David Nobay, adman, poet, 49: 10 Questions

Adman and poet David Nobay on the short art films he’s made for TV, and why the Mad Men excesses had to end.

TWAM 2 April 2016

You’ve been an adman since the age of 19 but you’ve also written a play, exhibited your paintings, and now you’re writing poems. Are you a Renaissance man?

I always resent the phrase because the inference usually is, “Well, you just do a bit of everything don’t you?” I don’t see it as diluting what I’m doing or being distracted; I actually think it connects everything.

Your poems form the basis of a series of short art films called #artbreaks to run on the ABC. How did that come about? It all happened in a haphazard way — [actor] Colin Friels said he’d like to record one of my poems, then I sent the voice recording to a jazz pianist friend who wrote a haunting track around it, and another friend, a camerawoman, interpreted it. The whole process was a lot like jazz actually, very improvisational. So I had this three-minute film, Snared, which is very artistic, quite bizarre.

And it grew from there? I started getting phone calls. People like Warwick Thornton and John Waters wanted to be involved. I’m post-rationalising this because the process was really quite chaotic, but it is a really interesting social experiment that has exposed the appetite creative people in Australia have to do something without being told to put it in a box.

How does making #artbreaks compare with your day job? The beauty of it is they’re not ads. This is art. It’s absolutely the antithesis of my world in advertising, which is prescriptive and linear. Much as we like to say we’re creative, everything has to be passed by committee.

How has the digital revolution changed your job? It’s something that’s very good for brands but also very challenging, because they like to think they’re having an authentic, transparent conversation with their customers — but some of the time they’re just aping that.

Have you become cynical about the business? Unfortunately what’s happened over the years is the budgets have shrunk and a lot of the balls have shrunk as well. But I just came back to Sydney from Spain where I judged an international awards show and it reminds you that this funny business we’re in is actually very powerful and if you get it right you can transform things.

You’ve won more than 40 Cannes Lions for your work. Which campaign is your favourite? The one I look back on when the ad gods were smiling on us, as opposed to shitting on my head, was the first film we did for VB called The Regulars. We had 2000 people marching through Ballarat — we closed down the town for three days. It was the biggest ad ever done in Australia.

The three-martini lunch is now as much a fiction as Don Draper. Does anything remain of the Mad Men era? There was a time when eccentricity was not just expected but encouraged in creative directors. For a sizeable amount of my career I was one of those guys. I stopped drinking almost two years ago. At the end of the day, advertising isn’t an art, it’s a business, and you can’t just be bouncing off the walls and having nine-hour lunches every day even if you think that process births random genius.

Do you miss those good old days? It is kind of a shame when we lose all of that quirkiness, when everyone has to be a grown-up. These days you’d be hard-pressed to work out in a room who are the creatines and who are the suits.

Have you considered leaving the ad world to be a fulltime artist? Regularly.

#artbreaks will screen on ABC iview Arts from April 1

www.artbreaks.com.au