Teen-Ager in Wheelchair Stars : BBDO Wins Addy for Apple Computer Commercial
An Apple Computer commercial that features a wheelchair-bound teen-ager zipping around Venice Beach took top honors at a major advertising awards ceremony Sunday night in Los Angeles.
The Apple commercial, set to the tune of Randy Newman’s happy-go-lucky song, “I’m Different,” is in sharp contrast to the much harder edge of Apple’s current ad campaign about executives in tense business situations.
The winning ad features 16-year-old Jody Kemp, an actor who lost the use of his legs in a car accident. In the 60-second commercial, Kemp is seen struggling to get his wheelchair over a curb, buying records at a record shop and even falling out of the chair during a rough-and-tumble football game. Of course, he is also shown at work with an Apple computer.
The commercial, by the ad firm BBDO Worldwide, was named top TV commercial of the year at the American Advertising Federation’s 20th annual Addy Awards competition.
The ceremony, held in Los Angeles for the first time, is regarded by advertising executives among the more prestigious in the industry. Meanwhile, the ad industry’s most coveted prizes, the Clio Awards, are scheduled to be presented in New York tonight. Although the Addy winners are notified ahead of time, the Clio winners generally are not.
In addition to the top honor, BBDO also won two other Addy awards. Two firms won four awards each. DDB Needham Worldwide won four, including two for its anti-drug public service advertisements. And a relatively small Coral Gables, Fla., ad firm, Susan Gilbert & Co., won four, including the best print ad of the show for a direct mail campaign for the Ryder System aviation leasing division.
The winning Apple commercial has strong ties to the Los Angeles area. Not only was it filmed here, but it was created by the Los Angeles office of the ad firm BBDO Worldwide. “By the time you win an award for last year’s crisis,” said Steve Hayden, creative director of BBDO’s Los Angeles office, “you’re so enmeshed in this year’s crisis that you have no time to savor your victory.”
It was a victory for a commercial that almost never got made, said Joe Pytka, the ad’s director. His Venice-based production firm, Pytka, is best-known for producing several of singer Michael Jackson’s Pepsi spots.
Pytka says that when he was first asked to direct the Apple commercial, he said no. “I told them I was tired of exploitative commercials,” said Pytka, in reference to a recent crop of ads by companies such as Du Pont and McDonald’s that feature disabled actors. “I just didn’t like the way the ad sounded,” he said. “It seemed fake.”
But Pytka, who formerly worked with a wheelchair-bound business partner, decided that the commercial could work if it was mostly improvised. So, he spent nearly three weeks filming the disabled teen-ager doing day-to-day chores and activities.
This year’s Addy contest has not been without its headaches. Ads that make it to the national contest must first win local and regional competitions. And earlier this year, a regional Addy contest in the Milwaukee area was criticized for awarding a prize to an agency whose ads for a Burbank dance studio apparently never ran.
Also, the number of overall entries in the national competition were down nearly 10% this year, said Janel McKenna, vice president of the American Advertising Federation. With dozens of different ad contests to choose from, she said, some agencies are cutting back on the number of contests they enter.
The most striking example of that may be the firm that creates Nissan’s advertising, Chiat/Day. The agency, which didn’t even enter the national Addy competition, is known not only for entering lots of contests, but for winning many of them. Now, however, the ad firm says it plans to enter fewer contests.
“This whole awards thing is getting too expensive,” said Bob Wolf, president of Chiat/Day’s Los Angeles office. “You can spend an incredible amount of money entering these things. You just got to draw the line somewhere, so we drew it here.”
