Brandcenter duo relish their sprint to a Super Bowl minute

By Leila Ugincius

Alex Ward and Boyan Zlatarski were out of grad school for all of five months when the opportunity of a lifetime practically fell into their laps: Develop a Super Bowl ad pitch for a major company. 

As graduates of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter, home to acclaimed master’s programs in advertising, design and brand strategy, Ward and Zlatarski knew their odds of eventually working on a Super Bowl ad were good. Each year, the work of roughly two dozen alumni of the prestigious graduate school airs during professional football’s big game this past Sunday. (This year, 32 alumni had work shown during Super Bowl LX.)

But Ward and Zlatarski didn’t expect it to happen so soon. The pair of artistic directors received their degrees in May and have only been employed full time at Mother LA since August. And while others may have worked on ads fresh out of school, this duo’s role for their new spot, and the incredibly quick turnaround time they had to execute it, might be unprecedented.

“It was really out of the blue,” Ward said. “We were working on a lot of other, fast-paced work, and this opportunity came up from within our company. Our chief technology officer dropped it into the [employee] chat and was like, ‘Mother LA is leading this pitch for this potential Super Bowl project,’ but it was now open to everyone in the entire global agency.”

This was October, less than four months before the ad – “Reflections,” for Oakley | Meta’s performance AI glasses – would air.

Employees from around the world were asked to develop ideas and drop them into a group presentation.

They had 24 hours.

“We knew it was a Super Bowl opportunity. We never had the opportunity to pitch into something like that,” Ward said. “And even though we were really busy with other projects, we were like, we have to do this. We have to block out some time.

“It was like 11 p.m. that night, and we had been working on this other stuff. And it was like, OK, let’s just take some time. Let’s switch over to this because it’s too cool of an opportunity not to do.”

Ward and Zlatarski sat down for a few hours in the dark, churning out ideas, and ended up dropping three into the company’s communal presentation.

“It was a surreal experience to see all the different minds just dropping creativity into one place from around the world,” Ward said.

From there, they went through several rounds of the company whittling down the ideas. “One or two of [ours] just sort of stuck around and stuck around and stuck around through all of the scrutiny,” Ward said. (Dinma Onyekwere, a 2021 Brandcenter graduate in creative brand management, also worked on the project.)

The winning idea digs into the spirit of athleticism in a way that both pushes viewers to be elite but also connects them to the everyday athlete. The two 30-second spots features notables such as NFL veteran Marshawn Lynch and skateboarder Sky Brown.

But this is not how pitches usually work. Like, at all, Zlatarski said.

“We were just in the middle of a regular pitch, where it’s like you work under layers of brilliant creative minds and you all communally create and build these many ideas that you send and present to the client,” Zlatarski said. “This was not like that. This is everybody from the chief creative officer of Berlin to some of the really heavy-hitting creative talent in London. Everybody is putting hundreds of slides for that opportunity to create a Super Bowl ad.”

Ward and Zlatarski attribute their winning idea to something that Brandcenter professors harp about: simplicity.

“We created such a simple visual tool to tell the story of what these glasses are capable of and what they see“ these athletes do, Zlatarski said. “The client and our CEO said that we might have unlocked the whole visual storytelling and branding of this product from now on. So it’s interesting to see how a simple idea can grow. The scope of a project can grow into the identity of the product if it just is hard-working enough.”