Last year’s Oscar-nominated film “The Brutalist” was epic in every way, clocking in at over three hours with an intermission; shot in the widescreen VistaVision format; spanning decades in a story of a character who survived the Holocaust, immigrated to America and navigated the battle between art and commerce.

With “The Brutalist,” director Brady Corbet proved he could go big. With “The Contextualist,” a series of ads for Bloomberg Media and Corbet’s first brand commercial work, the Golden Globe and BAFTA winner shows that he can bring a little big-screen magic to advertising.

Part of Bloomberg’s “Context Changes Everything” platform, “The Contextualist” is comprised of three 30-second spots that dissect and reimagine idioms to highlight how the media company provides insight and context within its journalism. 

“With the volume and speed of information in every news cycle, it’s more important than ever to connect the dots and dig deeper,” Corbet said in a statement.

In ads full of European elegance and natural beauty, a high-class spokesperson elucidates how phrases like “what’s that got to do with the price of tea in China,” “a rising tide lifts all boats” and “a bird in hand is worth two in the bush” can apply to concepts like tariffs, supply chains and high-speed trains. Overhead shots provide additional context for plazas and seaside locales.

The campaign will span contextual connected TV placements in the U.S., UK and Singapore, digital out-of-home in major cities including New York and Boston and audio platforms Amazon and Spotify, as well as connect to the brand’s content marketing across social platforms including Meta and Reddit. 

The campaign was developed in collaboration with Wieden+Kennedy New York, the agency that also helped create the overarching brand platform. While there wasn’t a “light bulb moment” where the idiom construct became clear, bringing a strong voice and presence to the campaign was a major goal, said Will Binder, creative director at Wieden+Kennedy.

“I thought it would be interesting to take cliché things that we take for granted, deconstruct them and put new spins on [them], much in the way that the Bloomberg platform is doing,” Binder said. “They're taking things that people think they know about… and they're putting these global nuances and twists on them that no other media company or news information company is doing.”

A new chapter

Bloomberg launched the “Context Changes Everything” brand platform in September 2023, and “The Contextualist” is the fifth chapter of the effort. With each chapter, the company looks to add more dimension and substance to the marketing push.

“We wanted to focus on our global coverage, because it's something that we've seen in our consumer research that our readers and our audience really finds to be important for them, and it's something that we know is particularly distinctive of our coverage,” said Colm Murphy, global head of consumer brand marketing for Bloomberg Media.

Once landing on the idiom concept, Wieden+Kennedy wrote many more scripts than the three that were filmed, keying in on sayings that resonate in the business world in which Bloomberg operates. As executed, the concepts land at the meeting point between audience and journalism.

“It’s a representation both of the curiosity that our audience has to not take things at face value, and the value that our journalism has, which is that you need to dig deeper and look behind what's obvious to reveal the true context of what's going on in the world,” Murphy said.

The agency began looking for the right production partners in the fall and linked with Corbet just as his latest film was building buzz on the way to the Oscars. His inexperience with commercial filmmaking was not seen as a negative but as a way to get a fresh spin on the campaign.

“To have someone who made one of the longest films... to have him take those talents and now have to think about that in 30 seconds, I thought it could deliver really interesting, provocative work,” Binder said.

While Corbet and his team quickly became recognizable Hollywood names, the team decided to buck the current trend in brand spokespeople and not tap a well-known celebrity that could bring their own baggage — and different context — to the campaign. All together, the campaign was a team effort between agency, brand, Corbet and Magna Studios, Binder said.

“Everyone was very generous with their time and very open to collaboration,” he continued. “It wasn't an auteur that was off in his own little room and you would slip him thoughts underneath the door. Everyone was there to bring this to life. That's really rare.”