People are much deeper than stereotypes. That’s the first place our minds go. Then you get to know them and you hear their stories, and you say, ‘I’d have never guessed.’ —Carson Kressley
Advertising is at its best when it does more than push a product and tells stories we weren’t expecting
Stories are a natural part of any good ad, whether it’s video or still. Ads have to be compelling stories where the viewer can put themselves into the situation or, at least, relate to some aspect of the story. No one buys a product with which they cannot in some way relate. So, a large part of being a creative ad person is knowing how to tell a good story.
Linus Karlsson tells great stories. As chairman of McCann/Commonwealth, though, we’ve seen Karlsson more as an agency builder. Some of us are old enough to remember his fantastic Miller Lite ads from several years ago, but he’s been heading up the corporate side of things long enough many might have forgotten just how creative he can be. Apparently, that is a large part of the reason he started a new agency, Ming Utility and Entertainment. Small and focused on work that is either useful or entertaining, Ming gives Karlsson the chance to spread his creative wings once again, and he has created a most compelling story in the Frank & Marty campaign for Smith Optics.
The trend among makers of sunglasses is to put them on pretty faces, cool people who are doing all the things you would like to be doing if you weren’t tied down with silly stuff like work and children and paying bills. Karlsson goes exactly the opposite direction not only in creating characters who aren’t especially young and hip, but the two people out of ten who wouldn’t use Smith sunglasses while fishing. They consider such an advantage cheating.
We’ve seen similar approaches before, but Karlsson goes all in with a set of short films that allow us to really get to know Frank & Marty, and gives Karlsson and his team plenty of room to tell the whole story. The two characters, both of whom are fresh castings we’ve not seen before, even have their own website and social media accounts. And Instagram (there’s a joke there, but you won’t get it until you’ve seen all the videos)
Take a look at the videos below and enjoy the work of a master storyteller. These are the kind of stories we all want to tell with our pictures. This is what makes being creative fun and worthwhile.
Dust On The Trail
Dust On The Trail. Model: Lisa Petrini
A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity. ― George Bernard Shaw
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]Death can be a difficult issue to discuss with children, especially when it comes to family members. One moment, you think they have a grasp of it, then later, seemingly out of the blue, the topic comes up again with new questions that need to be answered. With a five- and a six-year-old around the house, the subject comes up surprisingly often, sometimes in ways we weren’t expecting. Trying to figure out how best to respond to those questions and situations is a mixture of wiping tears and trying to not laugh at the wrong time.
We were driving past a mortuary and its large cemetery one afternoon when Baby Girl pipes up and informs us that this was where her pre-K teacher, Miss ‘Nay, works. When questioned as to why her teacher would work at a cemetery, the little darling responded without hesitation, “That’s where she puts the people she doesn’t like.”
Miss “Nay was horrified to hear of the exchange. She’s a jolly, pleasant woman who does a great job with children, but might be a bit superstitious. “I can’t stand dead people,” she told us. “I don’t even go to funerals.”
More frequently, and certainly with less humor, it is Little Man who raises the subject, frequently in tears over the loss of his great-grandmother a couple of years ago. Trying to explain to him that people don’t live forever and that his great-grandmother had lived a long life does little to appease him. She’s not here now, and that’s  what counts. At other times, though, he can look out across a cemetery and explain that once one has expired that, rather than becoming dust, our bodies become tree seeds that grow new forests. While perhaps missing a biological step or four, that perspective of a renewable life is certainly less traumatic and easier to discuss.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]Growing up in rural Oklahoma, and especially the son of a minister, death was such a normal part of life for us that we were almost callous about it. After all, we played and ran in large fields where it wasn’t unusual to come across whole sun-bleached skeletons of cows. The general opinion of ranchers at the time was to only remove a cow carcass if it was diseased and posed a health risk to the herd.  Coming across skulls in the dust just wasn’t that uncommon.
Western philosophies have evolved over the past couple of generations where we no longer see death’s natural role in the life cycle. Instead, we see that passing from life to dust as the ultimate unfairness, the unjust removal of someone important to our lives. We expect explanations where there are none to be had and look to blame people who are not genuinely at fault. In matters of violence that should never have happened, our sense of outrage stems from our own sense of privilege that the deceased should never have been taken  from us; a warped sense that it is we, more than the dead person, who have been short-changed.
Today is the thirteenth anniversary of my mother’s sudden and very unexpected death, a mere six months and four days after my father’s passing. I was living in Atlanta and one of the challenging decisions we had to make was whether the boys should go to their Mema’s funeral. To do so would mean them missing the first two days of school, but to not take them would deny them the emotional closure we thought they might need. We left the decision up to them. They opted to not go. As one of them put it, “We’ve been to enough funerals this year.”
Life is a wonderful thing, but sooner or later we all become dust on the trail. Love now. Live now. Find peace. Embrace the full cycle of life, even when it seems unfair.[/one_half_last]
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