Perhaps the only DVD commentary to live on as a meme is Ben Affleck’s hilarious takedown of the movie that made him a bona fide star: Armageddon. Riotous throughout, at one point Affleck merrily drives a space shuttle through the 1998 blockbuster’s major plot hole: “So, I asked Michael [Bay, director] why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than train astronauts to become oil drillers and he told me to ‘shut the f**k up’, so that was the end of that conversation.”

Of course, Armageddon’s big lie lands not because Ben and co. sell it, but because everyone that is not an ‘NASA nerd-a-naut’ (copyright Affleck) wants to believe it. Every department in an agency thinks their job is the hardest to learn, the most important to do right. Just as every agency on a roster acts as if they alone have the hard skills to avert a client crisis.

As lead of a BBDO agency, I will always bet on creative talent. But having spent most of my working lifetime in consumer media, I perhaps have a different view than most agency leaders about how to crew a shuttle if my life depended on it. Indeed, about the time Armageddon rocked the box office, I was Commissioning Editor at Smash Hits. Along one whole wall of the office we displayed 12 months’ worth of covers with sales figures pinned underneath. From this stark winners/losers wall, two truths emerged: the face on the front matters more than the creativity underneath and, compared to the Spice Girls, we were all ‘nerd-a-nauts’.

True co-creation

The importance of finding the right face to carry creative into culture has stuck with me ever since. At RedwoodBBDO we help brands tell more true stories which means the first question we ask of an idea is usually ‘who can we find?’ not ‘who can we cast?’ Sometimes this means heavyweight talent like Anthony Joshua to carry a big brand campaign for Google. More often it means identifying micro-influencers with disproportionate reach in a niche space like interiors or IT.

In all cases, once we identify the right talent, we invite them into the team to create the ideas with us. True co-creation requires a flexibility and even humility that some agency cultures can struggle with. But we don’t assume our creatives know social channels better than an influencer that has already built a following there. And we don’t believe the best way to craft authentic stories for talent is to just have a smart copywriter put words in their mouth.

We may be astronauts, but we are no oil drillers.

Collaborating with A-list filmmakers has of course been a staple of advertising execution since long before Ridley Scott rebooted Apple. But when it comes to developing ideas for front of camera talent, advertising still largely runs on a studio system Hollywood abandoned in the 1950s. Actors and ambassadors are contract players. They read the lines, collect the cheque, move on to the next gig.

But in social spaces slick scripts can sound as hollow as a lip sync TikTok. Which is why, when we set out to create a talent-driven campaign celebrating local businesses for Google, the first thing we did was sit down with the talent to talk about their hometown high street, their favourite haunts, the local characters. From these celebrity ‘interviews’ emerged treatments that were designed to balance scripted talking points and the spontaneous interactions we knew our documentary-style shoot would encourage. It takes a bold client to go into production without a locked script, but the result is a filmic authenticity you really can’t fake. 

The right cover star

As third-party cookies crumble, brands are hunting more unicorn content that audiences will seek out and share. Great creative will always cut through but the surest shortcut to culture remains finding the right person to put on the ‘cover’. In particular, as influencers continue to grow in influence, creative agencies need to have their own influencer solution in play. Media agencies typically see influencers as a channel to be bought, but creative agencies should see influencers as a creative resource to be brought into the core team. A full voice, not just a face.

At Redwood, we recently created an equivalent of my old Commissioning Editor role, Head of Talent & Influencers, to run these co-creation relationships. Sometimes this relationship relies on buying reach on purely commercial terms, but it can also mean working with PRs inside promotional windows. Regardless of how the deal is structured, by taking the time to develop a win-win idea with the talent that will front it, we can be sure that they are fully invested in it.

Sometimes this investment pays back immediately.

For instance, by giving 11 world-famous fashion photographers creative freedom to shoot a book for Aston Martin, they all signed on for editorial fees that were less than 1/10^th of their commercial rates. And by persuading our FMCG client to take a ‘pure purpose’ approach to a music and anti-racism film we are making right now, half a dozen famous musicians are waiving their fee entirely, not to mention two media partners that are largely setting aside rate cards.

Of course, not every project has a purpose this pure, but the principle holds true: agencies with the flexibility and humility to embrace co-creation with talent and with influencers will produce more authentic ideas that more often land in culture. After all, if Armageddon has taught us anything, it’s this: it doesn’t really matter who drills the holes so long as the mission is successful. And in the end Bruce Willis dies.