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Ad Agency Boosts Poetry's Profile, With Web Videos
If you needed further proof that online video isn't just about SNL shorts and Lonelygirl15, a series of beautifully animated works featuring the poetry of former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins have been seen nearly 500,000 times on YouTube in the last week.
Featured on YouTube's front page yesterday, the most popular of the eight shorts is "The Dead," a simple hand-drawn black-and-white contemplation of the deceased created by Spontaneous's Juan Delcan. Other videos such as "Forgetfulness," an elegiac ode to lost memories designed by Headgear's Julian Gray (also see our Top Ten), and "The Best Cigarette," a lyrical tribute to smoking made by FAD's David Vaio, are also worth a peek.
The brainchild of JWT, the largest advertising agency in the U.S., the shorts were created independently and then purchased and broadcast by the Sundance Channel in late 2005. They've also been available on the web for some time. But once JWT discovered they'd be on YouTube's front-page, they put up a branded channel with all their videos, which have given Collins' poetry a whole new audience. (As one YouTube commenter writes, "I hate poetry. But I liked that.")
Also backers of Nursery TV, home of the strange, but must-see online animated series "Predators of the Sprawl" and "Dick Cheney is President of the Future," JWT and its studio arm JWTwo Entertainment may be most known for working with big firms such as Ford, Unilever, JetBlue, and Pfizer. But they've also supported such diverse non-corporate work as creative springboards for their animators and designers.
"We make ads," says JWT communications director Erin Johnson, "but we also make art for art's sake."