Everything will be Awesome, Says Rupert Maconick

Rupert Maconick is adamant that advertising as we traditionally know it is dead, or at least is in a permanent state of atrophy. No one, he posits, watches adverts anymore, not if they can help it. Rather, he clarifies, no one watches traditional TV commercials anymore. “If it wasn’t your job,” he asks, “would you? If, at home, you have the ability to skip through them, do you? Of course you do.” Maconick, the founder of LA-based production company Saville Productions, has a habit of answering questions that he asks for you, but the thing is, those answers are generally right. 

Maconick’s company, actually defined as an entertainment rather than a production company, was set up in 1996, a few years after the native Brit crossed the Atlantic to the US West Coast. Before moving to America he worked in a commercials production house in the UK but then, post-move, completed a Masters in film business at the University of Southern California before reading scripts for a living at Paramount and William Morris. “But it can be demoralising,” explains Maconick, “because most film screenplays do not get made. The good news about the advertising business is brands need to sell products every quarter and need to market and produce promotional films.” 

Maconick enjoyed the cut-and-thrust of the advertising industry, the fast-paced nature of creating a piece of content and getting it out into the world before moving onto the next thing. He freelanced produced at various US production companies and eventually, in 1994, ended up working on Michael Jackson’s infamous HIStory album launch, which included spending four months in Hungary working on a four-minute Leni Riefenstahl-esque cinema trailer. “He’d seen Triumph of the Will and referenced that,” says Maconick of the late Prince of Pop. “Well,” he deadpans, “he had an unusual creative vision, you know.” 

Maconick founded Saville [his middle name] Productions and until recently the company was, like many other advertising production outfits, creating traditional TV commercials and online marketing content alongside longer form, less traditional fare. In essence the output of Saville Productions hasn’t changed, but the percentage split of what they produce has with Maconick strident about the need to engage with consumers in a different, more entertaining way. “Most of our advertising work was traditional ads or web content until around 2012 and when Netflix became mainstream,” he says. “Now it’s more like a 50-50 split.” 

Saville had always specialised in working with feature film directors and has a raft of big names, including Martin Campbell, Werner Hertzog, Paul Haggis and Bryan Singer on its roster. The company was, and still is, the go-to place if you wanted a features director on your project, but by 2012, Maconick realised the industry was changing, and would continue to change, “when everyone in the States started migrating to Netflix and unsubscribing from cable”. 

Maconick recognised the shift early and planned on being ahead of the curve. The movie business, he posits, has been turned on its head by the likes of Marvel; “A lot of movie stars only have box office success when they are in a Marvel movie,” he states. “So Marvel and DC have become the movie stars.” The film for which he leaves the most praise is LEGO: The Movie which conquered that twin battle of not only being a successful film, but being a successful film that is ostensibly a massive, feature-length advert for LEGO. LEGO, says Maconick, has done that wonderful thing, as has Marvel and - to possibly a lesser degree - DC, of creating a universe around the brand and it’s something which brands need to be taking more note of, in Maconick’s opinion. “The most forward looking marketeers are toy brands, comic books and game companies,” he says. “ They create incredibly entertaining worlds. LEGO, Marvel and Assasins Creed are good examples.  We pay to go and see their films which are simply promotional vehicles for their toy, comic book or video game.” 

Embedding your brand within a relevant and authentic world is what Maconick believes is the key to future advertising success. He cites examples such as Aston Martin and, potentially, any vodka brand within the world of James Bond as being good examples. Heineken, though, gets short shrift from him as it doesn’t feel authentically Bondian. “There are so many examples,” enthuses Maconick. “Minis in the original Italian Job film is a great example of how the car’s unique qualities allow the gang to pull off the heist. Even recently in Mad Men, it made people start drinking Negronis, because a character they liked was drinking them. Bad examples would be something like The Fast and the Furious franchise because those cars are not synonymous with the characters. If you ask the average person, ‘what does X character from those films drive?’, they wouldn’t know because they keep switching. What I’m saying is that it’s the biggest car film franchise in the world and you’d have thought that relevant brands would have figured out a way to integrate themselves.”

Bringing in creative partners, especially writers, to the agency world is what Maconick thinks needs to be done to improve how this part of the business will work. There needs to be more collaboration in his opinion and currently creatives within an agency setting don’t have the experience, nor are they trained, to write long form scripts. “[Writing a script] is incredibly difficult,” he says. “It’s easier to direct a movie than to write a script and there are many examples of a bad film being made from a great script, there are no examples of a good film coming from a bad script.” 

Saville has recently worked with San Francisco agency Pereira & O’Dell on a long form idea, an agency which has form in that space with their award-winning films for Intel. Maconick is also in conversation with BBH LA about a project and Werner Hertzog has recently completed a film through Saville for internet security brand Netscout called Lo and Behold; Reveries of the Connected World (below), which is a feature-length documentary looking at the internet, our reliance on it and how we need to protect it. “You can find an interesting story within some of the most mundane things,” says Maconick. “Internet security can be a pretty dry conversation [but] Werner’s exploration of the internet is very engaging.” And was Hertzog excited about the opportunity to work within advertising? “He’s told me he’d rather drive a taxi than watch a TV commercial, but we didn’t do that, we made an entertaining documentary as opposed to a TV commercial. Most relevantly for clients and agencies, consumers watch entertainment.” 

Like most forward-thinking people, Maconick embraces the changes that the industry is currently experiencing. It’s not a time, he says, to be risk-averse. He also doesn’t believe that traditional advertising, and traditional advertising practices are totally redundant; not yet, anyway. “Things are shifting, because the consumer’s behaviour is shifting,” he says. “Just because you don’t want it to change, it doesn’t mean it won’t, and we all have to stay relevant. I think it’s a good thing, we’re in an optimistic phase and instead of instead of the death of an industry, its the birth of a new one [and] it creates enormous opportunity. You know, the pinnacle of what you can do at the moment is create a Super Bowl ad. The pinnacle of the future is to create a Marvel-esque universe for your brand.”