What do old-fashioned weather maps, snowstorms, severe lightning, giant thermometers, an otter peeking out of the ice and a luxury sedan have in common? Simple: They all make appearances in "Stuck on You" for the Mercedes-Benz four-wheel drive E320 4 Matic sedan. The spot was done via Merkley Newman Harty, New York, which has handled the automaker’s account for the past two years.
"Stuck on You" uses the song of the same name as the background for fast, energetic cuts from one weather image to another—retro weather maps, the sedan driving through snow and rain, weather vanes—to stress the point that the car sticks to the road, no matter how bad the climate and conditions. With the exception of the shots of the car, the ad entirely comprises stock footage.
The use of stock footage in Mercedes-Benz commercials is not without precedent. One memorable instance is "Words," a 1999 spot out of the carmaker’s former agency Lowe & Partners/SMS (now Lowe Lintas & Partners), New York. "Words" featured images of Ernest Hemingway, Jackie Robinson and Laurence Olivier to demonstrate the 2000-S Class’s iconic status. Despite its use of stock, Mercedes-Benz doesn’t automatically prefer stock footage spots—it’s all about what’s right for the concept at hand.
"The client will never say, ‘We need a stock footage commercial,’" says Gary Grossman, head of production at Merkley Newman Harty. "Everything is driven by the creative. The creatives get an assignment, and then together with the production department we sit down and figure out the best way to achieve what they’re doing. Sometimes it’s using historical footage, sometimes it’s shooting, sometimes it’s a combination of both."
In the instance of "Stuck on You," art director Mike Rosen and copywriter David Johnson felt that stock footage was an appropriate choice. According to Rosen, they had footage of the sedan driving in rain and snow, but they wanted the look of the weather to be more severe, and finding a good, feasible location to shoot snow in October was an iffy proposition at best. (Michael Werk of bicoastal Moss/ Petermann/ Holtzman directed the footage of the vehicle.) So stock footage seemed the logical choice. "This was a necessary situation," adds Johnson. "We were pressed for time and this was a good solution."
"We had to be able to tie together the two pieces of car footage we had, one being in the snow and one in the rain," explains Grossman. "So, conceptually we needed something like stock footage to show the different weather systems that we were talking about. We wanted to do it in an amusing way that would go along with our song … so the way to integrate that perfectly is through stock footage."
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Once the team had a rough idea of what it wanted, the next step was to contact companies that could put together a wide range of samples for viewing. One of the footage houses contacted was Second Line Search, New York, a research, licensing and clearance company. (Second Line search is one of the firms under the bicoastal/international Sekani family of stock houses.) According to Giovanna Righini, Second Line Search’s project director, her company is "one-stop shopping for clients. Finding weather footage for Merkley Newman Harty was no problem."
Also in on the effort were the New York office of Energy Film and Image Bank, both under the Seattle-headquartered Getty Images umbrella of footage houses. Nikia Gonzales, film account executive at Energy Film, remembers being contacted by Version2. Editing, New York, the editorial house working on "Stuck on You." The request was for "a whole bunch of stuff," Gonzales says. "They wanted raindrops, water, puddles, bad weather, otters, beavers, hurricanes, tornadoes." In addition to Energy and Second Line Search, Merkley Newman Harty obtained shots from Re:Search, New York, and Image Bank, New York. The latter is also affiliated with Getty.
Gonzales says that a weather request was not all that unusual, and her company was able to put a lot of material together, which was presented in two ways. "We sent them stuff online and in research reels," she notes. Clients who have the time can go to the company’s Web site, energyfilm.com, and perform key word searches for the footage they’re looking for, which they can then watch in a Quick Time file.
With the material in hand, now the team had to sit down and watch hours of weather-related footage. Johnson hadn’t previously worked with stock footage in spots, and he says the experience was " a lot of fun. There’s a lot of goofy stuff out there, and weeding through the archival stuff of the forties and fifties was great." When watching all that weather became mind-numbing, he jokes, "You can always turn it over to the editor"—in this case, Tina Mintus of Version 2.
Rosen says that a retro look was on the boards to give the spot a "weather report feel." He says the team watched "tons of kitschy weather stuff—groundhogs, farmer’s almanacs"—trying to find iconic images of weather. Surprisingly, he didn’t find the selection process all that frustrating. "Sometimes it’s hard to find just the right shot if you’re trying to make the spot look like it’s all in the same place," he explains. "But the editing didn’t need to be linear, and we didn’t need to worry about it looking like the same location."
Grossman remembers spending about two to three days looking at the images they called in. "What happens is, you start seeing different things from different companies, and after three days I think we all realized we’d seen pretty much everything we were looking for," he recalls. "As you see stuff, you’re thinking about how it would integrate nicely, and then you have the big job of making it look like it’s one commercial.
"You know, what happens when you’re dealing with this kind of stock footage stuff, invariably you make a decision whether to go retro or modern or whatever the tonality of the commercial is," Grossman continues. "And as you’re cutting, you’re making these decisions. In a sense it’s almost more difficult to work with stock footage because you’re not able to shoot what you need. You have to find things and make them work conceptually. It’s an odd animal, in a way. …"
Grossman and team definitely made the "odd animal" that is stock footage work for them in "Stuck on You." As Grossman says, "You know, it’s an asset to be able to make an idea come alive with existing footage. It’s pretty cool."
