If you’ve spent time this holiday season catching up on the season’s movies and TV shows, chances are you’ve seen a couple of dogs. But it’s less likely you saw something directed by a dog.
That should change, argues Mikkel Holm. Holm serves as Chief AI & Innovation Officer of New York-based pet company BARK — they deliver popular subscription boxes of dog treats and toys and, oh yes, also run an airline. So this season executives commissioned a fun spot together with ad agency Tombras that was actually directed by a dog, an Australian Shepherd Pitbull mix named Mia.
OK, maybe directed is a strong word. But it’s not entirely inaccurate either, as we watch Mia and some of her compatriots from their perspective as they plow through a holiday gathering. (You can watch the ad, a tableau of a dog-human holiday gathering called “Merry Chaos, Humans,” here; it has been running on Hulu, Peacock, HBO Max and other platforms.)
So what exactly does Holm have in mind, creativity-wise, for the quirky, forward-thinking brand? We decided to ask him.
So Mia the Australian Shepherd Pitbull mix is the world’s first dog director, as far as we know.
Well I should point out she did have some good human collaborators. And editors. But yes, she directed our new holiday ad. Which is all centered around the idea that Christmas with dogs is better.
What did directing involve? I imagine not a lot of sitting in tall chairs. Maybe barking orders?
We strapped a GoPro on Mia. So many dogs in these commercial settings are doing what humans want — a lot of ‘sit,’ ‘stay,’ that kind of thing. But that’s not how most of us experience our dogs. This was about letting the dog dictate what she wanted.
What she wanted, judging by the ad, was for her and her co-stars to make mayhem at a holiday gathering — knocking over the tree, bulldozing some people, attacking the snack table.
Yes, she was not doing what a human would do directing a movie.
You’d be surprised. Anyway, it was pretty cool seeing something so gritty and, for lack of a better word, humanist.
That was our idea from the beginning. We didn’t want to do a Golden Retriever sitting in a field of flowers. I love Golden Retrievers. But everyone knows that’s fake. We wanted something real.
So like a Sentimental Value or Train Dreams sort of vibe — a handmade indie.
Exactly. We just wanted something honest. We didn’t have a shot list or specific script. Let dogs be dogs and see where it takes us. And really everything is from their perspective. You see the people the way Mia sees them.
In that way I feel like maybe she’s more of a DP, guiding the camera. A Cavalier King Charles Lang, you could say.
I guess you could say that.
I’d probably be the only one though. So were there outtakes — stuff we didn’t see?
There was a fair bit of butt-sniffing that we didn’t use. Especially when the dogs first met and were getting to know each other.
Not that different from how wary actors circle each other, tbh.
No not at all. But there is also something so pure about the dogs. They never make trouble for the sake of making trouble, unlike humans. Mia just wanted to go after what she wanted to go after. She wasn’t trying to cause anyone any harm.
Where is Mia by the way? I’m a little offended she couldn’t be bothered to come to this interview.
I think she has a lot of Hollywood meetings to take right now.
Come on, doesn’t she know those generals never yield anything?
But she can’t not go to them. Especially since she’s considering getting more into producing.
Has she talked at all about what the mood was like when the cameras weren’t rolling – like, was their jealousy about who was getting more screen time, angry calls to agents from trailers, that sort of thing?
Let’s just say NDAs were signed.
On a serious note I do feel like your ad captures something that we’re maybe losing in some of our creative these days — a genuine sincerity, where everything either isn’t drenched in cynicism on one hand or schmaltz on the other. We’re about to get a whole bunch of Super Bowl ads that do one of those things.
Totally, that’s what we felt we should do. Like we wanted to show something a little unhinged but also innocent. The dogs don’t have bad intent. They just knock stuff off the coffee table because they’re excited and don’t know where their tails are wagging.
That vibe feels in contrast with another, very different holiday ad, the Coca-Cola “Holidays are Coming” AI reboot this year. Do you see what you’re doing as a kind of counterpoint to it?
I generally like ads that have the “real” in them — real dogs, real people — instead of something overly polished and produced.
The AI does let them get in an incredibly wide range of animals though, from all over the world. As someone who serves as BARK’s chief AI officer, do you feel like that’s a good use case?
It’s hard to compare because Coca-Cola is one of the strongest brands around and they’ll be scrutinized in a different way than we are. But the challenge with “The Holidays Are Coming” ad as I see it is that the tools become the story and you want the story to be the story. Also I feel like the standards are changing with the tools — it’s like you can now get away with a different kind of storytelling so some brands are going to try that. And we should never let the tools be an excuse to lower our standards.
I feel like you could train a model all day and still not get the joyful chaos the dogs are creating in this spot.
Definitely not.
Finally, Hollywood is all about sequels. Have you been thinking about concepts for other holidays?
We have. We are thinking of one for Valentine’s Day.
Puppy love feels like it would sell.
Who doesn’t love a dog romance?
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