Michael Patrick Jann is not afraid to admit he’s been watching a lot of Indian musicals lately. The director, who works out of bicoastal HKM Productions, says that he finds their no-holds-barred style liberating. Although he hasn’t featured dozens of choreographed dancers in his commercials, he has displayed a comic imagination, evidenced in spots from the popular "sock puppet" campaign for pets.com via TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco.
Jann attributes the success of the pets.com spots—"Delivery" and "Parking Lot"—to his and the agency’s thoughtful development of the basic idea of having a "spokes-thing." Jann invented a saucy sock puppet that plays a sort of roving reporter role for pets.com. Jann says he wanted a character who would have "a quirky sensibility grounded in a real person."
That real person is Michael Black, Jann’s poker buddy, former New York University classmate and co-member of The State comedy troupe. While at NYU, Jann did freelance work for MTV. He recalls the network basically saying, "’Here’s three hundred bucks. We need nine minutes of television. Here’s a camera and a car. Figure it out.’" Jann also worked on MTV’s 25th anniversary special for Rolling Stone, for which he generated three-minute video packages incorporating the magazine’s covers from its origins to the present day. Jann says that experience was "really great. It was like boot camp."
Jann and his fellow State members also starred in The State variety show, which aired on MTV for two-and-a-half years. Jann wrote, directed and acted in skits, and says his experiences directing, writing and acting taught him an important lesson: "Funny comes first. People have to laugh, so everything else needs to work in support of whatever the joke is." He also learned that this focus on the heart of the joke must be accompanied by the ability to explain how one intends to execute it. This lesson, it seems, was learned the hard way. "There’s really nothing more awful than eleven people arguing about a joke," he remarks.
New Frontier
Jann recently applied his talents to campaigns for Kellogg’s and VarsityBooks.com, an online textbook seller, both via Leo Burnett Co., Chicago. His success with pets.com invites questions about how he views the explosive growth of Web retailing. "The great thing about it for advertisers is that there’s a billion new companies, all of which want to stamp their logo into everybody’s consciousness in the most impressive and eye-catching way," explains Jann. He says he’s found it refreshing to work with dot-com clients, some of which say to his ideas, "’Yeah, let’s do that. We want to make an impression,’" rather than "’No, no, no, we don’t do that,’" as more staid and traditional companies have done.
Despite the creative free-for-all that dot-com advertising has inspired, Jann has seen a growing sophistication in Web site advertising, and it’s a development he welcomes. "Companies need someone to provide them with a distinctive on-air voice, and that’s great for me because that’s what I do."
Jann says that his favorite recent work is "High Dive" for Kellogg’s. It was a project in which he got, in his words, "accidental freedom." It seems that Kellogg’s mandated a change in the original idea after the job had been awarded, and Jann and the agency creatives had less than 24 hours to come up with a new concept to advertise its Snack ‘Ums product. After spending an evening bouncing ideas around with agency producer Sean Pinney and several others at Burnett, he decided to turn in. The next morning he woke up with a fully-formed idea. He pitched it, and everyone liked it.
The spot features an 11-year-old
