Art & Copy comes back to the Triangle
Art & Copy will be playing at the Rialto on March 10, 6-9 sponsored by the AAF Raleigh-Durham. Executive producer, David Baldwin will be doing a Q&A after the film. The film premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival and came out in theaters in the fall.
Baldwin& hires account chief.
Indeed we did. In a way, Jerry Bodrie is rejoining us because we all worked together during our days at McKinney. Jerry is not only a smart guy he’s a heck of a good guy and knows how to get the right things done. Hence, his title, superconductor.
Art & Copy
Art & Copy is a movie David has been working on for four years now as an executive producer. The movie premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and was the only documentary picked up during the festival itself. The movie will be premiering officially on August 21, 2009. If you’d like to see if beforehand you’ll have to go to one of the many film festivals where it will be appearing in over the next few months.
SYNOPSIS
ART & COPY reveals the stories behind and the personal odysseys of some of the most influential advertising visionaries of our time and their campaigns, including Lee Clow (Apple Computer 1984, and today’s iPod); Dan Wieden (“Just Do It”); Phyllis K. Robinson (who invented the “me generation” with Clairol); Hal Riney (who helped President Reagan get re-elected); and George Lois (who saved MTV and launched Tommy Hilfiger overnight).
Directed by Doug Pray (HYPE! SCRATCH), ART & COPY captures the creative energy and passion behind the iconic campaigns that have had a profound impact on American culture. Featuring rare interviews with the aforementioned industry legends, the film seeks to identify the elements that transform an slogan into a pop culture catch phrases.
The movie was filmed and edited during a four-year period and had an unusual source for its funding — The One Club, a non-profit organization dedicated to the craft of advertising headquartered in New York.
ART & COPY provides a window into the creative process and the individuals who have changed our lives in ways we may not realize,” said Mary Warlick, CEO of The One Club. “The movie looks at advertising not as products flying off the shelf but as the work of a few American heroes who feel passionately about their craft, ideas, and the ability of ideas to change how people feel.”
The tenth documentary feature directed by Pray, ART & COPY was written by Timothy J. Sexton from an original concept by Gregory Beauchamp and Kirk Souder. The film was produced by Jimmy Greenway and Michael Nadeau and executive produced by David Baldwin, Gregory Beauchamp, Kirk Souder and Mary Warlick. The cinematographer is Peter Nelson and the editor is Philip Owens. The original score is by Jeff Martin.
David to speak at Boards Creative Workshops
David has been invited to give the Keynote address at the Boards Creative Conference in Chicago on May 19th.
David Speaks on Innovation at Shift Disturbers
David was recently asked to speak at Shift Disturbers, a creative conference in Toronto sponsored by Stimulant Magazine. He showed a 12 minute excerpt of Art & Copy and spoke about innovation.
David Baldwin interviewed by Boards Magazine at Shift Disturbers
David was recently asked to speak at a conference in Toronto called ‘Shift Disturbers’ presented by Stimulant. He was interviewed by Boards Magazine. Click here to read the interview or see it in its entirety below.
David Baldwin, ECD of Baldwin& and president of the One Club, considers the history of advertising, which began with the creative revolution of the ’60s up until the present day, as Chapter One. Chapter Two, he says, is yet to be written, and those who are bringing advertising forward into uncharted territory are this chapter’s authors.
Here, five questions with Baldwin on his role in creatingArt & Copy, the One Club-produced feature on the industry’s creative innovators, and why tough times like these are the best times to innovate. Hear Baldwin speak at the Boards Creative Workshop in Chicago on May 19.
What’s the idea behind the movie?
The idea for the movie was really to celebrate the figures behind this cultural movement over the last 30, 40 years. They’re anonymous to most people. They know the work, but not the people behind it. There’s something really fascinating about that. We wanted to talk about the art in the work.
It starts with this eureka that Bill Bernbach had back in the ’60s to put the art director and a copywriter together and let them figure it out. That had never been done before and it seems so simple, but it was a revolutionary idea. That’s where the creative revolution in advertising started.
The movie goes up through this creative revolution all the way though to the iPod ad, Goodby Silverstein and those guys, Cliff Freeman, right up in to the modern era. But it really does stop at the end of chapter one. Someone asked Lee Clow why didn’t we include interactive in this thing and he said because the interactive world is only now being turned over to the artists. It has been ruled by the scientists up until now. That’s the next the movie to be made.
An interesting piece is that advertising people and an advertising association is behind the making of the movie, which is very unique. You’d never have seen that 10 or 15 years ago. Now, suddenly in this new world you can do that. You can do anything…
I think a lot of people talk about needing to be thought-leaders. But you can’t say it; you have to be it. I think this is a great example of being a thought-leader. And it’s a great chronicle about why we got into this business and love it.
You’ve said that what’s happening now is not the death of advertising but the death of a business model. Can you explain?
What’s happening is that advertising is not under assault; the business model is under assault. Agencies are getting paid revenues in the millions of dollars for doing mass media television. That’s what’s under assault. There is still a need for clients to communicate their brand and communicate messages. The recession has not helped for the amount of work that’s going on. What’s happened is that the money has shifted around and into a lot more places.
Does the recession put a hamper on innovation?
Any kind of crisis puts pressure on business as usual. What you see is processes start to crack in a crisis period that normally wouldn’t crack when things are good. Certainly, from that standpoint there’s a quickening going on with some business models that could have been around for another five years if things were rolling. But I think from an innovation standpoint, tough economic times actually create innovation because you have to work harder to figure things out. Nothing causes new thinking like crisis. That’s really when new things start to happen.
Even me, starting a new company right in the center of the crash happening, I was very aware about that but kind of excited about it. What better time to create a blank slate, a white page?
Companies are struggling for answers. Is there a right answer?
I don’t know the right answer. But there seems to be this feeling that there has to be one right answer out there. I think we live in a time where there are a ton of right answers and that because of the way everything has fractured, there are all kinds of different business models and ways of approaching this that are going to come out. We’ll let evolution sort out the ones that work and don’t work but of the business models that are out there, there are a lot of right ones. Just look at companies like AKQA, RGA, Crispin and the Barbarian Group, they all have different models but they’re all enormously successful.
What can audiences at the Boards Creative Workshop in Chicago expect from your presentation?
Hopefully hope.
Silver Lining For Start-Ups?
Looks like we’re in good company or should we say companies.
Maybe our balls aren’t as big as we once thought.
An interesting read for all the Naysayers.
Hey, that’s us!
Current One Club chair and former McKinney ECD David Baldwin has teamed with former McKinney GCD Bob Ranew to launch a new Durham, N.C.-based “creative practice” called Baldwin&.
“We call it a creative practice because we ‘re interested in doing advertising, design and branded content solutions,” says Baldwin, whose past projects include Audi’s “Art of the Heist” and the launch of Travelocity’s Gnome campaign. “Everyone here is considered a creative. If you’re a strategic planner, you’re still a creative strategic planner.”
While the shop officially launched in late December, a lot of Baldwin’s recent time has been occupied by his role as an executive producer on Art & Copy, the Doug Pray-directed documentary that debuted at Sundance and shines a light on the ad business with interviews with folks like Dan Wieden, Hal Riney and George Lois. It’s exactly the type of project Baldwin sees the new shop being creatively invested in. “Ideally, we’d like it to be a 50/50 split between doing work for our own brands and others’.”
Right now the agency has a population of six that includes creatives, a designer, a strategic planner and an accounts person and is currently signed up for project-based work for troubled telecom giant Nortel. “We’re taking care of their post-bankruptcy communications, helping them get back on track as a company with a lot of positive things going for it that has had trouble in the current economic climate,” says Baldwin. “It’s a perfect client for us, as we see ourselves as change agents and look forward to working with them more.”
Speaking of the current economy, some might question the sanity of launching a new agency amidst so much financial uncertainty. But Baldwin sees it more as an opportunity to walk the walk. “It’s a great time to launch because we’re always telling clients to be bold and take risks and doing something like this now really shows we believe in that approach.”
Dear Barack
This is a side project/social experiment I’ve been working on for a while now with my good friend Greg Beauchamp. The idea is to see if one man can send an email to Barack Obama by 6 degrees of separation and spread the message of unity in the process.
From Creativity-online.com:
A unifying image for Obama.
“It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.” -Barack Obama
Inspired by the president’s words, Greg Beauchamp, ad man and executive producer of the advertising documentary Art & Copy, has created this graphic and the subsequent poster for Barack Obama. Beauchamp was also responsible for the McCain Dog Poo flags during the 2008 election.
He says he hopes the image will get to Obama indirectly via internet pass along to exhibit that even everyday Americans have the power to reach the president. On Flickr, Beauchamp has embedded a timeline of when states joined the union into a tiled image of the poster.
Welcome to Baldwin&
Welcome to our website. You’ll notice that there’s no fancy Flash 10 acrobatics or whizzy-bangy animated navigation. That’s for a very definite reason. Agency websites have become insane places that are hard to navigate, max out your bandwidth and generally make it very difficult to find what you’re looking for.
Our philosophy is that a website is a tool, in fact, someone once said to me that if your website isn’t a tool, you are. Sure it’s an expression of the brand, sure it should be cool, but it should be easy and useable. So we’ve opted for a very simple blog. Our site will live and breathe and change almost daily. We can add content at will. If you find it hard to navigate, tell us and we’ll get on it immediately. We’re also including tags to make accessing anything you want very easy to find
Welcome and let us know what you think.
