Message Too Real in Chiat Son’s Ad

Danny Santos will never see the TV commercial that stars Danny Santos.

Danny is dead.

He was gunned down this summer by rival gang members in a drive-by shooting outside his South Central Los Angeles home. The 15-year-old boy died in his grandfather’s arms. “I kept telling him to hold on,” remembers Ernesto Santos, a retired printer who raised Danny. “But he looked up at me and died.”

Two weeks before he was slain, however, Danny made a TV commercial. The ad, which has aired a few times on several Los Angeles TV stations, is not for motor oil, soda pop or chewing gum. It is an anti-gang public service announcement for a 3-year-old Los Angeles organization, Right Way Youth Activities Inc. The group tries to steer Central City youths away from gangs by keeping the kids busy with other activities ranging from day trips to Disneyland to weekend jaunts to Big Bear.

In his commercial for Right Way, Danny proudly wears his gang’s colors--a red bandanna and red baseball cap. But he doesn’t speak very proudly of what the colors represent.

“You know, it ain’t good to be gangbangin’,” said Danny, a term that refers to gang members who look for trouble with rival gangs. “I really can’t tell y’all what to do out there, I just figure, I’m already in it. My life is already messed up,” said Danny, who had been shot nine times in one gang encounter--and as a result lost a portion of his intestine. “So my advice to all the little kids is, just don’t get into it.”

Then this message flashes on the screen: Danny was killed in a drive-by shooting two weeks after this film was made.

Behind this powerful public service commercial--and several others like it--is a neophyte Los Angeles production company, Red Dog Films. The firm’s co-founder is Marc Chiat, the 31-year-old son of the Los Angeles area’s best-known ad man, Jay Chiat.

At a time most national public service spots are about drugs and AIDS, Red Dog instead focused on one of the Los Angeles area’s biggest problems: gangs.

What’s more, it is a problem that Chiat has seen personally. During the past year, Chiat has occasionally volunteered to teach art at the 122nd Street Elementary School--located in a neighborhood that is a bastion of gang warfare. The school is just a few blocks from Nickerson Gardens, a Watts housing project that is perhaps best known for its drug dealing and gang-related problems. The school’s playground is one of the spots where National Guard troops camped out during the 1965 Watts riots. The school has 650 students--66% black and 34% Latino.

It was a second-grade teacher at the school who coaxed Chiat into doing the gang spots. “Most of my teaching revolves around gangs,” said Danny Weil, who attended Sonoma State College with Chiat. “In social studies we talk about the Bill of Rights and the rights of students to be free from gangs,” said Weil. “And in math class, we chart graphs to show what portions of the neighborhood are infiltrated with gangs.”

In fact, Weil helped Chiat line up the handful of kids that appear in the anti-gang commercials. Gang members under 18 who appeared in the ads had to get releases signed by their parents. Although they weren’t paid for appearing in the ads, they were given lunch and Los Angeles Lakers T-shirts. Total costs of the commercials were kept to a bare minimum $20,000. Some of the supplies were donated or purchased at cost, and Marc Chiat and his partner Steve Kessler personally paid the remaining expenses.

The ads were filmed a few blocks from the school on the last Saturday in July. To avoid problems with rival gangs, the ads were filmed early in the morning and several police officers were on the set. Because some gang members were worried about rival gangs trying to stop them on the way to the filming, Weil picked them up and drove them to the site. “I suppose we could have all been shot,” he said, “but I didn’t really think about it.”

There were, however, no incidents during the filming. There were also no scripts.

After Chiat edited the commercials, he screened them for some kids who are members of the Right Way group. The purpose of the screening was to measure the reactions of kids who had formerly been gang members--or were at one time leaning toward associating with gangs.

Chiat got reactions, all right. But they were not what he expected. Several of the kids quickly recognized Danny Santos and informed Chiat that Santos had since been killed.

That’s when Chiat--whose company was low on funds--decided to press on with the project. And, of course, that’s when he added the written line about Danny Santos being killed.

Marc Chiat hopes these hard-hitting public service spots--which are basically one-on-one interviews with an off-camera Chiat--will help pull him out of his father’s huge shadow. “I can’t help it,” said Marc, “that my name is Chiat.”

Marc, who spent several years as a low-ranking producer at his father’s ad firm, nervously showed his father the ads. “He’s my toughest critic,” said Marc. But this time around, his father had little to say. “When I saw the ads, I got choked up,” recalled Jay. “Now,” said a boastful father of his son, “I’m convinced he’s more talented than I am.”

And now, Marc said, he won’t hesitate to submit bids to produce ads for his father’s ad agency. He feels he’s proven himself. A long way that is from a job Marc held just a few years ago, when he was driving a truck for the National Assn. of Broadcast Employees & Technicians.

But like most young production companies--which film anything from 10-second commercials to full-length feature films--Red Dog has had a tough time digging up business. Also, like many other ad agencies and production houses in town, its young founders decided that an eye-opening public service spot--produced at no cost to the client--might help bring them some business.

Time will tell.

“You see that ad,” said Alex Poe, who three years ago founded Right Way, “and it’s like Danny is reaching out of the grave trying to save other kids.”

Danny’s grandfather, meanwhile, says he can only hope that the commercials do some good. “Danny tried to tell something to the people. He tried to tell them that gangs are no good,” said Ernesto Santos. “All my hope was in Danny, and he’s gone.”

Selling Advertising on Spanish ‘Nightmare’

Although the original “Nightmare on Elm Street” has been on video for some time, next month a version with Spanish subtitles is scheduled to hit the video stores. And a Los Angeles ad agency that specializes in the Latino market says it would like to find an advertiser willing to place a commercial on the video.

Last month, that agency, CSI-West, picked up the advertising business of Condor Video, which specializes in releasing subtitled--and dubbed--videos to the Latino market. And now, the relatively new market of placing commercials on videos to blockbuster movies is crossing the language barrier.

The fad began about a year ago when Pepsi placed a Diet Pepsi ad on the video to the film “Top Gun.” Now, the use of commercials on feature film videos is just beginning to enter the Latino market.

“Ideally, the sponsors are somehow connected with the film,” said Alvaro J. De Regil, manager for new business development at CSI’s Los Angeles office. “But that is not a necessity.”

L.A. Agencies Score Big in ‘Best of’ Ad Book

What do ads featuring Joe Isuzu, California Tourism, Porsche, Transamerica, and Partnership for a Drug Free America have in common?

For one, all were created by Los Angeles advertising agencies. For another, all are included in the new book “The Best of Ad Campaigns,” just published by Rockport Publishers of Rockport, Mass.

Indeed, advertising agencies in the Los Angeles area may still be struggling for business, but they’re no longer struggling for national respect. The number of Los Angeles ad agencies named in the book ranked second only to the number of New York ad firms. The Los Angeles agencies honored for “the best recent regional, national and international advertising,” are Keye/Donna/Pearlstein (California Tourism and Partnership for a Drug Free America), Della Femina, McNamee WCRS (Isuzu Motors and Transamerica), and Chiat/Day (Porsche).

Winners were selected by a committee of 26 member ad executives in cooperation with the New York trade group, the American Assn. of Advertising Agencies. And several Los Angeles ad agency chiefs are gloating over the results.

“Where an agency is located,” said Leonard Pearlstein, president of the Los Angeles ad firm Keye/Donna/Pearlstein, “is less important than how big the idea is.”

Creative Director Charges Into New Job

Several years ago, Mike Pitts put a charge into the Duracell TV ad campaign when he suggested using an array of battery-propelled toys to show that Duracell batteries last longer.

Now as newly hired creative director, he hopes to put a similar charge into the Los Angeles office of DDB Needham. That’s where the former creative director of the New York Ad firm Ogilvy & Mather, began work Monday.

Although the Los Angeles office posts annual billings of about $120 million, it has picked up only one major piece of local business--the $8-million Carpeteria account--in the past year. “My mission isn’t to change everything around,” said Pitts, “but to let the creative people create.”

At 35, Pitts is also known for some TWA television spots pitching European travel that he created in 1984. The commercials were among the first airline spots to feature shots of smiling people instead of just pictures of famous buildings. “People have seen pictures of buildings like the Eiffel Tower a million times,” said Pitts, “but we felt that the best way to capture the mood of a country was in the faces of people who live there.”