Six Questions: Russell Wallach

It's the season for reviving defunct brands. Health and fitness publisher Rodale is bringing back Best Life, the high-end men's lifestyle magazine that it folded in 2009, Adweek has learned.

With well-rounded editorial and big-name contributors like David Mamet and Jay McInerney, Best Life was popular with readers and advertisers, carrying brands like brands like Lexus, Charles Schwab and Yves Saint Laurent. However, it became a victim of its newness (it had only launched five years before) and the luxury ad market, which took a dive in the recession.

Rodale kept the name alive in the form of a front-of-book section in Men's Health called The Best Life, though, and people who were key to the original magazine are still around, including the editor, Stephen Perrine; and David Zinczenko, gm for Rodale's Healthy Living Group evp and book division. Zinczenko will oversee the revival as editorial director. Perrine will resume his role as editor (while keeping his role as publisher of Rodale Books), and John Mather will be creative director.

Rodale is the latest in a string of publishers taking advantage of the resurgence in luxury advertising by launching new or bringing back defunct brands that folded due to a lack of ad support but which had a strong reader following. In the latter category, Condé Nast revived Domino as a newsstand publication and Gourmet as an app and special-edition magazines. They join a rash of new titles aimed at the high end, including Bloomberg's Pursuits, Fairchild Fashion Media's menswear quarterly M and Jason Binn's Du Jour.

"We're excited to be back in the rapidly expanding luxury market with a magazine that men really care about," Zinczenko said.

Rodale is being cautious this time around; Best Life will come out as a 300,000-circulation SIP (special-interest publication) priced at $5.99 for three months starting Oct. 23. There will be a companion iPad app and potential e-commerce component attached to it. Like the original, it will cover a range of topics like style, wealth, travel and fatherhood.

What do you get when you combine a controversial director, a pair of iconic British actors, and a famous Italian fashion house? That question was answered this week at the Cannes Film Festival, where Prada debuted a short film from Roman Polanski starring Ben Kingsley and Helena Bonham Carter. The result of their collaboration, titled "A Therapy," turns out to be a delightful (and impeccably stylish) little gem of a story.

Kingsley stars as a quiet psychiatrist, while Bonham Carter, refreshingly free of her usual Burton-esque attire, plays his haute-bourgeois patient. Bonham Carter, wearing a splendid violet Prada fur coat (all the clothes were created exclusively for the film), enters the doctor's beautifully decorated office to take her dose of the talking cure. After removing her coat and kicking off her (Prada-labled) shoes, she begins to prattle on about her various problems-the loneliness, the daddy issues, the curse of wealth-as the doctor attempts to listen. But he's more absorbed with his patient's luxurious fur coat hanging on a rack across the room, which he sneaks away to fondle and try on while preening in front of a mirror. The woman, oblivious to what's occurring behind her chaise longue, asks, "Oh doctor, what does it mean? What does it all mean?" Rather than attempting to answer, the doctor ecstatically sweeps the fur collar across his face, as the words "Prada Suits Everyone" appear over the frozen shot.

It's a well-known fact that fashion films, with their grim-faced writhing models and absurd voiceovers, are a generally absurd art form. But lucky for Polanski, Prada happens to be a high fashion house with an actual sense of humor. As a result, "A Therapy" manages to captivate its viewer with an unexpected wink while still exhibiting the Prada aesthetic. Luxury brands, take note: You could learn a thing or two from this three-minute session.



CREDITS
Client: Prada
Director: Roman Polanski

Miller Lite's revolutionary Punch Top can, which may completely reinvent the way high schoolers shotgun beers, frankly deserved better than the few desultory Draftfcb ads it got at last month's launch. Here, thankfully, are some new product-demo ads (from Digitas in Chicago, produced by Gifted Youth, Funny or Die's new commercials division) that have a little more fun with the Punch Top concept-in particular, the plethora of household items with which you could spear the can's top. (The faster the beer goes down, the better, perhaps.) On a related note, I received Miller Lite and Miller Genuine Draft Punch Top cans in the mail from a PR agency, and after trying in vain to give them away, I sampled them-and can confirm: The experience is gloriously glugless. Two more spots after the jump.

I learned two things from this Cheil USA ad for the Samsung Galaxy Note-namely, that Samsung has an Olympic Games ambassador, and that it's David Beckham. Who else would it be, really? After conferring with a quick S Pen diagram, Beckham kind of plays "Ode to Joy" by kicking soccer balls at a wall of drums. Not bad, but the obvious editing exposes the spot's artifice a little too much. If the finished product is going to be that much of a digital patchwork anyway, why not have him kick out something a bit more percussive? Like, I don't know, "Funky Drummer" or something.

Brazilian ad agency AlmapBBDO uses 873 stills, all from the archive of Getty Images, to tell the story of a life in this 60-second film. The pictures-of different people and locations-were culled from more than 5,000 images in Getty's archive and took six months to assemble into a coherent story line. As a marketing vehicle, the finished product, with the stills moving at a rate of 15 per second, is a tad dizzying, but ultimately succeeds as a novel way of conveying the scope of Getty's 38-million-image database. It's actually more affecting and powerful as a work of art. The ever-changing faces help make the story more universal than it might have been if told with a fixed group of actors. This technique makes the film, in effect, everybody's story, and even mimics the imperfect process of memory. (How often have you recalled people and places from the past, and then seen photographs of them looking different than you remembered?) Despite some fun and invigorating moments-the orgasmic zoom into an eye alight with fireworks is particularly inspired-there's a transcendent melancholy and deeper honesty to the piece that elevates it from most viral advertising fare. What strikes me most is the way it captures the fleeting nature of experience in each passing frame.

The "Speak English or leave" fringe of anglo America has a new reason to hate Spanish speakers: They get free pizza. Texas-based chain Pizza Patron has announced it will give a free large pepperoni pizza to anyone who orders in Spanish on the evening of June 5. It's not the first attention-grabbing promotion by the chain, which announced in 2007 it would accept pesos as payment. The giveaway has, as you'd expect, sparked national debate among social conservatives who fear the encroachment of Latino culture. "No thank you for your racist promotion. The native language in the USA is English," notes one Facebook commenter quoted by ABC News. I feel the same way about America's proud native language, which is why I always insist on ordering my pizzas in a Shoshone Uto-Aztecan dialect.

Marriott International is reviewing advertising for flagship brand, Marriott Hotels & Resorts, according to sources.

The brand's annual media spending is estimated at $15 million.

The incumbent, mcgarrybowen in New York, is expected to defend. The agency, which also handles a half-dozen other Marriott brands, declined to comment.

Media planning and buying on the base brand is not in play and remains at MEC. Last year, Marriott consolidated its global media business at the WPP Group shop after a review.

Joanne Davis Consulting managed the media search and is working on this one as well. The New York-based consultancy had no comment and referred calls to Marriott, which acknowledged the review but declined to discuss specifics.

Among the key decision-makers in the process is Susan Thronson, svp of global marketing.

The hotel chain's other brands including Courtyard by Marriott, Renaissance, Fairfield Inn & Suites, SpringHill Suites, Residence Inn and Ritz-Carlton.

Total media spending across all properties exceeded $45 million last year, down from about $54 million in 2010, according to Nielsen. Those figures don't include online spending.

Mcgarrybowen's relationship with Marriott dates back to 2003. Before that, McCann Erickson in New York was the company's lead agency.

For those of you who were getting a little tired of Zooey Deschanel's iPhone commercial with Siri-you know who you are-here's a breath of fresh air. John Malkovich has stepped into the campaign, by TBWA\Media Arts Lab, in a pair of commercials that broke Wednesday night-the 58-year-old actor's first U.S. ads. Malkovich and Siri actually make a pretty hilarious team. They're both equally quirky, and with their matching stilted speech, you get the sense that they really do understand each other. "I enjoyed this chat immensely. You are very eloquent," he tells Siri at the end of the "Life" spot. Is Malkovich falling in love? While these are his first American commercials, Malkovich has done plenty of overseas work, the most amusing of which is probably this promo for the Karlovy Vary film festival.

Even if you've never smoked a cigarette, you know that...sound. It happens when the stainless steel lid pops open under the pressure of the cam spring-a crisp, metal-on-metal "click" that precedes the snap of the flint wheel. This is the sound of someone-most likely a Humphrey Bogart-type with stubble on his chin-firing up a Zippo lighter. The sound is so iconic it's been sampled in pop songs, while the lighter itself-scarcely changed since its 1933 debut-has appeared in over 1,500 movies and TV shows, from Apocalypse Now to Dragnet.

Most brands today would kill for that kind of cultural ubiquity. And yet most brands today would probably not kill to be Zippo. Why? Consider the ads on these pages. Zippo's inexorable association with smoking, a socially suave habit that delivered steady sales for decades, became the very thing that has singed its image in recent years. These days, Zippo is hoping that other products will keep its fire burning.

When renowned portraitist Jack Wittrup drew the smooch-covered dandy in the 1953 ad at right, Zippo was at its cultural and commercial apogee. Butane Zippos were standard issue to troops during WW II. As a result, millions of American men were already sworn to the lighter that had not only fired up their Luckies, but because it also lit up instrument panels and heated cans of food rations, sometimes saved their lives. War correspondent Ernie Pyle famously called the Zippo lighter "the most coveted item on the battlefield."

This loyalty among the Greatest Generation would serve to further deify Zippo for their baby boom progeny. For postwar lads like the one at right, a Zippo thus became the figurative embodiment of becoming a man. Marcus Hewitt, chief creative officer of brand consultancy Dragon Rouge, points out that "the boy's giddy because he's just been kissed-but the lighter is the hero. This is what's made him grown up: the kiss, and getting his first Zippo." (The kid was going to use it too. The average U.S. smoker of 1953 lit up 3,650 times that year.)

But we all know what happened next. Ever since the mid-'60s, when the Surgeon General first linked cigarettes to cancer, smoking has steadily declined. Zippo's image also took a hit as its lighters became symbols of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Lighter demand ebbed. The 1998 production figure of 18 million lighters dropped to 12 million last year. As Zippo CEO Greg Booth recently told The Toronto Star: "Items like the Zippo pocket lighter are going to suffer from pressure on tobacco. If we want to be profitable and a growing company, diversification has to be part of the strategy."

So, that man with the ice in his beard on the opposite page? That's diversification. Harnessing its long-standing popularity with men and its indelible associations with fire, Zippo now sells an Outdoor Line that includes everything from emergency fire starters to hand warmers. Hewitt doesn't take issue with that strategy. "With the ruggedness and the flame that never goes out, you could argue that this is truer to the brand values [than the cigarette lighters]," he said. But by their very definitions, brand extensions mean a departure from the original product, and in this case, Hewitt can't fight the impression that a degree of magic has been lost. "There a cheeriness and sensory abundance in the first ad, but the second is bleak and-ironically-cold," he said.

Maybe that's what the Zippo hand warmer is for.