72andSunny’s Lauren Smith on Adobe’s ‘Fantastic Voyage’ and why creativity is essential

Ad Age is marking Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month 2024 with our Honoring Creative Excellence package, for which we asked members of the AANHPI creative community to write about pivotal projects in their careers. (Read the introduction here.) Today, our guest editor Lauren Smith, executive creator director at 72andSunny, writes about Adobe and celebrating creativity at the height of the pandemic. It’s 2020. I’m three months pregnant. In a dark conference room with some clients and a few creatives remote-shooting from L.A. to our set build in Prague two days after Trump has shut the borders for travel from Europe due to the novel coronavirus. There have been some hard pivots and intense scrambling to make this shoot actually happen. Once upon a time, the production department at 72andSunny called themselves “possibility makers”—and it was ever so true here. The director, Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, waltzed with glee (and a mask!) around his set with a video village an ocean away. We all sent prayers to the advertising gods for a strangely prescient and thankfully meticulous pre-viz. We were shooting a 60-second commercial for Adobe Photoshop, the vanguard for creative technology that was enjoying brand love for the first time in its history. One of the clients at the time proclaimed, “Our funnel is upside down,” and so we entered with a brand campaign for the software. No one really cares too much how the sausage is made, but it had been a journey and the journey would continue. Pre-pandemic, the challenges had been the usual: winning over all the interested parties at Adobe, some rebriefing when priorities changed, a determination on our side for relentless creativity at every iteration. But post-pan, we were in a creative industry in crisis. First, the shoot (see above). Ad Age Creativity Bookmark our section covering the best in brand creativity every day Read more here Second, our post-house was in Paris. We were locked up in homes across Los Angeles, wiping down groceries at the door and glued to video calls instead of being together. Third, the scene for our commercial, in a twist of fate, was on a crowded subway. We looked into costs for putting masks on everyone in post. It was prohibitive. We pushed the launch. We tried the thousandth song on the edit. We noodled the gold color of the octopus leg in the topsy-turvy scene. And in a more existential sense, brands and agencies didn’t really know where creativity would go and how to champion it with so much so very murky and so many other things at stake. Also, on a personal note, in addition to being pregnant I had an 18-month-old at home (literally—and we forget with some distance—we could not even go to the beach outdoors with masks on for some time) and no childcare. I have memories of this time that come in flashes—making lunch for her on video calls, hustling back and forth between a boiling pot and creative fire on a call, her little body spooned around my pregnant belly as I sat with earbuds on, typing feedback into the notes on a video call trying not to wake her up, the ever-present undercurrent of mom guilt every time I put on “Moana” again so I could focus just for half an hour. One of my favorite TV shows in recent years is “Station Eleven,” based on a book by Emily St. John Mandel. It’s also post-pandemic—although the impact on the world is much more dire and it’s some 20 years and change after the event—and in it, a Shakespeare troupe called the Traveling Symphony performs for those pockets of civilization left. There’s a phrase—originating from a Star Trek episode—painted on the side of their truck: “Survival is insufficient.” It was the Traveling Symphony’s tagline, but it could also be the tagline for this episode of our creative lives. It is not enough to get through it. Creativity—the arts, joy, tragedy, music, ineffable wonders of human creation, things like the endlessly relevant reincarnations of Shakespeare—is also a fundamental tenet of how we survive. It seems to me to be the enduring meaning behind this particular piece of creative work in my book and the others who dedicated themselves to this project. That imagination and joy and creativity are possible even as productions are shut down and edit bays go remote and we all worry about our fates. That it is maybe more than possible but essential. Maybe that’s a lot of meaning to put on a 60-second commercial. Maybe it’s just a fun ride on the subway. But for those of us who worked on it, I think we can all look back at this piece and think, yes, it’s true: Survival is insufficient. Also, the octopus tentacles look damn good. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Creativity Award winners here

72andSunny’s Lauren Smith on Adobe’s ‘Fantastic Voyage’ and why creativity is essential

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