Inspired thinking; the ads that made me

Ali Ali, director & Founder, Good People Films

It’s a tough choice you’re asking me to make,  but if i had to pick one - just one - film that inspired me to become a director, it would have to be the You Can Say Anything With a Smile campaign for Crest Toothpaste. 

These came out around mid-2009 and I was a creative director at McCann Dubai at the time. I remember thinking I wanted to quit everything I was doing at the time (mostly just shitty real estate and tired banking briefs) and start directing. I think I quit my job three weeks later. 

Crafted and shot to perfection by Harold Einstein, who is a comedic tour de force (he’s also done tons of Kayak and Geico spots), and probably the man who changed how we do comedy in ads forever. I remember feeling this fiery jealousy deep down, this sharp and intense I-wish-I-had-done-that feeling that I couldn’t shake for a while.  

I remember feeling this fiery jealousy deep down, this sharp and intense I-wish-I-had-done-that feeling.

Bulldozer stands out the most for me, in terms of the writing, the premise, the casting obviously, and the incredible comedic timing. The other two, Prenup and Lice, are not all that unfortunately. But Bulldozer is so refined, so elevated, that you stop caring about the other two. I would easily put these 40-seconds of genius amongst the top five ads ever made.  Watch it a couple times and I'm sure you’ll agree. If you could get over the fence. 

Parv Thind, Partner and Sound Engineer, Wave Studios 

I was never inspired to get into advertising, I always wanted to work in sound, it just happens I ended up making sound design for commercials. One of my favourite ads before I worked in advertising was the Birds Eye steak “We hope it's chips...” commercial.

I would imagine there are not a lot of people from that era that don’t know the words to it. In 1996, having started as a runner in 1994, I saw an ad which I thought was brilliant; it sounded and looked great. The ad was Kiss FM Music is Life. 

It was way before its time, in fact I just watched it again and it could have been made yesterday. 

It was way before its time, in fact I just watched it again and it could have been made yesterday. It was written by Tom Carty and Walter Campbell, and directed by Malcolm Venville, with sound design by Warren Hamilton and Johnnie Burn at the Tape Gallery. It obviously inspired me because, three years later, Wave Studios was born, and I would be working with them both.

Ali Brown, President, PRETTYBIRD

Considering that until I was on the first day of my temp receptionist job I didn’t know that the advertising industry existed, I decided to twist the assignment and share a piece of work that inspired me to stay in the industry. I had grown up hearing “time to make the donuts” and “look here come crispy critters” (I can still recite every word to that jingle) but considered ads annoying things that kept me anxiously awaiting the next episode of The Cosby Show.  

I had no aspiration to be in this industry - I wanted to be a Fly Girl or an actress but neither of those paths panned out for me. And so I found myself in LA, answering phones as a receptionist at a commercial production company, by complete and total mistake. I didn’t understand what we did or why, I just knew I had to wear my best Forever 21 outfit to work and “be charming". Fortunately for me, there were a bunch of young people in the office all trying to make it in the business. And, thankfully, they took me under their wing — from showing me the ways of the Thomas Guide to leaving bootlegged VHS tapes on the front desk for me to check out.  

And, one day, one of those tapes held a commercial that changed my perception of the business - it was a little ditty called Whassup… I remember all of us 'kids' were passing around the VHS tape at the office, and we all thought it was the greatest thing because it spoke the way we spoke. It was a style of humour that was exactly what we found funny. It had a cast of characters who were people that I recognised from my own life. It wasn’t this polished version of aspirational life, or overly complex choreographed fantasy, it was essentially a carbon copy of me and my friends calling each other on the phone and being dumb. 

It didn’t feel like an ad. It felt like something we would have made on the weekend when we were passionately creating things that spoke to us.

And it didn’t feel like an ad. It felt like something we would have made on the weekend when we were passionately creating things that spoke to us, trying to get our voice into the world by begging for short ends and returning equipment from a shoot on Monday AM instead of Friday night so we could use it over the weekend. Seeing that the worlds of film and advertising could collide and actually feed each other, that is something that has continued to inspire me to this day as we build companies that work across all the silos of entertainment. You actually don’t have to pick a lane… as evidenced to me in the year 2000, and held firmly in my mindset to this day. 

David Gamble, Co-Founder & ECD, Truant London

It was 1993. Floppy curtains framed my face, my scuffed-up biker boots had never been anywhere near a bike, and my desire to do something creative as a job was growing. But what? I grew up in an era of comedic ads. Happiness was a cigar called Hamlet; you knew when you’d been Tango’d, and Heineken refreshed the parts ‘wot’ other beers couldn’t reach. I loved these mini-comedy sketches and how they made me feel about the brands. But there was one ad that really stood out for me that bucked the comedy trend. 

The first time I saw Tony Kaye’s Tested for the Unexpected Dunlop spot I was blown away. It was like Mad Max and Hellraiser took acid and then had a baby. Freaky, alien-like characters stared blankly into the camera; a toothless, bald, silver fat man in S&M gear cackled crazily as a BMW weaved its way through the cinematic, otherworldly landscapes, avoiding everything thrown into its path. 

Brilliant advertising not only made me watch it. It made me want to make it.

Venus in Furs by the Velvet Underground was the eerie cherry on a beautifully fucked-up cake. I had no idea what it was for until the end sequence appeared, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to flick channels for anything. We now live in a world of “we need to see the brand and demonstrate the product benefits in the first five seconds”. As much as I love progress, we can definitely learn from the past. Brilliant advertising not only made me watch it. It made me want to make it.

Simon Labbett, Co-Founder & ECD, Truant London

1996. Guinness Chain. The finest Guinness ad. Yes, controversially, I preferred it to Surfer. But what actually made this ad genius wasn’t the storytelling, sublime soundtrack or incredible visuals, it was the strange assortment of letters that appeared in the final frame. Something we now recognise, 30 years later, as a URL.