Gaming the system; Advertising's state of play

Poets play with poems; they don’t work on them. Painters play with paints and brushes, and musicians play concerts and actors play parts. The work is in the preparation, the rehearsal, the craft, the experience. 

Put all those together and you can play. And no, it’s not the play-to-win of the gambler; which is not play so much as a diversion while the game picks your pockets. Gaming is finite, with a beginning and end, but play goes on forever.

It is the source of creativity, of making things up that weren’t there before, ready to be played with. In childhood, play is the way we start to learn about the world and respond to the people in it tasked with looking after us and falling in love with us. 

If you can make the audience feel like they are playing along with you, that’s when you have something special.

We play to make friends, play to test out feelings, limits, actions and desires. We play to escape, to discover, to be together. And in the big world of creativity and advertising, the tenets of play all point in the same direction: to connect, and to escape.

Creative work – the work that speaks to and attracts audiences, and makes a story out of products, and a character out of brands – needs play to manifest. It requires craft, skill and a budget – and all the work you need to put in so that you are able to play.

Above: Revolut’s playful spot starring Graham Norton positions the bank as an irreverent outlier.

“Play is so important,” says director Peter Thwaites of The Corner Shop. “That social interaction, coming up with things, sharing, and improving things because you’re sharing – that collaborative thing, that’s what really excited me.”

Thwaites came up as a DP in an analogue world, with the chemical light and magic of film, not digital. He sees the analogue spirit of experimentation and play corralled in the digital age. “There are a number of factors that reduce play,” he says. “The tech has changed so everything is in front of you, there are no grey areas to work in. A grey area gives you room to play. Budgets have got tighter, so there’s not the money to have that extra time to play and experiment, it’s more focused towards getting it done. 

“But giving room for play is important – creativity is often about putting yourself in situations that give you experience, and then maybe something unexpected happens. Those happy accidents are the things we all used to cherish, and I still do, but there’s less opportunity and fewer circumstances where that can happen.”

Real creativity doesn’t come from logical progressions of thought but from feeling okay to put two plus two together and get ‘gorilla playing drums’.” 

Rogue’s Alex Boutell, behind spots including Graham Norton for Revolut and David Beckham for Qatar, sees play as a necessary release of energies to kindle the fires, and playfulness as a way to communicate with audiences. “It’s the ability to feel you can ‘get weird with it’ without judgement,” he says. “The play state often unlocks the shackles and allows you go anywhere, which can result in myriad fresh ideas. And if you can make the audience feel like they are playing along with you, that’s when you have something special. Real creativity doesn’t come from logical progressions of thought,” he adds, “but from feeling okay to put two plus two together and get ‘gorilla playing drums’.” 

The young directorial duo Lewis Atallah & Mattias Russo-Larsson, aka Coming of Age, create performance art stunts, with music videos and brand spots also baked into a portfolio that includes the campaign for finance platform Ramp with The Office star Brian Baumgartner. It wraps short, smart, funny spots around a live activation that saw Baumgartner processing expenses by hand inside a big glass box in Manhattan’s Flatiron Plaza. For eight hours. 

We created a playpen and let him riff for eight hours live… That was the real experiment. Everyone was nervous because it was live for eight hours.

Around 10,000 watched in person, and cameras streamed it online. The Office co-star Andy Buckley dropped by. It was semi-scripted, semi on the fly, and no one knew if it would really work – or play. 

“That and the House of Leon spots are what people probably associate most with us,” says Coming of Age. “They’re both directly rooted in play. The fun is often the thing you’re not supposed to be doing – it’s the edge of the map.” Such was Baumgartner’s Flatiron Plaza residency. “We created a playpen and let him riff for eight hours live,” they say. “That was the real experiment. Everyone was nervous because it was live for eight hours. But once we saw Brian in the space, we knew he had the charisma to carry it.” 

Above: The experiential, experimental campaign for financial platform RAMP, featured The Office star Brian Baumgartner playing at being a CFO on his first day. 

Such a stunt, especially for a B2B brand, cuts through expectations with a playfulness that turns the tables. “The projects we’re excited about are the ones that let us experiment and play with format,” they say. “If you’re a B2B brand, maybe you should move like you’re not one.”

For Coming of Age the double helix of work and play extends their reach across the creative arena in a hand-in-hand marriage of equals. You can’t have one without the other. “This is work,” they say of their world. “It takes focus and effort. The play happens once you arrive on set. You do the hard work so you’re prepared enough to play in the moment. The more prepared you are, the more freedom there is for spontaneity.” 

Comedy falls apart the second it feels overbuilt. The play must be real and instinctive, not contrived or clichéd.

But, they add, play is not the only ingredient needed in the pot. “Play is definitely part of our aesthetic and the kind of work we gravitate toward,” they say. “But play is one variable you can tap into. Meditation can be restorative. Reading can be restorative. Even just sitting in peace can recharge you. These things aren't necessarily play, but they still feed creativity.”

If anything’s less funny and playful than B2B comms, it’s legal action, and the people at US injury law firm Morgan & Morgan have subverted this truism with eye-catching OOH and spots that play on life’s mishaps and injuries like a cat plays with a mouse. Its You Wouldn't campaign is peerlessly funny, Laid Off being an outstanding example; while Power Move’s pedigree spots include Nascar star Kyle Busch waiting for a dessert to be delivered, pit-style, in Pit Crew. 

Above: Personal injury law firm Morgan & Morgan have released some deliciously droll ads that offset their less than jolly business at hand. 

“The birth of both campaigns came from play,” says Morgan & Morgan. “The tone, the lines, the scenarios – they all lean into the absurd. That’s where the energy comes from, and the fact that it’s coming from the legal category only amplifies it. It’s not where you expect this kind of work, which is exactly why it connects.”

That comedy drives the campaign is, they add, the hardest piece of work to pull off. “Comedy falls apart the second it feels overbuilt. The play must be real and instinctive, not contrived or clichéd. You can’t engineer funny; you have to discover it. In a lot of ways, comedy may be the last true bastion of the creative instinct.”

In the serious business of making work, play is the underlay to it all. “Without play, you’re left with testing results, strategies and bottom lines. Play is everything… not just for the audience, but for the creatives themselves. It turns communication into connection. Without it, you get work that checks boxes. With it, you get something people actually feel, because it shows up in a way they didn’t expect. That’s the difference between something that runs and something that resonates.”

Above: This spot for Gund was shot from the perspective of the stuffed animal evoking a child’s eye view. 

For the Voyager-represented director Marcus Tortorici, who is behind the sweet, playful spots for Aspen Dental (Smile, We’re in Your Corner) and soft toy company Gund (Forever Friends), play is embedded in the script and in the shoot, where he avoids rigid set-ups for a “play” space where the action unfolds naturally. 

Forever Friends was shot  from the stuffed animal’s POV, reeling viewers into that childhood perspective where toys are real companions that never age. “My biggest priority was making sure the kids felt free to actually play with the camera,” he says of the Forever Friends shoot. “So we put fur and googly eyes on a little FX3, and suddenly the kids wanted to play with it and improvise. I really believe the heart of the spot came from how comfortable they felt treating that camera like a stuffed toy. Luckily,” he adds, “the agency trusted us enough to explore and improvise. Time and time again, I’ve found the magic lives in that unknown space.”

A lot of my time was spent in my imagination, creating stories and playing them out on my own. I still carry that world with me. There’s a sacredness to that world.

For Tortorici, play is the cocoon of creativity, and its primacy extends from a childhood with play and invention at its core. “I’ve always drawn heavily from my own childhood in my work,” he says. “A lot of my time was spent in my imagination, creating stories and playing them out on my own. I still carry that world with me. There’s a sacredness to that world. This career can feel very serious, but I always want my work to return people to simpler, more playful places. It’s usually time spent playing, not working, that creates the conditions for great creative ideas.”

When the playground of a successful shoot is over, it’s the playroom of the edit that we head to next, with Matt Posey, partner and editor at US edit house PS260, for whom “play is really the exploration of story. If you’re not having fun making this thing, how can you expect someone to have fun watching it?” 

Above: This film for Gucci, directed by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost and edited by Matt Posey, is a playful portrait of the House’s Creative Director, Sabato De Sarno.

Discussing his award-winning 20-minute high-fashion portrait Gucci: Who is Sabato de Sarno?, he says: “Sabato’s entire ethos could be summed up in that one word: play. Sabato is a serious, discerning artist but his playful spirit is what drives him and separates him from everyone else. We wanted to reflect that in the edit. We focused on telling the story we thought would be the most fun, and the most engaging, and one of the main things we focused on was poetry, telling a big story in a short amount of time, thinking about narrative in rhythmic beats, with the most visceral imagery.” 

Poetry is, after all, the ultimate playground of language. It’s an intense form of play with the viewer, too. “The best directors, editors, and creatives play with their audience because the audience wants to be played with,” says Posey. “It’s about taking them on a journey, showing them the inner lives of characters, and making them a part of the story. “Not every project allows you to actually play, but when you really get the time, the resources, and the freedom to play,” adds Posey, “it’ something special.” 

[AI] has a tendency to wow you in the first small stages, and then really disappoint you when the details matter. Like a shitty boyfriend.

But with  budgets shrinking and AI busy streamlining processes, the room for play can be hard to find. “AI can facilitate a sort of play. It has a role in concepting, pitching, and exploring. It can spark connections and speed up experimentations. But AI is a real joy-killer,” says Posey. “It has a tendency to wow you in the first small stages, and then really disappoint you when the details matter. Like a shitty boyfriend.” 

Does it have to be that way? Ask the veteran writer and creative director Andrew Miller, for whom AI has opened a door onto some serious playtime. He is one of the few directors making AI commercials – for cybersecurity firm Proofpoint, among others, using Luma AI. No set, no crew, no post, just some creatives and AI tools. “I’d mostly worked on prompt-based platforms, which can feel like banging on a locked door until something opens,” he says, “With Luma, it was conversational. I could give higher-level creative direction, and the creative agents would hold the context of the film and adjust without me rebuilding everything from scratch.”

I’ve got years of film ideas that never made it past the page—too strange, too hard to explain, too expensive. AI lets you give those ideas form.

As a tool to play with, “it gives you a license to follow ideas that normally die in a notebook,” he says. “I’ve got years of film ideas that never made it past the page—too strange, too hard to explain, too expensive. AI lets you give those ideas form. Creatives can quickly make something that actually resembles what’s in their head – without asking for permission or a budget.” 

Tighter budgets and deadlines are not to be played with lightly. Writer and director Fred Rowson, just signed to Rogue, is behind a number of award-winning short films, starring the likes of Olly Alexander, Judi Dench and Ben Wishaw, as well as music videos and spots via Blink Productions.