Italy: A Frothless Cappuccino

Fear stalks the client base and there’s been a slowness in the uptake of new media but frustration among the ranks of Italian advertising could soon boil up a fresh brew of work that’ll wake up a sluggish, recession-battered industry.

"Everybody you speak to complains about how sad the advertising world here is,” sighs Karim Bartoletti, executive producer at FilmMaster. He’s right. The general feeling among the ranks of Italy’s agencies and production companies is one of frustration and disappointment. “There are few clients willing to try new things because agencies are afraid to lose them, so they won’t push when there’s fear involved.”

The client is, of course, the classic scapegoat and while everybody agrees that the lingering hangover from the global economic meltdown is still making clients nervous about spending money and experimenting, Federico Pepe, creative director at DLV BBDO Milan, believes they aren’t the only ones responsible for the largely turgid work being produced in Italy. “It’s also up to creatives. I think that creatives and the people with the money on the client side should be together. They should trust each other more.”

Just a handful of Lions

The Cannes winners list is often a brutal summary of a country’s recent creative output and last year was barren for Italy. Only a handful of Lions were brought home. BBDO’s Life ‘n’ Roll internet short for Rolling Stone magazine was a slick comment on the country’s political state and the fact that Silvio Berlusconi’s alleged behavior resembled a Mötley Crüe aftershow party that any current rock star wouldn’t dare indulge in. Picking up a silver Lion, it was about as brave as campaigns come globally, let alone in Italy, and meant so much to the agency that they did the work for free. It caused a stir and was featured on some current affairs TV shows.

Another Cannes winner was JWT Milan who took several golds for their Auditorium campaign for Heineken, which involved recruiting hundreds of women to trick their partners into thinking they were being dragged to a classical music concert before a giant screen was unveiled to show the Champions League football match the disgruntled guys thought they were missing.

Despite these great campaigns shining through, others are currently hard to come by. Many industry insiders feel the country is years behind the rest of the world in harnessing the power of non-traditional media due to clients’ obsessions with tying budgets up in TV commercials and print.

The seeds of change

Mauro Mastronicola, producer at integrated creative, production and design studio abstract:groove believes the problem lies in the division of old and new media. “I can’t remember a great integrated campaign that had the same message for TV and web. The web campaigns we see are smart and contemporary but the TV campaigns for the same products are much more traditional. In 10 years in Italy we will probably never have a campaign like Philips’ Carousel.”

But Federico Brugia, director and founding member of The Family, feels a change in the air. “When you speak with clients they’re not happy about what they’re doing now. They’re always asking about other things we can be doing – digital, events and virals. They feel we can do more than a 30-second TV commercial. They are starting to want to spread the money around.”

FilmMaster’s Bartoletti agrees that the landscape is evolving, thanks in no small part to advances in technology. “If your client wants to do a web series or a TV show or 10 commercials, they can all come from the same group of people. Creatives are changing. The new creatives are coming from a world where a $2,000 computer and a $2,000 camera are all they need to be a filmmaker. It changes everything.”

A perfect example of this can be seen in the success of new collective CRIC (see New Directors in shots’ last issue). The three young Italians wrote and shot an unbranded short called Because I Like You, which racked up millions of views within a few days of being uploaded to Vimeo. They sold it to the Italian national postal service and have since made the second in what will be a series of three spots, proving that creating your own projects can get you noticed in a market where opportunities are scarce. Two other young directors making a splash are Francesco Calabrese and Igor Borghi (the latter is profiled on page 48).

Flatness is not an option

There is also an expectation that agencies need to restructure in order to deliver a multimedia service. BBDO has already taken steps towards this by merging its main shop with digital arm Proximity.

The Family’s Brugia believes things will go even further than that. “I think that in 10 years the client will want to sit with several people, whether it’s a creative, an art director, a photographer, an architect – people who can study something for him as a project, so they won’t be talking about separate things. They will sit there and propose ideas. Commercials will be just part of a global communication where TV, events, web and print campaigns will be part of something bigger.”

Despite the overwhelming dissatisfaction in the Italian ad industry of late, it seems there is light at the end of the tunnel and while things aren’t going to change overnight at least there are reasons to be confident that better times are ahead. Giada Risso, executive producer at abstract:groove, is one of the optimists. “I’m sure in a couple of years everybody will be celebrating. There’ll be a revolution of the young. It has to happen somehow as otherwise everything will stay flat and that’s not Italian – it’s impossible.”