Art & Copy (2009)

Trailer: 2009 theatrical trailer.

What it is

A feature documentary, interviews intercut with the campaigns themselves, built around the generation who moved advertising away from product claims and toward ideas.

What it gets right about the trade

The people are the real archive. Hearing Mary Wells Lawrence and George Lois describe their own decisions, in their own words, is primary source material and it will not exist for much longer. That alone justifies the film.

It shows the campaigns at length. Not clips, the actual work. You can see why it was good rather than being told.

It captures what changed. The move from explaining a product to building an association is the single biggest shift in twentieth century advertising, and the film documents the people who made it without turning it into a lecture.

What it gets wrong

It is a celebration and it does not pretend otherwise, which is fine, but it means the film has no argument and no doubt in it.

Nobody in it discusses a campaign that failed. Nobody mentions effectiveness measurement, which was developing throughout the period covered. The implicit thesis, that great creative work is self-evidently valuable, is exactly the assumption that the IPA databank was built to test, and the film predates none of that work.

So it is a good film about craft and a poor film about whether the craft worked.

The one part worth showing a team

The Lee Clow material on the 1984 Apple commercial.

Not for the commercial, which everyone has seen, but for the account of what it took to get it approved and how close it came to being killed. That is the useful part for any team that believes the hard thing is having the idea. The hard thing is almost always getting it through the room.

If you run the company rather than the marketing

Watch it for one thing: a sense of what a strong creative idea actually looks like, so you can recognise the difference between distinctive work and work that is merely competent.

Then apply the correction the film does not provide. Every campaign in it is one that worked, selected decades later by people who made them. You are seeing survivors, which tells you nothing about the base rate.

The practical version for your own business is a question your agency will not enjoy. Of the work you have made for clients like us, what proportion hit its number? A team with evidence will tell you. A team that answers by showing you a reel is doing what this film does, and it is lovely and it is not evidence.