Cable advertising is not one of the most exciting spot categories. But Shepardson Stern + Kaminsky (SS+K), New York, recently took a creative approach to a series of spots for Time Warner Cable that promotes features available from the company’s digital cable system.
Marty Cooke, partner/creative director at SS+K, New York (the company also has offices in Boston and Seattle), doesn’t think any spot category has to be dull. "I never understood the idea of ‘It’s a bad category, so we can’t do anything good,’ " he relates. "I think that’s a box creative people put themselves in; it’s not a box the client puts you in. There’s no excuse for being boring. When you realize you’re competing against Nike commercials—and whatever you think is the best that’s out there—you’re not in the cable category, you’re in the on-air category."
"Roses," directed by Robert Logevall of bicoastal Anonymous Content, promotes features that allow viewers to select, pause and resume viewing programs whenever they like. The retro-styled :60 takes the expression "Stop and smell the roses" and makes it literal. The ad shows a businessman going through his day without noticing the abundance of roses in his life. The flower appears in many forms: a pattern on a shirt, a waitress named Rose, a bus driver’s tattoo, the flowers in his front yard. Some roses even turn to look at him, as if hoping to get his attention. But the man ignores them all until he comes home, selects a television program, and finally notices the lone rose sitting in a vase in front of him. He pauses the show and stops to smell the rose before returning to the TV. A female voiceover says, "Shows that stop and start the instant you want." Then we hear the campaign’s tagline: "Now anything’s possible."
"[Logevall’s] a very emotional storyteller," says Cooke, explaining why SS+K chose him for the spot. " ‘Roses’ is not that rational, but it is a story. And we were blown away by the look of his film on his reel. He delivered in spades."
Creative director Josh Kilmer-Purcell served as creative director/art director on the commercial; Maya Frey was the copywriter. The Mill, New York, created the visual effects, while Robert Miller of RMI, New York, composed the sore.
The campaign includes six other spots: "Bear Daughter," "Son’s Future," "Night Out," "Mom’s Future," "Decorator," and "Man Eating Westie," all directed by Mike Mills of bicoastal The Directors Bureau. These six :30s have a humorous tone. In "Bear Daughter," a father tells his neighbor that he was able to see his young daughter in a school play because it was easy to change his appointment with a Time Warner technician. Then he says, "You know, if I missed her scene…" and the spot dissolves to his fantasy of the girl running away from home and being reduced to foraging for fish, much like the bear she’s befriended. The father snaps out of his reverie, and sternly says, "No daughter of mine is catching dinner with her teeth." The voiceover follows: "Flexible appointment times to meet your schedule."
"Man Eating Westie," which promotes Time Warner’s Road Runner broadband Internet connection, opens on an older man telling his wife he’ll feed the dog once a torturously long download is complete. We then see the woman’s imaginings: the famished pooch hungers for a squirrel, but winds up devouring a jogger and burying his remains. "Dial-up won’t bury joggers in my garden," she declares out loud, prompting her befuddled husband to ask, "Say what?" Voiceover: "Get on with your life. Road Runner is up to fifty times faster than dial-up."
brand identity
"Time Warner Cable grew by buying local cable companies and cobbling them together," relates Cooke, "so there was no brand entity. We came on the case and thought, ‘It’s time for Time Warner Cable to start acting like a brand’—something the client was receptive to."
Cooke says it was a challenge to make the ads work: they had to set up a problem about the conflict between life and watching TV, go into a fantasy sequence, return to reality, and then show a product shot, all in thirty seconds. He notes that there was also a fine balancing act in not making the ads appear too grim. "[In ‘Bear Daughter’] we’ve got a little girl running away from home and eating a fish out of a river," he relates. "We’ve got a woman who goes to prison [in ‘Mom’s Future.’] This could be incredibly dark."
Mills’ treatments made the spots appear more whimsical than threatening. "A lot of directors these days [think] dark is cool, dark is hip," says Cooke. "We heard a lot of treatments that were very dark, and Time Warner is not a dark brand—this is a light, entertaining brand. Mills’ idea was, ‘Let’s make these things like natural history museum dioramas that are obviously fake.’ "
Cooke points out how unrealistic elements like an absurdly low ceiling (in "Son’s Future") and fake animals (in "Bear Daughter" and "Man Eating Westie") lend the spots the right flavor. "Mills pulled it all off with this light touch that was just fantastic," notes Cooke. "He had a great unerring sense on the music. The team had a lot to do with that as well. The fantasy sequence music played a big role in telling [viewers] how to think about a dog eating a jogger or a girl running away from home."
Composers from Amber Music, New York, provided tracks for the six spots. On the agency side, Brian Murphy served as art director and Roman Tsukerman was the copywriter; Cooke was the creative director on all of the Time Warner Cable ads.
SS+K is currently doing a new campaign for Road Runner high-speed online, and additional Time Warner Cable work is coming up this fall. "You could focus on the cable and the pricing or you could focus on the entertainment," Cooke says of SS+K’s approach to the package. "They are an entertainment brand so they better be entertaining. That’s why the spots look more like little movies and have richer production."
