Hasta La Creative!

Honda’s and Toyota’s agencies, independent RPA, Santa Monica, Calif., and Publicis Groupe’s Saatchi & Saatchi, Torrance, Calif., respectively, have responded to their clients’ demand by bolstering the 3-D supervisory specialty roles, even while remaining largely reliant upon third-party vendors, many of which are photo-retouching shops that added 3-D CGI workstations and creative directors.

Four years ago, Toyota Motor Sales national manager of media and digital marketing Gregg Benkendorfer charged the agency with elevating its 3-D services. The program is coming into its own, says Michael Wilken, Saatchi’s manager of 3-D production. Every Toyota vehicle and trim package is now parked in the virtual garage for use by Toyota’s North American agencies. Wilken, a former art director, has added Larry Chou as a creative with a 3-D emphasis and Victoria Heric as a 3-D producer. The additions, Wilken says, bolster the creative, add to the agency’s pre-visualization skills for presentations, and support Toyota’s virtual garage and its business partners.

Saatchi works with vendors such as Tokyo Plastic, RTT, Sway and PsyOp to create 3-D for commercials, not only where it is obvious (Yaris’ Spy vs. Spy-like animation), but where it’s not (2006 RAV4 spots featuring animated car thieves and real-looking SUVs). All of Saatchi’s work for the Venza on Toyota.com is CGI. (The car is not yet available for shooting, among other reasons.)

Wilken says the department’s emphasis at Saatchi is not on developing finished creative in-house but supporting 3-D-related projects, such as developing HDRI modules, high-dynamic range images that capture a real environment so that a virtual vehicle can be placed within it in commercials. “There’s going to be growing 3-D capability at Saatchi, but mostly for creative concepting,” says Wilken. “CGI will significantly influence the advertising process and improve it.”

CGI’s growth at RPA is “inevitable,” says Tom Roberts, creative director in the interactive group. He supervises CGI with Laurie Slavin, art production manager, and Luis Ramirez, acd, who helps decipher the 3-D geometry from third parties such as Spring Box and helps create assets to be used agency-wide. RPA is using CGI for Honda because it is regarded as more cost-effective than live action. “There are no huge, elaborate off-site shoots, and we’re building a library of HDRI backgrounds,” says Slavin. “I don’t know if we’re there yet for broadcast, but for collateral and online we’re there already.”

Workstations on premises are a “step higher” than those that RPA uses for typical 2-D graphics. The agency’s in-house work is “solution development, training stuff, schematics, mechanics, engineering and the animation of the cars on the Web page.”

Overall, Slavin says, creative directors wandering past the computer like what they see. “More and more, CGI is becoming acceptable. There are about a half-dozen people here who know how to use CGI, even though it’s not their job. That’s making it more mainstream.”

While much of the growth in CGI business is driven by the automotive category, Richard Chuang, CEO of Pic2 and a co-founder of Pacific Data Images (now the multi-billion dollar computer-animation wing of DreamWorks SKG), says the use of CGI will become increasingly attractive to agencies working in all client categories. Among the benefits: It will reduce idea-to-delivery time; allow commercial delivery to multiple channels prior to product completion; allow ads to be more easily customized and altered after a market test; give creative greater global reach because of the standardization of the format; and allow unprecedented tracking and management of commercial imagery.

Finally, Chuang says, is the eye candy: “CGI ups the ‘wow’ factor.”

Gregory Solman for Adweek