The NBC Agency, the in-house ad department for NBC, didn’t have to go far to find the stock footage it needed to create General Electric’s "Then & Now." The :60, which aired during the Winter Olympic Games broadcast, features stock elements that were conveniently located in the archives of both NBC and GE. (GE is NBC’s parent company.).
"Then & Now" blends the new and old by combining footage culled from historic GE commercials and presentations, contemporary GE ads, and outtakes from "Now Is the Time"—another recent GE spot helmed by John Bonito, who is on staff at The NBC Agency.
As "Then & Now" opens, a contemporary dance music track plays over footage taken from a 1950s-era commercial featuring GE spokesperson Don Herbert, possibly best known as the host of "Watch Mr. Wizard," a children’s science show that aired in the ’50s and ’60s. The crisp, clear sound of the score for "Then & Now" contrasts with the footage’s otherwise crude sound quality and its vintage black-and-white look.
The ad segues into shots of GE founder Thomas Edison and the GE logo before the spot’s main section begins, in which older and modern footage are intercut to show the continuity of GE. One example of this editing strategy can be seen when a black-and-white shot of a man showing a boy something off-camera cuts to a color image of a modern medical machine. The edit makes the man from the ’50s appear to be gesturing towards the 21st-century device.
Throughout the ad we hear snippets of speech from the older material, as well as a contemporary voiceover pointing out that the 120-year-old company’s most valuable assets are "ideas and the people who have them." The spot ends with the familiar tag, "GE brings good things to life."
John Miller, co-president of The NBC Agency, along with Vince Manze, explains that "Then & Now" started out as a :90 presentation piece attempting to show that GE is not only an established firm, but a vital one. "We wanted to communicate that [GE] was innovative one hundred, thirty, ten, and five years ago, and that it is just as innovative today," relates Miller. "We wanted to make a transition away from the idea that [GE is] an appliance and light bulb company, to more of an ideas and services company. That’s why we focused on the power systems, medical systems, GE Capital and, to a degree, NBC.
"In the presentation, we didn’t have a budget to go out and shoot anything," continues Miller. "We utilized former GE commercials and presentations that had been made in the ’50s and ’60s; we went into the GE archives to look for that material. Then we ended up pulling recent commercials that had been executed mostly by BBDO [New York], which is the official agency of record for GE, and used some of that material."
Miller relates that the creatives at The NBC Agency were able to use footage from the spot "Now Is the Time" to show new advances that GE has made, technology-wise. "Since we got another assignment to produce an additional spot, ‘Now Is the Time,’ where we shot some of the medical equipment and labs and other things," he says, "we were able to add modern footage to give [‘Then & Now’] a sense of the cutting-edge technology that GE offers."
Miller notes that "Then & Now" creates "little leaps of time." "For instance, the NBC logo makes a seven-second transition from its debut in 1926 to its current logo," he points out. "In another three- or four-second sequence, we see the transition from an old biplane to a jet, for which GE made the engine. The recap in the final five seconds goes from Thomas Edison, who was the founder of GE, all the way to a futuristic shot that is a sort of fantasy element, of a refrigerator on the moon. The final five seconds take you from the 1890s to sometime in the twenty-first century."
The original presentation piece and the :60 have differences and similarities. Miller observes that the presentation utilized the same music that the spot did, but "the presentation had no announcer on it. It basically let the sound bites [from the old ads] tell the story of the difference between GE then and GE now." He also notes that the :60 uses elements from the footage shot for "Now Is the Time."
Editing the :90 presentation down to the form of a :60 commercial was a relatively smooth process. "Of course, once you’re working on something that’s going to play during the Olympics," he relates, "you tend to futz with it, and we certainly did that. It was in pretty good shape within forty-eight hours, and it took two months to finalize."
Did dealing with the various types of footage require a lot of post work? "In this particular case we didn’t do much effects work," says Miller. "We did a lot of effects work on ‘Now Is the Time,’ but this one was pretty much an edit job. We let the natural quality of the older footage speak for itself as it was contrasted with the current color footage."
"Then & Now" has run on NBC and CNBC, and will appear on MSNBC. BBDO, which also does media buying for GE, is planning to buy time on other networks for the ad. Additionally, the commercial will air in Europe in a slightly altered version, and there are possibilities that it could run in Asia. "Then & Now" and "Now Is the Time" were the first GE commercials created by The NBC Agency; there may be more GE assignments for the in-house ad unit in the future.
Miller and Manze closely oversaw the production for "Then & Now." "We were involved in seeing cuts along the away, and saying, ‘Change this shot, change that shot,’ and, ‘That copy’s not quite working,’ and deciding what voice to use," reports Miller. "We have a strong creative team here and I can’t say that anybody did more than anybody else, with the exception of Skip Stewart, who came up with the original idea."
Stewart, who is with The NBC Agency’s East Coast office in New York, also edited the original presentation of "Then & Now." Josh Kafka, his colleague at The NBC Agency, edited the :60 television version. Ron Hayes was the creative director on both ads, and Joseph Lee, a VP at The NBC agency served as copywriter on both spots. The ad’s thumping score is a re-recording of an upbeat Europop track by ATC, called "(La La La) Around the World." David Dore, who composed original music for "Now Is the Time," was responsible for recording the new version of the song.
