Of all the things I’ve worked on, this was so easy," says Laura Fegley, a copywriter at Cliff Freeman and Partners, New York. "It’s so rich with creative ideas."
Fegley is referring to a new campaign for DSW Shoes that she and her art director partner, Dawn McCarthy, created. The five-spot package, directed by Lisa Rubisch of bicoastal Bob Industries for the discount designer shoe store will no doubt strike a chord with any woman who has ever gone shoe shopping. This is the first campaign the team has created for their new employer, Cliff Freeman and Partners, who, Fegley says, "needed somebody who understood women’s shoes. Which we did, times twenty." (Fegley and McCarthy were previously at Merkley Newman Harty|Partners, New York, where they worked on Mercedes-Benz.)
As their titles imply, the spots—"The Hunt," "Springtime," "Mating Ritual," "Feeding Frenzy," and "Teaching the Young"—take the approach of a nature documentary dispassionately observing its subjects: women shoe shoppers.
For instance, in "The Hunt," a woman walks into a DSW store eyeing the huge selection. The music would go perfectly with a scene of a lioness stalking an antelope, and the soothing British narrator is straight out of PBS. "The hunter has high hopes as she sets out for the day," he intones. "Patiently she waits and watches for her opportunity. There. She sees her prey." Cut to a red closed-toe mule.
"Feeding Frenzy" depicts a situation many will recognize: a crowd of women vying for a particular style of shoe. According to the narration, "The quickest and strongest will feed first, while the timid must wait their turn. It is truly nature at its most brutal."
The spots are effective and engaging because they don’t engage in hyperbole. "The reality to me is what’s most funny," Fegley says. "It’s the fact that you can see yourself in these situations."
Of course, Fegley and McCarthy had to engage in grueling research—namely, going to shoe stores and observing the customers’ behavior. "We had a eureka moment sitting around in the stores and watching how women shop for shoes," says Fegley. "[We were] recognizing a lot of patterns in how they shop and recognizing them in ourselves. Then we started thinking that all these shoe shopping behaviors were a lot like the behaviors they outline in nature documentaries—all the shows on the sexual activities of monkeys."
The pair also watched a lot of National Geographic-style documentaries from the 1960s and ’70s as part of their research, noting the differences between documentaries and commercials in terms of storytelling style. "In commercials you have a lot of reverse angles, and in documentaries it’s more voyeuristic, kind of wherever you can get the camera," explains Fegley. "But there’s something kind of cinematic about it, too, because a lot of times you’re dealing with these broad vistas. And the store is like that too—it’s this big, broad expanse. DSWs really are warehouses."
Connections
Clair Grupp, executive producer at Cliff Freeman, notes that Rubisch was the perfect choice to direct the packages. "We were very curious when we started the process to find out how female directors would differ, in the sense that we thought they might relate differently than the male directors would," says Grupp. "Lisa had written a ten-page treatment and fully related to it. She not only understood the concept, grasped it, and really wanted to be a part of it, but her filmmaking captured people with emotion and quirkiness and realness."
In all fairness to men, however, Fegley says a lot of male directors that the team considered did get the concept. "Any man with a girlfriend or a wife could get that," she says. "[Lisa] definitely got it more, but it was also that she was really creative about how she was going to bring all this to life."
While the agency team hadn’t worked with Rubisch before, Grupp had worked with Bob Industries, which she calls "an excellent production company. Lisa was really collaborative, and she was just the perfect person for it. She brought in Erik Schmidt, the DP, who brought a lot to the party as well." Rounding out the successful team were editors Dick Gordon and Lucas Eskin, who cut spots out of the New York office of Mad River Post.
By all accounts, reaction to the campaign has been very positive. Two more spots are in the pipeline, with more in the works. Fegley says she has girlfriends who—not knowing that she was the one who worked on the spots—called her to ask if she’s seen them. Grupp showed a colleague the spot, and "she flipped out over ‘The Hunt’ because she was that person. Everybody reacts differently because everybody has such different shopping personalities," Grupp notes. "It’s very close to people."
