Pete Favat on Why Film Is Not Dead

Pete Favat, CCO, Deutsch North America, tells Tim Cumming film is back, if not from the dead, at least from its sick bed.

This year’s Cannes Film Lion president wants his jury to lead film’s romp back to full health, and would love to have brave clients along for the ride. The guy who took on Big Tobacco with the award-winning Truth campaign [below] is all about finding your enemy, then grabbing attention with provocative shit, man…

Pete Favat’s bottom line is: you need to know your enemy, you need to be provocative and you need to grab an audience’s attention. The rest, as they say, is work, but those three commandments are the fuel for it. Deutsch’s chief creative officer for North America since 2013, Favat is president of the Film Lions this year and, as such, he has another important message to share.

“Film is coming back. I’m starting to see people coming around again. Film took a back seat for a while, people were coming out saying ‘Television’s dead.’ Well, I want to write an article about how people who say things are dead are dead. Because I don’t believe anything’s dead. It all gets reallocated.

Yes, film got put on the back seat for a while, with the mad thirst for technology and digital solutions, but now we’re seeing a resurgence and we’re seeing the craft come back. And I’m going to tell the jury that we are at the forefront of the resurgence of film.”

Favat’s 13 years as CCO at Arnold saw him oversee award-winning work for brands such as Converse, Progressive, VW [below], Volvo and Ocean Spray, as well as the anti-tobacco Truth campaign; at Deutsch he has masterminded work for Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Dr Pepper.

But he started out a world away from corporate concerns, at the School of Visual Arts in New York at the scuzzy end of the 70s. “From ’79 to ’83 – an interesting time in NYC,” says Favat. “Radically different from what it is today. It was awesome. You never knew what was going to happen. It’s really cleaned itself up, but I miss the old gritty days.”

Classmates included graffiti artist Keith Haring [below] , who knew a thing or two about provocation. “The NYPD would arrest him for tagging, and he made a name for himself by getting arrested and being provocative,” remembers Favat. “He’d get a lot of people’s attention. I’d look at it and think, I don’t know about going out and getting arrested, but I understood the provocative nature and why people were attracted to Keith and his work.”

Feeding Taco Bell to Ronald McDonald

It’s an understanding that has stayed with him, and which he’ll apply to the work that comes before the Film jury. “It’s the same today, man. Cut to the work that wins Lions. It’s provocative shit. Cannes gives you a Lion for having balls. It gives you a Lion for being brave, and doing something that the status quo would never think of doing. For me, it goes full circle back to those art school days.

"I’ve tried my whole career, as a CCO, as an art director, as a maker, to push whatever client I’ve had into creating provocative messages, because it’s what people will pay attention to. Not everyone will like it, but they won’t ignore it.”

The key word is tension. “What you need to understand is, how are you going to shake people up and make them pay attention and say, ‘I need to show my friend that’? Tension is the way in – tension gets people to pay attention. Some agencies call it the conflict, I call it the enemy. I say to clients, who’s your enemy? Go find your enemy.”

He gives the example of Taco Bell [above], who wanted to get into the breakfast market. McDonald’s – an account Favat worked on for 14 years – more or less owned breakfast, while Taco Bell was a late-night call. “So you have to disrupt the routine by going head on with McDonald’s, the number one player.” Favat’s strategy was to make it a two-horse race, even though Taco Bell was coming out of nowhere for breakfast. So, with the enemy identified and the tension high, the next step was close to genius.

“One of our creatives found out that there were 300 men called Ronald McDonald, for real, in the US,” says Favat. A bunch of them were flown into LA, finding themselves in an arrivals hall full of drivers holding up signs for Ronald McDonald. “We served them Taco Bell for breakfast and they got so jacked up because they were all teased when they were kids for being called Ronald McDonald, so they were mad at McDonald’s.

When they learned it was all for Taco Bell, it was like, ‘Turn that fucking camera on, man.’” He laughs at the spot’s audacity. “The idea, basically, was that Ronald McDonald eats breakfast at Taco Bell, and it hit, it went crazy. The news picked it up, everyone talked about it.” He pauses. “That’s being provocative.”

Take a chance on clients taking chances

The campaign won a lot of awards, but crucially it was the client that recognised that they had to be provocative, and that the way to get people’s attention is to use tension. Which is why Favat is keen that clients be given a place on juries at festivals such as Cannes.

“This year I chaired the ANDY awards, and it was the first time that a client had been at the table,” Favat says. That client was the brand marketing head of Burger King, Fernando Machado. “He asked me why he had been invited and I told him that I wanted more and more clients to do more and more award-winning work and take a chance and be brave.”

When it comes to bravery and provocation, Favat’s work on the Truth campaign is hard to beat. Going up against Big Tobacco takes some guts, and some strategy, and Favat has both in spades. So instead of making smokers or the idea of smoking the enemy, he took on the business itself.

“Research done by British American Tobacco in the 50s to the 70s uncovered that the target was a 10-year-old child,” he says, “because that is the age of assertion, when the brain starts to develop and you start making decisions. All these psychological need states – the need to rebel, the need to fit in, the need to create your own environment, to express yourself.

These are universal among teenagers, from Berlin to Beijing. So we didn’t go after the idea of smoking, or cigarettes, or smokers – we went after the idea of these executives lying and manipulating and killing people using their lies and manipulation to make people unhealthy. When we talked to kids about that, they got really pissed off. So we harnessed teen rebellion and flipped it on its back.”

Creating with the enemy

With his wife Amy, Favat recently set up 100 Pieces, a pop-up gallery and silent auction that sells artworks by LA-based creatives to raise money for the Safe Place for Youth charity, which supports LA’s thousands of homeless teens.

“There’s hundreds of people like me who started off as artists and got involved in art for commerce,” Favat says. “So I thought, why not send an email to all the CCOs in LA to identify all the people who are painters and sculptors and furniture makers. We’re in competition with each other all the time, but what if there was this night where we come together and join forces for one common goal, to raise money for homeless teens?”

The first year they made $50,000. The second $70,000. This year they’ve been asked to bring it to Sao Paulo, New York and Berlin. “Maybe Cannes could sponsor it,” muses Favat, “because it’s all about releasing the creativity inside us aside from the advertising.” Unfettered creativity for the common good? Now there’s a provocative, attention-grabbing idea.