PRETTYBIRD Is AdAge's A-List 2021 Production Company of the Year!! by PRETTYBIRD

Ad Age

Creativity Amp Sections )

Datacenter Resources Latest ) Editor's Picks )

Events On the Move Most Popular )

Latest Issue

Newsletters

PRETTYBIRD )

Subscribe Now

Don't Miss

A-List winners revealed

Special Report: Agency A-List

Calm backs Naomi Osaka

Ad Age Next: Multicultural

Trump's 2-year Facebook ban

Creativity Awards finalists

PRETTYBIRD'S TOP TALENTS SHAPED THE YEAR'S BIGGEST IDEAS "#$

Shop is Ad Age's 2021 Production Company of the Year

By Ann-Christine Diaz. Published on June 07, 2021.

From left: Prettybird Co-Founder and CEO Kerstin Emhoﬀ, Co-Founder and director Paul Hunter and President Ali Brown Credit: Prettybird

When Kerstin Emhoﬀ and Paul Hunter opened the doors of Prettybird in 2007, things didn’t come easy. As a woman and a Black man founding a startup production company, they felt they had to be deliberate about their choices and their positioning. Hunter, though at the time already an A-List director, recalls wanting to avoid promoting Prettybird as a “Black-owned” business. “Kerstin and I were trying to fight against

Most Popular What K-pop and BTS can teach us about building brands

that, even though I was leading the charge as director because there was a limited amount of work, and the creative scene at the time was sort of dumbed down, which was a real issue,” he says.

Kate Spade enters the TikTok dance with a love letter to New York

More than a decade later, Prettybird’s storytelling is the furthest from “dumbed down” as you can get, all told from one of the most diverse rosters in the industry. The most telling example is Beat by Dre’s

The 2021 Ad Age Agency A-List & Creativity Awards Winners

breathtaking, polarizing “You Love Me” from Translation, which brought into stark relief the divide between how the masses simultaneously adore Black culture while failing to protect and respect those who create it. The film earned “Idea of the Year” and its director, Melina Matsoukas, won the Director of the Year in our Creativity Awards.

See all of Ad Age's A-List and Creativity 2021 winners here.



0:00

2:00







Translation founder and CEO Steve Stoute says that Prettybird’s expertise in creative and production problem-solving were palpable on the project. For one, there was Matsoukas’ uncompromising artistry. “Her images and stories have always had the highest level of quality, a strong point of view,” he says. At one point, however, the Beats job had a hiccup due to COVID, temporarily halting the production. Stoute cites Ali Brown, Prettybird president, as the force that steadied the ship throughout. “It’s a very dangerous thing when you start production, break down and start up again. You really need a partner to have your back because that has implications on cost, talent. That was Ali.” As a whole, Prettybird demonstrated the professionalism and roduction ingenuity “that allowed us to navigate through the diﬃcult COVID restrictions and make a beautiful piece of work despite all the obstacles,” he says. Indeed, Prettybird is known as much for its resourcefulness as it is for its ideas and craft. Even before COVID hit, director Max Malkin helmed 72andSunny’s film-to-real-world kickoﬀ for the Super Bowl, which saw the boy hero of the NFL’s pregame ad break out of the confines of the screen and onto the field.



0:00

1:15







After the pandemic shut live action production down, Prettybird delivered one of the first big brand spots to feature original film— Uber’s “Thank you for not riding with Uber” ad via Wieden+Kennedy, an outlier in footage. Prettybird rallied an army of directors and DPs around the globe to shoot intimate scenes of their lives at home (Director Calmatic, 2019’s breakout star of the year, for example, captured a sweet moment in which he does push-ups next to his baby boy). In June, when production was still at a standstill in California, Hunter himself drove all the way from L.A. to San Francisco in order to secure a film permit—apparently the state’s first in the post-lockdown period—ultimately paving the way for him to shoot Pereira O’Dell’s delightful, musical-inspired production for Stella Artois. Once production opened up a bit, the ideas poured in from across the bench. The Daniels, aka Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, stepped out for Facebook’s lightning-paced journey to the polls from Droga5, part of what the company billed as the “largest voter information campaign in U.S. history.” Calmatic brought his spirited tale-telling to Apple’s Homepod Mini holiday ad starring rapper Tierra Whack and her Lilliputian doppelganger. Matsoukas, too, jumped into seasonal fare with Amazon’s inspiring ballerina tale of dreams come alive during lockdown.



0:00

1:41







“It’s bittersweet,” Emhoff says of her company and directors’ accomplishments in 2020. In the wake of the year’s racial unrest, Prettybird unexpectedly found itself at the center of the spotlight. “We’d been pounding on doors for 13 years, trying to break those glass ceilings and get people in front of agencies and clients,” Emhoff says, “It just changed overnight. Reps start calling saying, ‘I need all your Black and Brown directors.’ That’s not what Paul grew up with—it was the opposite.” “There was a definite moment after George Floyd’s murder when everybody was calling because there was attention to this as an issue, and they were asking, ‘How did you guys get ahead of it,” Brown says. “But this is who we always were.” From the get-go, Prettybird has played the “long game” of developing directors from the ground up, looking for talent where few were looking. “A lot of these people were filmmakers of color, who weren’t being heard properly,” Emhoff says.



0:00

2:22







Just as important has been protecting those voices. In the case of Matsoukas, for example, “We say no to more jobs than yes because when she does something she has to have a real connection creatively or socially,” Brown says. “So when you see what she does for Nike Equality, or the Mamba Nike spot, or Beats or Amazon and how she cast that, it’s her whole being in it— there’s nothing half-assed.” Prettybird wants such opportunities to continue outside its own walls. Both Emhoﬀ and Brown are working actively to ensure diversity thrives across the entire industry. Along with Shari Holly, Emhoﬀ created Pipelines, a platform designed to connect underrepresented talents with opportunities across entertainment, creative and tech. Brown introduced “Double the Line” to the advertising production community, an initiative that aims to diversify commercial productions across the entire call sheet by asking agencies and clients to double the role of a certain crew member to create space for a BIPOC production professional who could benefit from the advertising experience. “Looking at Calmatic, Melina and some of our other young filmmakers of color and female directors, I’m very emotional,” Hunter says, his voice cracking. ““I definitely wanted to have that kind of career where everything that was inside of me lined up with the creative, but that wasn’t my route. My route was about sacrifice, laying down the foundation for a bigger picture. Now our foundation has been set and it’s awesome to see all these filmmakers come out. I’m just happy we are here, that we are getting these opportunities. I hope the industry doesn’t stop at this point.”

In this article:

Creativity

Special Report: Agency A-List

Ann-Christine Diaz Ann-Christine Diaz is the Creativity Editor at Ad Age. She has been covering the creative world of advertising and marketing for more than a decade. Outside of the job, she can be found getting in touch with her own creativity. Follow

View all articles by this author