The anatomy of MTV's on-air promo department - a ground-breaking creative shop and production company rolled into one.

The One Show at Alice Tully Hall in New York this year was a painfully long exercise. Introducing the ad industry's latest best work, guest emcee Nick Clooney, the silver-haired host of cable's American Movie Classics, rambled on about forgotten (and often forgettable) ads of the past, while also reminding viewers again and again that he was the brother of Rosemary and father of George. It was hard to tell if Clooney's act was serious or some kind of pokerface put-on, like the deadpan Cliff Freeman spots that dominated the event's short list.

During that long journey into night, there were occasional winning moments that roused the restive audience; perhaps the most memorable of these - and the one that nearly brought the house down - was the sight of Ben Stiller sucking on a baby bottle containing Madonna's breast milk in an on-air promo for MTV's Video Music Awards.

Tom Kuntz and Mike Maguire, a creative team from MTV's on-air promotions department, went up to the stage and received a Gold Pencil in the consumer television category for the :30 Stiller spot and two others in the campaign. The boys repeated their trip to spirit away a Bronze Pencil in the same category for an MTV Movie Awards campaign in which actor Samuel L. Jackson entertains impure thoughts about a hot-dog vendor, then does a turn as a porn star and finally, spews profanities on a movie studio lot.

And so, the One Show made history that night and few seemed to notice. The event, which recognizes excellence in advertising and is considered to be one of the most important of many ad award ceremonies, bestowed gold upon the MTV on-air promo department for the very first time.

The honor is a benchmark for the hybrid creative and production shop. Although it has won other advertising industry awards in its 18-year history, the One Show honor is, arguably, the promo division's most prestigious industry kudo. In addition, the award opened a window on an organization that otherwise has been shut pretty tight. Indeed, the very credits for the winning MTV work shone a ray of light on some of the anonymous players who toil behind the scenes in the department, and read closely, they also indicate the different creative cultures at work there.

Creative Differences

Tim Abshire, who recently left on-air promos and signed with bicoastal Shelter Films, is credited as a co-director on the Stiller campaign and Lisa Rubisch, who also left the fold recently and is now represented by bicoastal Bob Industries, directed the Samuel Jackson series. Abshire and Rubisch are MTV graduates. They both joined the promo department fresh out of college in '92, starting as interns and working their way up to directors in a department that has often been called a masters program in broadcast advertising. Their immediate superior, Christina Norman, a former freelance producer on the production side, arrived in '91 and worked her way up from production manager, to director of on-air promotions.

"It's better than any film school," says Brian Carmody, the West Coast rep for bicoastal/international Satellite, which has recruited MTV promo alumni Pam Thomas, Caitlin Felton and Brian Beletic for spots and clips. "They let people do their own thing and write their own stuff. It's awesome from a creative standpoint." Kuntz and Maguire are credited as the writers of the Samuel L. Jackson spots and as the co-directors, along with Abshire, of the Ben Stiller campaign. (They directed the Madonna spot; Abshire directed the other two, which feature the Wu Tang Clan). They are also credited as writers on the Stiller spots along with Alan Broce, senior VP/marketing at MTV. Kuntz and Maguire are former creatives from Kirshenbaum Bond & Partners, New York, and Broce, who hired the team, is a former account executive who worked at Lintas New York (now Ammirati Purls Lintas) and J. Walter Thompson USA. Just prior to coming to MTV, Broce was the director of advertising and marketing at ESPN. These ad vets (Broce has been at MTV for two years, the others for less than one) represent, according to some observers, a different direction for the department, one in which advertising and marketing principles are displacing the artistic improvisational style of the past. The recent hiring of Jim Hosking, a copywriter from the London ad agency Mother, seems to reinforce this view.

Some on-air alumni feel that this new influx of agency creatives, including Broce, represents a professionalization of the department that goes against the original spirit and unofficial creative charter of the division. "We basically became more ratings oriented and cared more about the masses," alleges an on-air alumnus who requested anonymity. "Whereas before, we didn't care and we just did what was cool. People followed us. And now it seems like, we're following what is cool or hip or trendy in advertising, which makes us followers."

Broce, on the other hand, says that his department is becoming more eclectic. "Yes, I want to attract people from agencies," he says. "And from television, and magazine writers and artists. I'm always on the lookout for friends of mine in the ad business, of course, but I also keep an eye out for people from television shows that have been canceled. We try them too. It's important to have a solid staff."

To Air Is Human

On-air promos started operations in '81, when MTV first went on the air. (MTV or music television is now part of Viacom-owned MTV Networks, which owns and operates four additional cable TV services - M2, VH1, Nickelodeon/Nick at Nite and Nick at Nite's TV Land.). The department was originally headed by a former Conde Nast magazine writer who was "trying to get to Rolling Stone, that was my dream" and instead landed at MTV during its first year. Her name is Judy McGrath and she is now president of MTV.

"We were pioneering a new idea and it was anti-TV identity type stuff," says McGrath. "It wasn't the static eyeball like CBS. Ours was a different kind of network."

In the first few years, the on-air promotions unit created slapdash tune-ins, including bumpers and station IDs largely with stock footage - including the famous man landing on the moon - cut quickly in time to music tracks.

"We were just re-editing pieces of videos," says McGrath. "And re-editing stock footage and writing copy. We always did the audio tracks first. I've never seen that in another network. We'd go into an audio room and mix some really great music and put some images on it. And I was always fighting for the stuff to be more writerly."

The department's first live-action promo, according to McGrath, was created for a Video Music Awards show in the mid-'80s. "It was like some guy dressed in a moon man suit, getting on a subway," McGrath recalls. "It was pretty awful." The spot, however crude, signaled a turning point in the department, one in which the unit moved away from an emphasis on editors and towards a focus on directors. During the late '80s, the department began employing people who wanted to direct films, including Mark Pellington, now represented by Crossroads Films, bicoastal and Chicago, Ted Demme, currently repped by CFM, New York, and Pam Thomas, now with bicoastal/international Satellite.

"We were always a farm team for talent," says McGrath. "People always moved through here. Sometimes faster than you would like. Nonetheless, the great thing about it was that we were always attracting different people. To this day, in my mind, the department remains the identifier of the network, the blood and guts part. A lot of the wars are waged there."

Abby's Road

A Saturday Night Live employee who created film parodies for the show was recruited in '86 as the new director of on-air promotions after McGrath moved up to become co-president of MTV. His name is Abby Terkuhle and he is best known for having developed within the on-air unit a pair of obscure and obscene cartoon characters drawn by a Texan named Mike Judge. Under Terkuhle's tutelage, Beavis and Butt-head grew from minor players to superstars with their very own program. Terkuhle also is known for having nurtured many young promo directors who went on to direct - as MTV grads refer to it - in "the real world." These would be Abshire, Beletic, Felton, Rubisch, Trez Bayer of Air Force One, New York, Kenan Moran, now with New York-based Compass Films, and Lloyd Stein, who works through bicoastal Epoch Films, to name a few. On the average, these directors matriculated from the department after five to seven years, very much like a college and graduate school course of study. Many of them entered as interns and left as highly sought-after directors.

"I felt very lucky," says Moran about his six years in the unit. "Where else was somebody going to pay me to succeed and fail and give me so much freedom?"