Teaching with McConaughey: Reflections from an Ad Professor

With more than 50 films, a best actor Oscar, and a long list of acclaimed films to his credit, Matthew McConaughey is one of the most accomplished actors of his generation. 

Less appreciated is his wildly successful career in advertising. All told, McConaughey’s done more than 100 ads, including major campaigns for Lincoln Motor Company, Uber Eats, Wild Turkey and Salesforce. 

If you were an AdPR school looking to offer a class on how TV ads are filmed and produced, it would be hard to imagine a more qualified person. Lucky us, because that’s exactly who’s been teaching such a class for going on five years. 

Since 2021, the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations has been offering Advertising from Script-to-Screen, led by the teaching team of McConaughey, Scott Rice (from RTF), and Laura Bright, associate professor of advertising and public relations. 

Based on the success of Film from Script-to-Screen, an RTF course McConaughey and Rice had been co-teaching since 2016, the advertising version foregrounds Bright’s expertise in advertising research. 

“My knowledge of consumer behavior and media complements their creative perspectives,” Bright says. That was the missing key to help students understand “what happens before and after an ad gets made.” 

“Besides being able to teach with Matthew,” Bright says the standout quality of the course – for students and instructors alike – is the synergy of elements, from the team of instructors to the interdisciplinary mix of students. 

The class takes 20 advertising students and 20 film students in their senior years. They get a combination of classroom instruction from Bright, Rice and McConaughey, and from special guests like the creative team at Salesforce, McConaughey’s longtime publicist, and specialists from local and national advertising and commercial production agencies. 

Bright, who is also director of the Nelson Center for Brand and Demand Analytics in the Moody College, says each co-teacher gets time at the head of the classroom throughout the semester. Both Bright and Rice – who also runs Two Shot West, a commercial film production company in Austin -- are there every day to learn from each other and the unique make-up of students. 

A good part of the magic, Bright insists, is due to “the cross-pollination of having an equal number of film students and AdPR students in the classroom.” 

A consistent feature of course evaluations, in fact, is the high volume of ad students expressing how blown away they are to learn about everything that goes into a commercial film shoot, and for film students, how blown away they are by the depth and detail of researching, planning and measuring campaigns.

Of course, there are other perks. 

“They all get a chance to meet Matthew, and most students are happy to get up and introduce themselves and ask him questions – a few are a little bit shy sometimes,” Bright says.

The team’s special relationship with Salesforce gives students access to scripts and creative documents, plus they get invited to attend basically every commercial shoot in the Austin area, including the campaign starring McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, who also appeared for Q&A in the classroom.  

“Having both Matthew and Woody together was a lot of fun,” Bright recalls. “Funny and unexpected things can happen on set."

Like on the set for the Salesforce campaign that lampooned AI mix-ups by portraying a distressed McConaughey getting an unexpected pelvic exam.

According to Bright, “Matthew accidentally broke the stirrup on the exam table, and it took a bit of time for a tech to fix it.” This gave students an opportunity to ask questions of the actors, and also witness the “Salesforce creative team throwing lines” at the actors to see what might stick.

Just as memorable, she laughs, was “this super weird medical staging facility in south Austin,” where it was shot, and she wishes she “didn’t know existed.”

Speaking of settings, that Salesforce ad set in London’s Heathrow Airport? It was actually shot in Dripping Springs, Texas, using a giant green screen in a production studio.

She says these experiential learning opportunities illustrate how different the behind-the-scenes experience can be from the finished product, stuff you just can’t get from a textbook.

Along those lines, “from the PR perspective, we’ve also been able to get Matthew’s publicist and agent Nicole [Perez-Kruger] to come in and talk to the class about what it takes to manage someone like Mathew and manage his PR.” 

For Perez-Kruger, students were invited to do their own “brand audits to get a glimpse of how they’re perceiving Matthew” in different roles and campaigns. 

Bright says she’s excited for another year of Advertising from Script-to-Screen and what she can learn from the special process and amazing people. 

“It’s been super cool to be a part of and I’ve learned so much. I can’t believe we’re going on five years.”