04/12/06 Madison Agency's Compelling Ads Get Attention

You don't understand a word they're saying. But you know exactly what they mean.

That was the guiding principle behind an award-winning advertising campaign developed for the Madison-based Peace Council by Madison's Spot FilmWorks and the Milwaukee nonprofit advertising agency Serve.

The spots (viewable online at www.spotfilmworks.com and www.peacecouncil.org) feature Madisonians talking about their experiences with war in their native tongues. They've been heralded for the simple but powerful way they take a concept as esoteric as "world peace" and make it tangible.

"Everybody is for peace," says director Michael Graf, who owns Spot FilmWorks. "Nobody says they're against it. But we really wanted to take this abstract idea and put a human face to it, and let people know the idea of peaceful resolution isn't just something that needs to happen on the far side of the globe. It's something that needs to happen here too."

In addition to doing ads for paying clients such as Dean Health Systems and University of Wisconsin athletics (Spot was responsible for the hilarious "fitting room" television ad featuring Bucky Badger), Graf's company aims to do at least one public service campaign for a worthy cause every year.

Graf approached Peace Council associate director F. Peter Brinkman with the idea of doing, free of charge, an ad campaign for the council, which is a group of religious and spiritual leaders who take part in global peace initiatives, often without much fanfare.

"They're based here in Madison, and not many people knew the organization," Graf says. "They're really a global organization that includes a lot of Nobel Peace Prize laureates, like the Dalai Lama and Bishop Desmond Tutu. I always used to joke with Peter that the organization was like the photographic negative of SPECTRE from the James Bond movies."

Council representatives sat down with Graf and Serve creative director Gary Mueller to talk about the council's work and its goals, then the creative teams went back to figure out how to convey that message in a 30-second or 60-second spot.

The first spot, called "Negotiate," features two men setting up a wooden table and chairs, the table serving as a visual metaphor for the possibility of peaceful resolutions through communication. "It's just a table, some chairs and the faith that peace is possible," the voiceover says, then adds, "Who will set the table?"

The second ad, called "Languages" in its 60-second version and "Voices" in the 30-second version, is even more powerful. The spot features several people, including a Russian woman, a Nicaraguan woman and a Nigerian man, talking directly to the camera about their experiences with war. What's striking is that they all speak in their native tongues, with no English subtitles.

And yet, as you see one woman break down in tears or a forlorn young man holding a photo, no translation is necessary. From the very beginning, the filmmakers decided not to use subtitles to keep the focus on the people and on the commercial's tag line: "Is peace universal in all languages? You tell us."

Serve initially came up with a prewritten script for actors to read, and Spot FilmWorks began looking for people to appear in the commercial. Graf said he expected to have to go to a large city like New York or Chicago to find immigrants from so many different countries, but was able to find everyone he needed in Madison.

What's more, as the participants met with filmmakers, they began telling their own stories of surviving war. A Nicaraguan woman told of how she grew up during that country's civil war with rifles and grenades stashed under her bed, and how her father is still haunted by the experience. Another woman spoke about living in Kenya under British rule, and how her father went out one night to buy bread, was arrested for violating curfew and spent seven years in a hard labor camp.

"The people who came in told us such amazing stories of their personal journeys, how they got to Madison, that we just threw out the scripts," Graf says. "What these people are talking about in their native tongues are their own personal experiences."

Graf said it was an amazing and humbling experience to film these people telling their stories. Perhaps even more moving was what happened behind the scenes as they filmed.

"Throughout the day, as we finished working with one person, they wouldn't leave," he says. "They stayed and listened to what the other people were saying. They were sharing experiences. Everyone on the crew was so choked up and so emotional. It was really a phenomenal experience."

The ads aired last fall on Bravo and CNN, with both networks donating the airtime. So far, the ads have won 11 local, regional and national awards, including three Madison Addy Awards, two regional Addys and a MOSAIC Award from the American Advertising Federation for promoting diversity and multiculturalism. Graf says he's also heard that the ads are under consideration for a special award from the United Nations.

Daniel Gomez-Ibanez, executive director of the Peace Council, said such exposure is great for an organization with such a limited budget. He was very impressed both by the ads, and that the filmmakers would do so much work for free.

"It was really a wonderful, generous and very helpful thing to do," Gomez-Ibanez says. "They succeeded in capturing the emotional essence of what the Peace Council is trying to do."

\ E-mail: rthomas@madison.com