Creative Profile: Charlie Gatsky

Having worn a number of hats in the world of advertising, from marketing to managing accounts, Charlie Gatsky has gained a unique understanding of how the industry operates that has led to award-winning campaigns including Sony Bravia Balls and John West’s Bear, voted the funniest ad of all time. The acclaimed producer and head of film at BBH tells Tim Cumming what 24 years in the business have taught her

An early midweek evening on Kingly Street, drinkers and diners filling the pavement around The Blue Posts and the tapas bar opposite, the hum and hubbub of a warm Soho evening rising up through the narrow Georgian streets, their crooked course set according to the boundaries of long-vanished field systems, bought up by long-ago speculators as London expanded through the 18th century.

Today, those speculators would be chucking money at the skyscraping new builds rising through a city that has always turned sharply to the wheels of money, fortune, and opportunity; more likely than not, they would then take their bricks and mortar to be branded and buffed by expert communicators BBH.

Inside the headquarters of one of the world’s great agencies, a lift deposits me on to a third-floor gallery overlooking the open-plan expanse of the floor below, the end-of-day flow of creative teams breaking up, signing off and signing out, perhaps stopping off for a drink on Kingly Street.

Soon, I am joined by Charlie Gatsky, head of film at BBH. We take up residence in one of the hermetically sealed meeting rooms. Up here, we can’t hear the pavement revellers below, but the antennae of BBH are pointed in their direction, aiming to pick up the signals and buzz from the street, trying to understand them and use them.

A colourful childhood and upwards

Gatsky is the producer who has that touch, who makes things happen. Big things. She has been a multi-multi award-winning film producer for WCRS, Leo Burnett, Mother, Fallon and now BBH, and her productions – the likes of Sony Bravia Balls and John West Salmon Bear – are part of advertising history (Campaign voted the latter the funniest advert of all time, and it remains one of the most-watched as well as the first of the viral phenomena). Gatsky has learned her lessons and put them to work to create game-changing campaigns – going back to her very first steps into the industry, ditching entertainment law for marketing a video arcade game called Quasar from a Rickmanworth trading estate in September 1992.

She stifles a laugh. “I turned down a place at bar school,” she says, “and spent 18 months there.” The third of four sisters from a matriarchal Jewish family in north-west London, her dad was from the East End, a socialist and a feminist – “really keen for his girls to stand up and go their own way”. Her mum was a nursery nurse from Essex, a property entrepreneur from the beginning of the 80s and, more or less, her own household’s head of production.

“It was a very extended family, uncles and aunts always staying, lots of debates, politically charged. Food was a big part of it. A really colourful background. Very special. It gave me a lot of the skills you need as a producer – making things happen and keeping an eye on the game and bringing people together – that’s a big part of my background.”

At Quasar, the game was simple – sell as far and as wide as possible. “Working with amusement hall people and the entertainment business was an eye opener!” she says. “Very interesting, and lots of lively characters. It was a really good start. It gave me an understanding of what it’s like for clients and what they think about, the other demands they have. Sometimes we take it for granted that advertising is the most important part rather than complementing what else goes on in the business.”

Quasar went west as the gaming market evolved (the consoles are collectables today), while Gatsky went from that client turning up at reception to handling clients at WCRS. The agency brought her in to work the Sega account, and she stayed for the best part of seven years. “They already had Carling and BMW, their iconic brands, but they were launching First Direct, Orange and Caffreys, three unbelievably successful products that are still dominant today.”

That period through the 90s she remembers as a heyday for the agency, both in terms of work and its after-hours ethic. “It had such a strong sense of its culture. A massive part of life there was parties and the bar. So it became really normal to me that you never left. It had this constant flux and activity.”

At WCRS, she moved from accounts to production, from the smooth exteriors to the granular inner workings. It was an irregular decision, not least because it came with a severe financial haircut. But then she got to be called ‘boss’ by Ridley Scott on the shoot for Orange Future Thoughts in 1998, his first commercial for eight years and just before Gladiator.

“It was an amazing insight into the world of those nomadic film tribes, travelling the world looking for locations and script reading,” she says. “Ridley was coming in and testing post production techniques that were all brand new. It was remarkable, to be part of this excitement. The scale, the beauty, the craft, the attention to detail.”

Bigger fish to fry

Gatsky was well-established in film production when she moved to Leo Burnett, and a very big catch was about to land in her lap: a tin of John West Salmon. “When I first got it, it was like: ‘A tin of fish?’” Cue laughter and a face-palm. “That experience taught me not to chase briefs but to find the opportunity inside them. John West was about using the constraints and conditions that were there to come up with the right creative solution. It was a classic of that process.”

Bear had a small budget, and at first wasn’t written as the nature docu-spoof we know and love, but as a big, fat bear fight scene. “Lots of people passed on it – it was an odd script.” Early treatments centred around animatronics and action, but budget restrictions forced Gatsky to consider bear suits. Could they? Really? She shrieks with laughter. “It was in really poor condition. So [director] Danny Kleinman said we’d do it from afar, like in a nature documentary. So the next step was, it had to be done in one take. And then you have to sell that to the client, as well.” She did, they did, and the rest is history.

For Gatsky, the next game-changer was joining Mother in the early 2000s, where creatives were selling their own work in an environment that dispensed with the account man altogether. “A lot of the things I learned there I try and keep hold of now – to give people a lot of rein, to try new things, to not be crippled by perfection, to run with it and see where you take it. To take off the labels you come in to the room with. It’s so much more integrated in terms of production and creativity.”

She took that more integrated approach to Fallon, just as those Sony balls came bouncing her way, an advance wave from a future of real-world interventions on a grand scale. “It was a stunt, an event, as well as a film. It was two takes, and it was the research that made that project possible. We had to find a million balls. Who stocks that many?! And how are they going to fall, how high do we have to drop them, do we pick them all up and drop them again? How do you protect the windows and drainpipes?” And, indeed, the client.

The only way it could work, she says, was through a perfectly aligned team cartwheeling down the corridors of creativity and constraint in unison – and getting that together was her job. “They had the vision and confidence that they would deliver for the client. It was a big, big budget. There was no control over what you would get, and that’s risky.”

The producer’s all-seeing eye

Organised, confident, opinionated – when it comes to talents, a producer needs these three to function,  “or you will be annihilated,” says Gatsky. Above all, you have to be good with people. “Someone who can lead, but who can be led. Someone who can read a room without saying anything, and hear what isn’t being said.

Producers are the only people in the room with a birds-eye view. The producer has everyone’s agenda.” As event campaigns – the likes of BBH’s Axe campaign, which went from product launch to rocket launch – enter the norm, Gatsky believes that producers must embrace uncertainty in a multi-platform live stream of a world where not everything can be pinned down.

“The question is, what’s the risk, what’s the investment needed to get to the next stage and get signed off on that? What do I need for someone to buy in to this? I don’t have all the answers, so that’s how I keep all the balls in the air. Let’s sit with this uncertainty and let me come back to you and give you a sense of what is possible.”