Talking to Palmer Jarvis DDB associate creative directors Dave Chiavegato and Rich Pryce-Jones is like doing lemonade with Robin Williams on a particularly manic day. From the hilariously irreverent to the smooth professionalism of seasoned pros, Chiavegato and Pryce-Jones are sure to keep you on your toes.

‘Rich is responsible for all the great work,’ Chiavegato begins, working his dry wit. ‘He carries the entire team. I just want to start out by saying that.’ Pryce-Jones, clearly adept at going with Chiavegato’s flow, responds by declaring himself ‘an incompetent jackass.’

The strange interview is compounded by the location of the subjects, an Anheuser-Busch convention in San Francisco. Surrounded by beer and beer models, Chiavegato says ‘It’s like walking around in a beer commercial – pretty insane.’

The road to the San Francisco beer haven has been a long one for the young team. Chiavegato started his career on the client side, working for four years in brand management at Unilever. He made the leap to copywriting with J. Walter Thompson before settling in at Palmer Jarvis. Pryce-Jones started his advertising career in South Africa as a graphic designer for KSDP Pentagraph before moving on to become an art director at TBWA Hunt Lascaris in Johannesburg. The pair got together two-and-a-half years ago at Palmer Jarvis, Toronto. Pryce-Jones was hired first and ‘hooked up with Dave shortly after.’

The rest is ad creative history. Chiavegato explains their success: ‘I think we have similar sensibilities when it comes to recognizing ideas. Also, there is a certain level of honesty – the brutal truth. So we’re able to give each other frank and blunt feedback.’

‘Like this morning. Dave said my ass looks really fat in these pants,’ Pryce-Jones jokes.

‘I’m just wearing a thong,’ the writer responds.

‘And he’s got the ass cut out of his pants – and I’m saying ‘This is not good for a convention!’ ‘

Any wonder why these guys have authored successful spots for such clients as Bud Light, Beer.com and Nearly Naked Lingerie?

However, with their energetic and loose attitude, it is somewhat surprising that the creative team has so little difficulty dealing with clients.

‘It’s part intuitive,’ Pryce-Jones says. ‘I think what we do is understand what the client has to do. What their objectives are. And so we don’t go in there being outrageous for the sake of it. We go in there understanding what they need to do to get themselves noticed. And most of the stuff we present is fairly grounded in logic and what we hope is a good marketing strategy, as well.’

Chiavegato takes us deeper into the team’s creative process: ‘Essentially, we get all the background information on what the project is about – where the brand is and what their marketing objectives are – and try to read as much information as we can to understand the market situation. At that point, we’ll go back and we’ll start thinking and conceptualizing. Rich will come up with a lot of really bad ideas, which I’ll have to shoot down. And then he’ll come back in tears, weeping like a little girl.’

‘I’ll come back with a stack of files and Dave will be sitting, sipping martinis. And finally I’ll have something he approves of,’ Pryce-Jones pipes in.

Again serious, Chiavegato continues to describe the creative process he and Pryce-Jones have translated to success. ‘We’ve just got to hit the ground running and try to find different angles as far as ideas go. If we do get an idea, we’ll keep going. And that’s good. I don’t think we’ve ever had a situation where we’ve said, ‘Okay, this is an epiphany. This is it. There’s no other idea out there.’ Essentially, we keep generating ideas right up until the time of presentation. In a sense, you don’t ever want to believe you have that big idea.’

With all the fast-flowing ideas, the difficulty becomes choosing what Chiavegato calls ‘a strong recommend’ to present to the client.

Says Pryce-Jones: ‘We’ll show them where we’ve been occasionally. But we won’t go in and give them the options. We might show them more than one thought – more than one idea. But we’ll kind of use it as support as to why we ended up where we did. So they get a good idea of where our heads have been at.’

‘I think part of the thing is demonstrating to the client what the logic flow was,’ Chiavegato explains.

Although they like to have at least a couple of weeks to develop strong creative for a client, the team notes the window they have for the creative ‘varies on the client – if they’ve already booked air dates or whatever.’

‘Sometimes you get ideas you think are good on the first couple of days, but you’re a little bit nervous going through with that until you’ve explored other avenues and tried different things,’ says Pryce-Jones.

Chiavegato continues: ‘A lot of times we’ll come up with ideas in the middle of the night and we’ll come back to the office and it will just be a big, steaming pile of elephant dung. There has to be a cooling-off period where you can walk away and come back and see if the idea is actually as strong as you initially thought it was.’

Besides Anheuser-Busch conventions, the most exciting part of the job for the team is ‘conceptualizing and coming up with ideas as well as the production and post-production process.’

‘It’s the variety, you’re never going to work and doing the same thing,’ Pryce-Jones says.

The most irritating portion of the job, if you ignore Pryce-Jones’ claim that it is ‘working with Dave,’ is ‘polishing and tightening up scripts.’

‘You have to do due diligence to really ensure that it’s the best it can be,’ Chiavegato says.

Chiavegato and Pryce-Jones service a lot of their clients through PJ DDB Downtown, an independent company within Palmer Jarvis DDB. With a mission ‘to provide clients with superior creative communications solutions through a streamlined agency infrastructure,’ many of the creative teams’ most loyal clients are serviced through the ‘Downtown’ operation. These include Labatt Breweries of Canada, Beer.com and the convention host itself, Anheuser-Busch.

Currently the creative team is working on ‘some prints for Michelin Tires’ and is about to ‘start doing some more stuff for Bud Light or for Anheuser-Busch in the U.S.’ They are also working on ‘some Bud Light outdoor and some Beer.com radio.’

What’s next for this hot creative team? Chiavegato muses on the subject: ‘I think we both realize we’ve got a great partnership. And for the medium term, we’re just going to continue to work away and try to do the best we can at our jobs. Long term, I don’t know. Advertising has a short shelf life. Longevity in this career is quite rare. We’re still interested in doing the work, though. We haven’t decided that we’re going to put our feet up behind a big desk yet. We’re still enjoying where we are right now. I think that’s a great position to be in.’ *

-www.pjddb.com