// This is a machine generated transcript. Please report any transcription errors to will-help@illinois.edu.

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Brian Mackey: Today on The 21st Show, a man who spent most of his life in Illinois is the creative brain behind some of the most memorable ad campaigns this century.

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Speaker 1: Bud Light presents Real Men of Genius.

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Brian Mackey: Pat Burke grew up in Chicagoland and went to the University of Illinois. We'll talk with him about that, what it takes to make a Super Bowl ad, and the way the best commercials can stick with us long after they stop airing. I'm Brian Mackey. That's coming up today on The 21st Show, which is a production of Illinois Public Media, airing on WILL in Urbana, WUIS in Springfield, WNIJ in Rockford DeKalb, WVIK in the Quad Cities, and WSIU in Carbondale.

But first, news.

From Illinois Public Media, this is The 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. And my guest today is not a household name, but there is a good chance you're familiar with some of his work. Especially if you're among the tens of millions of Americans who spent any amount of time in front of the TV watching ads during the Super Bowl. Let's start with a few excerpts. These are respectively for Cars.com, Rocket Mortgage, and Jeep. And we're going to hear, in these clips, a king taking part in a royal feast, the actor Jason Momoa removing his ripped Hollywood body to reveal a skinny guy underneath — that's for the mortgage company — and Bill Murray reprising his role from Groundhog Day for Jeep.

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Speaker 2: Ohs in checker. Sometimes it's better to let others go first so that we can learn from their experiences.

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Speaker 3: What does home mean to me? It's my sanctuary. It's the one place I can let my guard down, so I can just kick back and be totally comfortable in my own skin. He's not the groundhog. Hey, you're gonna freeze to death. Who cares? See you tomorrow.

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Brian Mackey: What all of those commercials have in common is the writing and creative leadership of Illinois native Patrick Burke. After spending most of his career in Chicago, Burke relocated to Los Angeles not too long ago. He's executive creative director at the ad agency known as Special Group, and by his count, he's been a part of making 18 Super Bowl ads for 10 different companies. But that's just one facet of a career that can now be measured in decades.

Pat grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago. For college, he went to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Originally, that was for art, but he graduated in 1995 with a bachelor's degree in advertising. And this week, Pat is heading back to his alma mater. On Sunday, he's the featured alumni speaker at the ceremony for people graduating from the University of Illinois College of Media, where advertising is located on campus. He's with us for the hour today. Pat Burke, welcome back to The 21st Show.

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Pat Burke: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

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Brian Mackey: Listeners, you can join us throughout the hour today at 800-222-9455. What do you think of advertising today? How much do you pay attention to it? What commercials have stuck with you? And what questions do you have about that field? Again, you can call in throughout the hour. 800-222-9455 is the number.

All right, Pat, take me back to your youth. When you're a kid, what was your relationship like with advertising?

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Pat Burke: You know, I was just a creative kid growing up. I always liked to draw and paint and write stories and, you know, like a lot of kids, [make-believe] and things like that. I mean, I liked sports. I was just a terrible athlete, so I really was drawn more to creativity. And I didn't really think about advertising as a career until — we went on a road trip when I was, I think I was like 9, and we took a road trip out to New York to visit a family friend, and he happened to own a small ad agency. And I just — we took a tour of his offices and I saw these people like wearing shorts and throwing a Nerf ball around, and they're surrounded by like drafting tables full of markers. And, you know, one of them had a Corvette, and I was like, wow, he could wear shorts and still make enough money to drive a Corvette. And it dawned on me then that it was a creative field that you could actually like kind of get a job in. And so yeah, at that point I was like, maybe that's what I should do.

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Brian Mackey: It's maybe difficult for young people today to remember how unskippable ads were back then. I mean, I used to have this VHS — I probably still do somewhere — cassette of Star Trek 2 taped off ABC, and like the ads were almost as much a part of it to me as the movie itself, because it was just, there was no skip button.

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Pat Burke: Right, exactly. Yeah. And I kind of like — I think my career is interesting, or the timing of my career is interesting, because I started in that time, and I've obviously been doing this and seeing the industry change so much. But like when I started, you had to — I think brands just could work on the assumption that a consumer literally had to interact with their brand in order to, you know, see who killed J.R., or flip to the next page of a magazine or newspaper article that you were reading. And now, in the course of the last couple of decades, consumers are actively trying to avoid advertising, and they're really good at it. And so now I think it's even more important to sort of reward people for interacting with your brand, you know, to get attention and do good creative work that people want to interact with.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah, I want to come back to that — the actual practice of the craft — a little later on. But let's stay with your sort of your path into advertising. So you mentioned you're a kid into art. You learned that you can wear shorts and still drive a Corvette.

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Pat Burke: I don't do either of those.

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Brian Mackey: How does that lead you to the University of Illinois?

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Pat Burke: Well, I, you know, again, I didn't really know. I knew that I wanted to do something creative for a living and advertising was a career, but I kind of didn't — my brother, my older brother went to the University of Illinois, and when I would go down and visit him, I just thought it was the coolest place. And I also looked up to him, and it looked like he was having fun and getting a good education, and I knew they had an advertising major there. Actually, initially I was an art major because, again, even though I knew that advertising was a career, I didn't really understand what the roles were, what the creative roles were. And I just kind of assumed that because I knew how to draw and paint and things like that, that I should be an art major and then that would lead me into advertising. And so my freshman year I was an art major. But yeah, my brother went there and it was sort of a — you know, it wasn't a unique thing for a kid from the suburbs of Chicago to end up at the University of Illinois. I think like 75% of the people I met there were all from the burbs.

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Brian Mackey: That is definitely a well-worn path. And I mean, they had a bowling alley right on campus. How can you beat that?

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Pat Burke: So —

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Brian Mackey: Talk more about art, though. So I mean, you're in art. How do you decide to leave that and pursue the writing side of the field?

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Pat Burke: Yeah, it kind of quickly became clear to me that being able to draw and paint — or liking to draw and paint — is very different than what an art director does in advertising. And, you know, for the listeners who don't work in advertising, which I assume is most of the listeners, the creative roles in advertising — a creative team is two people, and it's an art director and a copywriter, a writer. A copywriter is a writer, just basically does the writing side of it. And an art director is different than a graphic designer or a painter. Just being able to draw or paint doesn't make you a good art director. And I think partway through my freshman year at the University of Illinois, I figured out that I wasn't a very good graphic designer. Even though I could draw and paint, a lot of these kids were so much better, and they were going to end up kind of in the graphic design field or in the fine arts. And so I was told that there was a separate major for advertising, and I transferred. But I still thought I was going to be an art director all the way through all four years at the university and into my internship after I graduated. I thought I was going to be an art director, and then it took a creative director that I worked for in my internship after graduation who convinced me that I would be a better writer than an art director, and so I switched.

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Brian Mackey: What was that conversation like?

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Pat Burke: It was very — so halfway through the internship, and of course I'm hoping I'm going to get a job coming out of this, he pulls me into his office and says, I don't think you're a very good art director. And my heart just sank. I was like, oh man, this is the end of my career. But his next sentence was, I think you're a pretty good writer. Have you ever considered switching and becoming a writer? And I said, anything you will pay me to do — like whatever's going to get me a job at the end of this. So literally halfway through the internship, I switched to copywriting, and I had never even considered it for the last, you know, five years of trying to get into advertising and becoming a creative. I had never even thought of it. And it's definitely the best career move I ever made, because he was right — I wasn't a good art director. Hopefully I'm a good writer.

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Brian Mackey: All right, let me remind listeners, this is The 21st Show. We're talking today with an Illinois man who over the years has been a part of creating 18 ads that aired during the Super Bowl. A lot of people in advertising do an entire career without working on one. Pat Burke grew up in Chicagoland, went to the U of I Urbana-Champaign. We're talking with him about some of the work he's done over the years, how he got into the field, that sort of thing. If you want to join us today, 800-222-9455. 800-222-9455.

All right, let's talk a little bit about how an ad actually comes about. Tell me — is your company out there pitching clients? Are clients coming to you? Take me through the basics for those of us not in the field.

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Pat Burke: Sure. I mean, for most agencies, the brands that I work on, we have long-term relationships with clients, and those start with a pitch. Usually — and I'm not, as a creative director, as someone on the creative side, we're not really brought into the process until the pitching of creative ideas actually starts — but usually a brand will reach out to a few different agencies that they've heard about, that they're interested in, that they've seen in the press, and invite us to submit an RFP. And there's a kind of long, lengthy process until they brief us on what they're looking for from their agency, and then we'll sort of go into a creative pitch with them.

But once we have a brand on the roster and we're working with the brand for a particular project to come to life, it starts with a strategic brief from the clients — you know, what the brand needs are, if they're launching a new product, if they're trying to change the image of a brand or promote some new feature. They'll brief us on that, and then we have strategists who will come up with a creative brief. So they'll translate that brief into something with some consumer insights and some different sort of starting points and ways in. And at that point, we brief the creative teams. And they kind of — it's a lot like, you know, if you've seen movies and TV shows about advertising, it's like a couple of people tossing a Nerf ball around and brainstorming and coming up with ideas.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah, no, I've heard you say that you didn't watch Mad Men. So I initially was thinking about framing a few questions around that, but we won't waste our time. I get it. My wife's in the medical industry and she never watches medical shows. So — do you ever have a company come to your firm — you know, "we really want to sell private prisons in blue states" or something like that? I know you're not going to want to get into specifics and names, but are there times where you think, yeah, that's just not for us?

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Pat Burke: I mean, it hasn't really been typically my decision, those types of things. But yeah, I think when I was younger, you couldn't really turn down an assignment. And I worked at some pretty big ad agencies, and I remember working on fast food brands — which I won't name specifically — but I would get asked to work on fast food brands, and at the time, I think we had little kids and we were very careful about what they ate, and so there was certainly like some things that gave me pause. But when you're a young creative, you can't — at least in my mind, I was trying to sort of move up and make sure I stayed employed for the kids that I had to put through school. But as I got older, you can kind of take jobs and take roles — if you can afford to say no to things, then I started to kind of be a little more selective.

I don't really — we've never really worked on, at least I've never worked on, anything political. The agencies that I work for, it's more consumer, you know, packaged goods and things like that. But I did — my very first job, right out of the internship, they had McDonnell Douglas, and at one point I had to do a print ad for the fighter jets, which was a very strange one for me.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah, what do you — how do you say, like, the creative brief or the selling proposition of that?

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Pat Burke: If I remember — I'm an old guy, so this was many years ago — but I think they would run ads in Washington, D.C., specifically trying to sort of get noticed by people in the position to do these government contracts and things like that. And they had just sold a bunch of F-18 Hornets to like Finland, and they just wanted an ad in the newspapers in the Washington, D.C., area to let senators and people in the defense department know, "Hey, we just made a deal with Finland, isn't that great?" Like, that was literally the ad. It was a very strange assignment. I don't remember what we ended up producing, but yeah.

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Brian Mackey: Not looking for humor in that one, or heart, I guess.

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Pat Burke: Not that I remember. Yeah, no.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah. How do you — well, we need to take a break in about a minute here, but maybe you can just sort of set up, like, how much of this is you urging the clients to go a certain direction versus the clients pulling you in their direction, if that makes sense.

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Pat Burke: Yeah, it's a back and forth for sure. And that's, you know, the creative process with clients is usually multiple meetings where we show them many different ideas, and they'll come back and say, "Well, this isn't really what we want to be saying or how we want to be saying it." And so we do have to kind of also have a point of view as an agency and as creative people, and say, "This is what we think your brand should be saying and this is how you should be saying it," and then it's a conversation.

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Brian Mackey: All right, let me invite listeners to join us once again at 800-222-9455. Maybe you remember some of these Super Bowl ads that we talked about earlier. I'm looking at some of the other ones that my guest Pat Burke has worked on — the farmer for Lay's, the potato chip company, right? The little girl, potato falls off the truck, she plants it, nurtures it into its own plant, harvests the potatoes that are going to go into a bag of Lay's potato chips the next year. I saw that so many times last year when it was in heavy rotation on the Major League Soccer broadcasts after the Super Bowl, of course.

All right, if you want to — again, 800-222-9455 to join us. We're going to continue with Pat Burke, who of course is coming back to the U of I this weekend to give an address to graduates of the College of Media. We'll continue after a short break. It's The 21st Show. Stay with us.

It's The 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey, and we're talking today with Patrick Burke — Pat Burke — who grew up in Chicagoland, went to the U of I, and is back this weekend speaking to College of Media graduates. He himself has had a long career in advertising. He's worked on 18 Super Bowl ads, as well as countless others. Most of his career was in Chicago. He's now based in L.A. You can join us at 800-222-9455. 800-222-9455.

Let's listen to another example of your work. This is from the late 2000s. It was a campaign for Bud Light.

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Speaker 1: Bud Light presents Real Men of Genius. Today we salute you, Mr. Enormous SUV Driver. Your mammoth machine strikes the perfect balance between the towing capacity of a tractor trailer and the sleek styling of a tractor trailer. Lesser men might say a 26-cylinder engine is overkill, but someday they'll have to tow a cruise ship into dry dock, and that's when they'll come crying to you. I got the towing package.

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Brian Mackey: Oh man, that takes me right back, Pat. Talk to me about how that came about.

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Pat Burke: Yeah, I was one of the writers and later the creative director on the Real Men of Genius campaign, at an agency called DDB Chicago, which unfortunately no longer exists as of last year. But actually, the campaign idea was — my good friend Bob Winter came up with that. I can't take credit for the original, kind of the origination of the campaign. But there was a big team that worked on it, and I was one of the main writers. It was a 10-year — I think it was the longest-running radio campaign in advertising history, and the most awarded.

It was — I still, to this day, think it was the most fun project to work on every year. A couple of times a year we would do packages of those, and I think we ended up making almost 300 of them over the course of 10 years. It was very unique. It reminded me more of like a writer's room for a comedy show than advertising. We would all kind of get together in the recording studio with the talent, with the singers, with [Pete Stacker], the voice of the campaign, and we would write jokes together and make each other's jokes better and just have a lot of fun. It was late nights, but — and lots of Bud Lights consumed.

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Brian Mackey: What is the goal with something like that? Is it just to be talked about, to put yourself in the mind? Say more about that.

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Pat Burke: Yeah, kind of. I mean, Bud Light — it's a lot of talk value. You want people sort of associating your brand with fun, you know. I don't think the average light beer drinker wants to hear a lot about the hops. When you have a big macro brand like that, it's just kind of brand association, brand personality. And so I worked on Bud Light for many years — I think I worked on it for 15 years — and it was all just comedy and building a brand around fun and humor. And yeah, just kind of standing out and having that brand be top of mind. So to have a campaign that people not only would stick around and listen to, but would actually share — I mean, it was kind of the early days of the internet when that was running — but like, people were looking forward to hearing the next one as opposed to trying to turn the radio off when it came on.

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Brian Mackey: Yeah, I mean, so many people listen to podcasts nowadays, or satellite or whatever, that maybe they don't remember that you could hit the preset and go to a different station if you didn't want to hear, you know, the [Cars for Kids] ads or whatever. But this one maybe you'd stick around for. What's different about writing for radio than TV? I'll start with that.

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Pat Burke: Yeah, it's — well, I would say it's definitely — for a writer, we could sink our teeth into it. I really enjoyed it, and I kind of miss it. We don't really do a ton of it anymore. I mean, there's still obviously a need for radio ads, but it's theater of the mind, you know. You have to — and I know this is a very obvious statement — but you don't have the benefit of visuals to help you tell a story. So the entire story has to be told through audio. And I think as a writer, it was always an interesting challenge. And it was, you know, usually 60 seconds — or there were 30-second versions — but the average TV commercial back then was 30 seconds and the average radio commercial was 60, so it was a longer format. You had a little more time to tell a story, but it was still a really interesting writing challenge. It's a little bit lower budget, typically, than a TV commercial, and so the clients would sometimes put a little less pressure on it, which made it kind of an interesting opportunity to be more creative sometimes, because they didn't put quite as much pressure on what they were spending their money on.

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Brian Mackey: All right, let's listen to another clip — another example of your work. This is an ad for the candy Skittles.

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Speaker 5: You're acting so funny. What's wrong, Billy?

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Speaker 6: I should probably tell you. This isn't just my complexion. My doctor says I have Skittles pox.

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Speaker 5: Skittles pox. Are they contagious?

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Brian Mackey: I don't think so. Contract the rainbow. Taste the rainbow. All right. Theater of the mind. Can you describe for our listeners what's happening there?

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Pat Burke: They probably saw it — that ad ran for so long, they just kept running it. Even I got tired of seeing it. Yeah, I mean, the Skittles campaign — that was also done when I was at DDB in Chicago, but the campaign had kind of originated at another agency. But they were always a little bit off-putting and disturbing visually. Somebody had some sort of Skittles-based affliction, and that commercial is Skittles Pox. There's kind of like a teenage couple under the bleachers at high school, and the boy has Skittles all over his face and arms, like chickenpox kind of, and she — it was very polarizing, that ad. In the commercial, the girl plucks one of the Skittles off his face and eats it, and then she contracts the same disease — instantly has Skittles all over her. If you look at Reddit threads about the commercial, some people loved it. A lot of people found it very disgusting, but —

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Brian Mackey: But they're talking about it, right?

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Pat Burke: Yeah, yeah. And I think — you know, it was usually adult suburban parents who hated it, but they weren't the target. The target was 16-year-olds, and most of them, I think, found it really funny. I hope. It ran for a long time because it tested well and it did well, so I guess it did its job.

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Brian Mackey: So you've mentioned throwing the Nerf ball around a few times as like the stereotypical way people come up with their ideas. OK, what can you tell us about the Nerf ball that night? Somebody douse it in LSD, or where does an idea like that come from?

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Pat Burke: You know, it was — interestingly, that one — and I don't know, or maybe it's not interesting — but those were, there was a batch of Skittles commercials that we were asked to do that were meant only to run online. And so the budget was very small. When you really broke down what we spent on it, I think we shot that commercial in a half a day because we shot a different one that afternoon, and I think the budget was maybe $40,000, which — most commercials are more like $200,000 or $300,000 or more in production costs, even back then.

I don't remember exactly — there was no LSD involved — but we had a lot of sort of different, interesting versions of what the afflictions were, that people were — that was kind of the basis of the campaign: what can there be, kind of like a visual illness or mutation that someone has involving Skittles. And I don't know, it was one of the five or six that we produced over the course of two days that, for whatever reason, caught on and ran for many years. They put it on television instead of online, and yeah.

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Brian Mackey: Was that related to the Midas touch Skittles one? I've heard you mention that as sort of a great example of great work as well.

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Pat Burke: Yeah, that — so that was done at the previous agency, and it was sort of — I think, and I'm not a historian on the Skittles campaign — but part of the very first round of that campaign where people — yeah, so there was a commercial where basically everything someone touches turns to Skittles. And to him it's an awful problem because he can never hold his children or, you know, but to everyone else it's great because he just makes Skittles and they want to eat Skittles. So the commercial was very, very funny. And that was kind of the goal, to do something on that level.

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Brian Mackey: How do you know when a commercial is taking off? I mean, are you trolling Reddit, or do you have people who do that for you now? Yeah, talk about how you sort of follow the life of these things after you put them out in the world.

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Pat Burke: Yeah, I mean, for the clients, they test — and they can also look at sales and see if the campaign is working, and they'll do a lot of testing after something runs. But for us, I think it's just — at least for the brands that I work on and the campaigns that I work on — we hope that it is in some way getting talked about, you know, becoming part of pop culture. If people are debating it on Reddit, I feel like we've done something right, even if half of them, like the moms, hated Skittles Pox.

And then, you know, Super Bowl commercials — obviously you want to be part of that conversation after the weekend. You want to be talked about on talk shows and Jimmy Kimmel. But yeah, if it's at all breaking into pop culture, I feel like you're just getting so much extra exposure for the brand beyond just the paid media, and that's when it's really clicking, I think.

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Brian Mackey: So you entered the world of advertising in the mid-'90s, right? I think you probably had an email — I got to [the U of I] by fall of '95, so we must have just missed each other on campus. You had an email address. I don't know if the web was a thing yet — I remember CNN.com launched during my freshman year. So talk about the transition you have seen in this field with YouTube and now the short-form videos. What does it take to get someone to stop swiping, scrolling, that sort of thing?

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Pat Burke: Yeah, it's very different. Like we talked about earlier in the show, when I started in the business, the brands could just kind of assume that consumers had to interact with your brand. And now — we have to constantly remind ourselves and our clients of this — but people are actively avoiding advertising. I do it. I can't click the skip ad button fast enough if I'm trying to watch something online. And I work in advertising — even I don't want to watch the ads.

And so I think it's also — there are a lot more mediums out there. If you look at what the ratings were for your average network show in the '80s and '90s, because there just weren't that many other things for people to watch, no show even comes close to getting those kinds of ratings anymore because there's cable, there's streaming, there's all these different things fighting for consumers' attention. And so for us to stand out and break through and be memorable, I think we have to work harder at it. And I think I personally like it, because I think it makes brands be more creative and do work that breaks through. You can't just make a boring ad and spew a bunch of product facts in a boring way. You have to fight for the attention of consumers, and that forces us to be more creative, which is what I like.

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Brian Mackey: You know, we did a conversation with an advertising professor at the U of I — Jason Chambers — a couple of years ago about Tom Burrell, the sort of legendary Chicago ad man who is largely responsible for putting Black people in advertisements, starting back in the 1970s. And we got a call or an email or something for that show saying, "Why are you spending so much time on ads? These are terrible," blah blah blah. Do you get that in life at all? Maybe when you were younger at the sidelines of the soccer field, sort of thing? Or is it mostly like, "Wow, you can wear shorts to work and have the option of buying a Corvette"?

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Pat Burke: I think — yeah, I mean, when people talk to me about what I do, I guess I don't understand why it's that interesting because I do it every day. But I think for a lot of people it is an interesting field because you do something creative for a living, and I've been lucky enough to be part of campaigns that people recognize — you know, some of the things that you've been playing here — or, you know, working with celebrities. I think it's — I understand why it would be interesting for people to hear about. But I feel like I take it for granted now that I do something sort of interesting, I guess. I do enjoy it. I like it because it's different every day, and I get to — again, I just always wanted to do something creative for a living, and so I really appreciate the fact that I've been able to make a career out of it.

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Brian Mackey: Do you ever think about the sort of the negative consequences? I mean, you mentioned your own kids and working for a fast food company, and probably some number of cavities and dental work out there has been related to Skittles consumption over the years.

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Pat Burke: I do, yeah. I mean, obviously — yeah, I mean, I do. And I wouldn't work on cigarette brands. As I got older and was able to make some of the choices more on the brands that I would work on and wouldn't work on, the rule that I always kind of gave for myself is: if I won't use the product or eat the product or consume the product, then I'm going to say no to that job. For instance, I worked on beer for half of my career, but I like beer and I drink beer, so — yeah, I think that's just the rule that I place on it for myself.

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Brian Mackey: All right, let me remind listeners, this is The 21st Show. We are talking today with Pat Burke, an Illinois native who over the years has created countless ads, including 18 that have aired during the Super Bowl. We're going to talk more about that after we take a break here. He attended the U of I Urbana-Champaign for college, has a bachelor's degree in advertising from there. And he's coming back this weekend to speak to graduates of the University of Illinois College of Media, where the advertising program is located on campus. We're talking with him about some of the work he's done over the years, what makes an ad work, what makes them stick in our brains — in some cases, even decades after they stopped airing. You can join us throughout the program today. 800-222-9455 is the number. 800-222-9455. We're going to continue with Pat Burke after a short break. This is The 21st Show.

It's The 21st Show. I'm Brian Mackey. We're talking today with Pat Burke. Grew up in Illinois, works in the field of advertising. He's created 18 commercials that have aired during the Super Bowl, or at least been a part of the creative team bringing those to life. And he's worked in Chicago — now he's based in L.A. He's returning to Illinois this weekend to speak to graduates at the College of Media commencement ceremony at the U of I in Urbana. If you want to join us, 800-222-9455.

All right, how did you get your first Super Bowl opportunity? And maybe you can just tell our listeners, who are outside the field, why that's such a big deal.

[00:35:48]
Pat Burke: Yeah, it's — well, it's the biggest investment, you know, for clients who do invest in the Super Bowl. It is, obviously, the kind of the biggest single investment a brand will ever make as far as like one ad running. And it's also kind of the only time during the year when you're talking to literally everyone. I mean, I think everyone from my mom all the way down to my kids is typically watching the Super Bowl, or you're at least at a Super Bowl party and it's on in the background — as opposed to when you're speaking specifically to a target market for a brand. Instead of that, we're talking to all of America.

My first ad was for Oscar Mayer. It was actually four. So my numbers are padded a little bit, because the very first Super Bowl campaign I had was four commercials on one Super Bowl. So that 18 — there were four for Oscar Mayer. It was with the Wienermobile. And they had done contests across America to find the next kind of child star to sing the bologna — "My Bologna Has a First Name" — jingle, the Oscar Mayer jingle. And so we had this kind of talent contest across America, and then we revealed the winner right after the halftime show on the Super Bowl. And I was, you know, junior writer at an agency called J. Walter Thompson, which also still no longer exists. I seem to be the angel of death for Chicago ad agencies — so many of them closed since I left.

But I was just fortunate enough — I worked on Oscar Mayer, and my bosses came to me and said they want to do a Super Bowl commercial and we want you guys to be the team on it. And it was incredible. I was so excited. And I thought, this is probably the only time I'll ever get a chance to work on a Super Bowl commercial, so I'm going to enjoy the heck out of it.

And it was fun. When I go to Super Bowl parties every year, it's with friends of mine from [the U of I] who don't work in advertising, which is great because it reminds you that even though it takes up so much of my life for five or six months before the Super Bowl — it kind of is all-consuming — and then you realize you go to a Super Bowl party and people barely pay attention to the thing that you just worked on. And you're like, "Oh, that's right, most people don't care that much about advertising." It's not as big a deal to them as it was to me, so it's kind of grounding in a good way.

[00:38:17]
Brian Mackey: I would say — is that grounding in a good way, or is it a little like, "I can't believe I spent so many nights and weekends on this thing that people are just going to the bathroom during"?

[00:38:27]
Pat Burke: No, I really actually appreciate it. This industry can get kind of — I don't know what the word is — insular, or something. People spend so much time in the office, and in a good way you can become friends with coworkers, but it's really important to me to have things outside of the industry to sort of keep me grounded and remind me that the stress is probably not necessary, because what I do ultimately isn't all that important. I do it because it's a fun job and I enjoy it.

[00:38:57]
Brian Mackey: But you mentioned five or six months. I think that timeline might surprise people. So let's take — I think the most recent one that I saw on your portfolio website is the Little Farmer ad for Lay's potato chips. People I'm sure have seen this — the little girl, as I mentioned earlier, takes a potato that falls off a truck or something, plants it herself next to the barn, grows it, and then contributes to the next season's crop of Lay's potato chips. How does that come about? Take us through the process.

[00:39:30]
Pat Burke: That one was interesting, and my website isn't up to date — the most recent one I did was for Uber Eats at my new agency — but yes, the Little Farmer. That one was a little interesting because we actually pivoted in the middle of the process. But typically a Super Bowl brief, because there's so much pressure on it, starts way earlier. So we start in the summer, and we'll get briefed by the clients even as early as June or July, typically, for the next Super Bowl, because there's just so much pressure — they want to make sure that they have the idea, the thing that they can get really excited about, that's really going to break through on the game.

The Little Farmer — we had a — and I don't know how much I'm allowed to talk about this — but late in the process, the clients came to us and said they wanted to highlight and sort of hero their farmers. And we thought it was a very cool and exciting and interesting idea. We had a comedic — more of what you would consider sort of a typical Super Bowl commercial — that was already —

[00:40:39]
Brian Mackey: This is the Matrix thing — was it the Matrix one?

[00:40:42]
Pat Burke: Yeah, exactly. And that was our Super Bowl commercial, and they kind of came to us at some point in the fall and said, "You know what, we think what we want to do on the Super Bowl is" — and a lot of listeners in Illinois might appreciate this — they really wanted to shine a spotlight on the American farmers that were growing the potatoes that were used to make Lay's potato chips. And so we pivoted.

We very quickly wrote — myself and a friend of mine came up with that idea literally on the phone on a Friday night, trying to figure out: how are we going to do something serious and heartfelt that doesn't come across as disingenuous and fake and inauthentic? How can we do something that's still kind of worthy of the Super Bowl moment, that would stand out at the Super Bowl, without telling jokes and making visual gags? And yeah, we're really proud of it. It turned out really — like, it's a really sweet commercial. It ran a lot. People — like you said — people were probably tired of seeing the 30-second version.

[00:41:45]
Brian Mackey: I was. And I was surprised to see — and I guess this speaks to commercials, right? — you and other people who are behind the scenes, it's not well known outside the industry who is responsible for what. Taika Waititi directed that, right? Marvel movies, The Mandalorian, the Star Wars show. How did that happen?

[00:42:05]
Pat Burke: Yeah, so Taika — I mean, there are a number of feature film directors who, when they have downtime in between projects, will direct commercials. Typically, big-budget Super Bowl-type commercials are what they gravitate towards. Also, when we started the process — for instance, the Matrix spot, which was originally meant to be a Super Bowl commercial — having a celebrity on board, a lot of times the celebrities in the commercial will feel more comfortable working with a director who is a little bit more of that feature film caliber.

Taika Waititi does a number of commercials every year, and we immediately thought of him because — and I say his first name as if we're good buddies — he has this sort of, even when he does heartfelt and serious things, they have this sparkle to them, this sort of — I don't know, he's got a style to his film and his storytelling. "Quirky" is the wrong word, but he brings like this extra angle to it that makes it — a serious storyline doesn't come across as cheesy. It comes across as really charming. And we wanted that. When we came up with this idea of the Little Farmer, we were, rightly so, worried that if it was told the wrong way, it could be a really cheesy commercial. But if it was made by someone like Taika and he could bring his special magic to it, it wouldn't come across that way, and it would have that little sparkle, for lack of a better word.

[00:43:39]
Brian Mackey: Yeah. So we're coming toward the end of our time here. As you have been in this field now for three decades — I'm sorry, I keep hammering that — you've moved into more of a management role over time. How's that been for you?

[00:43:55]
Pat Burke: It's tough. I like — I never wanted to be a businessman, like growing up I didn't picture myself as a business — I just wanted to do something creative for a living. And as you sort of progress in this industry, if you get promoted and you do your job well and get promoted, you do less and less of the actual creative work. I mean, it's still — every once in a while, like last year again, the Little Farmer — it was kind of an emergency situation where we needed a new concept quickly, and my friend and I came up with that idea and wrote that. But I do miss being more the writer.

And now it's almost like being the editor of a magazine or a newspaper. As a creative director in advertising, it's like I'm evaluating the ideas from other creative people and I'm trying to make them better, or make them the best ideas that they can be. I do miss the creative process, but I do like working with the younger teams, the teams that work for me, and the young creatives, and helping them hone their own voices and skills and become the best versions of their own sort of creative self that they can be.

[00:45:05]
Brian Mackey: I wonder if that conversation you had back in 1995 — "you're a terrible art director" — ever rings in your ears as you are having, I'm sure, similar conversations with young people. And maybe you don't have the sweetener at the end.

[00:45:21]
Pat Burke: Yeah, I haven't — luckily, I've never had to tell anybody that they were bad at their job. I do have to sort of — you know, kill ideas that people feel strongly about. That's a big part of the job. Every creative loves all of their ideas. So typically they just think everything that they do is brilliant, and somebody has to come and say, "Yeah, this one's not going to work, we're not going to bring that to the client. It's not right for this reason or that reason." But yeah, I do kind of miss the creative.

I have started to do some writing outside of advertising. I did — years ago, I started kind of writing for magazines and things, just completely outside of the field of what I do, just as a creative outlet, so I can still kind of do that on the side and get that, you know, passion project kind of thing.

[00:46:11]
Brian Mackey: Fly Fisherman, Outside magazine, McSweeney's Internet [Tendency] — personal favorite is "Please Note the Rock Climbing Clip Attached to My Book Bag." I'm not going to disclose whether I have a rock climbing clip attached to my book bag, but what do you — say more about what you get out of doing that work.

[00:46:31]
Pat Burke: Yeah, it's — I credit my wife for pointing out at one point in my career that I kind of seemed miserable and needed a creative outlet. And I think I was literally flipping through a fly fishing magazine — I'm a big outdoorsman, I love the outdoors — and she's like, "Why don't you pitch stories to them, so that you have, you know, you get to do the fun part again?" And I was like, can you do that? Can you just pitch stories to a magazine? So I started kind of doing that on the side, and it doesn't pay much, but I guess it just helps me afford fly fishing trips without guilt.

[00:47:07]
Brian Mackey: You put the Super Bowl ads in the pitch letter, I mean — are you curious if that's a good calling card as a freelance writer without, you know, a thick writing portfolio?

[00:47:18]
Pat Burke: I might have shined a little bit of a spotlight on that — they know I'm not a complete outsider from the field of writing. Yeah, I'll put my link in there to my portfolio.

[00:47:31]
Brian Mackey: So you're in L.A. now. You were a lifelong Illinoisan. Aside from the weather, how's that been?

[00:47:38]
Pat Burke: It's good. It was kind of an unexpected move. My wife and I are kind of empty nesters now, and this opportunity came up. We had pretty much — I had spent my whole life here, and it just seemed like a scary, in a good way, kind of chance to shake things up and have a new chapter. It's exciting, it's scary — we don't know a lot of people yet, and so we're still kind of finding our footing there. But the weather's great, and it's just a new place to explore.

[00:48:09]
Brian Mackey: Yeah. Last question: what is your message going to be to the students graduating this weekend who want to get into advertising?

[00:48:19]
Pat Burke: Well, it's interesting because the School of Media is also journalism and media studies majors and things like that. So I've had to kind of — the speech — I had to try to tailor it to a broader audience than just advertising. And even among the advertising majors, a fraction of them are going into the creative side of it. But I think my message to all of them is sort of — and it's a little bit of a cliché, but hopefully I wrote it in a funny, less-clichéd way — to just kind of follow your heart. Listen to your passions, and sometimes you have to set aside what your brain is telling you, the rational, logical side, and trust your heart and the passions and where they're taking you, because I think that's when the best decisions of my life have come — out of those moments where I just kind of took a leap.

[00:49:10]
Brian Mackey: Pat Burke is executive creative director at Special Group in Los Angeles. He's been a part of 18 Super Bowl commercials — or you can say 15 if you don't want to pad that number out with his Oscar Mayer work way back when. Pat, great talking with you. Thanks for being with us today on The 21st Show. Good luck with the speech.

[00:49:28]
Pat Burke: Thank you. Thanks very much for having me.

[00:49:45]
Brian Mackey: That is it for us today. Coming up tomorrow here on The 21st Show, we're going to be talking about abortion in Illinois. The Chicago Abortion Fund says they are seeing record-breaking numbers of people seeking out their services, basically to travel here. There's also been a lot of legal changes with regard to family planning, medication, things like that. We're going to talk about all of that coming up tomorrow here on The 21st Show, which is a production of Illinois Public Media. I'm Brian Mackey. Thank you for listening. We'll talk with you again tomorrow.