How 30 Great Ads Were Made: From Idea to Campaign

Citation

McMains, A. (2013), "How 30 Great Ads Were Made: From Idea to Campaign", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 152-153. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363761311304988

In the fall of 2010, I interviewed Keith Levy, (http://tinyurl.com/8prxdpf) then head of US marketing for Anheuser‐Busch InBev, just after the launch of Budweiser's “Grab some Buds” campaign from new creative agency Anomaly. At one point, I asked him if he wanted to regain some of the talk value and pop culture influence that the “Wassup” campaign generated for Bud in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

While Levy acknowledged that Wassup was unique, fun and became part of the American vernacular, he nonetheless concluded that it did not “persuade people to buy more Budweiser.”

Continuing that thought, I said, “At the end of the day, it's art AND commerce, right?”

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” Levy replied. “I love awards like the next guy, but awards should be outputs of reaching strategic goals for brands with advertising that catches people by surprise or is different or groundbreaking. Certainly, ‘Wassup’ was that. I'm not trying to diminish the quality of the work. The awards speak for themselves. But again, it's trying to do a little bit of both. It's the art and science and at the end of the day, results.”

I recalled that interview recently (reporters have memories like elephants) while reading Eliza Williams' engrossing and beautifully designed How 30 Great Ads Were Made: From Idea to Campaign. The visually driven coffee table book highlights 30 ads since 2000 that the author deemed “highly creative,” successful and “have an unusual story behind their making.” Through interviews with the creators, Williams tells the back story of each ad, including the technical and logistical challenges that surfaced during production. Each entry is illustrated by a scrapbook of images, notes and other ephemera.

Among the ads featured in the book is the original “Wassup” TV spot (http://tinyurl.com/9y4st46) that featured director Charles Stone III and his friends, although – as Williams admits – the ad actually broke in late 1999.

Williams devoted six pages to “Wassup,” including an excerpt from the script, the director's notes and even the script and images from a 2008 re‐make that Stone created to support then presidential candidate Barack Obama. There's no question that the launch ad and its subsequent iterations (Remember “Wasabi”?) left a mark on pop culture and advertising, with the original winning the coveted Grand Prix for film at the Cannes advertising festival in 2000.

That said, as Levy told me two years ago, advertising without sales is art but not commerce. In short, TV ads typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to create – not including the price of media time – and marketers foot the bill. As such, they expect a return on that investment. Anything short of a sales gain is a failure, given that all brands seek growth and, of course, the livelihood of a chief marketing officer depends on it.

Therein lies my biggest problem with Williams' book. I agree that her selections illustrate the best craftsmanship of agency creative executives, producers and directors. Consequently, they cleaned up in the award show circuit – the ultimate in peer recognition in advertising. An obvious example in the book is BBDO's “Voyeur” for HBO – the projection of mini‐dramas on the side of a building in downtown Manhattan that also appeared online – was the belle of Cannes in 2008, winning the top prizes in outdoor and promotion. Also, make no mistake, top awards often trigger promotions, job offers, bonuses and bigger salaries for those who win them.

But is that how Williams defines success? Sadly, I think it is. Accordingly, copywriters, art directors and creative directors will love this book. CMOs? Probably not so much.

Don't get me wrong. I like most of these ads. Certainly, there's nothing wrong with celebrating and, even better, demystifying, the efforts behind say, the “Subservient Chicken” Web game for Burger King in 2004 (from Crispin Porter + Bogusky and The Barbarian Group) or 2005's “noitulovE” TV ad for Guinness (from AMV BBDO).

Until now, for instance, I didn't know that Bartle Bogle Hegarty's “The Man Who Walked Around the World” ad for Johnnie Walker – in which actor Robert Carlyle (“Begbie” from Trainspotting) tells the history of the Scotch whiskey during a long walk in the Scottish countryside – was originally conceived as an internal brand education film (www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NvDev‐5qP4). Hence, the unusual length of over six‐minutes Thankfully, “The Man...” subsequently found a second life on YouTube, where it has since generated more than 1.7 million views.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on Williams. After all, advertising can be aesthetically beautiful and arresting, and that in and of itself merits a closer look. I mean, even though that old Ginsu infomercial (http://tinyurl.com/393scv) sold a lot of knives – thereby fulfilling the commerce goal – no one would confuse it with art, let alone feature it in a book about great ads.

The problem is, though, that colorful advertising without ROI ultimately makes expendable the agencies that create them, no matter how many awards they win. In fact, the shops behind seven of Williams' 30 best ads no longer work on those corresponding brands. Budweiser, Sony, Philips, Burger King and Xbox have all taken their business elsewhere. So, however fondly those agency and marketing executives look back on their memorable work now, it may also sting a bit given that they're now divorced.

That said, there's definitely value in making brands playful and likeable, as Fallon did with its “Balls” and “Paint” ads for Sony Bravia, which in each case used a rainbow of colors to suggest the vividness of the television's screen. Neither ad showed the product. In fact, Fallon creative leaders convinced Sony to take that leap back in 2005 and 2006. A half‐dozen years later, Sony, under a different agency, struggles to reinvent itself in the age of Apple. This is not art school, people; it is business.

Hey, I loved the Wassup ads and still laugh when I see them. In fact, I even hunted down “Wasabi” on YouTube recently to share it with my eight‐year‐old son. But honestly, they never made me want to buy Bud. And that, in a nutshell, is why I question just how “great” these ads are.