This :30 is set entirely in a company’s tech-support room—home to a couple of computer troubleshooters. They’ve heard it all, and have a full grab bag of solutions with which to address seemingly any problem that arises. An employee calls in and we hear his plight on speaker phone: "Hey guys, I can’t see anything on my screen. Is the ser-ver down?"
"We’ll check," responds one of the high-tech wizards, putting the caller on hold. The two begin to brainstorm about the problem. "Let’s check out the network," suggests one of the guys. This elicits a question from his colleague: "Should we bing the router, or just tele-net to the server?"
The conversation between the computer experts continues with a flood of techno-babble that sounds like it’s streaming verbatim from an engineer’s manual. We viewers are hopelessly lost—but at least the poor guy on hold doesn’t have to listen to any of this.
The phone rings again. It’s the worker, who apparently got tired of holding. Turns out, despite being a novice, he’s pretty good at troubleshooting himself. "Hey guys, I found the problem," he says. "I just didn’t have my monitor turned on."
Silently the two techies view each other with expressions of embarrassed bewilderment. A supered message against a black background fills the screen: "Keep it simple."
We then hear voiceovers from the computer experts trying to save face regarding the turned-off monitor. "Yeah, that’s what we thought, too" comments one. "Yeah, we were just about to tell you that," adds the other.
The logo of IBM software subsidiary Tivoli fills the screen; underneath appears the slogan: "Manage. Anything. Anywhere."
The spot was directed, shot and edited by Greg Kiefer, who’s repped nationally as a helmer via Blind Spot Media, Los Angeles. The job was a co-production of Blind Spot Media and Kiefer’s Salt Lake City-based Cosmic Pictures. Nancy Moore produced for the two production houses.
The creative team from Orem, Utah-based agency Allbee Green consisted of creative director Kevan Allbee, writer Daryn Tufts, art director Kathy Eckenbrecht and producer Alan Green.
Kiefer cut the commercial via Cosmic. The colorist was Rick Stephenson of The Filmworkers Club, Dallas. Audio mixer was Palmer Addison of STS, Salt Lake City. Music was composed by Kem Kraft of Kem Kraft Music, Salt Lake City.
The spot was one of six helmed by Kiefer for computer industry trade shows. The ads have yet to air on broadcast or cable TV.
