Jodi Harris: How did your company, Jetset Studios, get started? And how does your (proclaimed) love of TV factor into your overall company mission?
Russell Scott's endless love for classic TV, films and toys resulted in a successful marketing company, Jetset Studios, and the retro-pop culture destination, Retroland.com. Russell has written and produced numerous film, TV, music, and online/interactive projects for major distributors including Universal Pictures, Paramount, DreamWorks, DreamWorks Animation, Sony Pictures, NBC, Warner Bros, and 20th Century Fox, and was recently a Webby Award Honoree for Best Copywriting. Russell Scott: Back in the early days of Web 1.0, my business partner, Patrick Young, and I founded an online entertainment company, and then immediately partnered with a well-known production company. One of our main revenue streams was creating online campaigns for films. At that time, the industry was relatively young, so we were competing with a number of graphic design firms. Since our background was in entertainment and content creation, what could have initially been a weakness we turned to our advantage. We won jobs based on the strength of our ideas and our writing. As the industry grew, we grew with it, helping shape the overall perception of what role a web campaign should take. One film in particular, "Dawn of the Dead," stands out in my mind as a turning point for me because I insisted that we include a fan outreach section that would engage the very vocal genre film fan base. I had to convince the powers-that-be to do it, and they received a lot of positive feedback in their inbox, which was a rare occurrence at that time.
As far as TV goes… I would go so far as to say that I owe most, if not all of my knowledge of popular culture to television. TV is a mirror of our society: who we are, how we think and what we want. To immerse oneself in TV is an excellent way to absorb the culture -- any culture -- without consciously trying. There is no such thing as too much TV. I consider it a lifetime of research, and time well-spent. Of course, I say all of this to make myself feel better about spending my formative years, more or less, living the sedentary lifestyle of an enlightened veal.
Harris: Your latest big project is the official site for "Knocked Up." In the film, one of the main characters is actually employed by a web design agency known as Jetset Studios. How did this come about?
Scott: Judd Apatow is one of the nicest people on the planet. He loves what he does and you can see it on the screen. Since we had done "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," "Talledega Nights" and "Kicking and Screaming," we were of course hoping to work on "Knocked Up." Judd tends to work with a loyal group of actors and filmmakers again and again, so when we got the script for "Knocked Up," we were quite literally blown away to see our company name in it. This by far is the nicest, most wonderful gesture we could have ever wished for. The man is a saint.
Someday, we hope to return the favor and have a solid bronze one-sixth scale statue of Judd displayed prominently in our lobby.
Harris: Since you already had some idea of Apatow's vision, what was your biggest creative challenge when developing this campaign?
Scott: Our challenge was to get the audience involved on an emotional level. We had read an early version of the script and were so taken by the honest portrayal of the characters that we knew we had to really push them out and let them live and breathe. Every inch of the site had to be personal and relatable. We worked closely with Universal and Apatow Productions to make sure that we were hitting both the marketing message AND the filmmaker's vision. These two viewpoints can often differ, so it is a delicate balancing act to make everyone happy. That was the biggest challenge of all.
Harris: Jetset seems to have cultivated some very strong relationships within the entertainment industry. Is it unusual for creative agencies working with entertainment clients to have access to directors and writers? How do you think this access impacts the success of the marketing campaign?
Scott: To me, the single most important aspect of this entire business is storytelling. The filmmaker is telling a story using film as the medium. Marketing is telling a version of that story to entice an audience. Jetset Studios has been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work directly with filmmakers as well as marketers.
I would say our situation is unusual but not unheard of. It really becomes more a question of hierarchy. The studio needs to be the gatekeeper since it is their campaign. I believe that if the opportunity is there, the closer a marketer can get to the source -- the vision of the story -- the more clarity they can get on how best to tell that story.
Sometimes filmmakers don't see the marketing direction as the right path. Other times marketing doesn't entirely understand the story. By working with both sides, there is an opportunity to create something that benefits everyone, like Futura, the sexy art deco robot taught us in Fritz Lang's silent sci-fi classic "Metropolis."
Next: How agencies can develop better working relationships with the studios.
