In this interview segment, host Tyler Wagner asks B. Jeffrey Madoff about his most enjoyable project and his most commercially successful work. Madoff emphasizes that the most fun projects are those where the entire team enjoys the process, highlighting collaborations with high-profile clients like Victoria's Secret and Ralph Lauren. He notes that fun stems from good people and smooth execution rather than just the idea itself. When discussing success, he distinguishes between sales-driven success and cultural impact, indicating that the most successful commercial should be measured by its sales performance, prompting Wagner to focus on that metric.
2 questions. So what was the most fun project you worked on? Could be commercial or any other creative pursuit. And then what was the most, like, successful commercial, um, that you had?
In terms of the most fun, honestly, the one I'm doing at the time, you know, because I believe if you take on a job— and doing a commercial is a job, or doing a video is a job— you go all in on it. So you try to make it as best you can. I don't know how to sort of make something less. And fortunately shot all over the world and worked with some really good clients where I had established trust, like Victoria's Secret or like Ralph Lauren, where I got to do things, you know, and that was fun. And the fun is not just in the execution of the job, it's the people you're with. You can have a fun idea, but every day is miserable because of the people involved in it or the person who's running it or whatever. So I think the job that's the most fun is the one that gets done well, where everyone has a good time doing it. And that to me what makes it fun. It's the people that make it fun, because, you know, you can have the coolest idea in the world which can be hell to execute. Uh, and similarly, in terms of the most successful, I guess you have to ask the question, do you mean the most successful because it generated sales? Is it the most successful because people talked about it and it got seen everywhere?
Right, the sales one. I'm curious on that.
Uh, well, I don't know for positive, but I think that one of the things I did, again, for Victoria's Secret is we did this they wanted to do a gift with purchase. And the interesting thing about the football one was we weren't selling anything. It was strictly imagery. Where we did this thing with umbrellas, they said to me, we want to do a gift with purchase and we want to do a commercial around it. We haven't done that. So can you come up with something? I said, what's the gift? And they said, it's an umbrella. And I said, okay, yeah, I can come up with something. And they said, what? I said, well, give me a few minutes. I don't know yet. Well, this goes back to what we're talking about in terms of influences and things that create the dots in your brain. I had seen Hamilton the week before and loved the— how it was choreographed and all of that. And I had watched a Busby Berkeley movie. Busby Berkeley was, uh, an incredible filmmaker with MGM Studios in the '30s and '40s. He did these crazy kaleidoscopic overhead shots of like 50 women and, you know, their arms and their legs and what they were wearing would look like you were looking through a kaleidoscope. I mean, they were really cool. So I knew I couldn't do something quite like that, but on a much smaller scale, umbrellas are cool looking, so I can use the umbrella as a prop. I like the idea of using the sound. What do you think of when you think of rain, of an umbrella? You think of rain, you think of thunder, lightning. So that gives me an image for the lighting. See some lightning flashes, you hear the sound of the rain and the thunder and the umbrella had a wooden tip. And so I said to the musician I was working with, I want you to make all of the sounds from the practice. In other words, things that are actually happening. So we'll record the umbrella tapping, and that's going to be the percussive track. And then the umbrella had a powerful spring, so when it opened, it made this popping sound. And so it was really a cool percussive track with the rain and all that. I had a great deal of fun doing it. I worked with the associate choreographer from Hamilton. She was fabulous to work with, really nice woman and very talented. And we did this piece that was hugely successful. And the video got a lot of views. And I did a number of videos for Victoria's Secret that before videos routinely got millions and millions of views, we were getting millions and millions of views. And so that also drove sales because they— targeted it in specific markets so they could track the sales. So I guess that's the one that led to a lot of sales.
