Creating campaigns beyond the 30 and 60-second formats is fast becoming standard operating procedure. Integrated campaigns–with viral ads, Webisodes, DVDs and other elements–represent an emerging creative outlet for directors and the production companies that represent them. So despite their relatively minuscule budgets, these projects have become attractive to production houses.
“Integrated campaigns are providing an enormous sense of freedom for both emerging and established directors,” says Bonnie Goldfarb, partner/executive producer at harvest, Santa Monica. “These projects are helping to either invigorate or reinvigorate [directors and production companies]…because the restrictions we find in network television don’t apply. Often, the length of spots can vary and they needn’t be packaged up into extremely confining parameters. We’re used to telling twenty-six second stories with a four second tag; that same spot can now be forty-one seconds or sixty-two seconds. Mostly agency concepts benefit from allowing ideas to breathe and these new formats speak to that quite nicely.”
“I’m absolutely in love with the new way that brands can communicate through the whole integrated campaign,” states James Rouse, a director with Outsider, London and Santa Monica. “It enables a brand to speak on a much more one-to-one level with a consumer and actually engage them, and talk to them on a one-to-one basis” Rouse, who works extensively with The Viral Factory, a London shop that specializes in creating viral advertising (Outsider has a stake in the company), splits his time about 50/50 between broadcast TV spots and viral ads. In the latter space, he’s directed some of the more emailed-about ads out there, including the groundbreaking Trojan package comprising ads such as “Precision Vaulting,” out of Media Therapy, London, and produced via The Viral Factory. More recently, he directed “Ravenstoke,” a viral for Lynx that featured an Alaskan town spraying itself with Lynx in an effort to attract more women. (Creative and production was handled by The Viral Factory.) While Rouse cut his directorial chops on virals, he never viewed them as just a steppingstone to more lucrative spot projects. “It’s not a forward-thinking way to think of virals as a way of breaking into the commercials market,” he notes. “That’s strikes me as going backwards. People should go into making virals because that’s the way forward.” Rouse notes that traditional advertising appears to be opening up a bit, taking inspiration from Web-based projects or virals or games. But he added that traditional commercial work is inherently different from sponsored content, simply because consumers seek out the latter, while the former is front and center during a viewing experience. Although a recent project he worked on, Slim Jim’s “Back Flop,” “Mud King,” “Pipe Pain,” and “Snow Bank,” out of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Miami, which feature the “Fairy Snapmother” encouraging youths about to engage in extreme sport, blurred the dividing line a bit.. “I thought actually they were really close to being sponsored entertainment, first and foremost,” he notes. “They still feel a bit like ads, but they were possibly the closest thing I felt might succeed in a world were people [seek out the content].”
Indeed Frank Scherma, president of bicoastal/international @radical.media, a company that’s long been active with numerous forms of sponsored content, believes there are many opportunities for both emerging and established directors in this new space. “I think as filmmakers, everybody is really interested in how this works,” he says. “They’re all open to the ideas, trying to figure it out, and learning about it–they’re all excited.”
Roy Skillicorn and Blair Stribley, partners in Backyard Productions, Venice, Calif. (along with director Rob Pritts), believe all the directors on their shop’s roster, including the new ones, can benefit creatively from working in the new spaces of advertising. To that end, the company maintains Seed (partnering in the shop is director John Immesoete, a former creative at DDB Chicago), a satellite that acts as a conduit for projects in which Backyard directors play an active creative role, and Transistor Studios, a bicoastal shop specializing in motion graphics, Web, print and DVD design. “Our job is to give [the directors] opportunities in diverse fields,” says Skillicorn. “What we’ve done with Transistor and Seed is give people opportunities in broadcast, in branded entertainment. We’re giving them Webisodes, different platforms, and I think that a real exciting thing for a director.” And the fact that new media offers strong creative license certainly doesn’t hurt a director. “The key for a young director is not unlike the key for established directors,” says Stribley, “which is to get creative opportunities that really showcase what a director is good at, and is able to put their vision, their stamp, their personality on.”
There are advantages, though, for a younger director, notes Scherma. Experience in branded or sponsored content can assuage an agency when a director takes on traditional spot projects. “When you make these stories for a brand, you start to understand right off the bat that there is a brand involved here. We’re not trying to hit people over the head with it, but there is a message about this brand we need to get across–and we need to get it across smartly,” explains Scherma. He added that this perspective is key when up-and-coming directors then start doing TV commercials. “It’s not like some of these kids out of film school or someone who’s done movies who doesn’t understand what the brand has to do with it. We’re still in the business of getting this information out to the consumer.”
And getting that information to a consumer, notes Derek Cianfrance, a director with @radcial.media, is all about the story, whether its via online films or virals or spots. “I think I’ve been on the forefront of this whole branded content [space], which has really been beautiful for me,” says Cianfrance, who has directed two season of Nike’s Battlegrounds series, which airs on MTV and MTV2, and was created in part by Wieden + Kennedy (W+K), Portland, Ore. He also directed the Lincoln Mercury online short film effort, Meet The Lucky Ones, out of Young & Rubicam Detroit, Dearborn, Mich., and Kirt Gunn Associates, New York. “I’ve been able to tell stories with a brand associated with it, and have been able to work with some really great stories.”
CREATIVE LICENSE
The new frontiers of advertising provide the chance to work creatively across many platforms, and to have a brand truly interact with consumers. Just ask Mike Monello, a partner/director at Campfire, New York, a content creation company that’s worked on several high profile integrated campaigns, including the Sharp Aquos “More to See” endeavor and the ESPN/Sega “Beta 7” package, both out of W+K, New York, and the more recent Audi A3 “Art of the Heist” saga for McKinney, Raleigh, N.C. “I love these projects, because we’re not reinventing the wheel, but each time you’re taking on something completely new and the challenge is great,” says Monello. “And the potential [is exciting]–to be working on something where the audience is seeking it out, [and spreading it]. … For something like this, where you’re actually creating something that people are seeking out and enjoying, and it works for the client as well, that’s a lot of fun.”
Monello notes however, that sometimes there are challenges in working on highly integrated projects that unfold over time, with complicated ongoing stories. “It’s difficult in that the structure of agencies right now is you have these creatives who are working on things on a day-to-day basis, then you have creative directors who pop in and give comments,” says Monello. “But when you’re working on a story, and working on a narrative that unfolds in real time, it’s very difficult to pop in a month into an ongoing story, and make a suggestion like you would on a :30…If your story doesn’t feel authentic, people are going to leave, then you have nothing. It can be difficult. There’s definitely a part of the process that’s about kind of getting the agencies to work with smaller teams who are more heavily involved with us [and supporting them over the long haul].”
Budgets, particularly in the viral environment, are often small, something production companies are willing to deal with if the creative is right. “Advertisers are more bottom-line conscious.” says Tom Rossano, the New York-based executive producer of bicoastal/international Hungry Man, and a member of the board of directors of the Association of Independent Commercial Producers’ (AICP) East Coast chapter. “They are looking for efficient ways of getting out a message. A viral ad has that impact. It can be made for a small amount of money, it can be targeted to a small segment who are going to tell so many people that it multiples from there.” Hungry Man partner/director Bryan Buckley helmed the Mini Cooper “Counterfeit” multimedia effort out of CP+B, while Brendan Gibbons recently directed a series of viral ads for Verizon and McCann Erickson New York. “The budgets are low, but if the ideas are really creative from Hungry Man’s standpoint, if the idea is really good, and the money is really shit, we’re going to do it,” explains Rossano. “We’ve always done that, so that’s really our mentality…We never want to lose the job over money; we just really want to be fair about it.”
“From the production point of view, the budgets for these emerging formats cannot be compared to the budgets we have established for network television,” says harvest’s Goldfarb. “We are being forced to review the technological needs for these mediums. It seems the most efficient use might be to package concepts for clients that cross over and include versioning for network, to Internet, to branded content. What I see happening is that production dollars for television are shrinking and those dollars aren’t relocating themselves yet. And when they do relocate, it will be a different sensibility than what we are accustomed to in television commercial production.”
Scherma of @radcial.media agrees, noting that there really is no model in place as of yet, and budgets can vary from high to low to in between, depending on what’s called for. “It’s a little wild, wild west,” he says, “and I think the wild west thing is going to last a little bit longer, because I don’t think it’s just the advertising community that’s trying to figure it out,” he relates, pointing to the changing nature of television and movie production. “I think until the dust settles, it’s going to be a little wild. which could be fun.”