Creative Focus: Austin

Scurrying cockroaches and decaying corpses dominate a restaurant client's ad copy. Fat men kiss dogs and eat sandwiches coated with tanning lotion in two spots on the agency reel. And, God help us all, one notorious execution pictures a kitten in a microwave. Is Austin agency T3 trying to make us sick? Or is it just pining for an ASPCA boycott? Neither, says Rob Buck, executive creative director, minority partner (with president Gay Warren Gaddis) and the person credited - or, as some would say, held accountable - for overseeing all of the above. "We haven't set out to push everything to the complete edge," says Buck, 34, laughing. "We just wanted to be relevant to the audience for each client." Take the microwavable kitty (preferably out of the kitchen) in the ad for BullFrog Software's Dungeon Keeper game. The challenge, says Buck, was to find an image other than the standard gore shot that's typical of on-screen videogame play. "[The player is] a bad guy who kills everything that's wholesome. It's pure evil," says Buck. Ding! The cat goes into the appliance, and a tagline is born: "All of the evil. None of the mess." Emulating its BullFrog work, T3 was again able to test the boundaries of taste with Dick's Last Resort restaurants. "For Halloween, our cockroaches will be dressed as rats" and "We were going to have Elvis in person, but the smell was unbearable" are examples of some of the shop's Addy-winning print ads. "The ads are selling a place where a person can let down his hair," where the rules of society don't apply, Buck says. Now in his second stint at T3, Buck has worked at the $26 million agency since April 1996, bringing nine years of GSD&M creative muscle to a shop some argued lacked the accounts to be a creative force. (He first joined T3 in 1994, but returned to GSD&M less than a year later, blaming T3's dearth of creative work.) At GSD&M, Buck moved up from art director to vice president while serving clients such as Brinker International, Southwest Airlines and the Texas Lottery Commission. Along the way, he learned the GSD&M philosophy of advertising, known as the "uninvited guest" theory. The creed establishes that admakers should always remember advertising is an intrusion into people's private time and that the goal is to be welcomed back for another visit. Buck still reveres that adage, even though the evidence indicates T3 is more likely to kick in the door. "I don't think we're violating [the GSD&M belief] at all. We're actually in tune with that," says Buck. Indeed, persuasion and entertainment are prominent components of GSD&M's "uninvited guest" dictum. Nowhere does it say you have to be nice. The first sign of T3's off-kilter approach under Buck was a series of 1997 TV spots for Golfsmith Golf Centers that parody duffers' fanaticism. One ad shows a man doing the fatherly thing, choosing a weekend game of catch with his lonesome son over a round of golf with the guys at the office. But there's a rub: Junior plays with a mitt while dad slams him a few golf balls with his wedge. "Nice pitch, Dad!" the kid exclaims. And there's more: In a spot for the Austin Lyric Opera, a fat guy smooches with a Pomeranian, and a tanning-lotion sandwich is eaten by mistake, courtesy of client TMC HealthLine, also in Austin. From the Austin Opera to Dick's Last Resort, as long as T3 is fronting the message, it might be a good idea to leave the pets at home. - Glen Fest VIVA LA DIFFERENCE "T3 is different from GSD&M," says Rob Buck. "Our goal isn't to conquer the world or to be the biggest agency. We're kind of like a microbrew and GSD&M is like Anheuser-Busch." But Buck still reveres his former agency's "uninvited guest" theory.

Brand Marketing

Creative Focus: Austin - Not Nice

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