The Commercials of Errol Morris

So everybody knows Errol Morris, right? The guy who directed A Thin Blue Line? Who won a 2004 Best Documentary Oscar for The Fog of War and whose most recent film is Standard Operating Procedure (2008)?

What is lesser known about this ground-breaking documentary director is that he is a prolific creator of ads for everything from Adidas to Volkswagon. These ads are for both intellectual / savvy faves (PBS and MoveOn.org) as well as very very corporate clients (Nike and Citibank). Many of these ads can be seen on a gallery on his site.

There are well over 200 ads up on the site including about 50 for Citibank and no less than 80 for Miller High Life.

Of course the two ad campaigns that he may be best known for are the Apple “Switch” campaign and the 2004 MoveOn.org political ads—a fascinating New Yorker article covers these ads and the history of presidential tv advertising–where ordinary citizens talked about switching from Bush to John Kerry.

Examples below show a couple of Apple Switch-ers of note…

Unfortunately ads on Morris’ site are not set up as embedable, so there are some ads I can’t find elsewhere, and you’ll just have to click through to see the creepy Cisco VPN commercial with an anonymous taxidermy collector, or the cartwheeling rooftop wedding party drunk on Southern Comfort (or the weird Soco ad in a Bomb Shelter (or the senior citizen dance party (or the strip poker one))) (“Southern Comfort: between friends” is the tagline but why not just say “booze breaks the ice”?), or the Adidas ad about a guy eating a lot.

Here are a few more great Miller High Life (the Champagne of Beers) ads that I couldn’t resist sharing…