AICP and David Shane follow one man’s journey to see his cheesy bread commercial at MoMA

One big perk of the AICP Awards—which the organization hammers home repeatedly—is that the winning work is added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Having one’s advertising rub elbows with the world’s most famous art—who wouldn’t want that? Now, though, AICP lovingly punctures a bit of that self-importance with an amusing short film from O Positive director David Shane, who also co-wrote the script with Ian Reichenthal and Michael Clancy. At the beginning, we meet an advertising creative who’s just learned his cheesy bread commercial—evidently a career highlight—has won an AICP Award and is headed to MoMA. This unnerves his partner, an actual artist, but our hero is undeterred. He heads to New York to screen his mini-masterpiece within the museum’s hallowed halls. But it doesn’t exactly go as planned. Also watch: Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo get dragged by dumb clients in AICP’s spoof of feedback process Shane is always great with performances, and this film is no exception—the protagonist’s delusions of grandeur are amusing throughout. It’s also nice to see the AICP let loose and have fun with something they’ve clearly taken quite seriously themselves over the years. “Making a short film is different from making an ad or a branded content film,” said Shane. “It’s not just a collection of jokes. It has to have a story that sustains itself, and hopefully this does. We made ‘The Journey’ as both a parody of—and a little love letter to—creatives like us who aspire to make ads that are art adjacent.” “We read a book that said you’re supposed to torture your main character, and with this piece we feel like we accomplished that,” added Reichenthal. The nine-minute film promotes AICP Week and the AICP Awards, happening June 4-6 at MoMA. “The Journey” follows another recent collaboration between AICP and O Positive—two short films directed by Brian Billow that imagined if Vincent Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo were subjected to advertising’s typical client approval process. Popular Creativity stories from Ad Age: Sign up for our daily Creativity newsletter to see the best stories of the day.

AICP and David Shane follow one man’s journey to see his cheesy bread commercial at MoMA

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