As they were wrapping up a challenging four-spot shoot in New York for Wrigley’s Eclipse brand, the creatives from BBDO Chicago weren’t necessarily looking for a good omen—but they got one. The agency team and director Kevin Thomas of Thomas Thomas Films, London, were shooting on a cold, clear night at the Brooklyn shipyards when a total lunar eclipse began to happen. "It was a Saturday night at about eight p.m.," art director/creative director Gail Pollack recalls. "It was wonderful."
What made the job potentially daunting was that the four spots—two on the air now ("Agents" and "Greek Salad"), two to come in March—are vastly different from each other visually, using subtle humor inspired by various movie genres. While "Agents" finds spies in black—he handsome, she glamorous—in a dark and menacing bind, "Greek Salad" features a couple on a swing in Central Park, evoking memories of romantic summer movies.
The humor comes in when we hear what the face-to-face pairs, just inches apart, are talking about. In the case of the secret agents, it’s coffee breath, while the lovers in the park discuss the effects of anchovies. That they can be discussing those things in such close proximity attests to the breath-freshening qualities of Eclipse. Wrigley and its long-time agency BBDO had always positioned the gum as a breath freshener, notes copywriter/creative director Jim Hyman. "It was seen as a problem-solution brand," he explains. "The last generation of work that the agency did was around the idea that offending foods were fearful of the product."
This time, Wrigley wanted something a bit grander, Hyman says, more of a lifestyle campaign. "We wanted to get away from ordinary problem-solution," Pollack explains. "We wanted to make the spots a little more relevant, a little more empathic to individuals who might need the product."
Up Close and Personal
The initial concept was just to create an ironic, funny campaign in which people were unusually close to each other while talking about the smelly food they had just eaten. "That’s how it started," Pollack says. "As we were looking at reels, it occurred to us that we could make it way more dramatic and cinematic. We thought, ‘Let’s make each one a mini-movie.’ "
"It made the misdirect larger and more unusual," Hyman adds. "You really don’t see it coming."
The challenge was to produce spots with cinematic production values, each true to a different genre of film. Intuitively, that might have suggested using several different directors on the spots. Instead, the agency decided on Thomas, who does little work in the U.S. and with whom none of the key players at the agency had previously worked.
But Diane Jackson, senior VP/director of broadcast production, who served as executive producer on the campaign, had once worked in London with Thomas’ partner Philippa Thomas (no relation), and Jackson had been interested in using Kevin Thomas for some time. "He has a lot of versatility, and the aim of the campaign was to give each spot a very cinematic feel," Jackson says. "When we looked at each script, we really looked at different film genres in which to place each spot. Kevin demonstrated on his reel the ability to give us a variety of looks. We thought he could push it to another level."
Jackson also applauds Thomas’ light touch with subtle humor and his handling of talent. "Kevin is a dream," Pollack says. "He is very aggressive in what he expects to get done and what he does get done, but he does it in a very mellow, relaxed way. There’s no tension."
Pollack found Thomas to be very collaborative in coming up with common visions of the various movie genres. "It was a slightly softer focus for the ‘Greek Salad’ spot," she notes, "because that’s kind of a Love Story thing from the seventies, and it has an innocence about it and a romanticism."
"Agents" wasn’t inspired by any one movie, but Pollack and Thomas took their cues from The Matrix, and its two sequels, Charlie’s Angels, as well as Jackie Chan and James Bond films. Casting was key because the creatives wanted new faces, but ones that were believable and could support the cinematic look they were seeking in very performance-driven spots.
"We got most of our cast from New York," Pollack says. "[Two people] were brought in from Los Angeles. Some of them had not done any commercials."
Although the spots were shot pretty much as written, some of the writing was done late in the process. "We did a lot of rewriting in casting, when it just didn’t feel right," Hyman says. "The client was great. They were very flexible. The vision of the spots was halfway there just from the raw casting tapes."
Hyman appreciated the chance to work with different movie genres. "What was nice about this … was it allowed me as a writer to craft a script in more genre-speak, in a tongue-in-cheek way, and play up whatever the particular dialogue was that would fit the genre," he says. "It made it a lot more fun. It’s really rewarding from both a writer’s and an art director’s perspectives."
Hyman and Pollack also sing the praises of editor Andre Betz of Bug Editorial, New York, and of Framestore CFC, London, which produced the end-tag animation that helps unify the campaign.
"Andre had a great feel for the timing, musical genres and sound design," Hyman says. "When we saw the edits"—which Betz and Thomas did without agency input—"it was love at first view. Framestore pushed the little end title to be more cinematic. It was one of those rare jobs where everything comes together."
