|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
His first boss told him, "Just remember that everyone in advertising somehow believes they are in show-business," recalls Matt Miller, president and CEO of the Association of Independent Commercial Producers, a.k.a. the AICP.
 "Commercial production," says Matt, "is where advertising meets art and the film community." So is the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It's filled with production community people in variations of black and white attire. So this is what passes for current New York formal wear.
These fashion statements were in the museum for the AICP 10th Annual Awards show. The setting, a major art museum, certainly underscored the originality of the event. Actually, the rogue factor was carried through the entire event. No award statues. No gathering of winners on stage. No speeches. No flashy staging.
Just an hour of the very best in commercial production. The prize? Winning commercials become part of the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. Matt Miller, resplendent in black and white, is in his element.
After a stint of four years after college playing drums in the almost famous band, Bicycles For Afghanistan, and touring the seedy club circuit in New York City, Matt decided he didn't have the stomach for that career and needed to get into something really upstanding. Like advertising.
At the time, he was working at a New Haven, Connecticut, radio station his godfather owned. It didn't take long for Matt to realize that hustling radio was not really advertising. So he went on a lot of interviews and decided that the agency account world was the right one for him. The interviewers thought he would make a great account person. Naturally, they wanted to know how many words a minute he could type. Matt decided that wasn't the way into advertising either.
But then he answered a New York Times ad, and this ingenious guy at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), saw right through Matt, recognized his skill set and knew that he could do the job.
We are saying that commercial film-making is an art form and should be recognized for just that.
|
|
So Matt started at the ANA in 1989. Fortunately and unfortunately, that same guy who sort of shined Matt up and helped him out ended up leaving a couple of years later. Matt was lucky enough to get a new boss who was more interested in other ANA challenges.
Anyway, throughout his five years at ANA, Matt had a lot of contact with the AICP staff and membership. He talked to them about how to grow their organization and operation. Matt thought they were a good bunch of people who had interesting values, played a vital role in the industry -- but who were also under appreciated. So Matt gave them a lot more ANA time. They loved that. In their minds they were being really understood and getting some airtime with their clients, even if only indirectly.
Then, in 1994, the AICP had an idea. They offered Matt a job. As president! And here he is.
Where is the innovation in TV commercials today?
The innovations have happened out of necessity to break through clutter and through the advertisers' acknowledgement that you need to really invest in your brand in order to make the right types of commercials that will represent your brand. As the clutter has grown, advertisers have seen that they have to stand out. They realize they're going to have to invest the time and energy into the techniques and styles that have grown into what is today modern film making.
Many filmmakers who would never have touched a commercial years ago now are very interested in shooting commercials because there is that freedom. You find very few Hollywood directors that wouldn't be interested in doing a commercial package these days. You also find a lot of the directors of photography interested in doing commercial packages. You find a lot of crossover and that creates cross-pollination.
|
I like it when advertising breaks molds. As always happens in the evolution of art, people break molds and that’s how you get onto a higher plane.
|
In some ways what's happened is that the commercial industry has become the testing ground for a lot of technical areas for Hollywood filmmaking. You might have created some interesting commercials like the Budweiser ants years ago and then all of a sudden you might get Pixar coming out with a full length CGI film.
It happened because they had some experience and were able to test the software that was developed specifically for a commercial and then use it for a full-length feature once they perfected it.
That cross-pollination and the idea that Hollywood is now fully ensconced in commercial production, as opposed to being a separate filmmaking world, has had a huge impact on the level and the type of work that advertisers expect to stand out today.
How do you feel about the blurring of the lines between advertising and entertainment?
The line between advertising and entertainment started blurring the second advertisers started realizing that they were losing their audiences and they were competing for eyeballs. That started pushing advertisers into a rationale that in order to deliver their marketing messages to consumers they needed to keep their attention. To keep their attention, the commercials had better be entertaining.
Our show has some great film making in it. It also has some horrible ads that are garbage strategically, but still great film making.
|
|
The entertainment value in advertising shouldn't ever be taken lightly. BMW has brought it to a point where it really is at its pinnacle. The product is the star of the BMW brand sell, they've really tapped into Hollywood in ways that CAA tried to do years ago with Coke. That is, really creating films around products in a unique manner and doing it at the highest level of production.
Will trends toward product placement on shows like Survivor lead to fewer traditional commercials in the future?
The way Survivor does it is really interesting, but it's because of the type of show it is. No one's really taking the plot seriously. Sure, the viewers may be taking the game seriously, but they're not taking the plot seriously. So cutting to the Reeboks and having cell phones and then someone winning the ability to have a Bud or win different cars -- everyone understands that it's a game show. No one feels invaded by that.
But, over time, a new level of interesting ways will evolve that weave the products into the storyline, or into the script, to highlight products. But we have to remember that American consumers won't be scammed.
DaimlerChrylser announced a substantial pullback in TV budgets, citing the ineffectiveness of the medium. What’s happening there?
Obviously the economy is playing a big role in people looking at that. I don't believe that corporations are cutting their budgets because they think TV is an ineffective medium. They're cutting their budgets because, as corporate citizens, they have to be responsible enough that if they're laying off thousands of people, they're also cutting back on their other expenditures.
In an economic slowdown, you always are going to have advertisers who are temporarily diminishing advertising. But they eventually realize that have to get back out there and talk to their customers. When the economy starts to rebound, they will be reminded that television is still the most effective way to reach vast numbers of people.
Media strategists will continue to try to weigh those scales and figure out where the balance is, and how much to spend on certain things and what they're getting for it. Television advertising certainly has become expensive, but in spite of the corrosion and erosion and everything that everyone talks about -- five hundred channels and all the various media out there -- TV is still the most effective medium.
 What will be the impact of technologies like TiVo that let consumers zap commercials?
The doomsdayers who say, "TiVo is the death of advertising" are premature. But it is definitely a threat to the business model for television itself. The reason studios develop shows and are able to then sell them to the networks and then get farmed out to syndication -- or whatever it happens -- is because of the advertising revenue. The second that advertisers believe that the revenue they are pouring into TV is not getting the eyeballs and the attention they need, they're going to pull out of it and they're going to look for other ways to advertise.
BMW, with its online mini-films, is a great example of another way to make commercials. Other advertisers are going to say, "Forget it. We're not going to allow the system to be that way. We're going to produce our own programming that people can't zap.” It's almost like back to the future, back to Ford Star Time, GE Theater, GM presents Dinah Shore. Eventually, we're going to end up going back to true sponsored programming.
In light of the ever-consolidating universe of global brands, are there now global production companies?
That's the issue that AICP is dealing with the most today. There are a few production companies that have opened up truly global offices. There are more companies that have partnerships with companies all over the world.
Years ago, you needed the infrastructure that only Hollywood offered to have a certain level of production. Now, the availability of equipment, while still not as deep as the U.S., has permeated the globe. Recent union situations have really accelerated this evolution. We have union agreements here in the U.S. that are based on a lot of history and are quite burdensome and expensive when compared to how you can work overseas.
As a result, these production centers have become truly global production centers and turned American companies into world travelers, when previously the farthest they went on regular basis was Vancouver. It's truly changed the face of the business and is accelerating it everyday. Even small companies now are working on a global basis. That's something that the U.S. is going to have to really address.
In the U.S., we fuel about five and a half billion dollars worth of production a year. More and more of that is going overseas now. Within that five and half billion dollars, about twenty-seven percent is payroll. The rest is rental fees and everything else. That's real cash money that gets infused into the infrastructure. As we lose that business to these foreign markets, our infrastructure will erode and theirs will grow.
The Screen Actors Guild strike probably didn't help.
Nothing can be more important than the lesson we learned last year from the SAG strike. A ton of money went overseas because SAG was so militant about stopping production. For the six months of the strike, the U.S. infused the globe with all of that money. I would say that eighty percent of the money that would have been spent here in the U.S. was spread around the world. What they're now able to do is invest in the business and get their governments to see the importance of it.
Even though the strike is now over, it has come home to roost because advertisers not only got the experience of going overseas and being able to buy out talent and get around the SAG contract, but now they've realized the level of production that can be achieved in all those other places. There are still types of production that really need to be done here. But most types of production today can be done in Cape Town or Prague or Sydney.
It's part of the evolution of a business and you can't stick your head in the sand or turn back the clock. I'm sure there are still steelworkers sitting on their rocking chairs in Pittsburgh thinking that the business is going to come back. But there are also steelworkers who got up and followed the business and did other things and I think that's what production companies are going to have to do. They're either going to have to truly globalize or they're going to have to morph into companies that create other types of media.
How has the consolidation within the big agency networks affected production services?
You have to define what you're honoring. Otherwise, you end up honoring ads that judges having drinks with umbrellas in them happen to find funny that day.
|
|
For the most part, on the creative levels, the agency holding companies have not truly consolidated the various offices that they've merged. They've merged as businesses and they've done some things with media buying. On production, it doesn't make sense for them to do much to change the process. That's because part of what they sold to their clients was the idea that by acquiring all these companies they're not truly creating conflicts because the various units don't talk to each other.
Does that help insure that smaller production companies still have a bright future ahead of them?
Companies will always have a bright future ahead of them as long as they stick to the basics of the business -- that is, helping to bring marketing concepts to life. A lot of them do need to diversify, though. A lot of production companies are now doing television production. One of our members has developed a television show for Nike with Weiden. It's a weekly show that they shoot and it's really a Nike sponsored show. It's about the athlete and it's basically about the marketing and branding message.
Production companies have always dabbled in things. As soon as they saw music videos some got involved. Some of them were able to make money and some weren't. The same thing happened with infomercials and the same thing is happening with new media. They take their skills, because they really are visual artists and able to approach these things and create imagery, and see if it's a model that can work for their company.
 What would you say you’re the most proud of in terms of AICP’s accomplishments during your tenure?
I'm proud of how we are marketing the industry. I'm proud of the ability to bring the group together and make sure that our mission statement wasn't just a statement, but a reality.
I'm proud that the advertisers and agencies really understand the importance of the production company, and that any organization dealing with any issues surrounding production now call on AICP as both a consulting service and a friendly adversary in certain areas. They know that our opinion and our input are paramount to getting anything done.
I also am proud of creating standards in the business, issuing and implementing those standards, and the role that it plays and the importance it becomes within the day-to-day operation of the business.
We don't just issue guidelines and then the agencies and advertisers sort of shoo them away. They actually abide by them. It creates some hysteria whenever our national board meets and we issue new guidelines on certain areas in business practices. It gets everyone's attention.
And then, of course, there's the development of our awards show, which I’m obviously very proud of.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
©2002 reveries.com |
|
