A series of new commercials for Hallmark created by Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, and directed by James Gartner of GARTNER, Santa Monica, introduces us to the people who pen the prose on the greeting cards that we buy–with the writers sharing insights into what inspires them. It’s rather interesting to hear their personal stories, and the spots reveal the generally unappreciated thought and effort that goes into their work.
“Lee Bill Lisa,” which runs a minute-and-a-half and is this week’s Top Spot, features a trio of writers. The first, Lee Franklin, talks about how her own experience getting ready for the birth of her first child resulted in her writing a card expressing how a woman can never be prepared for the intensity of the love she will feel for her baby.
Another writer, Bill Gray, discusses the 20 years he has spent writing jokes about dieting and how he knows he has nailed a joke when he gets a chuckle out of a particularly hard-to-crack co-worker.
The third, Lisa Riggin, opens up about how her own miscarriage inspired her to write a Hallmark card especially for other women dealing with the loss.
The idea for this honest, heartfelt spot and the rest of the campaign came out of Hallmark’s Writers on Tour program, which has their writers going out to coffee shops and libraries to meet the people who buy their cards and find out what kind of impact the cards they write have on them.
In the spots, the situation is reversed, and as noted, it is the writers who do the talking. “We always do things [in our advertising] that make our consumer the hero, and in this case, we wanted to show something about the Hallmark brand and show the human face behind the company, the people that make the cards,” explained Leo Burnett executive creative director/copywriter Tim Pontarelli, who conceptualized the campaign with art director Pippa White.
Gartner was working on another Hallmark assignment when Pontarelli approached him about possibly directing this campaign. “He was somewhat hesitant to ask me, I think, because [this campaign] is outside of our normal box where you have your actors and you have your story and you have your script,” Gartner said. “But I jumped at the opportunity because it was out of the box. It was essentially a documentary.”
The director also thought greeting card writers would make interesting subjects. “I always did have a curiosity about how those cards were made,” Gartner remarked.
For his part, Pontarelli hoped that the campaign–in addition to satisfying the client’s goals–would also put to rest any questions about who writes the cards. “People are always curious about who writes the cards, and any time I tell people I work on Hallmark, they immediately ask, ‘Oh, do you write the cards?’ ” Pontarelli shared with a laugh. “Hopefully, that curiosity has now been taken care of.”
After putting together some thoughts on how the spots should be produced, Gartner joined Pontarelli and White at Hallmark headquarters in Kansas City, Mo., where they met with a lot of writers in an informal setting just to get a sense of what they were like.
The people with the most interesting stories and the ability to tell those stories on camera were cast, and Gartner later returned with DP Jack Donnelly to film them.
Finding the “nuggets” Pontarelli praised Gartner’s skills as an interviewer. “He just asks very insightful questions, then sits back and listens. Like any good interviewer, he’ll pick up on little nuggets he thinks are interesting and probe a little deeper,” Pontarelli said.
While some of the stories the writers share are painful, Gartner did not aim to have his subjects fall apart on camera. “I don’t like it when people are emotional on camera. I think it’s cheap, and I think it’s easy,” Gartner said. “And so I try to stay clear of that, and I hope we did.”
In addition to conducting and shooting the interviews, Gartner also captured cutaways for each interview. The goal was to find imagery that would visually suggest what was being talked about in a particular interview.
For example, Franklin’s segment of “Lee Bill Lisa” features black-and-white stills of a mother and her baby; we see Bill at a Hallmark writers’ meeting and images of an illustrator sketching a humorous character; and Lisa’s interview includes cutaways of a tree with no leaves and a woman sitting on the side of her bed looking at a window.
Michael Saia of jumP, New York, cut the spots, including “Lee Bill Lisa.” Gartner and Saia actually got a couple of weeks to work on the commercials and got them “ninety-percent there,” according to Gartner, before the creative team got involved.
Balancing act One of the challenges faced during the editing process was finding a balance between lighter and more serious stories. That was done to avoid any one spot being too maudlin and to create spots that represented the emotional range of the greeting card rack, Pontarelli pointed out.
The music for the spots was provided by Matt Schaeffer, a young performer Pontarelli discovered in a Chicago coffee shop. “This kid was playing the piano and singing, and I thought, ‘That guy is so good.’ I went up and talked to him and asked him if he was interested in doing music for us,” Pontarelli shared.
Schaeffer was indeed interested, so Pontarelli called him when this Hallmark campaign came up. “We ended up using [instrumental versions] of tracks right off the disc he has coming out,” Pontarelli related. “It just worked beautifully.”
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