‍

Being busy is usually a good thing, especially when you are running your own company. But it’s kind of a bummer when you have the opportunity to meet a talent you have long admired, only to realize you just cannot fit it into your schedule.

That was the experience of Wavemaker Creative’s Ira Rosensweig when he was tapped to direct and produce this year’s Academy Awards promos for ABC, starring host Conan O’Brien. 

Like so much work that falls before a big event, production of the spots encountered some challenges along the way – among them the LA wildfires in January. But in the end, Wavemaker and ABC pulled it together to produce a fun and creative campaign starring O’Brien with a little help from O’Brien’s Team Coco.

Read the entire edited interview below to learn how the campaign came together, see the work and hear how Rosensweig has pivoted his directing and production business post pandemic.  

[Editor's note: AI was used to generate the above image's background.]

‍Spotlight: Hi Ira and welcome back. We last talked when Spotlight was Brief but now what you do and what I do have both changed somewhat.  Can you walk me through what Wavemaker Creative does and how you’ve changed its structure in the past couple of years post pandemic? 

 Ira Rosensweig: I started out as a director and a creative director for a lot of different agencies, production companies and networks over the years. Basically, there were a lot of times when I was brought into a project too late. An approach was settled on, a budget settled on, and then I was hired as director. I sometimes felt like there was a better way to use the budget.

I started Wavemaker to ensure best outcomes in the work that I direct. Half of the things I would do were through Wavemaker and the other half I would be hired as a freelance director. 

I do both promos and commercials and it’s very different between the two. In the commercial world, an agency puts out a brief, their producers go to reps and look for directors, they look at hundreds of directors’ reels, then they narrow them down, and hire a director and usually the production company comes along with them. With promos, it’s the opposite, where a production company is hired and then finds a director or has a roster of directors. 

I felt like the benefit I had with my own production company was that when I was approached about a job, I could basically draw on my years of experience as a director and say this is the best approach for this specific creative. I was coming into it saying ‘this is the way we can really stretch your budget and put as much as possible on the screen.’

I’ve been lucky enough to do really high-end commercials and I take the same ethos to promos. At the end of the day, it’s commerce, but I become incredibly invested and treat each spot like my own little personal art project.

Promos have really evolved, and I think they’re now on equal footing with commercials. With all the media clutter out there now, it’s even more important for the creative to capture people’s attention. 

With promos, at least my experience has been that I can take more ownership of my work. With commercials, often the creative is developed, then I’m brought in to direct it and then you hand the project off for post and you are done with it and you may see it when it’s finished. That can be difficult for me if the editor takes the cut in a different direction than what was intended. With promos, I feel like I can be more involved, and love the opportunity to work on a spot from script stage all the way through post. 

I started working with Wavemaker’s current EP Mel Loncich at the beginning of 2024. She had previously produced high-end commercials and promos, as well as documentaries. There was an instant click; we work really well together.  And while the company was initially created as a vehicle for my directing work, we now work with many different talented directors, and will always bring on a director uniquely suited for the creative.

Spotlight: A lot of Wavemaker’s work has a comedic bent. Is that intentional? 

Rosensweig:  I’ve always been drawn to pretty serious movies.  My first feature film, entitled Share?, which is a sci-fi thriller, was released at the end of 2023 in theaters and streaming platforms. But I’ve also always loved short-form comedy, whether commercials or SNL skits. Early on, I was producing/editing a job for Spike TV and I turned it into this live-action comedy thing. I immediately took to it and realized I had a knack for it. As you get more and more of one kind of thing on your reel, you tend to be hired for that kind of work. 

Spotlight: This week is the 97th annual Academy Awards and Wavemaker was privileged to do the campaign for this year’s ceremony, hosted by Conan O’Brien. Can you walk me through that process? How did ABC select you, what was the creative brief and how did you execute against that brief? 

Rosensweig: Wavemaker produced the entire 360 campaign – the promo shoot, key art, digital, social and electronic press kit (EPK).

I’ve been a huge fan of Conan O’Brien since he went on the air in the ‘90s. He’s one of three to five people I would want to work with or meet. ABC asked us to produce the job and I couldn’t tell you how excited I was. Not only would we be producing it, but I would be directing it too. 

But then the shoot got moved, and I was like ‘oh no,’ because I was committed to another job. I did everything I could to reschedule my other work but I couldn’t so we brought on Mike Bernstein to direct. He’s done some other Oscar campaigns for ABC, including the Top Gun one with Jimmy Kimmel.

Through the process I stayed hands-on but unfortunately I didn’t get to meet Conan. We shot on a Tuesday and I had to leave for my other shoot on Monday night. 

There were a ton of pivots in pre-production. The shoot we were initially prepping for was a simple black void set with a few Oscars behind Conan. 

But on Thursday afternoon of the prior week, we got additional creative that everyone really wanted to do in which Conan is married to an Oscar, and the spot charts the dissolution of their relationship. 

We immediately budgeted and storyboarded, and it required a huge set build, especially since we had only prepared to do the black void thing. 

We got the green light at 1 p.m. on Friday. We only had two hours before construction houses closed and we needed to build this big gold-gilded house set before the shoot on the following Tuesday. Mel was amazing, and our production designer, Dylan Hutchins, was amazing, and we somehow pulled it all together over the weekend. I’m used to a lot of big pivots in my career but this is the most ambitious turnaround that we’ve ever had, essentially pulling together a job that would have normally taken two weeks to prep in two days. 

Spotlight: How long did you have Conan for?

Rosensweig: We had Conan for about nine hours, which was a luxury. He was very into it and dedicated. 

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look of Conan backstage at the promo shoot: 

I once had to do two spots with [Kansas City Chiefs’ quarterback] Patrick Mahomes, and I only had him for 15 minutes. 

I also directed a spot for Night School with Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish and three NBA All-Stars where we had Hart and Haddish for two hours, but each All Star individually for only 15 minutes. So we had to do a full rehearsal with stand-ins with exact lighting and the crew rehearsed going from setup to setup to make sure we could get everything we needed in the time we had.

Spotlight: Why do you think these brands come to Wavemaker for this work? What do you consider Wavemaker’s unique selling proposition to be? 

Aside from my vast experience with creative, direction, and production, now that Mel is on board, she’s incredibly communicative and hands on and she’s ensuring a great client and talent experience. Because I’m the principal, we are best known for comedy and high-level celebrity work, but we have also produced spots centered around VFX, cars, kids, athletes, etc. – you know you are going to get a high-level polished project and a really great experience along the way.  And we have a knack for executing logistically or creatively challenging projects, often on a shortened timeline.‍

Spotlight: Can you tell me about some other recent campaigns you directed? 

The Amazon and Hyundai integration for Thursday Night Football, which launched Amazon Autos, was really fun. There are two spots –  one where Kansas City Chiefs Hall of Famer Tony Gonzalez is walking through a stadium tunnel and then the other, “Control Room,” which was a situation where I was welcomed into the scripting process and it was a real collaboration with the creative team. 

The conceit of the spot is that LA Rams legend Andrew Whitworth is locked into his phone, buying a Hyundai on Amazon, and unaware that the show producers are desperately trying to get him to leave the desk because the second half is about to start.  I thought that if we treated the situation like control room scenes in movies like Apollo 13 or Armageddon, overdramatizing it would make it more ridiculous and therefore funnier. We shot the green screen - ultimately placing them in a stadium - in the morning, roughly comped the shots at lunch, and then placed those comps into all the monitors for the control room shoot in the afternoon.  It was an intense shoot, but I love how it turned out – it’s definitely one of my favorites of the last couple years.

The Hallmark Plus work was really fun too. That was a situation where I got to edit the spots and see the post all the way through. Getting to work with that number of talent and figuring out how to integrate them was a good challenge. Some of the actors we shot in LA and some in Vancouver and we had to make it look like they were all together on the same set. 

 I also recently directed a brand campaign for Philo; a Yellowstone and Dish Network integration for Paramount Network; and a Criminal Minds and Spectrum integration for Paramount Plus, among other things. 

Spotlight: How do you feel about AI and the way it’s being used in commercial and promo work? 

Rosensweig: I think I panicked about AI a year before most other people. I was the guy in the room when we talked about AI that would be bumming everybody out. I remember I was at a conference and someone on stage from a network was talking about how amazing AI was, and how they wouldn’t need to hire production companies to do live action in 2 years. Seeing the panic on the faces of my colleagues, I realized I wasn’t alone anymore.

I think there will be some resistance from the public about generative AI creating movies and series, but I don’t think they’re going to cry about AI being used in commercials and promos.  I hope I’m wrong. But on the positive side, there are so many different ways to use AI as an incredibly efficient tool – translating dialogue with lip sync to different languages, separating married audio tracks, etc. – that I think are great. 

Spotlight: Besides your own work, what is the coolest promo, trailer or campaign or even just creative work that you’ve seen recently? 

The cold open of the 50 Years of SNL Music documentary, produced by Questlove and edited by John MacDonald, is unbelievable. The sound and picture editing involved in that was amazing. They blended songs that I never would have imagined would go together in any way. It was brilliant.