During his brief tenure as group creative director at FCB, San Francisco, Chuck McBride met with a young director who had flown up from Los Angeles to pitch his ideas for a Levi’s spot. "It was back when they were doing ‘501 Reasons,’ and they wanted to do a girls’ spot for that campaign," McBride recalls. "We’d come up with this ‘mistaken identity’ thing, where cops think a girl is a bank robber and chase her off a bridge into the water. At the end, the cops look over the edge and they think she’s a goner and walk away, but you realize that she’s hanging on to the bottom of the bridge. That was our basic idea." The director’s take on that idea was unusual, to say the least: "He came back with a treatment where all the cops had dogs’ heads."
While he understandably passed on the pitch, McBride clicked with the director, Spike Jonze, of bicoastal/international Satellite, and hired him for another FCB Levi’s spot called "Doctors." That ad went on to receive an Emmy nomination, and a longstanding, successful collaboration began.
Today, McBride is the executive creative director at TBWA/Chiat/ Day, San Francisco, where one of his primary accounts is Levi’s. Recently, McBride experienced a sense of déjà vu when he once again collaborated on a spot for the jeans maker with Jonze. The ad, "Dres-sing Room," which carries the tagline "Make Them Your Own," features people trying on Levi’s in what appears to be a dressing room. The footage of the people trying on the jeans was captured on a security camera. (McBride also works on the Sony PlayStation account, for which he recently did two spots, "Fumble," directed by Kuntz & Maguire—Tom and Mike, respectively—of bicoastal/international Propaganda Films, and "Targets," helmed by Brian Beletic of Satellite. McBride is currently at work on a new package of ads for PlayStation.)
Collaboration
Over the years, McBride and Jonze have worked together on several ads, including Nike’s "The Morning After" via Wieden + Kennedy, Portland, Ore., that recently won the primetime Emmy for best commercial. "It’s really great working with a director who treats me like a writer," says McBride, who moved from his creative director’s post at W+K to TBWA/Chiat/Day in October 1999. "I think directors and writers have a unique relationship because they bounce ideas off of each other. One is using the other, and vice versa. It’s an interesting, organic thing. And it’s certainly the way my experience has been with Spike."
McBride admits he was "a little surprised" when "The Morning After" scored the Emmy. Like many in the industry, he’d thought Budweiser’s multiple-award-winning "Whassup/True," directed by Charles Stone of C&C Films/Storm Films, Brooklyn, N.Y., via DDB Chicago, was a shoo-in.
Still, McBride is proud of the Nike ad. Made while he was still at W+K, "The Morning After" depicts a runner who wakes up on New Year’s Day, 2000, and obliviously jogs past such post-apocalyptic images as armored tanks, escaped zoo animals, detonating bombs and ATM looters. At the spot’s end, he exchanges greetings with another, equally unaware, jogger.
In the original script, however, the destruction wasn’t a surprise, and the runner was more determined than oblivious. The camera first captured the nightmarish Y2K scenes before zeroing in on the man, who was to doggedly wake up and take his morning jog despite the mêlée. "Spike said, ‘Wouldn’t it be funnier if you saw him first, and he just kind of ran through it?’ " McBride remembers. "I thought, ‘It probably would be, huh?’ So as we talked about it, it became him running through chaos without noticing. It seemed cool. But then I said, ‘Wait a minute. This guy wakes up, and he’s just running through chaos? It kind of says he’s a fucking idiot.’ He said, ‘Well, I just know that it’s going to be funnier that way.’ So I thought about it and said, ‘Well, what if he meets another runner along the way, and they just say, ‘Hi. How are you doing?’ Spike said, ‘That’d be good. Let’s write that in."
For McBride, this close collaboration produced ideal results. "It became a situation where we both owned the script a lot," he explains. "When that happens, I think you’ve got the best chance of coming out on the other side with something really good."
On The Move
A creative in every sense of the word, McBride takes great care in choosing directors. A lengthy résumé isn’t essential. In fact, he says, "I love working with first-time people." Far more important to McBride are enthusiasm, originality and, of course, the ability to collaborate with him on the script. It’s proven to be a winning combination. "I’ve seen a lot of the directors I’ve worked with go on to become film directors because of the success they’ve had in commercials," he notes. "It’s fun to be part of the path."
McBride’s own career path has taken more turns than most. "I don’t think I got in this business to stand still," he observes. His first advertising job was as a copywriter at Franklin and Associates, San Diego, Calif., in ’89. Since then the University of San Diego graduate has worked at five different agencies—one of them twice.
Nine months after he began at Franklin, McBride received a call from Tom Cordner at Team One Advertising, El Segundo, Calif. "Tom gave me an opportunity to work in television, whereas most of the stuff in San Diego was print based," recalls McBride, who stayed with Team One for three years, working on the Lexus account. He was then offered a job at W+K’s now shuttered Philadelphia office.
The new situation was less than ideal: "I got out there, and things got ugly pretty quickly with the client, Subaru." W+K lost Subaru, and morale plummeted. Although he did some successful work for clients like ESPN, McBride saw several of his co-workers jump ship. ("You know how it is when you lose a piece of business. No one knows what to do, and people panic.")
When he received an offer from Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, he gladly moved back to the West Coast and dove headfirst into the "Got Milk" campaign. "I remember Jeff [Goodby] saying, ‘This is going to be the hardest type of commercial you’ve ever done.’ And the milk spots were, because they were just sprinkled with nuance. It was incredible.
"After that, that agency exploded in growth," McBride continues. "In a period of two years, we were being courted by Pac Bell. When I had gotten there, there were under a hundred on staff. It was three hundred or something when I was leaving."
He left Goodby to become group creative director at FCB. But he was rocked by more professional turmoil when the Levi’s account shifted to TBWA/Chiat/Day. "I still think I did a good job," he says of his days on Levi’s at FCB. "We really did get people excited. But for some reason, it wasn’t necessarily the direction that the client wanted to go in at the time. I started to learn, in some cases probably the hard way, that clients make the ads."
McBride received his second offer from W+K, this time to work in the Portland office. When he arrived there, however, he found that the agency was on the verge of losing the Nike account. "It was seriously a case of going out of the frying pan and into the fire," he recalls. "At first, I stood by, doing some other things in and around the brand. But then there were some shake-ups, and Hal [Curtis] and I were, in some ways, the only [creatives] left standing." Curtis and McBride took over and resuscitated the Nike account with a range of imaginative, award-winning spots. "Hopefully, it could be viewed that we helped those guys win the business back," says McBride.
The opportunity to move back to San Francisco was part of the reason he went to TBWA/Chiat/Day, where he was hit with an unwelcome bit of déjà vu: The Levi’s account was on shaky ground. "I jumped back into the frying pan again," he says with a laugh. But, this time around, McBride was able to cook up the right recipe.
For Levi’s Engineered Jeans, he came up with the idea of "engineered spots"—extremely simple scenes, often consisting of one basic action—a kiss, for instance, or a motorcycle ride—in which each frame is separate and discernable. He turned to the Icelandic techno rock duo GusGus, a.k.a. Siggi Kinski and Stefan Arni, of Public Works, Santa Monica, a satellite of bicoastal HKM Productions, to direct and compose music for four spots, titled "Run," "Ride," "Dance" and "Kiss." Although Kinski and Arni had little commercial experience, McBride says, "I’d been to one of their shows, and it was one of the most sophisticated audio-visual presentations I’d ever seen."
Levi’s was pleased with the results: "Ultimately, I’ve been told that it was the work that saved the account," relates McBride. Since then, he’s collaborated with Jonze and Michael Haussman of Serious Pictures, London, on Levi’s ads. The latter helmed "Fix It" for Levi’s 569 Loose Straight Jeans. And McBride is content, for now, to stay where he is. "I’m having a gas," he concludes.v