In a joint letter reflecting upon what 2008 has meant for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GSP), San Francisco, co-chairmen/creative directors Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein wrote, “This was the year we decided we should no longer be an advertising agency. In fact, no one should be an advertising agency. They just don’t know it yet.
“Instead, it turned out we should be something that leads our clients to create and embody popular culture in the world at this point in time. Something that puts them into mainstream media well beyond advertising.”
That mainstream placement–continuing in the longstanding “Got Milk?” tradition–certainly was realized in ’08 on behalf of several clients, deploying traditional and interactive media, to the point where SHOOT’s staff found GSP deserving of not only its Agency of the Year honor but also distinction as the top interactive shop of ’08.
Indeed generating a buzz both literally and figuratively speaking was the agency’s work for Haägen-Dazs, a prime example of Messrs. Goodby and Silverstein’s described nirvana of a brand creating its place in contemporary culture.
The media launching pad for Haägen-Dazs was a TV :30 which told a tragic love story of operatic proportions (SHOOT Top Spot, 5/9). The protagonists in “Opera” were a honey bee and a flower.
The commercial opens on a bee buzzing around near a garden shed when he hears the call of a flower in need of pollination. He goes to her and gets oh so close. But a strong wind blows, and despite a valiant effort to connect, the bee is blown away.
“Honey bees are dying, and we rely on them for many of our natural ingredients,” relates a female voiceover. She implores us to “help us save them.”
Viewers are directed to Helpthehoneybees.com where they can learn more about the dwindling honey bee population. The site also introduces us to the newly created Haägen-Dazs Vanilla Honey Bee flavor, which blends vanilla with a taste of honey.
According to Steve Simpson, partner/creative director at GSP, agency planner Christine Chen came up with the conceptual springboard for the campaign, her research uncovering the fact that honey bees, the creatures responsible for pollinating one-third of the food we eat, are disappearing at an alarming rate. America’s bee population, for instance, fell 30 percent in the past year and no one knows why.
Simpson observed it wasn’t all that long ago “when creatives would get up and leave the room when the media guys started talking. Now planning is so important in contributing to the creative process. We creatives can’t be prima donnas anymore. We have learned to play with others. The planners can be the prima donnas now–although Christine is as nice and unassuming a person as you’d ever want to meet.”
The creatives pitched a Help Save The Honey Bees-themed campaign to Haägen-Dazs, which relies on natural ingredients like strawberries and blueberries for its ice cream, and the client immediately embraced the idea.
The campaign unfolded with “Opera,” a website, viral videos and print ads supporting the new flavor. Chen came up with the idea of the print ads growing into flowers when planted in soil.
In a single week, news of the campaign appeared in some 300 newspapers, magazines, on TV and cable shows. And increased awareness of the honey bee issue resulted in Haägen-Dazs execs testifying on June 24 before the U.S. Senate about the plight and flight of the bees.
“It’s bringing purpose and relevance to a company,” related Goodby. “Haägen-Dazs can’t just be a high-end ice cream for yuppies. It has to represent much more than that. For years, we talked about the purity and simplicity of its ingredients, doing a couple of commercials tied to that. But this issue brought everything to a whole new level, giving the Haägen-Dazs brand a purpose that people care about in their hearts.”
Silverstein observed, “It’s no longer enough to make an ad. Now you have to show how the company you are marketing fits into the social fabric of the world. If your company is not relevant in some way, you’re probably doomed. The connection, though, has to be real. Without the honey bees, Haägen-Dazs cannot make the same quality ice cream. Once you have the story to tell, then you have the basis for a campaign.”
And this was a campaign, added Silverstein, “that you could not have done easily years ago. The web has opened us up to thinking differently about filmmaking. You make a lovely film with a message that has a social conscience–from there you go to a very deep website and then to congressional testimony. We have more arrows in our quiver today and they’re all stitched together. It all comes down to storytelling but now we can tell stories across many more different media, some of which consumers can meaningfully interact with.”
White Gold This cultural relevance–which can entail clients creating and/or embodying pop culture–was evident on assorted fronts at GSP in ’08.
“The cool thing about this agency,” said partner/creative director Jamie Barrett, “is that there are great pockets of talent all over the building. Looking back on 2008, there was great work coming out of here that I wasn’t even remotely aware of until I saw it.”
On that score, Barrett cited the White Gold work for the California Milk Processor Board. “I saw it for the first time and went, ‘Holy shit!,’ recalled Barrett, who noted that writers Andrew Bancroft and Paul Charney showed White Gold to him initially. “I vaguely remember thinking ‘how good can this really be?’ before I looked at it. It was like, there have been so many musical numbers done in advertising over the years, how could they make this one seem like something dramatically new?
“But they did. And I loved that, that greatness was happening about fifty feet away from me and even though I had nothing to do with it, I could share in its awesomeness.”
The brief was to make teens think milk was as cool as Red Bull. The means toward that end was a spandex-clad rock star brandishing a guitar full of milk. Lead performer White Gold and his posse, the Calcium Twins, were launched on a MySpace page. Ultimately the act had five songs on iTunes, three full-length music videos and thousands of 12 to 17-year-old fans who thought the band was real.
Split personality Also seeping its way into mainstream culture was the split screen campaign for this year’s NBA playoffs, in which Barrett had a lead creative hand. A split screen showed half the faces of two star NBA combatants, making one composite face uttering the same dreams, philosophies and competitive mantras with a single goal in mind–being the one to win the NBA championship.
The campaign resonated not only with pro basketball fans but also captured the imagination of the public at large. Soon there was a Saturday Night Live parody, a knockoff in an Adam Sandler movie, a bit on funnyordie.com and the piece de resistance, a Time Magazine cover during the intense Democratic presidential primary season with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton presented split screen style–the accompanying caption being that which tagged the NBA campaign: “There can only be one.”
Ringing true A TV campaign for Sprint/Nextel similarly captured and captivated public sentiment. The premise had regular working class people moving into new roles, running the world more smoothly than the alleged professionals. A group of roadies efficiently run an airline using Sprint/Nextel push-to-talk phones.
And perhaps most poignantly, fire fighters handle the business of the U.S. Senate–this during an era when our elected officials seemingly contribute to a dysfunctional government that has betrayed America’s working class. Again, it’s a concept that registered with viewers everywhere.
Engine Room Meanwhile HP worked its way into pop culture in ’08 with Engine Room, an original short-form TV series which teamed GSP with MTV and media firm Zenith Optimedia. The series shows four teams from different continents displaying their artistic chops in such disciplines as film, animation, sound mixing, web and graphic design using assorted HP resources ranging from notebook PCs to workstations, DreamColor displays, software, smartphones and the like. The winning team–as judged by such notables as graphic designer/five-time Grammy nominee Stefan Sagmeister, hip-hop artist Aesop Rock and Guggenheim Museum chief curator Nancy Spector–will earn a $400,000 cash prize.
Airing on MTVU in the U.S. and mainstay MTV outlets overseas, the series also found life on MTV’s online and mobile screens, inviting viewers who are part of an online community of artists to interact with the teams, respond to creative challenges and upload their own work. Special guest artists–such as director Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Zack and Miri Make a Porno) and singer/songwriter/musician Moby–make surprise appearances before the Engine Room contestants and the online community. The quartet of four-person teams was culled from 2,000 artists who entered their work for consideration in a massive user-generated content contest.
Check-in time Speaking of online, Frito-Lay’s Doritos wanted to revive old flavors from the dead. So GSP created a site, Hotel626.com, that had the sole purpose of scaring the hell out of teens. The premise was a hotel that was open from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., playing host to varied frights and horrors. Kind of like the lyrics from the classic rock tune “Hotel California,” you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
New technological wrinkles were deployed to make hotel visitors feel, well, like real visitors. Those with web cams would have their pictures shot at unexpected moments and woven into the site. Directions would be relayed to visitors’ cell phones, instructing them how to proceed along the hotel corridors. The breakthrough site has become a teen cult favorite.
Banner year GSP even broke new ground in banner land this year for Nintendo game Wario Land: Shake It featuring the famed Mario. The banner became a pop culture phenomenon as YouTube consented for the first time to allow the action of a banner–in this case GSP’s creation for the new Mario game–to spill out into the pages of their site. The idea got passed around so many times that it broke the record for most hits for a banner on YouTube, with more than 4 million visitors.
GSP also entered the political culture this national election year with print fare, some 20 spots created by agency artisans who posted them on YouTube, and such choice work for the Democratic National Committee as “Maverick” and “Better Off.” The latter evoked Ronald Reagan delivering his famous speech asking Americans if they were indeed better off than four years ago. Is America more respected in the world? Is it easier for you to go out and buy things? Images of a tanking economy, gas pumps with soaring prices making it a hardship to fill up our tanks, and the visages of Bin Ladin, Bush and Cheney lead to the conclusion that, as introduced by Reagan, we need a new alternative to affect change: Obama.
Silver anniversary GSP earns our Agency of the Year honor the same year it marked its 25th anniversary with an evening celebration back in May bringing current and former employees together at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco.
The real gold in this silver anniversary is embodied in the agency’s people. “What I realized most that night is that we sure hired a lot of really good, talented people over the years,” said Silverstein. “I didn’t even know some of them left. What I do know is that without them, we don’t reach 25 years and there’s no Agency of the Year honor.
At the same time, paradoxically, the 25-year milestone doesn’t mean all that much to Silverstein. “I keep my head down and never look back. I’m always looking ahead to what we have to produce next. We never want to be a company of the past. We don’t think much about what 25 years in business means. We think more of what are the next 25 going to be like going forward.
“On one hand,” he continued, “we’ve never lost the art of storytelling–that hasn’t changed though now we do it across different platforms. Yet on the other hand, we’ve reinvented ourselves constantly during the past 25 years.”
Perhaps the highest profile reinvention came three years ago when GSP diversified meaningfully into interactive, recruiting digital talent and broadening the scope of many of its traditional broadcast and creative staffers. “We created a lake for the fish to swim in and we finally got the right fish,” said Goodby of extending the agency’s reach into new content forms and media.
Fast forward to ’08 and Goodby estimated that slightly more than half of the agency’s creative output this year was in the interactive space. Integrated campaigns became the norm. Already, though, Goodby finds himself getting antsy.
“Viral films are starting to seem like yesterday’s news,” he said. “Widgets are starting to seem like yesterday’s news. Our habit here is to keep looking for new things. This may very well be a dramatically different business in five years, in ten years. We will go far beyond the forms we know today.”
By staying ahead of the curve, GSP has managed to buck trends, including those of an economic nature. Despite a free falling economy in ’08, the agency had its largest revenue year and scored the biggest profit in its history. GSP’s staff increased about nine-and-a-half percent, and the agency’s client wins included Propel, Frito-Lay Dips, Tostitos and Quaker Oats, as well as all interactive work for Dreyer’s Ice Cream.
The lone client loss in ’08 was a major one, Hyundai, despite a successful launch for its luxury Genesis automobile. The Hyundai account shifted over to an agency in Seoul run by the daughter of the automaker’s chairman.
Fish Those “fish” in the lake alluded to by Goodby are the lifeblood of GSP. But Barrett noted that those fish never feel like they’re swimming upstream thanks to Goodby and Silverstein.
“This is one of the few agencies in the world where the cofounders are purely creative people,” explained Barrett. “They’re entirely dedicated to making great work. I’ve been here six years and it’s never been anymore complicated than that. Your work is what you’re judged on. You don’t have to worry about any political angles or getting into a particular group or on a particular account. I only have good things to say about the agencies I’ve worked at–Wieden, Fallon, Chiat. I’ve been very lucky. But this place is the healthiest and most uncomplicated I have ever worked at. It’s just a bunch of people trying to make good stuff.
“And part of that healthy environment is that, while it’s hard to believe, people get a genuine kick out of others doing great work at the agency. There are no factions or rivalries here. When there’s great work being done or shown in one part of the agency, everyone flocks there to check it out. They want to be inspired.”
Production In ’07, it seemed like everyone was flocking to the broadcast production department. That year the department virtually doubled in size and currently sports 33 staffers.
“For me, 2008 feels like the year that it all came together–the veterans in this department with the new talent that came aboard in 2007,” related Cindy Fluitt, GSP’s director of broadcast production.
The veterans in the department have mentored and at the same time learned from the new talent brought into the agency. Fluitt herself is a vet of GSP, having been with the shop some 20 years. In ’05, she succeeded Debbie King who retired as head of broadcast.
Many of the executive producers and producers have been at GSP for quite some time. Exec producer Elizabeth O’Toole, for example, marked her 20th anniversary at the agency earlier this year.
In a Chat Room interview in February (SHOOT, 2/29), O’Toole recalled the mentoring dynamic that she benefitted from and that continues today for those coming into the department. “I learn everyday from Cindy Fluitt…I’ve known her for 25 years, dating back to when I was at Riney. I had the good fortune to learn from the best in Debbie King…And then there’s Barbro Eddy, another executive producer here. I used to be her coordinator at Riney. I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by these great icon producers. They’ve all helped me to grow.”
Fluitt noted that the core of exec producers, which also includes such veteran GSP staffers as Josh Reynolds, Tod Puckett, Tanya LeSieur, James Horner (who additionally is co-director of the agency’s E Level division) and Hilary Coate, has played a lead role in team building among producers.
And this team building extends outward to the creatives and the interactive production department, which is under the aegis of chief digital officer Mike Geiger. Fluitt cited as an example the White Gold campaign for the California Milk Processor Board. “Ashley Sferro produced the TV and Amanda Cox the interactive–they worked side by side, hand in hand, figuring out who needs do to what and how to share those characters, how the characters needed to develop across TV and interactive,” said Fluitt. “It’s the kitchen table effect between the two production departments. Everyone sits down and figures out how to best do justice to the concept and campaign across all the platforms.”
Geiger concurred, noting that in ’08, “Broadcast and digital came very close together. One of the highlights of the year for me is how we kind of figured out how to work together in an integrated way as a team. And over the past two years, creatives have come to work in every medium.”
Yet while there is structural separation with two clearly defined interactive and broadcast production departments, Geiger related, “We may not be integrated in an official way but we are in how we work together. Two producers are working on a campaign’s assets, determining which assets are needed, how we shoot for online balanced with the needs of broadcast. It’s a very healthy collaboration.”
Geiger was on the interactive production/design boutique side before making his first foray into the agency world when he joined GSP six years ago as an interactive producer. “At that time we had only two interactive producers here,” he recalled. “Six months later, I was asked to help start an interactive production department. After one year, we grew to eight people, then 15 the second year. Today we have 42 producers in our interactive department. And it’s all because Rich and Jeff believed in interactive. Even if you have some people at an agency who know what to do, you still need the support of the partners up top. Rich and Jeff realized early on that digital is for real and that has helped us to grow–not just our department but what our department can do in terms of working with and helping other departments to grow and continue to produce relevant work for our clients.”
Traditional but atypical Traditional broadcast spots from GSP in ’08 were anything but typical. In addition to such aforementioned fare as Haägen-Dazs’ “Opera,” Sprint/Nextel’s “Roadies” and the DNC’s “Maverick,” there were VFX tour de force efforts like HP’s “Maestro” in which a young man orchestrates images and information out of thin air as if he’s a musical conductor, making for an empowering introduction for the HP TouchSmart PC. And there was Netflix’s “Lights” in which town folk gather and then climb upon one another so they can reach and pull down on a giant lamp chain. A voiceover relates, “With over a billion movies delivered so far and never a late fee, get the lights. It’s movie time.”
Perhaps best underscoring GSP’s prowess in broadcast commercialmaking is its extensive body of work for Comcast in ’08, estimated to consist of more than 100 spots. “It’s regional retail work that kind of flies under the radar, maybe gets lost in the quantity of production we do. But it’s consistently high quality, great conceptual work across that large volume of TV,” assessed Barrett.
A prime example is “Rabbit,” which puts us smack dab in the middle of a “Comcastic Labs Field Test” opening on a little bunny in the desert, taking sips from a PowerBoost bottle. A voiceover and accompanying action then continually up the ante as the rabbit runs across the terrain and then picks up speed as it transforms into a genetically modified creature cross bred with a panther. Then turbines are attached to this hybrid creature. The speed continues to increase exponentially as such dynamics are added as an unusually strong tail wind, an ice surface, the rabbit being shaved with a surgical glide razor, and a human driver who is put atop the rabbit/panther/turbine-powered creation. This driver by the way happens to be an over-caffeinated fighter pilot with a lead foot. And finally this accelerated contraption with man and beast is seen racing down a ski jump in Switzerland–all to give us an idea of the immediacy of Comcast High-Speed Internet with PowerBoost.
As for work that is really down below the radar stateside–in fact it’s Down Under–consider the campaign for Commonwealth Bank in Australia. When GSP won the account a year ago, the move was vilified by the Aussie press who lambasted the notion of an American advertising agency being chosen over a homegrown shop.
GSP’s concept for turning the tide in a climate predisposed to hating its campaign was to make the star of the work a fictitious ad agency that was everything the press Down Under thought GSP was–arrogant and out of touch with the people and marketplace that the bank wanted to connect with. This wry, self-deprecating campaign wound up captivating the Australian press and more importantly consumers, scoring a 90 percent retention rate among viewers, which was six times what the competition’s advertising generated.
Going home again
GSP group creative directors Rick Condos and Hunter Hindman are on their second tour of duty at the agency and based on that perspective provide insights into how the shop has evolved. They started out the first time around at GSP as a writer (Condos)/art director (Hindman) team and then associate creative directors before going overseas to assume creative director positions at Wieden+Kennedy, Amsterdam, where they helped pitch and win the global Coca-Cola business and turned out such notable work as Coke’s lauded “Happiness Factory” commercial.
About a year-and-a-half ago, Condos and Hindman returned to GSP, serving this year as group creative directors on such stellar fare as the Doritos hotel 626 website and the Cheetos broadcast spot “Plane” in which we see that the Cheetos cheetah character has grown up with us into an offbeat adult.
“We left [GSP] at the time that Jeff and Rich issued the challenge to become proficient in interactive,” related Condos. “To come back now and see how the agency responded to that challenge has been amazing. This past year, more than half of the production was interactive and online.”
Hindman noted, “The broadcast and interactive production departments collaborate so well with creatives and each other. There are so many talented interactive people here–the depth of talent is so much greater than when we were first here. The interactive producers are now very much like the broadcast producers have always been here–they always take on challenges and find a way to make any idea possible.”
Still the more things change, the more they stay the same. “A big draw for us coming back were the amazing creative people at Goodby,” said Condos. “You want to be at a place where you can continue to learn. People like Jeff and Rich, Jamie [Barrett] and Steve [Simpson] are so incredible to learn from.”
Simpson, who joined GSP in ’90 and has been a partner since ’96, noted that the body of work in ’08 is still grounded in what the agency has been imbued with from day one. “Some faces have changed, technology, clients and media have changed,” he said. “But in some ways little has changed during the time I’ve been here. Everybody comes in everyday wanting to reinvent, wanting to come up with a simple and fresh approach to the work. And that all comes down from Rich and Jeff and the way they approach the work on a daily basis. This feels the way a creative place should feel. Ultimately it’s the work that matters.”
