 best films of the year by the New York Times – didn't reach an audience as large as Walker had hoped, with its urgent display of the human cost of wildfires and its tough, crucial questions for the future.
That could change. Walker thinks people may now be more receptive to her message, given the devastating wildfires that have wrought havoc on Los Angeles itself the past week. Firefighters were preparing on Tuesday to attack new blazes amid warnings that winds combined with severely dry conditions created a " particularly dangerous situation."
"This is probably the moment where it becomes undeniable," she said in an interview.
She added: "It does feel like people are now asking the question that I was asking a few years ago, like, 'Is it safe to live in Los Angeles? And why is this happening, and what can we do about it? And the good news is that there are some things we can do about it. What's tricky is that they're really hard to accomplish."
Documenting the human cost, confronting complacency
In "Bring Your Own Brigade" (available on Paramount+), Walker portrays in sometimes terrifying detail the devastation caused by two wildfires on the same day in 2018, products of the same wind event — the Camp Fire that engulfed the... Read More
