How do you take a product that’s 20 or 30aor even 40 or 50 years oldaand make it fresh and exciting to people who know it and people who don’t?
That was the conundrum facing TV Land, a cable network offshoot of Viacom-owned Nickelodeon, which features re-runs of classic and near-classic shows like The Honeymooners, The Andy Griffith Show, The A-Team, Sanford and Son, and St. Elsewhere. The Martin Agency, Richmond, Va., stepped up to the plate and solved TV Land’s marketing worries with an original and hilarious advertising campaign, tagged: "Times Change, Great TV Doesn’t," that debuted in May ’99. This year’s continuation of the series broke in June.
The campaign, which includes print and spot work, was masterminded by agency VP/senior copywriter Bob Meagher and VP/art director Pat Wittich, and overseen by senior VP/associate creative director Cliff Sorah. The concept behind the spots is deceptively simple: Take clips from old shows and dub in contemporary dialogue. "Sushi/The Andy Griffith Show," for example, features a black-and-white clip from The Andy Griffith Show. Opie, Andy and Aunt Bee are sitting down to a nice dinner. But instead of discussing the delicious roast and potatoes, the adults rave about sushi dishes, while little Opie scowls at his plate. Eventually, he bolts away from the table, and a perplexed Aunt Bee says, "I thought he liked sushi." In "Liposuction/ Leave It to Beaver," the weasel-like Eddie Haskell advises Mrs. Cleaver to get liposuction, as her hips seem to be getting a little broad. And in "Regis/Leave It to Beaver," Wally Cleaver takes a call for his father, Ward, from Regis Philbinaapparently the elder Cleaver is a lifeline on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? In one of the most clever ads in the series, "Whassup/Adam-12," two patrolmen are seen in their police car, receiving a transmission over the radio. Instead of an urgent request to respond to an emergency, the dispatcher begins to ask, "Whassup,?" mimicking the award-winning campaign for Budweiser, out of DDB Chicago, which was directed by Charles Stone III of C&C/Storm Films, New York. As the "Whassup" dialogue ends, one of the deadpan patrolmen answers the call with, "Nothing. What is up with you?" Other ads include, "Survivor/ Charlie’s Angels," with dialogue from the summer hit Survivor; and "You Da Man/The Honeymooners," which shows Ed Norton getting jiggy with it to Tone Loc’s "Wild Thing."
Sorah says it was very exciting to get the TV Land account. "We really wanted the business because we could see how much fun it would be to work on it," he explains. "We’d looked at a lot of different ways to think about it, and one of them was that it’s the most-loved TV on TVathe most enduring TV. It’s amazing that as old as some of this stuff is, people still talk about it. If you go to a cocktail party and mention Opie, everybody can kind of talk about it. It’s one of those American things that really connects us."
