The image is grainy videotape of a mustachioed man sitting behind a news desk. Speaking in a foreign language, he is obviously a sportscaster of some sort. A screen behind him shows a man on a cliff preparing for a high dive, surrounded by a crowd of seated, turbaned onlookers. The diver leaps off, plunging 100 feet, head first—splat!—into the ground, demolishing himself in a cloud of dust. The crowd claps and Olympic-style scores appear on the screen below his remains. The image fades to black and words appear: "Sports from the only region you care about. Yours. 11 P.M. Regional Sports Report. FOX Sports Net."
The :30 "Turkey" is one of four for FOX Sports Net helmed by the directing collective Traktor of bicoastal/international Partizan, which garnered Cliff Freeman and Partners (CF&P), New York, the coveted Grand Prix at this year’s Cannes International Advertising Festival. The four darkly comic spots—"India," "Russia," "China" and "Turkey"—highlight the cable channel’s local/regional sports newscasts by offering "coverage" of such fictional sporting events as blindfold club combat in India, face-slapping in Russia (with slow-motion replays of the winner’s slap), and tree-catching in China (featuring a man being crushed to death by a huge tree).
The commercials (there is a fifth, "South Africa," which was not part of the Grand Prix package) are the brainchild of CF&P copywriter Dan Morales, and art directors Rossana Bardales and Taras Wayner. Morales and Bardales, a creative team, were paired with Wayner to create ads for the cable sports network. The trio began batting around ideas in November; by mid-January they had hit on their concept.
"There is a show called Regional Sports New York, and each [television] market has its own version. There’s one in Chicago, one in Milwaukee, etc.," relates Morales. "And we said, ‘What if you had a regional sports report from Zimbabwe or Siberia? From there, we thought about viewers sitting through sports reports about teams they didn’t care about, just so they could see their home teams. We thought it would be funny if you had third-world sporting events, with nothing said in English."
The campaign was approved almost instantly by Eric Silver, executive creative director at CF&P, and by Neal Tiles, executive VP of marketing for FOX Sports, who is said to believe that outrageous makes for stand-out-from-the-pack advertising. In fact, one of the first campaigns that Tiles approved for FOX Sports out of CF&P, promoting the network’s hockey coverage, was also an award-winner. That package of ads—"Billiards," "Bowling," "Golf," "Squash" and "Basketball"—was directed by Christopher Guest of bicoastal Moxie Pictures, and won a Gold Lion at Cannes, among other honors. "Eric and Neal constantly push us to be different," Morales says. "As a client, Neal is great. He lets us do stuff we never thought would be approved. He wants to make FOX ads as distinctive as possible."
Reality TV
Having viewers believe that they were watching actual sportscasts was a crucial part of the campaign, so the creatives tried to mimic reality as closely as possible. For example, in "Turkey" "it’s supposed to look like the cliff divers in Acapulco, and then you realize there’s no water," Morales says. "Then you have the scores run along the bottom. It’s based halfway in reality. It all has to look very familiar in format. That’s why the commercials work—there’s nothing in English, but they’re easy to follow."
According to Morales, the collective Traktor was the team’s first and only choice as director. "All along, we knew this would be perfect for them, for their sensibility, and their track record of placing odd characters in absurd situations," he explains. "They nail it every time. We sent the script over to them and heard back in twenty minutes. They agreed."
South Africa was chosen as the location for the campaign’s shoot for a number of reasons. The budget was "incredibly small," the dollar was strong abroad, the country had people of all the nationalities required, and Traktor was very familiar with cast, crew and locations there. "We needed talent from Russia, China, Turkey, India and South Africa, and the country had a lot of ethnic groups and great places to shoot," Morales observes.
The operating principle was "bad is good": bad video and bad acting equal good results. "The main goal was to mimic third-world sports reports where the footage is so crappy," notes Morales. "We wanted it to look authentic. So we shot on digital video."
Traktor also cast non-actors for their look and their lack of acting skills. The anchor in "Turkey," for instance, was discovered in a Turkish restaurant. He was the owner, and had never acted before. Traktor slapped a moustache on him and shot take after terrible take. "He was perfect," Morales recalls. "Who knows what he really said? None of us spoke Turkish; he could have been saying, ‘Next time you’re in South Africa, come to my restaurant.’ He was horrible, but horrible was what we wanted."
The cliff-diver was equally bizarre. "This crazy diver dove fifteen feet, headfirst into cardboard boxes. We said, ‘Don’t you want to dive into air bags?’ He said, ‘No, no, cardboard boxes are much better.’ He had all his stuntman buddies there watching him, so it was all about testosterone. He would get hurt every time—it looked real painful, but each time he said he could do it better."
Aside from some bumps and bruises, the shoot went smoothly, with all five ads shot in about a week, and only minor hitches from the weather, which was much more windy than expected. Postproduction was handled at Quiet Man in New York.
Winner’s Circle
The awards started coming in soon after the spots aired: honors in the copywriting category at the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP) Show; a Gold Clio; a Bronze Pencil at the One Show; a Silver at the British Design and Art Direction (D&AD) Awards; Best of Show and four Golds from the Art Directors Club, New York; and an ANDY for best campaign at the ANDY Awards. But the Grand Prix was the highest and most unexpected. "The funny thing was that Rossana and I, even Traktor, were saying we’d do well in Cannes because the spots are international in nature and easy to follow," recalls Morales. "But we were surprised that they took the top award."
Nevertheless, no sequel is planned. "One of the cool things about Eric and Neal is that they say, ‘Let’s do something new every time. The main thing is that people don’t find us predictable," states Morales.
In the end, the agency team realized that its fictitious sports weren’t totally off base. "We found that [our invented games] were not that far removed from reality," Morales notes. "ESPN has lumberjack competitions—though, of course, no one tries to catch a two-hundred-foot tree. And one of the spots we were considering was midget-throwing, in which midgets in shoulder pads would be tossed great distances. Then we heard that there actually is just such a sport in Australia. A lot of really weird sports do exist."
