Pelle Sjoenell: From the launderette to the Film Lions

While I might be looking at Pelle Sjoenell through a screen as he sits in his home in Los Angeles, the sun streaming through the large window behind him, he - head slightly tilted, eyeline aimed up and to his left - is not looking at me, but back into his past. 

"[Launderette] wasn’t pushed on me. It wasn’t flirting with me. It felt like it was seducing me.” 

Sjoenell was born and raised in Sweden and it’s there, as a boy, that the flame of his love for advertising was ignited. The picture in his mind, he explains as he continues to stare happily into his youth, is of a man in a pair of pristine, white boxer shorts, standing in an old-fashioned launderette, surrounded by gawping onlookers. 

“I think what that moment was about, for me,” he says, “was that Levi’s Launderette managed to find me, and I felt like I had found it. It wasn’t sold to me. It wasn’t pushed on me. It wasn’t flirting with me. It felt like it was seducing me.” 

Above: The commercial that started it all for Sjoenell; Levi's Launderette. 

That one of BBH London’s most iconic spots, made in 1985, was the catalyst for Sjoenell’s eventual, hugely successful, career is interesting because twenty-five years later he would go on to found the agency’s LA office before, in 2016, becoming BBH’s Worldwide Chief Creative Officer. “It’s interesting because Sweden didn’t have commercials on TV at that point,” explains Sjoenell. “At that time, we only had commercials in cinemas [the country only introduced commercial television in 1992]. You went early, and those [commercials] were windows to the rest of the world. They were part of the experience. They weren’t interruptive, they were prequels. They were part of the show.” 

“I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I think that the last decade of Film Grands Prix do not look like advertising."

Being ‘part of the show’, Sjoenell believes, is key because it’s at that point that commercials transcend advertising, no longer being annoying messages of interruption but, essentially, bite-sized chunks of entertainment. “When we [the advertising industry] do that now is when we do it right,” Sjoenell says. “I’m going to go out on a limb here, but I think that the last decade of Film Grands Prix do not look like advertising. They don’t feel like advertising. They are exactly that. They are obviously doing all the things that a commercial needs to do, but they don’t come in the form of that. I think that’s what [Launderette] did. That’s when we make great work; thinking beyond just the spot.” 

Launderette has obviously been on Sjoenell’s mind ahead of his stint as this year’s Film Lions President, only the second Swede to be president of the category, after Bosse Rönnberg in 1997. “When I got the job at BBH, I asked John Hegarty about Launderette, and I told him about my love for the spot, and how working at BBH was an amazing honour, and a closed loop. 

I asked him, ‘why was it so different?’ – told me about the first scene, of a GI – standing there, with traffic going by. It’s actually not part of the story and, when they were editing, John said they wanted to stay on the first scene as long as possible to make it feel like a film and not a commercial. To make it feel like this is another type of story and they were not in rush, that they were taking you into this world. I think that has stuck with me, always. I think it’s so interesting. Exactly to the point I was talking about, it doesn’t feel like a commercial.”

Above: The Sydney Opera House's 2024 Film Grand Prix winning Play It Safe.

Sjoenell cites the 2024 Film Grand Prix, Play It Safe for the Sydney Opera House and starring Tim Minchin, as a case in point, saying that he believes there are ‘blockers’ in people’s brains which, when they sense a commercial, filter it out, or makes them automatically reach for the ‘skip’ button. “If you can find a way to trick the blockers,” he says, “by reaching something deeper, something interesting, or different, I think you can get past that.” He admits that he might be slightly biased because, after leaving BBH, and following a four-year stint as the Chief Creative Officer of Activision Blizzard, Sjoenell was the Worldwide CCO at Droga5, which made Play It Safe. Regardless, the point stands, he believes. 

He’s looking forward to overseeing this year’s jury, watching the entries and debating with his fellow jurors what work should rise to the top. He’s been a juror at Cannes twice before, his first stint coming in 2017, on the Branded Entertainment jury headed by PJ Pereira of Pereira O’Dell. After the festival the jury banded together to write a book, The Art of Branded Entertainment, the proceeds of which went to educational institutions. “We wrote about our findings from that category, about what branded entertainment needs. It was a really powerful jury, with lots of great people.” As for stepping up for his first time to preside over a Lions jury, Sjoenell thinks his nationality might help him. “I think there’s a part of being president that is very Swedish,” he says. “It’s diplomacy, you’re in between. I like making sure that everyone gets heard.” 

“I think there’s a part of being president that is very Swedish. It’s diplomacy, you’re in between. I like making sure that everyone gets heard.” 

Being Swedish has been a boon in his career in more ways than one, he says. We’ve already discussed the impact commercials had on him while sitting in a darkened Swedish cinema, waiting to watch a film [it was A View to a Kill, in case you’re wondering], but instead being transfixed by the pre-show adverts. The country’s late arrival to commercial TV also meant it didn’t fall into the pre-conceived advertising notions that had already been established elsewhere in the world. 

Above: Sjoenell contributed to the book The Art of Branded Entertainment after serving on the Cannes Lions Branded Entertainment jury in 2017.

Sjoenell cites the example of Swedish supermarket ICA, one of the country’s biggest supermarket chains, which has a long-running campaign that is, essentially, branded content before branded content really existed. “It’s in the Guinness World Records as the longest branded soap opera,” Sjoenell explains. “I would call it the backbone of Swedish advertising. By 2006, when I left, we had done about 200 or 300 episodes. Actors are launched through this and every week there’s a new episode in the ad breaks across the big channels. It’s a very simple format. We wrote this together with some of the best comedy writers. Every episode has different products, four products per week, paid for by the brands themselves. This has been running for over 1,000 episodes. It’s the biggest thing.” 

The existence of this campaign also brings Sjoenell to another point which he believes the industry is suffering because of: IP ownership, or the lack thereof. The way in which agencies charge for their work is the same as lawyers; they bill for time spent on a project, regardless of how successful it ends up being. In advertising, owning IP is like the Holy Grail, but the Swedish agency behind the ICA campaign, King, took a different route. “When we won the pitch, we said they could pay us as an agency fee up front, or they could licence the concept from us and pay for production. They took the latter, which means that ICA can never leave that agency. The value of that agency is, in part, that they own that concept. It’s fascinating that the value was looked at differently. That is what we need to do now.” 

Above: Levi's Lauderette was a formative advertising experience for the young Sjoenell. 

After his stint at BBH, where he eventually stepped into the incredibly large shoes of Sir John Hegarty to oversee the agency’s global creative output, working with brands including Audi, British Airways, Tesco and KFC, Activision Blizzard was a huge, and hugely interesting, proposition. “I think it was Andy Berndt who went to Google to start Creative Lab. In the Google book [In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives, by Steven Levy] his quote is, ‘If a spaceship lands in your garden, you get in’. Well, a spaceship landed in my garden, and I got in.” 

"There’s so much more that’s happening inside a company. There are so many more important things, or equally important things, than advertising.” 

At the company, he worked on properties including  World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo and the behemoth that is Call of Duty. Amazing campaigns were created, such as the photographic campaign for Call of Duty Vanguard, in which war photographers were given the opportunity to wander around photographing images of war within the game. But, Sjoenell says, one of the most fascinating elements of the job was simply getting to work client side. “After about three weeks, no one had mentioned any ideas or campaigns or agencies,” he says. “That was such a revelation because I thought that’s all they would be thinking about after our recent presentation, because that’s all we were thinking about. But no, there’s so much more that’s happening inside a company. There are so many more important things, or equally important things, than advertising.” 

Above: Sjoenell worked on the photographic campaign for Call of Duty Vanguard, in which war photographers were given the opportunity to wander around photographing images of war within the game.

Working at Activision, at what is, in part, a tech company, wasn’t a huge leap for Sjoenell because, again, being Swedish, technology was in his blood. When it came to the internet, Sweden was light-years ahead of the rest of the world, adopting broadband in 1997, which put the country at a digital advantage and gave them a surge of creativity. Directors like Fredrik Bond, Johan Renck, Traktor and the much missed Johan Camitz came to the fore, as did creatives such as Linus Karlsson and Paul Malmstrom and, of course, Pelle Sjoenell and his brother Calle, who started his own digital agency at the time. “It was almost like when Olympians practice on higher grounds to get unfair advantage,” says Sjoenell. “We had that higher ground where we could just do things.” 

"A prompt is essentially a creative direction. You can be lazy with it, or you can be precise and visionary."

Work such as Dear Sophie for Google Chrome in 2011, which highlighted the platform’s technology in an emotive spot, and Dig Out Your Soul for Oasis’s album of the same name in 2008, which saw buskers playing the album’s tracks ahead of its release, a campaign which picked up the Titanium Grand Prix in Cannes. These campaigns came at a point when there seemed to be a shift in what advertising was, and what it could do. Around this time we also saw Decoded for Bing, which was made in association with Jay-Z and the release of his memoir, which was an audacious, interactive treasure hunt around New York. 

It was Sjoenell’s involvement in such campaigns which led to his first association with BBH, convincing the agency to open an LA office. Technology has moved on, though, as it is wont to do, and Sjoenell is as excited by the arrival of AI as he was about the rollout of broadband and the dominance of the internet. “It’s very exciting because AI is a fantastic tool for creativity. A prompt is essentially a creative direction. You can be lazy with it, or you can be precise and visionary. The problem with AI, creatively, is that it isn’t questioning. A prompt is, by its nature, an order, and if your creative partner is not questioning you and your ideas, if they’re just obeying, then you are in a team of one.”