Sean Bryan & Tom Murphy on Storytelling for Brands, Fans and Kids
The Co-Chief Creative Officers of McCannulls New York office talk about the new ways in which truth can be well told.
McCann's Bryan & Murphy on Storytelling
for Brands, Fans and Kids
Sean Bryan and Tom Murphy, Co-Chief Creative Officers of the agency's
flagship office, talk about the new ways in which truth can be well told.
By Anthony Vagnoni
Sean Bryan and Tom Murphy are something of a study in contrasts, if only subtle ones. Both live in Connecticut (the storied advertising suburb of Jim Blandings and a succession of agency executives). Both have two kids, a boy and a girl. Same ages, too. And the pair have worked as a team for a period of time that seems just shy of half their lives.
The duo were named Co-Chief Creative Officers of McCann's New York office in June of this year, with responsibility for the creative portfolio of the venerable agency's flagship and single largest office. They share primary responsibility for McCann Worldgroup's Sony Mobile work, which includes the recently-launched 60-second Sony Xperia tablet spot titled "Frames." Shot all in one take by Partizan's Augustus Punch, it features a long camera pullback through what's clearly a warehouse; as we move back, three giant tablet frames are revealed that function as stages for the action, representing different experiences the Xperia offers, such as surfing the web, playing games or watching videos.
Bryan and Murphy also spearhead the agency's Verizon business, and served as ECDs on the "Joy" spot for the Chevy Sonic spot for GM that aired on Super Bowl Sunday this year and was named to a number of Super Bowl best-of lists. They also work on Weight Watchers, Staples and other brands.
Prior to joining McCann they were at DDB in Chicago, working on Bud Light and other accounts, and started their partnership at JWT in New York. And in addition to all of this, the two have found the time to dabble in publishing as co-authors of the children's books "A Boy and His Bunny," "A Girl and Her Gator" and "A Bear and His Boy."
They recently sat down with SourceEcreative to talk about how the new forms of advertising storytelling have changed the way they work at Creative Directors.
SourceEcreative: You guys started here in the fall of 2005, right? How long have you been working together?
Tom Murphy: We're a very long standing team. Sean likes to remind me of that.
Sean Bryan: Almost 18 years, since we were kids.
Where did you start out?
Sean: I was an art history and history major, from the suburbs of Chicago. My parents were teachers. I went to Harvard and studied what was interesting to me, which was medieval art history and things like that. And then I tried to find a job in New York, where all my friends were going.
As what?
Bryan: I had no idea. I looked into law school, I interviewed at an investment bank. But the parents of a college roommate were friendly with this guy named Burt Manning, who was CEO of J. Walter Thompson, and he got me a job in the account management department. I didn't even know what that was. It was just, 'sure, I'll go make ads.' I started in September, and by Christmas I knew that I loved advertising and that I hated account management.
What year was this?
Bryan: It was 1993, and I was 22. And the agency used to have a big holiday party, and the creative director was this intimidating guy who's now a big time author, James Patterson. I wrote a satirical skit and got two other idiots to do it with me on stage, kind of making fun of him and the whole place. He thought it was funny and said, 'That guy's a good writer, let's put him on Trident.' And so I started writing copy, even though I had no portfolio or anything. About 8 or 10 months later Tom joined me.
Murphy: I went to Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts, came out with a portfolio and headed straight for New York. I went to a portfolio review for Syracuse grads and got a job at an agency called FCB Leber Katz. It was in the GM building on Fifth Avenue, which is an exciting place to work for your first job out of school. I had a number of friends who were in the creative department at JWT, and made contact with Nancy Temkin, their creative recruiter. I got an offer to go there not really knowing who I'd work with. I walked in the doors and was paired with this guy.
What was behind your move to DDB in Chicago, besides bringing you both a bit closer to home?
Bryan: It was exciting for us to try something new. A former CD at JWT had gone there, and DDB had just re-won McDonald's. There was a great deal of energy at the place, and it was a great time to work there. We worked on General Mills and Pep Boys and won and launched Cars.com. And then we were made CDs and put on McDonald's. After that we were put on Bud Light, which ran for a year.
So why the move to McCann?
Bryan: We'd been in Chicago for a while and were looking to come back east. And Joyce King Thomas had just been named Chief Creative Officer, and we came to work for her. And like when we went to DDB with McDonald's, Verizon Wireless had just landed, and we were hired to be group CDs on that. It seemed like a fun opportunity, as the wireless wars were just starting up.
I came out and interviewed first, and they said, 'Okay, we want to hire you, you're a good fit, we just need to find the right person to pair you up with.' Tom was initially a little reluctant to return to New York, but we put the hard sell on him.
Murphy: For us, McCann was on that list of big agencies that do big agency stuff well. We'd been at big agencies, we like being at big agencies. And while there's always that appeal of doing the small creative boutique thing, you see them come and you see them go.
Bryan: And if you're big agency guys, which we are, this is a good one. It's the flagship office of the largest agency network in the world. And it has a long history, over 100 years, of building big brands. Besides having just won Verizon, it had done all that "Priceless" work for MasterCard.
How has the place changed the most since you got here?
Murphy: Well, the industry's changed. This place is just half the size of what it used to be, in terms of numbers of people. Yet the volume of work has not been cut in half. There's a lot going on, and I'd say that we, along with a lot of other big agencies, went through an identity crisis for a couple of years, trying to figure out what we really were. It was interesting to watch, but at the end of it you sort of say, 'Well, we build brands.' That's what we do. Regardless of whether that means a TV commercial or a social media campaign or whatever the appropriate channel is for it, that's what we still do. We build big brands with big brand ideas. And we're entirely focused on getting back to that, and spending less time thinking about tactics.
Bryan: I think a lot of big agencies went through some angst over this, and there was this bit of self-examination about who we are and what we want do to. Here at McCann, I think people came to the realization that it doesn't have to be wildly complicated. We're still creating these big brands, and we're doing it in new ways and utilizing new media channels.
It's the trendy thing for people in advertising to talk about their narrative skills. How does that influence the work you're supervising here, as the industry moves away from short, catchy slogans – 'Truth Well Told,' for example – to longer and more complex messages?
Bryan: We've always felt the most powerful thing you can for a brand is build an emotional connection with the consumer, and a lot of people describe that as storytelling. And it can be that, and it can take place in long-format things. But first you need to get an emotional reaction out of people, and that can take lots of different forms. It can be comic; it can be what "Priceless" was for many years, which was kind of warm and touching; or it can be surprising or shocking.
You want to establish not just a rational explanation for why your brand deserves a place in the customer's mind, but in their hearts as too. And that's one of the hardest things to do, with the proliferation of brand messages. The average New Yorker sees over 2000 forms of brand messaging a day, studies have shown, and it's much the same all over the world. And you're not going to give a shit about most of them.
Isn't it harder to get an emotional reaction in the kinds of media people are looking at today? It's one thing to show a TV commercial about a Coke and a smile; it's another to do that with a rich media ad.
Bryan: That's right, there are some forms of communication where that's exceedingly hard. And some of the work we've done with Sony has been a fun example of that, like the series of web videos with the comedy routines. (That campaign, starring the actress and comic Kristen Schaal, was designed to promote a Sony Ericsson phone as a gaming platform).
Another example is the global launch we did for Sony-branded mobile phones after they ended their relationship with Ericsson. Sony is one of those big, hallowed brands, and "Make.Believe" has been their campaign for a couple of years. And we came up with this thought that all of our devices – smartphones, tablets, etc. – are not just made of chips and cameras and processors, they're made of imagination. To get that across, we did this interesting project with a seven-year old kid and the director Wes Anderson.
That's the "Mind of a Child" campaign, right?
Murphy: Right. We felt that if we were going to stand for imagination, there's probably no one more qualified to fulfill that than a child. So to create the narrative for our campaign we did this very wide casting process around the world where we looked for children's explanations as to how these devices worked. And then we contacted Wes.
He's got a kind of child-like take on storytelling himself, doesn't he?
Murphy: His aesthetic is certainly that. And we paired him with this notion which this little kid had, and he brought that story to life.
What about this most recent spot, "Frames"?
Murphy: That's a continuation of that campaign, "Made of imagination." And I think regarding your point about storytelling, one thing that McCann has always been very good at is that 'truth' thing; it's deducing or figuring out what the story is about a brand that you want to tell. Almost before you start telling it, you've got to figure out what the outline of the overall message is going to be.
It's kind of like a design exercise, where you try and get to the soul of what a brand is, and what you come away with can be something like 'The Real Thing.'
Bryan: Exactly. And then once you've got the real thing – once you've got the arc of the story – then you can tell it in lots of interesting ways. Once we arrived at 'imagination' for Sony, the fun of it becomes figuring out how you tell it in different channels.
In an article we published in March (see it here), your recently-named Chief Production Officer, Brian DiLorenzo, talked about how the whole concept of production at an agency needs to be re-defined, that it's less about broadcast and more about, well, anything. That means the process from ideation to execution is a lot different for you than it was back when you were shooting Bud Light spots, right?
Murphy: It is. I saw someone on Facebook who put down a description of what they did in advertising which essentially said, 'I do this, that and the other, and I occasionally make advertisements.' We don't just make ads anymore, we make a lot of different things. But again, they're all in service off that big brand idea.
Bryan: And for some advertisers, it can still be that. Their goal might be to hit the consumer squarely with their message, so it could be via TV at night and online during the day, as well as here and here and here, too. And they're all arrows pointing at the same thing.
It used to be a much simpler process to go about making ads.
Murphy: There was a set route that everything followed. The brief came in, it went to these guys here, and then to these guys here. And that process has been broken apart and is much more fragmented. And I think that freaked out a lot of people at big agencies, which had been built for decades on that very linear path. There's been a shift, and across the industry people are now seeing the excitement of this different way of doing things.
Bryan: But I also think – and this was what was happening here when we arrived – the first attempts to get some of these new forms and media channels integrated into the process were siloed. You'd have a digital department, and you as the creatives would come up with this idea and you'd take it over to the digital guys and say, 'We need something digital to go along with this TV commercial.' And that was not the way to do it. It's like the old stories of the pre-Bernbach era, where the copywriter would slip the copy under the door for the art director. There was I think a little bit, at the big places, of that mentality, where we arrive at the idea and then we slip it under the digital guys' door. Which is not the way that it should work.
What you see now is you get these different sorts of thinkers in at the beginning of the process. I was at a meeting the other day about launching a new brand for one of our clients, and the diversity of talent in the room was much different than what it was even five years ago.
With having a guy like Brian here, how are you set up differently to execute these ideas? What's changed about how you get work produced?
Murphy: What we're trying to do on the production end – and Brian has done this before and he's now doing it for us – as well as on the creative end is to be completely integrated. When a brief comes in, we no longer have just art directors and copywriters there, we have our social experts, our technologists, our strategists, so we come up with integrated concepts. And then we want integrated production for all of this. We don't want to divvy something up into just the guys who do TV commercials and here's the guys who do print, etc.
And this is what's fun about things and also what's challenging about them, in that every time it's a different thing. We were talking to Catherine Patterson, one of our mad geniuses in digital production – Cat Pat, as we call her – and we told her that we wanted to put a robot in outer space for Nature Valley granola bars, and she figured out how to do it. What it requires is a different kind of thinker in terms of who we're used to sourcing from.
Bryan: Brian's philosophy is, producers are no longer people who make TV commercials, they're the makers of stuff. And a lot of that has to do with problem-solving. We did a thing very recently for Nestle Waters that involved the construction of a fountain that was designed to talk to people. It was this sort of cryptic thing, you could ask it questions, and through the way it emitted water your answers would be clear in the fountain. (Dubbed "The Fountain of Electrolytenment," it was staged at The Grove, an upscale shopping center in L.A. For a deeper explanation of it, along with a video clip, click here.)
The route to making it work was so circuitous and such a journey, and that is emblematic of this new process. The producers couldn't just contact a production company for this; they had to figure out, from the ground up, how to make this work.
So how has this impacted the kind of talent you need to have now in your production departments?
Bryan: You need people that are not just detail-oriented and great at getting things done, you also need people that are innovative thinkers on the solution end, almost first and foremost. For a campaign we did for Nature Valley, we thought, you know how Google does street views? We should do that in national parks, so people could take a virtual hike, so to speak. And since the brand had a relationship with the National Park Service, it made a lot of sense. But that was another example – how can we let people do street views of these famous trails? And we won two Gold Lions for it. (For more on the effort, click here.)
That's another case of how in the world are we going to do this? And we kind of did it ourselves. Our creatives and production teams went on these extensive hikes, they had to train for them, walking around Manhattan with these big packs on their backs. And we put these cameras on top of backpacks and covered 300 miles of trails.
So if you're doing all this interesting new integrated work, that requires all these new skill sets, what's up with the children's books? They feel like a throwback, in a way.
Murphy: We do, and the book thing kind of coincided with the growth of our families. We conceived of the first one actually before either of us had kids. But we did a series of them and it was right around the time our kids were young, and it was a nice little break from advertising. It started very randomly. Sean wanted to create a gift for his nephew. This was back when we were living in Chicago. He was the ring bearer at his wedding.
Bryan: He was three-and-a-half years old, and he left the message on his family's voicemail, and did this little sing-song thing and said, 'Henry Hobbs has a bunny on his head, please leave a message at the beep.' And everyone who heard it laughed, so I wrote this little rhyming story about a boy with a bunny on his head. And I asked Tom if he could do some drawings.
Murphy: I did doodles, and we packaged it together in this spiral-bound notebook and gave it to Henry as a present, and he treasured this thing and loved it and had his parents read it to him all the time. And his parents, and Sean's extended family, started sharing this thing and it became very popular in the family. So they said, you guys should try and get it published, to which I said, 'Whatever. That will never happen.' But we ended up speaking to contacts in the publishing industry who decided they wanted to publish it.
So 'A Boy and His Bunny' was first, right?
Bryan: Yes, and it's on its fourth printing and it's has done very well. And the publishers asked us to do another one, this time about a girl. So we did "A Girl and Her Gator." And each of these books ends with an allusion to the next one, so we had to come up with a story about a boy who wakes up on top of a Kodiak bear and that's why we wrote "A Bear and His Boy," which is more from the perspective of a bear/parent figure. It's about a stressed-out bear who doesn't have time for this kid hanging around his neck. And we did our fourth children's book, "A Juggling Pug," and it did okay, but there's not a ton of money in children's books, especially when you're splitting it in two.
Murphy: We had grand visions of leaving advertising, but it didn't happen quite like that.
So are there more books in you? What can we see next on our Kindles?
Bryan: We keep talking about doing another one. And we've talked with some directors we've worked with about doing an animated version. So maybe there's a way for them to evolve.
Published 12 November, 2012
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