Canada’s TV spot awards fete the best and the brightest – Playback looks at the talent behind this year’s crop

In this report

– Palmer Jarvis’ evocative ad for Playland is a prime example of Vancouver’s guerrilla-style admaking at its best p. 22

– The winners montage: pix of the picks p. 26

– Preserving our TV advertising heritage p. 28

– A profile of Bessie-winning cinematographer Peter Hartmann p. 31

– Flashcut’s Bob Kennedy scoops the Bob Mann Award p. 32

– And the winner of the prestigious Spiess Award is BBDO’s Michael McLaughlin p. 33

– Allstars roundup p. 34

– Playback introduces ZapProof, a new feature on TV spots that stand out from the clutter p. 40

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Zapproof is a new Playback feature focusing the lens on the best tv spotdom has to offer from an other-side-of-the-screen perspective. We’re not calling it ‘Playback’s Pick of the Issue’ because if an issue comes along where there’s simply nothing worth picking, we’re simply going to pick nothing. (This time, just to confuse you, we’ve picked two.)

Let’s hope for the sake of directors’ job security and the Canadian advertising and production industries in general that Zap Proof appears every fortnight without fail.

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it’s hip, it’s hop, it’s happening. And it’s Canadian. Or rather, Blue.

Labatt has answered Molson’s high-energy ‘I Am (Canadian)’ campaign with an eye-popping pool for Labatt Blue.

With the requisite gazillion cuts per 30 seconds of any spot aimed at the young adult crowd, ‘I Will,’ the first spot to air of three, has the potential to blend into the blur that is current commercial watching, but the nature of the gazillion images make it stand out.

From surreal scissors to young men at urinals (a spot all beer-lovers can identify with), the pictures pop. We’ve got disco balls and graffiti, vixens and slackers, clubs, parties and bodies in freefall, all backed by Iggy Pop’s driving anthem Lust for Life.

But these are slackers with a new sense of purpose. The stasis of I Am has metamorphosed into the proaction of I Will. The voice-over intones such promises as ‘I Will build it and they will come.’ One thing’s for certain: we Will watch.

‘I Will’ is a high-tech spot for a low-tech product, but there’s a low-tech spot for a high-tech product that’s been prompting a lot of chitchat around the coffee maker lately.

Also the first of a pool, ‘Virus,’ ibm’s Dilbertesque tribute to artsy-educated office workers trying to function in a 50-gigabytes-of-ram world, will warm the heart of just about anyone who has to deal with a computer – while making an unarguable argument for why we need ibm’s solutions for a small planet.

It looks like office videocam. It’s b&w. It’s slow.

The dialogue is a study of brilliant minimalism:

‘It won’t print.’

‘Still won’t print?’

‘Still won’t print.’

‘It won’t print.’

‘Jiggle the cable.’

‘I jiggled. I’ll jiggle again.’

The characterization is a psychologist’s study of rats in a maze. A male has come over to the female’s desk to bring his innate knowledge of things mechanical to bear. He crawls under the desk to jiggle the cable only to have the woman tell him, ‘That’s the light.’ An older, obviously learned, male arrives and asserts his dominance by standing by helplessly. By the time that inevitable coworker pops his head over the half wall to ask ‘Can you print?’ the viewer is laughing aloud, glad it’s them and not her for once.

Meanwhile, a younger, relatively computer-literate guy dashes up to inform everyone that it’s not the printer, it’s the fact that ‘Hadley downloaded a virus off the Web.’ Everyone groans in disgust as if they actually know what he’s talking about. Then snippets of ibm’s anti-virus program flash across the screen to remind us there’s someone out there who can save our technocretin butts. Works for me. By Paula Costello

Roll credits

Labatt Blue ‘I Will’

Director: Richard D’Alessio

Production house: Imported Artists

Executive producer: Christina Ford

Line producer: Marylu Jeffery

dop: Guillermo Navarro

Agency: Ammirati Puris Lintas

Creative directors: Brad Riddoch/Doug Robinson

Art director: Doug Robinson

Copywriter: Brad Riddoch

Agency producer: Pat White

Post-production house: Axyz Edit

Editor: John Hopp

Music: Rosnick MacKinnon (The second spot in the pool has original music by Steve MacKinnon.)

IBM ‘Virus’

Director: J’e Pytka

Production house: Pytka Films

Agency: Ogilvy & Mather New York

Creative head: Bill Hamilton

Creative director: Susan Westre

Copywriter: Chris Wall

Post-production house: Crew Cuts

Editor: Adam Leibowitz

Music: Ear to Ear (Brian Banks)