On a mission to entertain

Tom Carty has been responsible for some of advertising's best-loved images. His latest brief is to put some fizz into a new campaign for Pepsi Max, he tells Ciar Byrne

You wouldn't recognise Tom Carty if you bumped into him on the street, but name some of the advertisements he has created - such as the Guinness surfer and the BBC promo featuring the man who leaps across rooftops to make it home in time for EastEnders - and they are instantly memorable.

On a sweltering summer's day in Soho, the heart of London's media land, Carty is hard at work editing the new advert for Pepsi Max. The cheeky Irish-born, London-bred director is heralding a change of tack for the Pepsi brand - away from the celebrity endorsement of David Beckham and Britney Spears, towards a more vibrant and youthful image.

The inspiration for the soft drink's new advertising campaign, which hits cinemas this week, is Japan's answer to the Royal Variety Performance, a popular annual television game show called Masquerade. Amateur performers train all year round, dreaming up bizarre acts combining martial-arts moves with wacky optical illusion.

Carty flew out to Japan and persuaded the talent behind Masquerade, masterminded by a Mr Kajihara, to use their brief holiday allowance to come to the UK to make the advert. The result, "Can Fu", features two teenage boys in an apartment fighting over a can of Pepsi Max - the drink's target market is 16- to 24-year-old men.

At first glance, their weird and wonderful movements - dancing on the back of a sofa like a spider, having their arms sliced off and punching hands through one another's bodies - appear to be the result of clever special effects. Closer inspection reveals the stunts are, in fact, the work of human puppeteers, dressed from head to toe in black.

Despite the crucial involvement of the Japanese, they are all but invisible in the final cut. "I'd have loved to have had the Japanese guys as the main characters, but Pepsi felt, because of their market, that they wanted the main people to be Caucasian. I thought they should have gone with Japanese people, to be honest," says Carty.

Honesty and advertising are two words rarely heard in the same sentence, but Carty proves an exception. He has no qualms about explaining what he feels has been wrong with Pepsi's advertising strategy to date. "I think that how they think people react to Pepsi and what the real world thinks about Pepsi are two very different things. All the young people I know, they don't buy those Pepsi ads with Beckham and all those celebrities in. People are very hip to advertising and they're smart to what advertisers do. You've got to keep one step ahead. Something like this, because it's very unique and original, kids will love."

He is even more sceptical about Nike, for whom he directed the recent Euro 2004 ad in which Thierry Henry plays an imaginary football match against Manchester United in his own home. Carty feels that Nike undermined his artistic integrity by adding "crash-bang-wallop" gimmicks, including Henry smashing through a glass window and knocking a picture of Sir Alex Ferguson off the wall, while taking out clever shots such as the star heading a football into a dumb waiter. "After three days of me editing that Nike ad, they took it off me, because the client had issues about it. They completely changed it. The original treatment was completely different. It was much more subtle... It's now become a Nike advert, but I think it's lost its soul."

He identifies a wider malaise in creativity, which he believes is being stifled by the corporate world. "I think at the moment there's a bit of a downer on creativity generally. People who hold the money are making it very difficult for creative people to do things. In film, in music, there's a real hold on creativity. Part of it is probably the way the world is; people are in fear."

Carty moved into directing in 2001, after a successful 15-year career as one half of an award-winning creative team. Together with his partner, Walter Campbell, he created the famous Guinness commercial, directed by Jonathan Glazer, that Channel 4 viewers recently voted the best advert of all time.

The idea originated from a simple poster and when Guinness asked whether it could be turned into a television campaign, Carty and Campbell were "really scared" at first. "We thought, 'Shit, we're going to end up with an Old Spice commercial here'." But Guinness is another client that disappointed Carty by switching to a new advertising strategy after he, Campbell and Glazer had made just four commercials for them. "They changed the strategy very quickly. We did three, and then Walter did another one with Jonathan. I think that 'Good things come to those who wait' could have gone on for ever."

As a child, Carty, 39, was fascinated by commercials and slogans - he thinks it's a "real shame" that Kit-Kat has abandoned "Have a break, have a Kit-Kat", which he considers one of the "great British slogans".

At the age of 16, he approached Dorland, an advertising agency near where he was living in London at the time, and asked for a job. He was told either he could go to college and take a copy-writing course, or start out in the mailroom. He chose the latter option and within four years had worked his way up to become a creative.

At Dorland, he teamed up with Campbell, and together they planned their escape to a more glamorous agency, secretly working on a portfolio in snatched moments, and hiding it under the carpet on an empty floor of the building. They eventually moved to TBWA and from there to BBDO London, before moving over to Abbott Mead Vickers when the two companies merged.

In just three years as a director, Carty has already built up an impressive film reel - the BBC1 "Rush Hour" promotion; an advert for The Economist based on the fact that Nelson Mandela and his fellow prisoners on Robben Island tricked their guards into letting them subscribe to the journal; and a film made in collaboration with Yoko Ono to mark the anniversary of the September 11 atrocities.

But there is a price to pay for a successful career. An avid Manchester United supporter - "I'm Irish," he explains - so much of his time is taken up with work that he was forced to relinquish his beloved season ticket last year.

Carty's next ambition is to move into film, but his philosophy on advertising remains quite simple. "The most important thing is entertaining people, because people don't turn on the TV to watch commercials. I think we owe it to them to entertain them, at least to make them smile."