Ad Astra: Bruno Bertelli on the Art in Advertising

“In writing, the third act is key. You show that you’re a good writer always in the third act, never in the first,” says Bruno Bertelli, an advertising creative with a cineast’s eye. We’ll see whether profile features really fit the cinematic three-act structure in a couple of thousand words’ time, but Bruno’s first act certainly opens in style…

It was among the grunge and glory of New York in the swaggering ‘90s that Bruno Bertelli kicked off his advertising journey, a crucible that would shape the man who would become Publicis Worldwide’s global chief creative officer, Publicis Groupe’s Italy CCO and the CEO of LePub. 

But Bruno’s creative story doesn’t start in the eclectic dynamism of 1990s New York or off-beat New Jersey - it’s in fair Verona where we lay our scene. A small, sleepy town in Northern Italy, popular with tourists thanks to a certain play, Bruno was steeped in the creativity, art and architecture of the mediaeval and renaissance eras. But as a young man, it was not necessarily Italy’s art history that captured his imagination, but its cinema. Growing up on a diet of Italian movies, especially the golden age of neorealism and the works of Fellini and Rossellini, Bruno felt the siren call of the film world. 

The neorealists had picked up cameras and film equipment that had been left behind by the American soldiers, who’d brought it to document the conditions of WWII in Europe. Though their films told stories of morality, injustice, poverty and desperation, there’s also a certain inspiring romance in the filmmakers’ sense of agency. And so Bruno decided that he too would make it happen for himself.

He headed to New York to study screenwriting - and it’s not difficult to imagine this young, idealistic man in the Big Apple in the ‘90s, through the lens of one of those directors he had admired. Living on Times Square as the seedy world of peep shows and grime butted up against Rudy Giuliani’s scouring clean up and the thrusting local economy.

With Madison Avenue in its full, glittering pomp, it was, perhaps, unsurprising that Bruno swapped his dreams of the movies for marketing. However, the decision to explore the world of advertising came about gradually. He had a chance encounter with an advertising creative while working as a diving instructor one summer in the Seychelles, and then later one of his professors suggested he might be more suited to it, and he took some courses at university.

“The issue with cinema, especially if you want to be a writer, is you need to know the slang, you need to know all the little nuances that, at the time, I didn’t know. The other thing is, you can be a writer on the main structure but it’s even more complicated and you need to have a lot of experience to do so,” he reflects, noting that this was the time of Tarantino’s dominance, the playful use of vulgar verbosity. “You need to own the language well to do so.”

Advertising, though, offered different entry paths for multilingual writers. Bruno, whose mother tongue is actually German and who grew up speaking and writing Italian, found that he could leverage a more strategic approach to writing in English.

“When you start thinking and working in English, and if it’s not your mother tongue, what’s important is we need to focus on the rational part of the strategy. So, maybe it’s less about the execution and it’s more about the strategic skills… and the pure idea,” he says, reflecting that some of the best copywriters have been forced to get smarter and sharper in their thinking because they didn’t have the casual ease of their mother tongue to rely on.

Being a polyglot, Bruno also sees how different languages present very different challenges and opportunities for copywriters. German, being highly theoretical and packed with long, complicated words to capture complicated concepts lends itself well to philosophy but, perhaps, is a little trickier to craft a snappy endline. “Italian is fun, it’s good for singing - in terms of writing it’s too wordy. I think English is much sharper because the structure is simpler, you can focus on the details, the verbs, so much better for advertising,” he says. “If I have to write an opera, Italian is good, or if you want to write a poem, if you want to be very emotional… but if you want to be rational, punctual, sharper, English is much better.”

For Bruno’s first experience in an agency, his Italian identity - if not language - proved to be an asset. Rather than head to Madison Avenue, he joined a creative hotshop in New Jersey, the now-shuttered Cliff Freeman & Partners of ‘Where’s the Beef?’ fame. It was, he says, a fantastic environment to learn about strategy and craft. And he was put to work on… wait for it… Little Caesars.

“Obviously, as an Italian, they put me to work on an Italian brand. At the time that was not judgemental. It was a way to justify why they were hiring you and not an American writer,” he explains, recalling that the Italian connection was very useful from a visa perspective. “In any case, it was a very creative brand, actually, with a lot of good films.”

It was at the agency where he learned one of the most important, foundational lessons about creativity. He recounts a weekend where he wrote 35 scripts - but his supervisor only picked one or two to shoot. “I got pissed off because I was not recognised for the scripts so I went to the executive creative director, complaining about my supervisor not acknowledging me or putting me in the credits. He said, ‘Ok, show me all 35 scripts that you wrote.’ I gave him all of my scripts and after reviewing them he told me, ‘Ok, I’m going to give your supervisor a raise’. And I said, ‘Why?’ - ‘Because they picked the only script that was good among all 35’. That was a good lesson, actually - so it’s not only about quantity, it was also selecting the work, understanding if there was a jewel among the rest.”

That formed a rough rule of thumb for Bruno - that 50% of his time ought to be spent on ideas, 25% on reviewing them and 25% on craft. Things are not quite the same now that creatives are not simply tasked with coming up with one-off campaigns.

“Obviously today is very different. I think now we’re living in a world that is more about platform ideas. I think the job to be done is to identify what can make the brand different and then try to apply that to different touchpoints,” he says.

These days, that meaty, strategic creative thinking is one of Bruno’s favourite parts of the job. “Today it’s about repositioning brands. So the first part is about identifying the challenges, the weaknesses of the brand or discussing the issues on the business side with the clients and identifying the opportunities. It’s the excitement when you get to know a new brand, trying to understand what it’s about, what’s needed, the KPIs, what they’re asking to be changed in order to make an impact.”

With all that’s changed, he reflects that these days he finds that creatives now often come to creative directors with fewer ideas overall. He grew up with the ‘rule of 10’, which he suspects made feedback a little easier and less vulnerable. Within ten ideas, there will more than likely be something that can be built on. 

That ‘building on’ is an important aspect of Bruno’s approach to feedback more generally. “The point is always trying to be positive - and when you want to criticise something, always try to find the positive or try to understand why the creative went in that direction and to build on that. It’s never about killing for the sake of killing, but to try and encourage, to be there to help identify another angle. I think a good creative director is not someone who selects the idea, but someone who nourishes an idea and takes it step by step to make it better. It’s a tiring process if you want to do it right.”

The other thing that Bruno is keen to nurture is the creative-client relationship. As well as being global CCO of Publicis Worldwide and CCO of Publicis Groupe Italy, Bruno is also CEO of LePub, the specialist agency created to work on Heineken. It’s a relationship that’s borne fruit when it comes to creativity and bold ideas. During covid-19, the brand stood up instead of shrinking back with empathetically humorous campaigns about lockdown life and the freedom experienced by the older generation following the vaccine - not to mention the ‘#ShutterAds’ project that quite literally saved several drinking establishments by turning their shutters into advertising space when they were not able to open. 

Last year, Heineken celebrated its 150th anniversary, and LePub was partying right alongside them with a global campaign that relished in people’s idiosyncratic relationships with the brand. And Heineken-owned brands like Singapore’s Tiger Beer have also been flourishing under LePub, putting out creative that revels in contemporary Asian culture and design.

“With Heineken, it’s a brand that we’ve helped grow and become more and more international. What I like about it is that it’s all about the tone of voice and it’s difficult to explain. It takes a while to understand what makes Heineken, what’s working and what’s not [in terms of creative]. So I would say, the relationship with the client is quite unique,” he says. And at the heart of it all is Bruno’s relationship with Heineken’s global head of brand, Bram Westenbrink.

Diesel is another brand that’s stitched into Bruno’s career. The Italian clothing brand known for its denim describes itself as ‘disruptive fashion’. Its creative ambition precedes its marketing activity, driving Bruno and his team to make truly culture-shaping work, like ‘Go with the Flaw’ and the extremely viral ‘Go with the Fake’ stunt which saw the brand sell knock off ‘Deisel’ merch in Canal Street, New York.

Whereas many creatives talk of the challenges of working with uncreative clients and coaxing them gently on that journey, with Diesel the challenge was quite different. Creative roadrunners blazing forward, they set a high bar.

“The uncomfortable situation is when the client tells you it’s not creative enough, it’s not disruptive enough. It doesn’t have a limit for bravery, so you can always push it to something more disruptive. This is similar to art. It’s so easy for creatives to have safe clients and say ‘Oh, you know what, I tried to push it but the client killed the idea’. When you have ambitious and creative clients, the challenge is the opposite,” he says.

As Bruno compares Diesel’s attitude to art, he also laments that creative advertising has lost something of that connection with the art world that characterised the work of the late ‘90s and early 2000s. As much as Bruno still loves film (1970s cinema, he says, and Dirty Harry director Don Siegel in particular), he says he’s personally fascinated by art and loves to paint when he can, and he’d love to see the industry embrace that.

“I think today, art is interesting when it’s really becoming part of our life. Banksy is quite interesting because his messages are quite simple, but at the same time, what’s intriguing is the way he brings them to life in the right moment, the right time, in unexpected places,”  he says. “My recipe for a good piece of communication today is the simplicity of the message but quite surprising in the execution - and that gets us back to Banksy.”

That artsiness might also help to combat what Bruno sees as a complacent backslide in creativity since the end of lockdown. Although covid-19 was challenging, it also granted brands permission to be contemporary and topical - indeed they had to be to be relevant. “Now we’re getting back to normal and that is the problem, because it’s like going back to the past. So now there is a lot of this feeling of not being so innovative, interesting, creating something new,” he says. AI is opening up more possibilities, particularly to create more with less money - but the strategy and thinking needs to look forward and move ahead too. 

On artificial intelligence, Bruno’s pragmatic. It’s a tool that will allow creatives to do more and faster. He likens it to post production and CG, which triggered a degree of alarm when it first exploded but didn’t, in the end, destroy the live action shoot. “It's all about the way you use it, the way you own it. And for sure, for creatives, there's a lot of possibility in knowing the techniques to have a good creative path and a long lasting career. Because this is something that will make a big difference,” he says. Today, creatives are asked about their experience with AI at the interview stage - and already within Publicis Groupe, AI is being used to create storyboards, layouts and, recently, even whole films. He’d like to see sharper briefing and prompting skills when it comes to working with AI, though. “The more we’re able to correctly brief AI, the faster we go and the better results we get.”

The industry’s certainly in a very different place compared to those hazy, halcyon days in New York and New Jersey in the 1990s, and the demands placed on creatives are radically different too. And as a new generation enters advertising and marketing, Bruno has some pointed advice as they prepare to work in this age of platform brands and constant change.

“So, today, a good creative is not a general creative - the best creatives do something specific. So getting specialised is one of the recommendations that I always give. The second thing is to try and work in a consistent way for some brands, because today is really about the tone of voice, it’s about understanding brands deeply. It’s impossible to do when you pass from one brand to another too easily. Working on the same brand for a couple of years helps you to get better work, for sure.”

What’s really changed since Bruno’s early days in the bustle of Seinfeld-era New York, though, is that creativity has become so much more gloriously global. People are becoming more open to culture from all over the place - it doesn’t emerge from one or two intensive crucibles and, more crucially, it doesn’t have to be limited to English in order to have international success. Whether it’s a Turkish TV series or K-pop and K-drama, great culture is finding its audience. Bruno doesn’t need to be in New York to lead a global network, he can do so from Milan.

Creativity now is a diverse and diffuse world of platforms and problem solving - a world and a half away from the linear storytelling of Bruno’s cinema heroes. Today, says Bruno, the game is about giving brands relevance in people's lives and to create value and to keep up with people's changing habits. But if creatives can follow Bruno's advice and lean into their artsy side a little more, and think a little bigger, they'll find they have the opportunity to be as surprising as Banksy.