Bob Nelson may link his career successes with creative chief Lee Garfinkel, but the buttoned-up broadcast vet's approach to spot making stems from his own experience - more than 30 years producing for some of New York's most creative agencies.

Over the years, Nelson has produced and overseen countless spots for clients including Heineken, Diet Coke, Subaru, Marriott and Mercedes. As a whole, his works' broad humor, evocative classic music choices and streamlined storytelling delivers clear communication with definite mass appeal. Now, as head of global creative services with D'Arcy Worldwide, New York, Nelson acts as global creative head, Garfinkel's right arm and as production braintrust for D'Arcy's $9.4-billion, 131-office global agency network.

Nelson began his career in the DDB, New York film library in 1970, where he produced for nine years, cutting his teeth working on Polaroid and VW. In 1979, he moved to New York's Levine Huntley Schmidt & Beaver as head of production and soon began working with Garfinkel (a relationship that has resulted in more than 100 spots).

That agency's Subaru business won creative accolades, but at the end of the '80s, Garfinkel headed to BBDO, NY to work on Pepsi and Nelson went to TBWA, NY. The two men came together again at Lowe, New York in 1992, where they set about revitalizing the Sprite brand, the result of which was the "Obey Your Thirst" campaign.

Access to more Coca-Cola brands soon followed, including breakthrough spots like "Diet Coke Break," featuring a group of female office workers, who, every day at 11:30, gather to watch a buff construction worker peel off his shirt and guzzle diet soda. Shot on spec by Steve Horn, the spot won Lowe the Diet Coke business. Shortly thereafter, Lowe absorbed Scali, McCabe, Sloves, bringing the Mercedes business to the agency.

"We were lucky with our timing, but a year into Lowe, the agency was unrecognizable from when we walked in. That's what I want to do here," says Nelson, who joined D'Arcy in February 2002, not long after Garfinkel made the move from Lowe.

"What Lee and I have between us is an ability to cut through most situations rather quickly. We don't need to spend a lot of time with each other discussing things in depth because we have a shorthand with each other," notes Nelson.

For his part, Garfinkel says: "Usually the writer and art director come up with and sell the idea, then the producer gets involved. I've worked with a lot of producers, but the more I worked with Bob, the more it became a three-way team. With Bob, it's more than production; it is making the concept better. Some producers feel their job is to [just] execute the board, but Bob always makes the board better. Over the years, I wouldn't wait until we sold the board; rather, I'd get his opinion early on.

"Also, sometimes people come back from a shoot without a scene because the director didn't want to do it, but we still have to present to the client. Bob makes sure we end up with what we promised the client - even if it pisses directors off."

Dubbing his producer "Mountain Lawyer" for Nelson's tendency to keep the necessary paperwork on hand no matter what (even in a blizzard on Mt. Hood during a Subaru shoot, for example), Garfinkel says the pair continue to conceive and produce ads alongside their managerial responsibilities at D'Arcy, which includes a fair amount of globetrotting, gauging the creative and production output from each network node.

Of course, offering up a recommendation on a director appropriate for a job at one of D'Arcy's many and far-flung offices would not be a task foreign to Nelson either. "I've become famous for the director's database I started about 14 years ago," says Nelson. "Keeping it forces me to be disciplined. It forces me to be a student of the industry. I have over 1,400 directors in there now, and if I call up the latest and greatest, there are 168 names. There is nothing evaluative in there. What gets a director in is doing something noteworthy, it could be winning an award or getting a write-up in Boards."

The constant clamor for new directors means every top producer's list is constantly growing, and Nelson is particularly aware of the somewhat disposable nature of the latest trendy director, only a select few of which have real staying power, he says.

"I think guys like Kinka Usher, Joe Pytka or Gerard du Thame have an amazing depth and range of talent. They can direct dialog, comedy, fashion or special effects. Once you have a project that requires two or three dimensions, the pool goes down really sharply, from maybe 150 names to 10 names," says Nelson. "If Lee does a car commercial, it's telling a story with emotional involvement; in finding that human truth, the field [of capable directors] narrows quickly. All the great gear heads who do great car shoots suddenly have to have this other dimension, and a lot of them get triaged out."

Beyond the ongoing struggle to connect an expanding pool of directors with a decreasing number of commercials ("with 1,000 directors out there in the marketplace, you don't have as many $20,000-a-day directors doing the job"), Nelson also sounds off on two other issues that provide inexhaustible fuel for production community debates: so-called "runaway" productions and the incredible shrinking budget.

"What every producer should do with every storyboard - whether it's for economic reasons, production reasons or talent reasons - is start by deciding what the board needs to be brought to life. If you need the Eiffel tower, obviously you have to shoot in Paris. Any producer, at any level, should look at a board and say: 'What is the best way to execute this?' And a foreign country may be the answer," says Nelson, who has produced jobs in the Czech Republic, Spain, Canada, South Africa and the US.

"Runaway production is when you are really doing that - 'running away' from labor unions. Unfortunately, the SAG strike gave the entire industry a lesson in how to do it. But that said, clients are not strictly American anymore, they are global. If you have a global client with global needs, [the commercial] should be shot in the most appropriate place."

Of course, since economics does encourage the flow of production out of the US, budgets are the next logical topic of discussion.

"I hate when low budgets become the property of the producer. Production is not a separate and discreet thing," says Nelson, referring to a 2000 meeting between a number of agency heads of production and client-side budget managers.

"We were all in 100% agreement. We agreed that if there is a budget issue, everyone should know what it is before a project starts. There are agencies and account people who protect their creative teams from low budgets, saying 'just give me the best work, and we'll figure out the budget later.' That can be a recipe for disaster, with people coming up with million-dollar ideas on $200,000 budget. Budget shouldn't be a constraint, it's just one more element of the brief. Tight budgets, cost consultants, watchdogs, are nothing new. People will always lament budgets, but since the AAAA cost of production survey was conceived as a way for agencies to be their own watchdogs, markups have been driven down from 35% to more like 25%. By and large, it's not our money. It's the clients money, and they have a right to monitor how it's spent."

But a great producer, head of production and yes, even global head of creative services, is more than just a bean counter. CJ Waldman, a creative with whom Nelson worked on numerous Sprite and Heineken jobs while at Lowe (he's now a director with Harvest, Santa Monica) points out the depth of the man's production skills: "He is a very buttoned-up guy and has a tough reputation with production companies; he takes his job very seriously and is committed to trying to save the money and make each production good.

"My fondest memory of Bob Nelson was having him in the Heineken 'Woodstock' spot, in a crowd scene in a wig and leather vest. Not only is he a great producer, he's willing to dress up in pigtails if necessary."

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