Bob Giraldi had a dream: to create an agency that was a production company and a production company that was an agency.
How’s that again?
"Certain clients always told me that they didn’t like dealing with the agency bureaucracy," says Giraldi, the Clio-winning director and partner in bicoastal Giraldi Suarez. "They wanted to deal directly with the people who would be coping with a particular creative problem."
"Agencies may do great work," adds David Sklaver, a former president of now defunct Wells Rich Greene BDDP, "but oftentimes an agency will sell you whatever [talent] they have on the shelf. To them, it doesn’t make sense to pay salaries, and then hire a freelancer. If they have to go outside, to them, that means the account is in trouble. It’s an admission that they can’t solve the problem with the talent they have. I don’t feel that is always the best way."
The solution? Say hello to the Artustry Partnership, a relatively new idea in advertising that is being promulgated by co-founders Giraldi and his longtime partner Phil Suarez, Sklaver, and Bill Perna, executive producer of bicoastal Voyeur Films, a satellite of Giraldi Suarez. Not quite an agency and not really a production company, the New York-based boutique purportedly offers the best of both worlds, presenting talent, services, ideas and, presumably, none of the drawbacks of the agency or production worlds.
"David and I were talking and said where is the business now?" recalls Giraldi. "We thought that there is a new entrepreneurial flavor; young, hip ‘downtown’ clients do not want to go the traditional route of the agency. And we felt production companies were pulling off incredible logistical feats. So we said, ‘Why not apply that concept and theory to creative help?’ There are a lot of clients out there who want to have creative partnering."
Adds Sklaver: "I was always enamored of the production company model in which people pulled off incredible tasks in a timely way with independent people. It was highly charged, instantaneous team building. And they would do as complex a thing as a film or commercial. Why not do that for the strategy and creation part?"
Trading on its founders’ can-do reputation, Artustry opened last fall, in a Soho adjacent office shared by Giraldi Suarez and Voyeur, and quickly demonstrated its team’s abilities. A recent promotional campaign for Texaco, for instance, involved shooting short films that sold the oil company’s virtues to business partners and investors around the world. The pieces had to be as catchy as commercials but as factually detailed as documentaries. "I call it a job of corporate anthropology," Sklaver says. "We really had to dig in and understand the psychology of the company. We also had to appear in many different venues."
Rather than use a traditional copywriter/creative team to develop the spots, Artustry hired Murray Bruce, a director on the TV reality series America’s Most Wanted: America Fights Back. "We turned investigative reporting on its ear," claims Sklaver. "We looked for heroes, not villains. Who was better at digging than an investigative reporter?"
After filming around the world, the company designed informational packages that could be shown as films, on video, and over the Internet. "We created a whole new way for Texaco to communicate with an audience," Sklaver says. "We did different versions of the piece for different markets. We were adaptable."
Adaptability, in fact, is a key word at Artustry, which has landed such clients as Chase Manhattan Bank, Tabacalera de Espana, Gigno Trattoria, AMBI, Trump Properties, and Today’s Man. Sklaver notes that the company is currently working on selling and marketing a TV series about boxing and "we’re about to launch a major campaign for a nutritional company, which I can’t discuss at this time."
The team has created everything from a six-minute promotional video for Trump to a Tabacalera de Espana cigar ad, written by Dan Mountain, a freelance copywriter, which mocks the tradition of other cigar ads: "The lacy, white smoke and elegant, easy fragrance made its gentle way through the early evening air, reminding him of…oops, wrong cigar. Save the flowery poetry for some other time … This cigar is all cigar and proud to let you know it. Strong. Honest. Quintero."
Artusts & Writers
Sklaver, who is responsible for the company’s day-to-day operations, adds that Artustry is "not an ad agency and we’re not perceived as one. We call ourselves a ‘communications architect.’ Major agencies make money by placing an ad; we make money by solving problems, whether it’s doing a print advertisement, a promotional film, or a direct marketing piece."
That hybrid nature allows Giraldi and Perna-who both head up more traditional production companies of their own-to straddle the fence between the different operations. "One day, I’m a working film director, the next day I’m an executive meeting with the clients about ideas for promotions," Giraldi notes.
But the formation of Artustry also raises questions of conflicting loyalties. Can Artustry exist without drawing on a client base brought in from Giraldi Suarez and Voyeur? Giraldi and Perna are dismissive of such talk, saying that the operations are separate but complementary. "Since Artustry was founded, Voyeur has done only one production for it." Perna notes, referring to a Trump Properties’ sales film. "Artustry draws on Voyeur’s data base, but work does not necessarily flow between the companies." Although, Voyeur is about to produce its second Artustry job, this one for Today’s Man.
"People have said to me, ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ " adds Giraldi. " ‘You’re competing against agencies that have fed you for 30 years.’ But I’m not going up against big agencies; we’re not looking to take jobs. We’re offering opportunities. I meet clients every single week as a film director. I’d be a schmuck to try and solicit them. People come to us because of who we are and our ideas."
Giraldi argues that the company is not about finding work for him as a film director but "about finding the best solutions. Artustry goes outside. We’ll look at what a particular client needs, and then go out and get the best people for the job."
"We hire whoever is appropriate, from whatever field," explains Perna. "I’m constantly on the lookout for talent. We’ve got a pretty good resource database, as well."
As an example, Sklaver points to the promotional film Artustry shot for Trump Properties. Co-directed by Giraldi and Thomas Mignone (who at the time was with Voyeur’s music video division), the piece is a flashy but informative introduction to another Trump building project, with Trump himself selling the site, riding around in a helicopter over the Big Apple. "We got Mignone from music videos," says Sklaver. "If we had gone the traditional corporate route, we would have gone with someone else. But this guy was different and brought a different feel to the piece."
Working with freelancers on a job-to-job basis cuts back overhead-Artustry employs only a handful of full-timers-and allows the company to go with the ebb and flow of the work. Sklaver says the freelancers like it, too.
"The incentive is different," he notes. "At a big agency, they conduct ‘gang bangs.’ You may have five to seven teams working on a campaign. That doesn’t create an incentive for great work. There is no sense of ownership. In a situation like that, someone feels, ‘Well, if we don’t get it, someone else will.’ We work hard to find the right creative person, and we give them a proprietary interest. We pay for development, and then when the client buys, we pay again. We try to give them a financial and professional interest in the outcome."
Is this the way of the future? Several other production companies have attempted to move into or to invest in creative services-for instance, Denver-based Celluloid Studios has a partial ownership stake in Fusion Idea Lab, a Chicago-based ad agency-but Sklaver says Artustry is different because it is headed up by a former agency type, a production house head, and a director, who all bring unique skills from their different fields (and Giraldi himself is a former agency creative, as well).
"Others have tried to do this, but we’re the only ones combining the skills of a production company, an account manager, and a creative director," notes Sklaver. "A lot of directors hang up a shingle and say they’re an agency and then go ahead and make the same product; whatever they can’t do, they say they’ll job out. But rather than spending money on hiring talent, they’ll just bang it out. Once again, they’re selling ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions. That’s not our philosophy."
Still, Giraldi does think that Artustry is a model for the way things might one day be. "Agencies may delude themselves into thinking they have a long-term relationship with a client, but they are only as good as their last campaign. We live and die by our thinking and the quality of the work we produce. A company like ours has an advantage. Our model is less expensive than [that of a traditional] agency’s because we don’t have that large overhead. Companies like ours can charge based on what the work costs. The money goes into the ideas."
