By Christine Champagne

The three-spot Crest “You can say anything with a smile” campaign directed by Harold Einstein of bicoastal/international Station Film won a Gold Lion for campaign at the 2008 Cannes International Advertising Festival–not bad for a director only a year into his career at that juncture.
    Created by Saatchi & Saatchi, New York, the absurdly funny Crest campaign is made up of three commercials–“Bulldozer,” “Lice” and “Prenup”–that find people sporting smiles while breaking bad news. Case in point: “Bulldozer,” featured as a SHOOT Top Spot, has a construction worker informing some kids that he is about to demolish their playground.
    Not one person on the receiving end of the bad news in the Crest spots freaks out, and you can see why they don’t–the smiling gentlemen delivering all of the downers seem so incredibly sweet and sincere.
    While the overall concept for the Crest campaign is clever, the spots ultimately succeed on the strength of the casting/performances.
    It’s all about the actors when you talk to Einstein about directing. “I think the reason I’m directing is because more than anything else, I love being around actors,” said Einstein, expressing his empathy for any performer who has to walk onto a set full of people who don’t react but just stare into monitors. “It’s different than walking onto a stage. You walk onto a set and do something funny, and you don’t hear anyone laughing.”
    The director continued: “To find really talented people who can do that and to work with them and, hopefully, get them to do things they didn’t even know they could do, that’s what this job is about for me.”
    Einstein, who grew up in Los Angeles, seemed destined for a career as a performer himself. A guitarist, he attended a performing arts high school in Los Angeles, then studied music at the University of Southern California with the intention of becoming a studio guitar player/composer/arranger.
    Eventually, he was doing studio work and playing in a band, but Einstein just couldn’t get into the groove. “All of the guys that were in the band with me, if they couldn’t play music, they would have died. It was their oxygen. I was as close to feeling that as you could get without stepping over that line,” Einstein shared, “and I felt like if I couldn’t cross that line, then maybe music wasn’t the perfect thing for me.”
    Einstein had always enjoyed writing, and before long, he was taking formal classes in agency copywriting. He put a book together and landed his first job as a copywriter at Ketchum in Los Angeles. After two years at Ketchum, Einstein crisscrossed the country, doing stints at DDB Chicago, New York’s Cliff Freeman & Partners, BBDO West in Los Angeles, Portland’s Wieden + Kennedy and Goodby Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, working on campaigns for clients like Little Caesars, Guinness and HP over the years.
    As he moved up the agency ranks, Einstein found himself writing less and less, so seven years ago he gave up full-time employment to become a freelance copywriter, and he spent a lot of time writing with Gerry Graf as Graf, who is currently the chief creative officer at Saatchi & Saatchi, New York, went from agency to agency. The two men were actually employed by Goodby at the same time, Einstein noted, and they even sat across from each other but never got to work together back then.
    One of their post-Goodby collaborations gave Einstein a chance to dip a toe into directing–while Graf was at New York’s TBWA/Chiat/Day, the duo wrote some Sprint spots, and the agency asked Einstein to direct the batch, including “Wonderful Wheel,” which centers on a man so impressed with Sprint’s Fair and Flexible plan that he’s at a loss for words and must rely on Sprint’s spinning wheel of adjectives to express his thoughts.
    “I had so much fun directing those spots I kept going,” Einstein said. His next directorial effort was a spec spot for FedEx titled “Whee.” He had written the spot with Graf back when Graf was at BBDO New York, but it never got made. In “Whee,” we see a supervisor’s pacemaker going off after he learns that an employee didn’t use FedEx to ship important packages.
    Both the Sprint campaign and the FedEx spec were run through bicoastal/international Hungry Man, and Einstein signed with the production company in June 2007. He rounded out his reel while at Hungry Man by writing and directing a short film called Eulogy for Jack. The film, which depicts a man composing a eulogy for a friend as he goes through his morning routine, has been screened at numerous film festivals.
    Einstein’s run at Hungry Man was brief. When Hungry Man founder/managing partner Steve Orent left to form Station Film last February, Einstein followed. “I don’t think I’d be doing this without him because he’s a very good mentor, and he moves through this industry in a way that I admire,” Einstein praised.
    Einstein’s first job through Station Film was a slyly humorous commercial for Avis out of McCann Erickson, New York, titled “Accents.” Promoting Avis’ role as the official rental car of the New York Yankees, the spot demonstrates how baseball fans can determine team allegiance simply through a person’s accent.
    More recently, Einstein directed a commercial for Motorola called “Chase” that was a joint effort between Ogilvy & Mather’s offices in  New York and Buenos Aires. In the spot, a guy wants to use his cell phone to identify a song that he hears blasting from a car and embarks on a mad scramble that takes him through locations including a pet store, a music shop and a pool hall before he catches up to the car, stops it and identifies the song–it is Wyclef Jean’s “Touch Your Button.” As it just so happens, Wyclef Jean is behind the wheel of the vehicle.
    “Chase” stands out on Einstein’s reel for being action-oriented and not humor/dialogue driven like the rest of his spot work. Explaining his interest in the assignment, Einstein related, “I had seen lots and lots of spots with outdoor chases–creating and shooting a chase that took place predominantly indoors was very intriguing to me.”
    That said, Einstein isn’t turning his back on the dialogue-driven comedy that has won him acclaim so early in his career as a director. “It’s very important for me to establish–I hate to say a niche, but who I can be before I can be everything,” Einstein reasoned, “and so what I’m interested in right now is stuff that’s most reflective of what I loved when I was just writing–funny, dialogue-driven stuff. That’s the sweet spot.”

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