Few directors approach a spot with the same sensitivity to agency creative as Apple Box Productions director Randy Diplock does.

Diplock spent 20 years on the creative side of advertising – 10 years as an art director and 10 more as a copywriter. Even with his creative background, Diplock says it was not easy for him to immediately find comfort in the director’s chair, likening himself to current Philadelphia Phillies manager Terry Francona, who became a baseball manager at age 36.

‘He was interviewed and he said if he had known that he was going to be a manager that quickly, he would have paid more attention as a player to what the coaches and managers were doing – and I feel the same way,’ says Diplock. ‘When I was on the agency side, I was very into what we were doing. I wish I had sat down and taken some notes.’

In 1997, Diplock’s first assignment as a director was for Sony while still a writer at bbdo. For his efforts he picked up a Silver Campaign Bessie – and he wasn’t even directing full time yet.

After joining Apple Box in March 1999 , Diplock began to collect work for his reel with clients like Nokia, Molson, Star Choice and the Western Canada Lottery Corp.

Diplock says the spots all look vastly different for a reason. ‘If I have a style I hope I can get rid of it,’ he says. ‘There are a lot of creative and agency people that have a ‘style,’ and I always thought it was a bad thing, because one day you could be working on oil filters and the next on a charity for aids. [Commercials] should look and sound different because the stuff that you’re selling is pretty varied.’

Diplock hopes that in the future he will be able to do more ’emotive’ work, adding that one of his strengths in creative was being able to make people laugh and cry as needed with his work.

The director is outspoken in his views on egotism, especially where it relates to the commercial industry.

‘You run into all of these unnecessary egos sometimes in this business and I could never figure out why,’ he says. ‘You see guys running into burning buildings to save babies, and they don’t have the egos some directors do. I’ve seen so many times someone’s opinion not being listened to because they are a junior account person or something – and I have never understood that.’

Diplock is also not a big fan of extensive research and focus groups in advertising. He believes research and nitpicking at focus sessions can sometimes do some serious damage to what otherwise might have been a tremendous piece of work.

‘It’s just so tough to get great work out there for major advertisers,’ Diplock says. Incidentally, Diplock admits that Apple Box is working on a short film about focus groups.

For Diplock, now an established commercial director, it is important that credit for ideas goes to the right places. He says during his two decades on the creative side, he would occasionally see too much credit for a great spot going to a high-profile director and not nearly enough to the creative team behind the original concept.

‘You’d sweat over this spot for weeks and push it through the client and push it through the focus groups and show up to shoot the thing and you almost didn’t have a handle on it anymore,’ he says. ‘It is so easily forgotten that these concepts and genius come out of the creative people. We must do justice to what they come up with.’