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The Slicker and The Snake: A Tale From Two Weeks of Texas Production:

June 1, 2010 in Advertising | 2 comments

Today, we’re happy to welcome Patrick Brennan, Canice Neary, Adam Samara and Josh Witherspoon back to the agency.  For the past two weeks, they’ve been galavanting all over Texas with director Jeff Bednarz, capturing authentic sights and sounds for a series of Wolf Brand Chili commercials.

Production has many uniquely wonderful joys: the discovery of location shooting, the challenge of designing shots on the fly, the plentiful gums and mints on the craft service table.  But best of all are the stories; the hilarious, ridiculous, remarkable stories that crop up any time a team of creative people work together for any length of time.

The following came verbatim via an e-mail from Creative Director Canice Neary last week.  Enjoy, won’t you?

“When Patrick Victor Brennan awoke at 4:45am on Tuesday, May 25, at the Holiday inn Express in Mineral Wells, Texas, he had no idea that this was the day he’d (almost) be a hero.”

Element 79 Chicago Advertising Dennis Ryan

Patrick V. Brennan, Producer/ (almost) Cowhand

We were setting up a shot where the director’s kid was to throw rocks into the Brazos River.  Young Josh Witherspoon was the first to spot a water moccasin, sunning itself on a river rock with a very full belly, right next to the area in which said youngun was to hurl the scalloped stones (being an art director by trade, Josh’s keen eye shouldn’t surprise anyone).

One thing was certain; that snake had to go.

After one of the ranch hands initiated the battle. brave Patrick began looking for boulders that would (almost) put that serpent out of it’s–and our–misery.

One after the other, rocks pelted that poisonous beast.  After about the fifth stone, it appeared the job was complete.  Until the ranch foreman lifted up the largest stone with the biggest walking stick these slickers from Chitown had ever seen.  Jaws agape, the snake prepared for it’s final defense.

Well, lemme tell ya…  They don’t call it ‘the Wild West’ for nuthin’.  With one whack, the moccasin slid into it’s watery grave for good.  And we got the shot.

And that my friends, is the story of how Patrick V. Brennan (almost) killed a water moccasin.”

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There really is no greater joy in this business than making stuff.  And when it’s great–when it inspires and surprises and sells, the reward is the opportunity to go back out and make even more stuff.  Here’s hoping those two weeks provide nothing but good things for Wolf Brand as we go to edit.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79
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The City of Chicago Is Going Blackhawks Crazy! More Proof Of TV’s Incredible Influence

May 24, 2010 in Advertising | No comments

It’s still fashionable in some circles to dance on television’s grave, despite that medium’s ongoing domination in daily reach and time spent.  All sorts of research companies and think tanks have banks of data about television’s ongoing relevance even in our web-driven world, but frankly, the most visceral example to me came as the Blackhawks swept San Jose to earn a berth in the Stanley Cup Finals.

Element 79 Chicago Advertising Dennis Ryan

Somebody Buy This Defenseman A Milkshake!

Despite being one of the original six, the Hawks have the longest drought between championships in all the NHL.  The last time they made it to the Finals was 1992 when they ran into the juggernaut of Scotty Bowman’s Redwings.  This year, they have Scotty’s son Stanley in their own front office but more than that, they have the power of TV broadcasting spreading the excitement.  And that makes all the difference.

In 2007, owner Bill Wirtz finally ditched his longtime policy of not broadcasting Blackhawks home games.  He defended that policy by claiming that airing home games would cheat ticket-buying fans.  Of course, from his businessman’s perspective, Wirtz’s real concern was lower attendance at the gate; wouldn’t people just watch at home if they could?

The real longterm effect of that policy was that as cable expanded and television coverage grew ever more effective with the advent of HD, the Hawks lost a generation, or perhaps two, of potential fans. Perhaps they wouldn’t buy tickets every night, but more would buy, if they cared.

Now, building off some amazing Blackhawks’ play for the Canadien and US teams in the Olympics’ Gold Medal final, and a strong finish and to the regular season and increasing excitement through the playoffs, people are jumping on the Hawks bandwagon.  Despite ongoing challenges like unspellable names (“Toews” or “Byfuglien” anyone?), the familiarity made possible through TV’s incredible reach has rallied the city behind a franchise we’ve long ignored.

Admittedly, I’m one of those Johnny-come-lately’s that long-suffering, there-through-the-thin-years fans view with skepticism…or worse.  But think of it this way: I grew up outside of Philadelphia during the era of the infamous Broad Street Bullies.  And they could be coming to town this weekend.

But let’s all be perfectly clear: Chicago is four wins away from their first Stanley Cup since 1962, but that should never be described as ‘just’ four wins away.  Go Hawks!

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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The Best Way To Scale Social Media? Use TV. And Vice Versa.

February 18, 2010 in Advertising | No comments

One of the biggest complaints about Social Media is how difficult it is to scale.  Sure, your Twitter feed may have a thousand followers, but aren’t those people likely to already be in your brand’s camp?  And what exactly do you do with them, besides, you know, be social about your brand and stuff?  It’s way too micro, too one-to-one.  It’s simply not scalable unless you happen to be that allegorical advertiser with a million monkeys typing on a million socially-networked Dell computers…

No, what’s scalable is aggregating a big, whomping audience around one cool, memorable thirty second TV spot.  Television is scalable–that’s long proven.

Unfortunately, those big, whomping audiences are increasingly rare in today’s hyper-proliferated media world.  People simply don’t gather in one place anymore.  But they’re doing that right now.  And they did it last Sunday.  The Winter Olympics and the recent Super Bowl have drawn huge television audiences.  One reason for this resurgence in the most traditional of mediums?  Social media.

In an article for Advertising Age, John Rash posits that one of the reasons why the Vancouver Olympics are drawing an audience that’s 25% larger than four years ago in Turin could be the effect of tweets and Facebook updates.  The “I got it first” nature of so many social network messages, particularly when they concern an event or a personality, can actually drive larger audiences to the television.  Given a reminder, lots of us would like to catch a glimpse of Lindsey Vonn’s downhill gold or Shaun White’s latest halfpipe innovation, thus re-aggregating an audience around specific events.  And it is better watching it on television, particularly if you have one of those HD big screens that had such huge price drops last Holiday season.

Events like the Super Bowl or the Olympics get everyone talking, but most advertisers don’t need everyone; they just need large like-minded groups.  Integrating and encouraging messages on social media that drive traffic to television events large or small can clearly serve that purpose.

Media scalability is still very much possible.  Chances are, you’ve been experiencing it personally these past few weeks.  It’s not about any one medium; it’s about integrating multiple mediums.

Want to aggregate an audience?  Aggregate your media messages.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79


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You Are So One-Track: Kids Squeeze 10.75 Hours of Media into 7.5 Hours Every Day

January 29, 2010 in Advertising | No comments

In a feast of content consumption with Houdini-like overtones, today’s multitasking youth find a way to overclock their daily intake of various media at a rate of 143%.  These numbers come from a study of media’s effects on America’s youth released last week by The Kaiser Family Foundation.  Over the past five years, daily media consumption by eight to eighteen year olds rose by an hour and seventeen minutes to seven hours and thirty-eight minutes: roughly the length of a typical workday.  Of course, childrens’ media consumption does not take weekends and Holidays off.

The sheer volume of watched, heard, read and gamed material is staggering.  Even if it is all intellectually vapid, the scale of consumption boggles slower minds like mine.  In fact, it’s arguably far worse if most of that content is intellect-free: the mental hard drive is decidedly finite and clogging it up with tripe like the names of every Autobot or the Jonas Brothers’ astrological signs seems unconscionably wasteful.

Consumption of almost every type of media is up over the ten years of the study, with the glaring exception of magazines and newspapers.  But before you let that bum you out too much regarding our nation’s future, the time spent reading books has actually increased over the past ten years.  Granted, it’s only twenty-five minutes a day, or less than ten percent the amount of time devoted to television, but it’s still reading.  And candidly, in a footrace between The Last of the Mohicans and GTA San Andreas, bet on the glock-wielding digital homies to win everytime.

The one definite upside of this information?  If your kid ever tries to weasel out of chores with an “I’m too busy” excuse, the facts are on your side.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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Be Smart, Be Strategic, But Above All, Be Remarkable

December 7, 2009 in Advertising | No comments

toby-keith-goes-crazy-on-peter-cooperDespite not knowing his music, I often quote country star and Ford truck pitchman Toby Keith when presenting to clients, specifically his brilliant line “If you’re middle of the road, you’re just stuck in traffic.”

That’s more than just a philosophy or opinion; today it’s a proven fact.  A must-read article in this month’s issue of The Economist outlines our radically-evolved entertainment consumption habits.  Television is dead…except it’s not (despite the proliferation of cable and satellite choice, the Wednesday “American Idol” averages 16.5m households).  The music industry is finished, except Billboard disagrees (album sales are down nearly 20% but sales at the top of the charts are slightly up).  No one goes to movies anymore…except they do (“New Moon” earned more in one day than any movie ever).  No one reads books…and yet bestsellers move more volumes today than ever (take Dan Brown…please).

And that’s the key word: best sellers.  Rather remarkably, we live in a time of both the long tail and the blockbuster.  Chris Anderson’s famous prediction of the explosion of niche markets as demand for media migrates from the head of the distribution curve where a few products dominate sales back to the tail where a great many can sell modestly has definitely come true.  And yet simultaneously, the mega productions at the other end of the spectrum have grown as well.  The reason for this may be as simple as society’s ingrained desire for shared experiences or as modern culture driven as the hypothesis that when offered so many choices, we will opt for the popular ones as the best investment of our all-too-scarce time.  That explains why albums ranked between 300 and 400 and television shows below the top ten struggle to survive—there are just too many better options immediately available to suffer through Two and A Half Men for a half hour, hoping something better comes along.

Hits and niche provide today’s power markets, which can be very exciting.  Unfortunately, most advertised products live—or historically have lived—in the vast middle: not too too either way, just pleasantly widespread and accessible.  But to maintain health in this new market, brands and their brand managers need to radically re-imagine their vision for the product.  Stay too broad and you are open to creeping parity from higher-value alternatives.  Hold to your historical marketing methods and brand voice and you grow easily lost in the hue and cry of a highly distracted market perpetually searching for the new thrill, the new idea, the new new thing.

Even if you can’t move entirely to the edges, every brand can and should make forays there in hopes of influencing opinion leaders and spurring word of mouth.  But those communications will have to be more singular, more engaging, more remarkable.  The comfortable idea is rarely viral.

For many, that’s a scary thought.  And these are scary times.

But it’s also an awesome thought.  Because these are exponential times.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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Pop Culture's Daily Cliff Notes: Keeping Pace With Google Trends

September 15, 2009 in Advertising | 1 comment

My venture capital friends don’t concern themselves with whether or not Kevin Jonas is dead (“Kevin Who?  Does he play for the Brewers?”).  My accountant acquaintances may or may not know who Leodis McKelvin is, or care what it means to professional athletes when a poor on-field performance leads to fan vandalism of their homes.  And most anyone I know who is gainfully employed and enjoys a social life of even the most modest proportions has better ways to occupy their time than watching Shaquile O’Neal embarrass himself in a pool against Michael Phelps.

Spiking Up To #29

Spiking Up To #29

But this isn’t a luxury for anyone in advertising.  Being informed about ephemeral pop culture happenings is part of the business.  It’s why I kept a subscription to People for years, despite the certain knowledge that my brain cells shrunk everytime I read it.  It’s why we have to pay attention to pop music and reality TV.  It’s why we have an opinion on Kate Gosselin’s new hairstyle (“Hate the waves!”).

For years, if you had a friend in advertising, you wanted her on your Trivial Pursuit team.  Because advertising people spend countless hours learning the names and attributes of every human footnote who earns even fifteen minutes of fame.

Which is just one more reason why advertising people should embrace the web with appreciative abandon: it makes these needs easier than ever to know.  If you want a list of one hundred topics that are popular right now, you simply punch up Google Trends and the top 100 most discussed topics on the internet are there, neatly listed for your perusal.  Along with perennials like diets and recent television episodes, you will find the names of basically anyone in the news.  And phrases enjoying their moment of pop popularity.

I read through this list every now and then and always learn something that I can use in conversation later.  It’s quick, it’s effective, and it’s glaringly obvious that as a culture, we are not a particularly intellectual bunch.  That said, I took some heart in trend #26 today; apparently a number of people want to learn the definition of “admonish.”  

And you thought boobs like Joe Wilson and Serena Williams and Kanye West couldn’t teach today’s young people anything…

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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You’re Right Again Bill Bernbach: Advertising Is Fundamentally Persuasion, and Thus Not Science But Art

September 10, 2009 in Advertising | No comments

A group of us spent the day yesterday at a briefing session for a new business pitch. Unlike most of these exercises, this client spent a lot of time carefully assembling a presentation that was incredibly dense with facts and background information.  To a person, they understood their advertising’s key shortcoming: it is long on reason but lacking in emotion.  They want to inspire people to not simply consider, but to care.

After 104 powerpoint slides, they ultimately arrived at the same sentiment as Bill Bernbach’s famous quote: ”Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”

“Art” is a big word and one that many of us shy away from: it implies too much, it assumes a level of importance that a static banner ad may not seem to merit.  And yet, the best advertising messages contain an extra something, a spark of humanity or truth or simple engagement that transcends mere communication.  You can call that art, but in television, that ‘art’ usually amounts to ‘performance.’

Which brings me to this ad for Harris Bank pulled from YouTube.  Please pay particular attention to the vignette of the couple kayaking on the Chicago River…

Nice huh?  I’m probably more proud of how the team brought this scene to life than any other we’ve captured on film in years.  Candidly, I didn’t think this vignette would even work when I saw it in board form.  Yet somehow, inspired confident casting, deft choreography, and two actors capturing a commonplace yet momentous human exchange through a believably natural yet heartwarming performance, elevates this scene beyond the prosaic.  The guy’s look away at the end is money.

If you analyze the meaning of this scene in a commercial context, you reach one understanding.  But when you feel it, the experience reaches a far deeper, more meaningful level.  A great human performance–whether remarkable or hysterical or moving or naturally relatable–can be powerfully persuasive.  Because it can make you feel.

And that my friends, is why creating an animatic to understand how a commercial might work is like buying a blow up doll to understand how a relationship works.  It’s not even close.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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On Commercials, Virals and the Legacy of Conditioned Expectations

July 29, 2009 in Advertising | No comments

Marketing leaders spend a great deal of time worrying about the changing media landscape these days, and an article on MediaPost by Gavin O’Malley this morning will only further their agita.  According to a Princeton Survey Research study, 90% of young adults use video-sharing sites.  Well, no kidding.  The only reason that figure is not 100% is that broadband has yet to penetrate the entire country.

One of the marketing leaders’ principal responses to these changes is their insistence on renaming television production as “content” production.  In their minds, “content” or “video assets” can be endlessly re-purposed with different edits of different lengths for different platforms beyond merely television.

That is good planning, even if it is nothing particularly new.  Candidly, framing a shoot as “content production” helps agencies sell something that every creative on a shoot always wants:  options and additional scenes.  Production experience will quickly teach you to get alternate takes, particularly alternate endings.  With so much of a commercial’s impact and engagement dependent on the actors’ performance, the cost of getting options on set is relatively low.  If you experiment a bit, the actor might deliver a different and better performance than you planned- -which explains roughly 75% of creatives’ bristling at dogmatic pre-testing.  An animatic is but the palest imitation of fully produced film with human performances.

Viral? Or TV Commercial?

Viral? Or TV Commercial?

Consider the videos that have clogged your inbox over the years: Bud Light’s “Swear Jar”, the non-sanctioned VW “Terrorist”, and arguably the granddaddy of all internet virals: John West Salmon’s  “Bear”.  People forward clips like these to their friends and family because they’re entertaining, surprising and fun.  And yet, every one of these began as a television commercial, albeit an outstanding television commercial.  These may have also worked in a longer format, but thirty or sixty seconds often proves ideal for their impact.  And our attention spans.  Why?  Because we have spent decades absorbing commercial messages at these lengths; we have been conditioned to expect these clips in these concise formats.

All of which means that the changing media landscape will not suddenly render the way we have learned to tell efficiently-structured stories as meaningless.  We must still engage consumers with worthwhile messages presented in a rewarding fashion.  Technology will continue to change, but story endures.

So yes, the marketing landscape is evolving and will continue to evolve.  Change will continue to be a constant.  And so creativity must adapt to embrace and leverage new platforms but never at the cost of classic storytelling.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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B-G-B (Bonus Guest Blog): Avoiding the Diplodocus Dilemma: Moving from Broadcast to Content Production

July 21, 2009 in Advertising | No comments

Picture 1Guest Blogger: Patrick Brennan

The ever-charming, eminently capable Patrick Brennan graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a Communications major and began his career in production with a Madison cable access show featuring shelter animals. After moving to Chicago, he worked various freelance crew gigs (“Anyone need a second second AD?”), and slowly worked his way into advertising through the Leap Partnership, BBDO, and the DDB dub room.  He got his first staff job at JWT, then moved on to Leo Burnett and high profile work for McDonald’s, Kellogg’s, Nintendo and Samsung.  Element 79 eventually wrangled him in as a Senior Producer where he applies his high standards for film to both television and interactive work.  He likes to bike, cook, travel and lavish attention on his wife and bull terrier.  He would also like to sell his condo.

In the ad world, rarely will you see the gathering of more specialists, more experts in diverse fields, than you will at a broadcast commercial shoot. In order to create the perfect :30 world where every nuance is scrutinized (local cable TV ads notwithstanding), every element from the carpet to the cat is discussed ad nauseum among the client, the agency, the director, and experts in the fields of carpets and cats.

blueprints_main_levelDue to this level of specialization, the TV shoot is often where advertisers spend most of their creative production dollar (and given the budgets our industry has seen lately, I use the singular form of dollar intentionally). In order to gain efficiencies of scale and stretch the production budget, the TV shoot has increasingly become the locus of all efforts to acquire material for other media. Thus, the TV shoot has become the headwaters for the flow of creative content. It has become the norm rather than the exception for agencies to shoot a TV spot while also acquiring assets for digital, stills for print, and the inevitable “making of” video that rarely sees the light of day (not unlike the video’s editor).

Because production has become so integrated, the title “Broadcast Producer” is starting to go the way of the Diplodocus and ¾” tape. We now call ourselves “Content Producers” or “Creative Content Producers”. In some cases, our titles seem to cross over to other professions entirely, like “Content Architect” or “Creative Content Specialists” giving the impression that we bustle about the halls of ad agencies with stethoscopes and armloads of blueprints.

Hopefully, unlike the Diplodocus, the producer has evolved. The resourcefulness and creativity required to be a good producer can be applied outside the Broadcast realm. It’s not Aquaman fighting in space. There are new terms to learn, new shenanigans to call bullshit on, and auspiciously, new people to meet.

By Patrick Brennan, Senior Producer, Element 79  Visit him at pangaean-american.com


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A Huge Television (and Online and Mobile) Audience Is There For Your Ad, But You Still Gotta Earn It

May 21, 2009 in Advertising | 1 comment

We’re still watching.  Actually, we’re watching more than ever.  The three-screen audience for video content has never been larger or more active, that is, if you define ‘active’ as sitting still and watching other people do things.

...And Everyone's Watching

...And Everyone's Watching

For advertisers, that’s terrific news. But candidly, it’s even better news for traditional ad agencies that long specialized in television production. Because despite the flurry of new formats and technologies, the fundamental consumer desire to watch video thrives unabated in a platform agnostic manner.  Clients who ran to new media shops based on the strength of their technical prowess alone may want to reconsider; the viewers are there, but you can’t assume they’re an eager advertising audience.  It takes compelling content to earn an audience, and that starts with story.

Two recent posts on this subject actually make for an interesting compare and contrast. Last week, Chris Rohrs, the president of the Television Bureau of Advertising (find their rather hideous website here), posted a persuasive editorial in Adweek where he cited recent Nielsen       time spent data that registered the highest numbers in their nearly sixty-year history.  Nielsen suggests the average American household spends eight hours and twenty-one minutes in front of the TV every day, with the precious Teen demo logging nearly three and a half of those hours.

He went on to cite a March study from Ball State’s Center for Media Design, hailed as the “largest observational look at media usage ever conducted.”  Rohrs takes great delight in that study’s finding that ninety-nine percent of TV viewing in 2008 was done on a “traditional” TV with less than 5 percent of that viewing using DVR playback.  Web video from YouTube, Hulu and all other Web/cell phone media accounted for less than one percent of all viewership.

Obviously Mr. Rohrs has a bias to present but still, he uses these facts well to rebut the conventional bromide of so many new media advocates: “television is dead.”

Of course it isn’t Chris.  Say it with me, won’t you?  ”Television is not dead, it’s just diversified.”

And that’s the point Gavin O’Malley made yesterday on MediaPost: viewership on all three screens has never been higher.  Special events added extra fuel to online viewership numbers as people watched the Inauguration and the Final Fours from their desktops.  Again citing Nielsen, US online video usage grew thirteen percent year-over-year while mobile jumped more than fifty percent.

The two mens’ numbers around DVR use seem to conflict but the undeniable truth is that we are watching more video than ever…which must have something to do with this great nation’s rampant obesity, but that’s another blogpost.

Call me self-interested but my takeaway from all of these findings is that agencies deeply schooled in television production can no longer be cast as behind the times.  The collective skill and experience all that commercial production engenders gives us a leg up over any putative content provider, particularly if we’ve moved aggressively into new media anyway.

Like so many things, the means don’t matter nearly as much as the ends.  Facile skills on specific platforms mean nothing if the content isn’t there.

Stories, drama, ideas always come first.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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