Aussie ad industry condensed into :30 seconds

When creative director Martin Manning realizes he’s dropped to double figures in the Campaign Brief Creative Rankings – thanks to a ruling by the agency’s new CEO to ban the agency from entering awards – he has a meltdown. He then sets out to create an award-winning campaign to get him back to number one, a play for power that has unexpected consequences.

Manning, played by Joel Tobeck of Lord of the Rings fame, is one of the stars of :30 seconds, a six part satirical drama set in the Australian outpost of a multinational agency called BND Worldwide whose motto is: ‘BND. Truth Well Sold’.

Airing mid-year on Foxtel’s The Comedy Channel, it’s a co-production between Andrew Denton’s Zapruder other films and Foxtel. This is Denton’s second foray into portraying the advertising industry – the first was panel show The Gruen Transfer, which has been a ratings hit for the ABC.

The series is the brainchild of Tim Bullock of Prodigy Films, Justin Drape and Scott Nowell of Three Drunk Monkeys, Sydney who first started working on it six years ago.

Bullock, Drape and Nowell previously worked together at Saatchi & Saatchi Sydney which is when they first started thinking it would be funny to take the real-life incidents they experienced in daily agency life – such as flying to Melbourne to judge the grill marks on a burrito – and turn it into a TV series.

They presented the idea to Denton who came on board as executive producer and Andrew Knight from Sea Change, Tripping Over and After the Deluge worked as a script consultant. The four-week shoot for the six half-hour episodes started on Monday at Black Sheep Productions.