Industry News Feb 17, 2012
Archiving Creativity to Stimulate the Future
I recently took an active role in an historic event at McMaster University's Ron Joyce Centre. It was historic because McMaster University President and Vice-Chancellor Patrick Deane was there to officially announce the donation of a significant collection of advertising campaign materials from some of North America's most iconic brands - Molson, Coca Cola, Pepsi, McDonald's, General Motors and Budweiser among them - to McMaster University from the Pirate Group.
Anyone in the ad biz will tell you that Pirate Group is the largest advertising audio production company in Canada, co-founded in 1990 by Terry O'Reilly (host of CBC Radio's "Under the Influence" – formerly "Age of Persuasion"). For the record, Pirate partners include Tom Eymundson, Chris Tait, Tom Goudie and Vanya Drakul.
The real highlight of the night was the casual and often humourous storytelling that took place as part of the one hour "Master Class" led by Terry, Tom (Eymundson) and Chris. Terry talked about the personal insights that led to his award-winning campaign for Toronto Symphony Orchestra; Tom presented clips from Pirate's hilarious work on Bud Light Institute and Chris presented some of their ground-breaking video music work for Maynard's Candy.
As a part-time MBA instructor at McMaster for more than 20 years, and as someone who had worked with Pirate over the years as a member of the JAN Kelley Marketing team, it was my distinct pleasure to moderate a question and answer period following the Master Class. We had great discussions about the critical role of strategy in guiding the creative process – something that Mr. O'Reilly referred to as "ballet in a phone booth". We also talked about the challenge of selling unique ideas to conservative clients; Chris quipped that "it works best when we sing to them", while Tom and Terry pointed to the need for an endless stream of usable rationale so that the decision-makers can, in turn, sell their recommendations to everyone else. The evening concluded with lots of one-on-one discussions and Terry signing his book, "The Age of Persuasion; How Advertising Ate Our Culture".
So how did Pirate's unique archive - which documents the creation of some 50,000 radio and television commercials from 1981-2007 – land at Mac? Virtually every college and university in the country had expressed interest in Pirate's treasure trove, but Terry O'Reilly and his partners picked McMaster mainly because of the compelling plan put forward by the University for archive use, evolution and student access.
But here's the real back story. O'Reilly had also run into Professor Mandeep Malik – one of McMaster University's greatest ambassadors – at Canada's Next Top Ad Executive, an event that Malik had helped to personally create and develop. I have known Professor Malik for a great many years, and he had often spoken of an idea that he had for McMaster – an idea that he referred to as "The Journey of Influence". He described it as a living record of the evolution of advertising in Canada. I imagine that Professor Malik was a bit like an anemic vampire at a blood bank when Terry O'Reilly mentioned that he had an exhaustive archive of advertising treasures in search of an academic home!
Jim LetwinPresident & CEO
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