Art & Copy

The documentary talks to the people behind the best-known American advertising campaigns from the sixties onward. The small Volkswagen ads, the Nike line, Apple's 1984 commercial, the Got Milk campaign and many more are recounted by the people who wrote and designed them, among them George Lois, Lee Clow, Jeff Goodby, Cliff Freeman and David Kennedy. The account concentrates on how the campaigns came about and whose idea got through. Doug Pray presents advertising as a celebration of creativity, which is the film's most contested quality: what the industry sells, who it sells to and what follows from that are almost never asked. The people speaking describe their own work and there is no opposing view. Against that, the film does one thing well: it shows in concrete cases how an idea is found and how it survives corporate approval. The billboard and street footage cut between the interviews is a reminder of how much room advertising takes up.