How hungryman woke the dead

The phrase “murder your darlings” has been used in writing for the past 100 years, but in the many-mastered world of advertising, it’s not necessarily the writer who’s wielding the axe.

Thankfully, hungryman has a solution for frustrated creatives who have seen beloved ideas consigned to the scrapheap. Its Dead Ad Society, billed as an “anti-award show award show”, invites people to submit scripts that never made it, with shortlisted ideas performed live before a jury and the Gold winner ultimately put into production.

For this year’s event, more than 250 submissions were whittled down to 16 finalists, with Jagger Moore’s years-old coffee script, All Grown Up, taking Gold before INNOCEAN helped find it a new home with Jones Coffee Roasters.

Here, shots speaks to Dead Ad Society founder and hungryman managing partner Caleb Dewart, director Lena Beug and INNOCEAN ACD copywriter Jagger Moore about resurrecting abandoned ideas, making a commercial back-to-front, and the creative freedom that can come from giving dead work another chance.

Above: The finished All Grown Up spot for Jones Coffee Roasters.

How does Dead Ad Society actually work, from somebody submitting a dead idea through to choosing the one that ultimately gets made?

Caleb Dewart: It starts with creatives and agencies submitting their dead ideas at DeadAdSociety.com, scripts they loved that, for whatever reason, never got made. Once submissions close, the jury goes through everything and selects a shortlist. Those shortlisted scripts are then performed live by professional improv actors in front of an audience at the Dead Ad Society show. It’s essentially the ideas stripped down to their most basic form: no decks, no treatments, just the script and the performance.

The jury then deliberates live. We have a blind voting system that gives us an initial sense of what people are loving, but once it gets narrowed down, there’s a lot of debate and discussion. We ultimately pick three scripts and award Bronze, Silver and Gold.

During the shortlisting process, we also talk with the creatives who submitted the work to understand the history of the idea and get a sense of whether there’s a real path to getting it made. The Gold-winning script then gets fully produced by hungryman with the support of our amazing production and post partners.

You had more than 250 submissions last year, which became 16 finalists performed live on stage. What are you looking for when you whittle that number down, and does an idea need to work differently on the page to work in that environment?

CD: In the last two years, we’ve had a few scripts that, on the surface, seemed challenging to perform on stage. But we’ve been delighted and surprised by what great SAG actors can bring to the table. One of our shortlisted scripts in Year One, submitted by Mischief, had no dialogue at all. It was an absurdly funny script describing an encounter between a woman and a horse-sized duck. Our actors brought it to life in a way that was genuinely hilarious and gave everyone in the room a vision for what the spot could have been.

If the idea is great, that’s what matters.

So we try not to be too constrained by what seems immediately “performable” on the page. If the idea is great, that’s what matters. That said, simple, dumb and funny generally wins the hearts and minds of both the audience and the jurors.

You encountered All Grown Up before you knew it would be the winning script, because you directed the live performances of all 16 finalists. What was your first reaction to it?

Lena Beug: All Grown Up was one of the scripts that came in as just words on a page, not a 27-page deck, no images, no selling. Just a funny script. Words on a page. Those are the ones you remember, because if you read the words and it comes to life in your head, and a part of your brain is thinking, this is absolutely ridiculous, those are all good signs.

I wish we could have made all 16.

Why was live performance such an important part of the judging process? What does hearing these scripts performed in front of an audience reveal that simply reading them doesn’t?

CD: It’s almost like we’re market-testing the spot in front of the toughest audience in the world, a room full of brilliant agency creatives. Having talented actors perform the scripts gives everyone a real sense of what these spots could actually become.

And, in a way, it mirrors what we already do in the pre-production process for all the work we produce. Casting callbacks are often the first time you see an idea move off the page and come to life through actors working with a director. The live performances do the same thing, except you’re seeing it happen in real time, in a room full of people, and you immediately know what’s working.

Above: The Dead Ad Society live event.

What did directing all of those scripts in such a stripped-back form teach you about the difference between an idea that is beautifully presented and one that fundamentally works?

LB: I was listening to the radio yesterday and they were talking about these big movies and TV shows that started off as small, messy, one-person shows at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. It’s kind of like this. If it works without all of the bells and whistles, it’s an idea worth hanging on to. It might need to evolve, be developed and so on, but the kernel is there.

It’s always hard for agencies to sell work to clients, and complete creative freedom obviously comes with a trade-off.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a bit of beautiful presentation, but there has to be something underneath.

What was it like hearing the idea performed live after it had existed as words on a page for so long? Did the performance expose anything about its rhythm, characters or comedy that you hadn’t noticed when you originally wrote it?

Jagger Moore: To be totally honest, I couldn’t hear most of the dialogue on the night. But I could tell from the physicality of the actors’ performances that the script was working well. It was nice confirmation that the script could actually get some laughs.

The prize isn’t just recognition, it’s actually making the winning idea. Was that always fundamental to Dead Ad Society, rather than simply celebrating great work that never happened?

CD: That was an essential part of the idea. We already have award shows that give out trophies. This is that, our Bronze, Silver and Gold “dead fish” trophies are pretty fun, but the ultimate prize is that we actually bring the winning idea back to life. 

Plus, we get to make something fun, and make it for the right reasons.

How much of the script that won Dead Ad Society was the original version? Did you resist the urge to update or improve it once you knew it was actually going to be made?

JM: The final spot is structurally the same as the original script I wrote a few years back. We did update a few lines of dialogue, notably that last line about eating sand. When I knew we were actually going to produce it, I came up with a bunch of jokes to end on, and that one rose to the top.

With All Grown Up, INNOCEAN ultimately found Jones Coffee Roasters and you ended up with something resembling a traditional agency-client-production relationship, albeit assembled backwards. How did beginning with the idea, rather than a client brief, change that relationship?

CD: It’s always hard for agencies to sell work to clients, and complete creative freedom obviously comes with a trade-off. We were so fortunate that INNOCEAN brought Jones Coffee Roasters to the table. They were a dream client.

And the fact that hungryman and our post partners are paying for the spot makes it a pretty unusual dynamic. Not all brands are willing to relinquish control, even if it costs them nothing.

Above: Behind the scenes as Lena Beug and the team bring the winning script to life.

Did being able to look for the right brand after the script had already won help protect the original idea?

JM: As we shopped the script around to potential clients, we had the freedom to pick and choose the brands that seemed like a natural fit for the script. It’s nice knowing that the script won’t be compromised. And all credit to Chuck and Larry Jones, who were behind the idea 100% from the get-go.

Once Jones Coffee Roasters became the brand, what needed to change to make an old script feel genuinely theirs rather than simply attaching a logo to an existing idea?

JM: The way we talked about the coffee definitely evolved. The original script used adjectives like “smooth” and “refreshing” and, while Jones Coffee is both of those things, we wanted to speak to the rich flavors that their beans are known for. They’ve been growing and roasting their own beans for decades, so we wanted that to come through in how our big baby man talks about the coffee.

Once you moved from the live performance into production, where did the unusual setup of the project give you freedoms you might not normally have on a commercial?

LB: I think so. Fewer people to answer to, less fear maybe. It became just about making it come to life in a way that lived up to its winning status.

It was a bit like making an amazing meal from leftovers you find in the fridge. There’s plenty there, but you know you can’t exactly follow the recipe. You have to use your imagination, come up with more unusual solutions. No one is signing overages. Sometimes a bit of healthy scarcity is what we all need.

Something lovely happens when everyone is working for the same cause and, while this can absolutely happen on a well-funded commercial project with clients and agencies, it doesn’t always.

I’m thinking in particular of the conversations with our wardrobe designer, Anette Cseri, about how we transform the baby clothes into a fully grown man/baby outfit that still feels reminiscent of the original, all in just a few seconds. Where do we find that, and how do we bring it to life without a team of seamstresses? And with our production designer, Eric Archer, who manually disassembled a cheap stroller, put a motor on it and, with the help of a few guys and some fishing line, created this amazing visual which tells our brain that a transformation is happening live. He kept sending me videos of it from his phone because it was exciting.

Something lovely happens when everyone is working for the same cause and, while this can absolutely happen on a well-funded commercial project with clients and agencies, it doesn’t always. Everyone was doing this for the love of what we do, and we do have fun jobs, no question.

Did that freedom change the way decisions were made on set compared with a more conventional commercial process?

LB: I started my career at MTV in the early aughts. There was no agency or client. We pitched ideas, got money, not a ton but enough, and made stuff. The first time I did a real commercial job with an agency and a client, I got the fright of my life. Before that, I had just been going with my gut, and suddenly I had to justify my decisions and fight for them, which, at the time, was absolutely terrifying, and possibly good for me.

This felt more like the old way. Let’s talk about it and find the best way and make something cool. It was more cooperative, less hierarchical. There were no decisions being made by unseen bosses.