When young boys watch a sporting event on television, they often fantasize about growing up to become a star athlete.
John Hall had other dreams. Hall, the new director of marketing for Vancouver Film School (VFS), would focus on the clever hooks of the beer commercials and the FedEx ads during the game. While kids and teens of the 1970s dreamt of hitting home runs like Reggie Jackson, young Hall imagined coming up with ads like the Miller Lite spots with journeyman ex-player Marv Throneberry.
Born in Toronto, Hall grew up in an entertainment environment. His father, Ian Hall, was an executive with Baton Broadcasting, the radio and television company that would become CTV Inc.
“Television and entertainment were all around me. I was enamoured by it, enamoured by the popular-culture aspect of it,” said Hall, 52, from the boardroom of VFS’ Hastings Street building. “I liked the persuasive aspect of it. I liked being able to connect with somebody in a 30-second commercial, to grab someone’s attention and allow you to influence a purchase decision.”
Those beer ads, Hall said, “didn’t make me want to drink beer; it made me want to get into advertising.”
Hall’s family moved to Vancouver when he was 13. He attended Point Grey Secondary School, then the University of British Columbia. Upon graduation in 1985, he couldn’t find work here, so he moved back to Toronto and found a job as account co-ordinator for Foster Advertising, whose clients included GM Canada, then one of the largest advertisers in the country.
He moved to Young & Rubicam, which transferred him briefly to Vancouver. When they wanted him back in Ontario, Hall decided to leave the company and stay on the West Coast, where his family lived. He joined the Vancouver office of Cossette Inc., starting a 16-year affiliation during which he worked his way up from group account director to general manager. After leaving Cossette’s spinoff company, Dare, in 2013, he went to MacLaren McCann, then joined Traction the following year before taking the VFS job three months ago.
Though still in marketing, Hall has left the ad-agency world, which, like the industries it serves, has been fractured by digital and social media.
“Advertising unto itself is intermediary, not unlike the music industry or the newspaper industry,” Hall said. “It’s one of those things where you’re in the middle, and you’re trying to provide a service. But there’s [now] the ability to provide a direct-to-customer relationship that doesn’t necessarily have to rely on an ad agency any more.
“Advertising in the broadest sense was always this interruption of somebody’s daily life, and now we have so many channels through which we can avoid that interruption. As a communicator, as an advertiser, it’s incumbent upon you to present information that people find helpful, useful, informative, and you need to do it in a way that is entertaining or alluring in some way.”
Hall heard about the job opening at Vancouver Film School from a colleague and, having always been impressed with the quality of work done at the school, and its reputation in the entertainment field, jumped at the opportunity.
“VFS is an unrecognized driver of the whole creative economy of Vancouver,” Hall said. “They’ve put so many people into the entertainment industry, it’s phenomenal.
“When you look at the learning model the school employs, from the day students arrive they’re in production. It simulates real-world production scenarios.”
Hall points out that so many of Vancouver’s entertainment trades – film and television production, animation, gaming, visual effects and programming – are all taught at the school.
Education is a competitive market, and Hall hopes to use what he’s learned from his years in advertising to make VFS stand out from the pack.
“Trying to attract students to come here will always be hard, and [though] we have a superior product in terms of the education they receive, we still have to grab their attention and make them understand why they should come here.”
As he saw in advertising, there are many different platforms available to get the word out. But regardless of which platform is used, the primary consideration is to “understand what people’s needs are, and make sure you have the right information for them,” he said.
“Whether they’re reading a blog or [looking at] a friend’s Instagram post, you must fill in the necessary blanks for them to understand what the brand is about.”
Social media is undergoing major changes, and marketers like Hall have to be on top of them. For instance, potential future students now in their teens primarily use an instant messaging app.
“The role of mobile [devices] is the underpinning of everything,” Hall said.
Whenever he takes on a new job, Hall gets at the big picture by working small.
“Whether you’re a corporation or an individual, there’s a place where you are and a place where you want to be, and that journey may be overwhelming,” Hall said. “What you need to do is break that journey down into bite-size pieces.”
Alvin Wasserman, president of Wasserman + Partners Advertising, expects Hall to make a difference at VFS.
“John is respected in the ad community,” Wasserman said in an email. “He worked especially effectively with government [Tourism BC] and larger brands. He comes across as down-home, a very good listener.”
Hall, who will get married in August, likes to spend time away at his place on Piers Island, one of the Southern Gulf Islands. When in town, he likes to spend his leisure time playing hockey, and one guesses that these days when he’s at the rink, he’s thinking more about on-ice heroics than about the ads they could show on water breaks. •
