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Joe Baratelli is the chief creative officer of RPA, an independent agency where he’s been working for nearly four decades.
Favorite project you’ve worked on? There are so many favorites. Going way back, a big highlight was working on the VH1 series with musical legends that was spoofed on SNL. I also fondly remember the Honda “It Must Be Love” work. You know how people look like their dogs? People also look like their Hondas. We created an engagement piece where Honda owners submitted their photos and created a UGC version. And because of my big love of hockey, I will always remember, “Where there’s hockey, there’s Honda.” It gave me the chance to direct Hockey Hall of Famers Mike Richter, Pat LaFontaine, and Neal Broten with a bunch of kids on an outdoor ice rink in the middle of Minneapolis for the Honda sponsorship of the NHL.
Of course, the biggest advertising event of the year will always bring favorite memories. I’ve led the development of more than 10 Super Bowl campaigns for five different brands. It’s exhilarating, nerve-wracking, and rewarding.
What’s your favorite ad campaign? There are so many favorites among the work we’ve done. For Honda, there was “Element and Friends”—the Honda Element talking with animals, comparing their features. One character, Gil “The Crab,” became a bit of a celebrity, conversing on MySpace. Early, early social work.
Remember when Facebook was the thing? We created an app to show “Everyone knows someone who loves a Honda.” It was a full campaign to show the connections of Honda owners all over the world.
Also for Honda, we created “Project Drive-In,” a social activation to save community drive-ins. The American institutions were threatened with extinction due to the shift to digital projectors. Honda stepped in with a contest to help bring the crisis to light and saved 20 theaters across the country.
For the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation, we made the Imaginary Friend Society, a series of animated short films explaining cancer treatment and recovery to kids. It ended up becoming a phenomenon, translating the films for hospitals all over the world.
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Not to forget J.K. Simmons as Professor Burke for Farmers Insurance. Still going strong after 12 years, and still performing well.
One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: I was in a movie, Dr. Caligari, a 1989 midnight-screening, low-budget, quasi-sequel of the 1920 German Expressionist classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I also designed the title treatment.
What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? AI. The way I see it, we’re in the business of selling creative ideas. We need to come up with, then demonstrate and illustrate how those original ideas will come to life. A lot of labor goes into the research for imagery, deck-building, and storyboards, etc., to help represent what that creative will be. It all takes different people and time. I can see the potential of AI tools speeding up that process to free up creative thinkers for more creative thinking.
AI’s involvement on the creative side is going to be a big mess, and it will take time to sort out. Just take copyright issues alone: Based on the actors’ and writers’ strikes and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith Supreme Court decision, it’s clear that more contracts, lawyers, and business people will be involved. Also, I’m afraid folks will use it as a crutch, or an argument for not using truly imaginative solutions. And I’m concerned that the noncreative types will take the tools and circumvent true creative intent. They could settle for good enough and not think it through, which will devalue the creative process.
What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? Martini Shot by Rob Long. He’s a longtime TV writer and showrunner, but his stories about the business—trials, tribulations, and musings—are so relatable and insightful to any professional creative process, especially the ad game.