Tapping the Reality Zeitgeist at The Artists Company

By Anthony Vagnoni
 

A real-life buyer for TJ Maxx talks about her job in this Gregory Maya-directed spot.

The time seems right, says Roberto Cecchini, Executive Producer and principal at The Artists Company, for a new breed of director to make an imprint on the advertising consciousness—and, more importantly, on the increasingly wary minds of consumers. They’re talents that can meld the at-times contradictory worlds of marketing communications, in which everything is meticulously planned and staged, and the real world, with its glitches, stammers and hiccups, and create the kind of reality-based, documentary-inspired work that we see more and more of these days.
 
There’s certainly no shortage of material for these directors to work with.  Brands across the spectrum have employed, in one form or another, documentary-style narrative in their outreach to consumers.  If it’s not seen in their traditional TV spots, then it’s most likely going to show up on their web sites or in their internal communications to employees and stockholders.
 
There are lots of reasons behind the trend.  First and foremost, says Roberto, it fits with the zeitgeist of the times.  We live, he observes, in an age where transparency is kind and authenticity is the currency of communication.  People reveal their innermost secrets on web sites, talk shows, radio; just about every form of media imaginable.  Somehow, in this age of YouTube sensations and nonstop tweets, advertising has to find a way to fit in. One clear way is to feel more real than it historically has in the past.
 
Who’s best positioned to capture this sense for brands and agencies?  For Roberto, the answer might be surprising.  Two of his top talents in this growing arena—Michael Cuesta and Gregory Maya—are experienced advertising filmmakers with major campaigns under their belts that range from traditional performance and dialogue work to glitzy fashion and beauty spots.  A third is the single-named talent known as Otis, who came up through technology and post production and has blossomed into a post-modern hyphenate, someone whose skill set and outlook on media allows him to move easily between platforms and formats.

For Gregory Maya, reality-based work is an opportunity to "explore and discover."

As a group, they’ve collectively produced a deep body of reality-based work for such brands and organizations as Dove, TJ Maxx, Verizon, Exxon Mobil, Neutrogena, State Farm, the Dana Farber Cancer Center and the New York City Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, among others. 
 
One recent campaign was shot by Cuesta for Tempur-Pedic and Acme Idea Co., the Connecticut based agency and think tank run by Scott Kulok.  In a clever bit of synchronicity, the company went to St. Cloud, Minnesota, to promote the brand’s St. Cloud line of mattresses by giving selected consumers free samples to sleep on for several months. Afterwards, Cuesta and his Artists Company crew went to the town and interviewed them about their experiences, capturing their well-rested passion for the product in an honest and spontaneous way. Another campaign is in the works.
 
Cuesta, says Roberto, is a second-generation advertising filmmaker and master storyteller whose work ranges from traditional TV spots to indie features (“L.I.E.”) to extensive work in episodic television series on both the broadcast nets (the current “Blue Bloods” on CBS) and in the edgier world of cable (“Six Feet Under,” “Dexter”).
 
What’s driving this kind of work? Roberto has some ideas.  “People respond profoundly to seeing other people they identify with describing their experiences,” he offers.  “This genre coincides with what they’re seeing more and more of on TV, which is real people being put into a variety of situations.  It reveals the interest of the viewer to connect to someone like themselves—to listen to and relate to them. It’s a new phenomenon, just within the past five or six years, but it really corresponds to the gigantic change in our culture.

Mothers and daughters talk about beauty in this Dove campaign directed by Otis.

“There is this enormous appetite for shared human experience,” Roberto continues. “It’s not all found on Facebook, you know. People want to know about and be inspired by these experiences.  Sometimes, they’re about how they interact with a product or service.”
 
Roberto points out that the reality-based approach is now at home in categories where it never would have found a welcome just a few years ago—beauty and fashion being one of them.  “Everything about this style of advertising is geared to it being aspirational,” he says about the genre,—and that used to be achieved (and still is) by the depiction of the beautiful people living the insanely fashionable life. But now, there’s room for another approach. “Today, what you often find is that aspirational sense comes through connection,” he says.  
 
An example, Roberto notes, is the current TJ Maxx campaign for Grey Worldwide that Maya has directed.   It’s a continuation of a campaign he started earlier this year, but with a few twists.  The concept behind all the work is showing TJ Maxx buyers and other experts talking about their approach to acquiring merchandise for the retailer, but the previous spots, produced earlier this year, were more fashion-oriented in their settings, showing people on the set of shoots, for example.

The new work, with spots like “Buyer” and  “Editor,” feature real people in more everyday settings, yet they still have the fashion-feel of the previous work. Maya’s use of framing, locations and lighting, along with the quick-cut pace of the spots (both edited by Frank Snider at Rock Paper Scissors), combine to make them feel like fashion videos, while still anchored in the real-people testimonial space.

Otis says his first documentary-style commercial shoot "energized" him.

“Interviewing people in corporate settings is an interesting process,” Maya says of his approach to the TJ Maxx work.  He works initially with a lean crew—just him, a PA and a digital video camera. The key is finding people whose comfort level with this set up will translate to a full-up production, “with bigger cameras, lights, a bigger crew and clients,” he says.  “You still want them to be themselves.”
 
The director’s introduction to the reality-based approach came on a public service announcement he did for New York’s Fresh Air Fund, a charity that raises money to send inner-city kids to summer camp. The experience was one that he describes as exploration and discovery—terms he uses over and over to describe the documentary-style work he’s done.  He followed that up with a project for Dove, produced before the brand’s “Real Beauty” effort re-wrote the category.  Maya and his team travelled to five cities in the US, interviewing close to 100 women about what beauty meant to them. “There were lots of extended interviews, lots of insights,” he recalls.  “It was fascinating to get into the question of how to define beauty with so many women. Some really great stories came out of this exercise.”
 
What interests Maya in creating docu-style advertising is the ability to have a foot in both worlds. “You have to work within the parameters of the brief and the advertising form, where you’re dealing with branding, images and message,” he says, “and you have to bring a reality to that within this construct. You have to still find places where you can  explore and discover new things.”
 

Real people croon about their Tempur-Pedics in this campaign directed by Michael Cuesta.

Another form of real-people work Maya has done is the type seen most powerfully in his early spots for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in a series of ads that feature stories told by real cancer survivors.  “We were in people’s homes and in their neighborhoods,” he explains. “It was a very moving experience, as we were able to spend time with these survivors. And that process of being in their environments proved to be a world of discovery for me. You’re not just scouting locations with them, you’re scouting their lives. And then you have to find a way to shoot their stories that’s not intrusive. It has to feel and look artistic, without being flat. I think the challenge is to find great compositions within the moments.”
 

Otis’ most recent work in the reality-based genre can be seen on the Dove Movement web site, in which the director interviewed young girls and their mothers as they talk about how beauty is a way to build confidence and self-esteem.  The clips, shot against a plain background, show girls of varying age, from kids to teens, interacting with their moms in an honest and straightforward way. 
 
This isn’t Otis’s first foray into shooting branded web shorts that employ real people connecting with an audience—he also produced an integrated campaign for Neutrogena’s Skin-iD line of skin care products that ran on both the net and on broadcast.  “The medium offers you an opportunity to do something that’s not as expected,” he says of the major difference between shooting for one versus the other. “Conceptually, we can work outside the norm and devote more time to developing story and character. The goal is to develop a deeper experience not just with the site, but with the brand.”
 

Cindy, a make-up artist, seen in Otis' "Made in New York" campaign.

An NYU Tisch grad who always wanted to get into production, Otis came to directing in a round-about fashion that’s helped shape his outlook on the business.  He initially worked in editorial, and given his technical chops he landed at The Artists Company where he immediately set to work on its Avid, building director reels and working with them on director cuts. At the same time, he rebuilt and redesigned the company’s web site.
 
“Roberto took an interest in me,” he says, “and gave me some money to direct my first music video.” It was for a pop duo known as Melky Sedek, which was comprised of the brother and sister of Fugee’s star Wyclef Jean.
 
Otis continued working in music videos and commercials, looking for a style that he felt comfortable in, when he had a revelatory experience.  He shot a PSA for Lambda Legal, the gay rights organization which provides legal assistance to gay and transgender people that have been the victims of discrimination. “I got emotional responses from people that I’d never gotten before,” he says of his work on the spots. “The whole experience energized me, and Roberto picked up on that. He told me then that he thought I’d found my voice as a director.”
 

Cancer survivors were the stars of Gregory Maya's early work for Dana Farber.

He followed that up with the “Made in New York” campaign for the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. The spots show real crafts people in the film and TV industry talking about their jobs and about how much they love living and working in New York. The campaign was designed to help defuse growing frustration on the part of city residents with the inconvenience of hosting film shoots—the closed streets, etc. “We needed to tell New Yorkers that the people who work in the business are your neighbors—they’re someone you might be standing behind them at the deli,” says Otis.  
 
What Roberto finds most interesting about the work of Cuesta, Maya and Otis is that none of them are what you could call formal documentarians.  “They represent three completely distinct sensibilities and pallets,” he says, “but what’s most important, and what I think they truly bring to the realty-based form, is a set of very stylish advertising skills. Yet there’s a really solid foundation to their approach that is incredibly intuitive and reveals their ability to be excited about work without artifice. None of them have ever shot a documentary before, yet they’re doing very visible, very connected, very modern work in this genre. And I think that says a lot about them as directors, and about us as a company.”

Published Oct. 18, 2010