Finding advertising’s funny bone with Jeff Low

Jeff Low’s retinue of stop-motion spots for Telstra, Australia’s broadband and mobile provider, were wrangled into being with the help of some astute one liners and the dexterity of stop-motion master Tobias Fouracre, whose credits include Isle of Dogs and Fantastic Mr Fox. 

There are 26 Telstra spots in all, each featuring a critter (prawn, lizard, sheep, parrot, frog, rat… it’s a cast assembled from Aesop’s Fables) extolling the brand’s connective virtues in specific Aussie locations – the likes of Flinders Island, Northcliff, Rocky Cape. And collectively, they won Low a joint Best Director gong at shots 2024 APAC Awards. 

It’s not false modesty to say that I truly cannot believe my luck.

It’s not Low’s first rodeo. Wind back the clock to 2015, and there he is, accepting a shots Director of the Year award for his interactive Skittles Cat campaign with BBDO Toronto (just place your fingertip on the on-screen Skittle and let the feline do the work).  

“Awards must have an invisible impact on us, right?” he says of his gong hoard. “It’s certainly not a dramatic impact – I still get my ass handed to me by other directors even after winning... but it’s flattering and amazing to me that I am not a karaoke host in deep French Canada, divorced and living above a bar. It’s not false modesty to say that I truly cannot believe my luck.” 

All in all, it’s not a bad result for a former bassist and keyboard jockey for a bunch of bar bands and Bowie tribute acts playing to liquored-up students. Low got his break by selling a PC to a customer who turned out to be a production manager in search of an assistant. Like music, it seems, a good career break is all about timing.  

It’s a common thing for people in comedy to be failed musicians ... it must have something to do with rhythm.

“It’s a common thing for people in comedy to be failed musicians, in some way, I’ve found,” remarks Low. “It must have something to do with rhythm.” He credits his years as a musician for one of his attributes as a director of comedy. “I do tend to work more with my ears than my eyes,” he says, “at least up front. When I hear a thing, I can see it, and because I spent so much time in recording studios, I know how to get a sound design going pretty fast – and that becomes the basis for deciding what shots will get the most from a given piece of writing.”

Looking back at the Telstra spots, he hands a lot of credit to Micah Walker’s Bear Meets Eagle on Fire. “The agency was so kind to me on this job. They gave me hard-won ingredients and I was just tasked with making it funnier. I mean, that’s a dream if you’re me. I would take whatever animal and place they had predetermined, and just perform dialogue into a microphone until I hit some bits I felt were a good way to get a laugh. Human truths rather than jokes was sort of how I tried to think of it. Relatable and complex emotional lives inside a childlike visual. It’s a place I feel like I understand pretty well.” 

I never had a ‘big break'. It’s mostly all just been a brick-by-brick sort of thing.

One of the first spots with which he felt he was hitting his stride as a director was the fruity weirdness of his General Mills Fruit Snacks Cocoon spot from 2011. “It was disturbing but had the subtext of a boy ‘coming out of the closet’. I remember being a bit disappointed that I was good at THAT and not something that looked more like a Paul Thomas Anderson film. I have a cartoon mind – but I don’t want that kind of mind. 

“I never had a ‘big break’,” he continues. “It’s mostly all just been a brick-by-brick sort of thing. I will say, though, that my personal world view puts a ton of emphasis on luck. Everything about me and any success I’ve had is, at a minimum, 88 per cent luck. One hundred per cent if you consider the fact that I didn’t author how my brain works.”