Ad Icon: Bryan Buckley

With an Oscar nomination for his short film, Asad, and a major Hollywood feature in the works with Reese Witherspoon, Bryan Buckley is riding high. And with some forty Super Bowl spots on his CV, this god of the gaps between the sporting action talks to Tim Cumming about the art and dynamics of the big sell, and why he’s with the brand.

There’s so much on Super Bowl King Bryan Buckley’s plate right now, we’re talking Desperate Dan portions. There’s his 2013 Oscar nomination for short film Asad, the imminent production of his first feature, an adaptation of John Gray’s bestseller Men Are From Mars, Women are From Venus starring Reese Witherspoon, and when I talk to him over the phone from London to LA, where the New York-based directing dynamo is holed up in the cutting room, he is about to finish what he calls “an unbelievable spot” for the Oscars. “It’s a two-minute spot,” he enthuses, “a two-minute movie. I strongly recommend looking at that before your deadline…”

He’s got reason to be jazzed by this riotous reprise of the 1981 Grey Poupon Pardon Me mustard campaign – famous enough to be parodied in Wayne’s World – featuring two Woosterish chumps exchanging a spot of mustard between vintage Rolls-Royces. But in Buckley’s The Lost Footage, made through Crispin Porter + Bogusky, it’s a case of anarchy rather than Oxbridge rules and the Highway Code, with a riotous car chase through town and country club and a deadpan, roof-raising pay-off. “There are very few ads that have come along over the years in the States which have had the pop culture impact of the original Grey Poupon spot,” he says. “People still quote it here 30 years after it first ran. So when I saw the board, I knew we had a pretty high bar to get over. And the piece had to be absolutely epic but in an 80s sort of way.”

Sitting on top of the Super Bowl

If 80s means over the top, then it certainly cut the mustard. The 30-second spot aired during the Oscars ceremony, while the longer online version has interactive elements and the chance to win luxury prizes including champagne and caviar. Then there were his three latest spots for the Super Bowl – Coke Mirage, Best Buy’s Asking Amy, with comedian Amy Poehler getting all 50 Shades with a poor Best Buy guy, and last but not least, Tide Miracle Stain – not least because it grabbed the number-two spot in the AdMeter ratings, missing the top by a nose to Budweiser’s Clydesdale tale of the heart-tugging bond between a trainer and his hoss.

“To me it’s a rush,” he says of his King of the Super Bowl tag – the god of the gaps between the action, which you can price at $8m a minute. “Positioning yourself to be the Super Bowl guy was always the smart move. You talk about creativity, well you can do a great spot and win a gold at Cannes and five people see it, and it’s hard for that to really help you except in small creative circles. But if you have a spot that can work under all that pressure and in that spotlight, and it hits, the ability for you to go sell another spot – it’s cumulative and it puts you up at the top. It makes doing great work easier. That success breeds itself. One hundred per cent.”

It’s been 15 years since he first hit the ball out of the park with When I Grow Up for Monster.com, inverting the “I want to be an astronaut when I grow up” trope for grotesque under-achievable goals such as “I want to file ALL day/get fired on a whim/be paid less for doing the same job”.

It takes a dab hand to make a downturn funny and sell stuff, but there’s something about his work that tends to hit home, and just at the right time, too. Take the 2009 ad for Cash4Gold, One-Up. When Buckley starts talking me through it, he can’t help but laugh at the audacity – and the success – of the enterprise.

“That particular piece captured the essence of the banking collapse,” he remembers. “Right on the heels of that, advertisers were literally pulling out of the Super Bowl, and that was a last-minute buy. We started two weeks before the event.” For Buckley, it came with the appeal of rooting for the underdog. “They built an empire with schlock and it speaks to people. And it’s fun. And if you can make it slightly creative and smart, that underdog is suddenly building a whole business.”

Starring MC Hammer – down to selling his famous gold baggy trousers – and the long-time MC for Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, Ed McMahon, whose bankruptcy shocked the US, and whose last screen appearance would be on Buckley’s Cash4Gold spot, it launched the company onto the global market – “so you can thank that spot for Cash4Gold coming to the UK,” Buckley laughs. Thank you, Bryan.

Like a fistful of dollars, it’s got everything going for it: humour, stars, bathos, and a gold-plated toilet; and with the brand placed dead-centre to get its message between the eyes and into the guts of every viewer out there, at a time when ‘cash for gold’ could be a mantra for bankrupt nations and collapsing banks as much as for struggling single-income households.

From first spot to final touchdown

Buckley came to advertising after a stint at the college of performing arts in Syracuse, setting up an agency that, within two years, had made the front page of the New York Times business section as one of the top five start-ups in the industry – but it wasn’t the kind of success that worked for him. “I remember it being the most miserable day, like, wow this is the good part, these are the good old days,” he remembers. So he sold the agency, started writing screenplays, his partner Hank Perlman flew to Hawaii, then came back with a TV job for ESPN. “Frank Todaro and I codirected it. Hank sold us as directors, even though we weren’t, and that’s how it started. I never went to film school or anything like that.” He and Perlman set up Hungry Man in 1997, and they now have offices in LA, São Paulo, Rio, and London.

Lack of a film school diploma hasn’t hurt him any in building on the success that came with When I Grow Up, but how has the industry and its expectations for the world’s biggest ad break changed since then? Has it grown up, too? “It’s bigger now – the business has shifted so much and the Super Bowl has so much importance for a marketer, it’s crazy.” In a volatile world of expanding media platforms and ways of viewing, those 55 spots between first possession and final play are like enormous branding irons searing the minds of the biggest viewing audience you could ever hope for – around 100 million for this year’s battle in New Orleans.

“It’s a guaranteed event that people are going to watch, and it’s guaranteed that your spot’s going to go viral,” says Buckley. “There’s so many guarantees that only happen at this time, even in the US. You can build a company or a brand off of one spot. And that is pretty exciting. As much as I love the creative aspects, the brand part is also equally fascinating.” He returns his attention to Cash4Gold. “That, to me, was the Antichrist of the Super Bowl. The NFL even tried to ban them because they were seen as so lowbrow; they wanted a kind of quality to be maintained – which to me is really funny. For me, that was going in the face of capitalism and democracy, like ‘WHAAT?! You’re regulating the Super Bowl spots?”

An African adventure

There’s something egalitarian about Buckley and his work. He’s at the front of the race when it comes to witty, big-impact campaigns, but he can work at the other end of the scale too, delivering a very different kind of impact with his Oscar-nominated short, Asad. Filmed with Somali refugees in South Africa, it is, he says, a fable, a day in the life of two Somali boys, played by real-life brothers Ali and Harun.

Harun is a kid too young to join the pirates, and not quite strong enough to pull fish from the sea with the old fisherman Ibrahim. But these two threads of fate – of piracy and fishing, the lucrative and the sustainable – collide in a powerful, compacted short that uses real people, not actors, and real situations – life in a displaced setting – to tell its tale.

“People were pouring into the camps between the famine and the attacks to the south,” remembers Buckley of the shoot, in the coastal village of Paternoster in South Africa’s Western Cape, and featuring Somalian refugees from nearby Belville. “It was extraordinary how people were showing up, shell-shocked, literally shot or beaten. It was vicious, there was no way in hell we were going to be able to film in Somalia.”

There was, he says, not even a basic film culture to build on, just plenty of screen presence from a cast he found by improvisation, and when he found them, he found they were illiterate, so they memorised the script, and he saw to it that “it was our task,” as he says, “to put together a truth, and train them to be before the camera.”

Rolling out the red carpet

He flew the two brothers, with their dad, over for the Oscars, and though they didn’t walk away with a statuette, “walking the red carpet with those guys was really an incredible experience,” says Buckley of the night. “I don’t think we could have been further from the empty beaches of South Africa. Listening to Harun, who couldn’t even speak English when we first met, fielding questions from the BBC was a testament to how far he had come with his education.”

For schooling has become part of the film’s legacy. “We made a deal where we’d set up a school just for them,” says Buckley, explaining that the two boys, aged 12 and 14, were too old to attend classes in South Africa. “And they go every day. They started in March and now they’re in fourth grade. Harun now speaks English, and Ali’s starting to speak it, and the BBC picked it up, and a report went out to 55m Africans about that story.”

They even received a letter from Nobel Peace Prize Winner Desmond Tutu. “The young Somali actors Harun and Ali Mohamed are the stars of a compelling show,” he wrote. “They are also real-life stars in an inspirational South African story about hope and reconciliation. So are the filmmakers – South African Rafiq Samsodien and the US partners Bryan Buckley and [producer] Mino Jarjoura. Their film has been nominated to receive an Oscar. They deserve two Oscars: one for creative endeavour, and the other for contributing to our collective understanding of our dependence on one another.”

To be King of the Super Bowl, you must wear your crown with pride – and maybe a stiff neck and a stiff drink – but embedding the life-changing opportunities of an education for Ali and Harun in Asad’s legacy is the hallmark of a 24-carat royal flush of a creative act. Hand him the crown. And if Buckley ever finds himself with a cash flow problem, he knows where he can sell it.