Toronto-based advertising and communications agency Elemental recently launched a four-part web series called The Brief. Dustin Brown is a partner at the agency who co-created the series.
Why did you decide to make a web series about agency life?
We have always tried to do promotional pieces about the agency to either attract new clients or new employees, bring on new talent and [create] stuff to show our clients what we’re capable of doing. We have run some campaigns in the past and then when one of our new copywriters came on board, he was a director and had the background. I had toyed around with making a full-length series once upon a time and he had some ideas about how to do a web series, which I had never really explored. We brought these two things together and created these shorts and we just had fun with it. From there, it grew into this four-part series, which is great.
How would you describe the characters’ style in The Brief and the employees’ style at Elemental?
We’ve got a mixed bag here. We’ve got hipsters. We have a hoodie and jean culture here. People suit up when they need to, but it’s pretty relaxed. I’ve always been a blazer, suit and pocket square guy so that’s definitely an influence on one of the characters on the show. Growing up, I always wanted to wear a suit to work.
The creative director on the show and in real life at Elemental has a lot of amazing patterned shirts. They’re not as ridiculous as the ones that are in the show; they’re very stylish. We joked about his legacy. There are always people where you’ll always remember certain things about them. One of the founders of Roots has really big eyebrows and everybody recognizes his face because of that. Arlene Dickinson has the grey stripe in her hair.
Photo Source: CBS
Why do you think TV shows like The Crazy Ones that have tried to cover agency life have failed?
What I didn’t love about The Crazy Ones was that it was a little more glam in the way it was shot and felt. To me, it didn’t seem real. Mad Men did so well because it did feel real and it was about real people and really interesting, darker storylines that all revolved around advertising and the people that worked in it.
When we started working on this, our approach was we wanted it to feel like Mad Men meets The Office. We didn’t want to glamorize the industry or make it seem like something it was not. We wanted to showcase the funny aspects, which I think is where The Office influence came in. It wasn’t about super handsome Don Draper or a creative director that was standing on tables screaming.
I think [in The Brief] we stayed closer to home and what agency life is really like. People leave and people go – spoiler alert! The work’s not always great. Real life. Real work. It wasn’t a glamorous advertising world. I think the whole Office meets Mad Men [approach] was where we were trying to be different from other shows that have failed over the years.
I’ve noticed that Elemental and some other local agencies, such as Zulu Alpha Kilo (ZAK), are using humour to attract clients and employees. How did you decide what kind of humour to align with the Elemental brand?
I think that like any agency, we try to build a culture. Every culture of any agency is unique and that’s what makes us different as an agency. All of us work and build banner ads and websites and TV advertisements, but it’s really our culture and who we are as individuals and how we come together that differentiates us.
One of the things we’ve seen over the years [are] these parodies like the ZAK stuff that’s recently come out, some of the case study videos that have come out over the years that have been very funny and for us we just wanted to do something different.
Different for us ended up in the form of this web series because we hadn’t seen anything like this from any other agency before. We really wanted to bring our own style of humour that people could relate to in the industry, but was really representative of the culture and obviously we had a little fun with it. That’s not as zany as it is every day, we do get work done here, and we are a real business. [The humour] stemmed from who we are as an agency and how we all work together.
For the extended interview, including insights about how Elemental promoted the web series, check out my LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-launch-promote-web-series-interview-sarah-prince