How do you promote a company that creates systems that design microchips? And make it interesting? If you’re San Francisco agency BigMouth Advertising, you do it by shooting your commercial, "Shibuya," in Tokyo, using a Japanese-language pop tune, a lifestyle montage of Japanese pedestrians on the street, and arty-looking bright lights that glimmer from each piece of technology your client helped to create: a cell phone held by a young woman, stereo headphones worn by a young man, a passerby’s portable computer. Then, as the haunting melody fades out, you superimpose a title explaining the concept: "We make the systems used to produce virtually every microchip in the world. Information for everyone."
The :60, directed by Pucho Mentasti of Los Angeles-based Palomar Pictures, is one of three in the Applied Materials "Ubiquity" campaign—the other two spots, also helmed by Mentasti, are "Turbo" and "Gavea." The Applied Materials campaign is a major one for seven-year-old BigMouth. Until now, the relatively young agency has primarily worked in print and radio, with few television ads. Nor had Applied Materials ever been involved in a TV campaign before. In addition, the ads themselves are chancy since all three take place in foreign locales, with a two featuring the characters speaking in untranslated foreign languages. So the new commercials were a big risk for everyone.
But the boutique agency is used to taking chances. BigMouth was started when former freelance creatives Mike Yoffie and Todd Spina, who are co-partners/creative directors, turned their then-fledgling freelance operation into a full-service agency. The pair met in San Francisco, in 1992. Yoffie had previously worked in public relations, while Spina had his own art direction and design business, and frequently collaborated with agencies, as well as handling client-direct projects. Yoffie and Spina, who are both natives of San Rafael, Calif., found they had similar creative ideas but were frequently stymied by what they saw as agency reluctance to go with the unusual.
"We founded the identity BigMouth [in ’94] because we felt we weren’t close enough to the client," Yoffie explains, noting that BigMouth formally became an agency in ’99. "We try to sell pretty hard solutions—things that are hard to sell. If you do not have direct access to clients, forget about it. You are caught up in other people’s lack of will."
They began promoting their radio and print work—for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Aristotle, and ConsumerReview, among others—as "bullshit-free advertising." Says Yoffie: "We offer simple and streamlined solutions. The ads for Applied reflect our creative philosophy. Some say we’re edgy, but I like to think we have an honest truth some people can relate to. It just looks edgy because a lot of advertising is contrived."
Different Solutions
The "Ubiquity" campaign reflects the BigMouth approach. "Last year Applied Materials did ten billion dollars in sales," Yoffie notes. "They’re a huge company, but they are under the [public awareness] radar. They felt they should be up there with IBM, Microsoft, and other core information companies. We needed to create awareness for them."
The commercials were all conceived as "slices of life. Very focused and very simple," states Yoffie. "The goal was to add an emotional component to the product. We wanted the viewer to see it as a cool company."
Reflecting its "not-take-it-safe" approach, the agency called on Mentasti, a director well known in South America, who had not yet done a U.S. spot, and with whom the shop had never worked before. "He had never produced a campaign outside Argentina," Yoffie notes. "But Pucho made the short list because of his sensibility. [His reel] was beautiful film. There was something enticingly different and exotic in his approach. Given that it was a global campaign, we wanted a different feel."
The exotic touch was enhanced in "Shibuya" by the Japanese-language music track, which the creatives found by accident. While shooting in Tokyo, they heard a local pop tune—"Innocence," performed by Japanese singer Chihiro Onitsuka; the track appears on her debut album, Insomnia—and ended up using it because, explains Yoffie, "It helped capture the global slice-of-life feeling."
The shoot itself was a major challenge, with the spot lensed in Shibuya, one of the most crowded business districts of Tokyo. "We felt that this was not a totally controlled setting, which is what makes it dramatic," Yoffie observes. "As you watch these swarms of people, the humanity in the place is overwhelming. We went to the Mecca of the telecommunications world."
The other two spots are also slices of life: "Turbo" is a point-of-view sequence of a car racing through the hills, to a pulsating pop tune. The little white lights again show how much Applied Materials’ microchips are used in various components of the car. "Gavea" depicts a group of kids going to hang out at someone’s house after school. As they chat and lounge around, they are shown using various electronic gadgets, while the soundtrack plays a song called "Dreams." Once again, the ethereal white lights highlight just how ubiquitous the chips are.
Shooting in foreign locales—"Gavea" was lensed in Marbella, Spain, and "Turbo" in Grazalema, Spain—was central to the concept behind the campaign: that Applied Materials is a global company with global impact. "It is the definition of ubiquity," Yoffie opines. "In a sense, these spots are taking archetypal moments and treating them in a dramatic, cinematic way, and then overlaying the story about microchips."
For the future, the shop plans to continue its expansion into television. Two years ago, BigMouth added Mark Whitty, partner/president, to handle more of the business end of the shop, freeing up Yoffie and Spina to continue what they feel they do best. "We are trying to expand the reach of ads. The idea has to be bigger than the client and have broader interest," states Yoffie. "We are really kind of outsiders to the ad business, trying to use advertising to create credibility, knowing that this is really one of the least credible forms of communication. We want to create bits of cinema, to avoid the cliché. We want to create ads that don’t feel like ads."
