AICP Awards Start Fight of 'Art vs. Advertising'

The Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) start an epic battle between art and advertising in a new series of web videos encouraging entries to their AICP Show and AICP Next Awards.

In the Art vs Advertising campaign, created by R/GA and directed by Collin Goodspeed for Fallon, the AICP take advantage of the fact that a win at either of their awards gets that ad into the permanent archives at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). As such, they match ad execs with famous artists who have similar numbers of pieces in the MoMA archives, comparing them through some tongue-in-cheek statistics across three videos.

‘Van Gogh created more than 43 self-portraits between 1885 and 1889’ goes the voice over in the first video, Van Gogh vs Credle, comparing the Dutch painter with 6 works at MoMA with Susan Credle, global chief creative officer at FCB. ‘Credle,’ the voice-over continues, ‘has posted over 50 selfies today.’ The video also compares Van Gogh’s love of yellow with Credle enjoying writing dialogue for the yellow M&M.

The other two videos see Jeff Koons face of with Jeff Kling (CCO at Fallon), and Cezanne taking on Gerry Graf, CCO at Barton F. Graf with a staggering 21 ads in the MoMA collections.

All three videos end with a call to action asking ad people to submit their own work for this year’s awards and to find out ‘which modern artist is as talented as you’. Let’s hope that talent is for timekeeping, as there are only two weeks to submit before the deadline of March 3.

UPDATE: As of February 23, the AICP mysteriously deleted the three ads, leaving this timely but cryptic message in their place: