It’s rather ironic that forward-thinking, pioneering e-tailer Amazon.com would go back some 35 years to find the inspiration for its new ad campaign out of Foote, Cone & Belding (FCB), San Francisco.
But by dipping into the early ’60s Mitch Miller program called Sing Along With Mitch, whose trademark was sing-along music performed by an all-male chorus, FCB has created five holiday-themed :30s with an undeniable millennium-eve appeal. The campaign was helmed by co-directing team Joe Public (a.ka. Adam Cameron and Simon Cole) of bicoastal Headquarters.
The Amazon.com spots are true to the Mitch Miller format: shirt, tie and V-neck sweater-garbed men earnestly singing (actually lip-synching); amateurish choreography; lyrics displayed as on-screen subtitles for viewers at home; and self-conscious camera moves.
The spots’ humor also owes to the lyrics. The chorus sings its own yuletide favorites that point out the benefits of shopping on Amazon.com: "…I’m sucking down the eggnog/With 20 days to go/Practicing my yoga/With 19 days to go/Nothing else to do today/but worry about Y2K."
Perhaps the funniest of the ads is "Spent Two Minutes," due to a wonderfully goofy opening sequence in which the left- and right-hand sides of the chorus exchange lines in a bit that could not be any hammier. "You shouldn’t have," intone the men on the left as they lean toward the men on the right; concurrently, the men on the right sway backwards in response. This bizarre choreography is repeated as the right side answers, "I didn’t," and everyone leans left. "You shouldn’t have," the left side repeats.
At that point, the entire group faces forward as we hear the first strains of a score described by composer Roger Wojahn as classic "late fifties-early sixties variety show music": a two-beat, polka-like track marked by sounds of a ukelele and an accordion. (Wojahn and brother Roger Wojahn scored the music out of Wojahn Bros Music, Santa Monica.)
"I spent two minutes/Two whole minutes/Two minutes shopping for your gift," the chorus sings cheerily. "And it was so pleasant/Getting credit for a present/That was really super easy to give." During this time, the camera pans over the men. A few of the faces aren’t exactly camera-ready, but everyone is beaming.
"Thanks to Amazon/Dot-com," they sing, as two large cardboard clock faces slowly descend on either side of the chorus. "I don’t mean to flaunt it/But it’s just the thing I wanted/And it only took two minutes."
The FCB creative team was comprised of creative director/ art director Tom O’Keefe; creative director/copywriter Matt Reinhard and executive producer Steve Neely. (An FCB spokesman said the client would not allow the agency to be interviewed about the campaign.) According to co-director Cameron, the team spent "months and months" writing and rewriting sets of lyrics to fulfill different client directives.
Cameron explained that FCB gave him and Cole tapes of the Sing Along With Mitch show as reference. "We were all very clear from the start that we weren’t trying to poke fun at the shows; we were trying to do the perfect re-creation of them." To that end, they made a conscious decision to shoot on Beta SP, and used two of the cumbersome, old-fashioned studio cameras that slide around the floor on wheels.
"Obviously Sing Along With Mitch was in black and white, which we felt was not the most interesting route to take," added Cameron. "We felt that going for the very early days of color was a more interesting look, and released us more for things like the styling and wardrobe decisions," such as the color of the sweaters, which are different in each spot.
An all-male chorus presented some concerns about women not being represented, according to Cameron. But it was ultimately decided to cast all men, because a funny component of Sing Along With Mitch was "a load of middle-aged men singing along in a committed way, rather badly," said Cameron, who added that the concept was slightly reminiscent of Monty Python-style humor for him and Cole.
"It was such a crucial part of it to find these great faces—people that you normally wouldn’t expect to see in commercials—and have them all sing together," observed Cameron. He related that they chose not to cast experienced actors, and went out of their way to find amateur singers. On set, they gave minimal instructions to the talent in order to preserve their natural awkwardness. "We had to stop them from rehearsing," said Cameron. "We never told anyone we were [for example] going in on a close-up on them; we shot them very much as if we were shooting live."
After the five spots were shot in two days, the video was conformed at Santa Monica-based Asylum, where Inferno artists Nathan McGuinness and Pierre Laquerre also supplied color correction, tweaking the colors to look "more pasty," and treated the footage with film weave to look older, said McGuinness. He added, "We basically designed an old treatment for the subtitles as well."
The Wojahns tackled the music with a similarly retro approach. O’Keefe and Reinhard collaborated closely with Roger and Scott Wojahn. "They’d give us some strategy or title ideas, and we probably wrote a dozen songs," said Roger Wojahn. "The production was very much like they would have done it in the sixties—we used all analog tape and old ribbon microphones. That was around the time they’d discovered reverb, and they overdid it because they’d just discovered it. Even the accordion in the track has tons of reverb on it; at times you don’t even know it’s an accordion."
Wojahn related that they couldn’t afford a large singing ensemble. So instead, 12 singers were used and their voices were triple-tracked using all the old gear. The final music tracks were played on-set for the actors to lip-synch against, which was the method used in filming the ’60s variety shows. "There wasn’t a part of the process that wasn’t funny," said Wojahn.
