A late night road trip from Milwaukee to Chicago may not sound like the most stimulating experience, but for Young & Rubicam senior partners/creatives Nelson Martinez and Randy Van Kleeck, it was downright inspirational. "We were on our way to a Miller client meeting," Martinez recalls. "We had an account person with us … and he was taking us through the ‘Cheddar Curtain.’ It was midnight, and it was pitch black outside. You couldn’t see anything. It looked like something out of The X Files, and Randy mentioned aliens."
It wasn’t long before Martinez and Van Kleeck had invented a new spokesperson for another client, Sony: An alien truck driver, negotiating the galaxies while listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s "Sweet Home Alabama."
The team made the intergalactic trucker part of a Sony Electronics pitch. But, Martinez recalls, "It was actually one of the few spotsamaybe the only spotathat we showed at that meeting that didn’t get produced later on." The character was put on the backburner for over a yearauntil eight months ago, when Martinez and Van Kleeck were asked to reintroduce the Sony Walkman to consumers.
Their nascent alien went from truck driver to college freshman, and PlatoaSony Walkman’s big spaceman on campusawas born. A far cry from the lifelike creatures in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, big-headed, blue Plato is a silent puppet with a limited range of facial expressions. "We definitely knew we didn’t want to go with CGI," says Van Kleeck. "I think the thing we were most concerned about was not trying to fool people. We also thought it would be funny to have something that was obviously a puppet, without seeing the strings."
Plato’s appearance was important. "We tried not to make him too cute," Van Kleeck continues. "We wanted him to have an edge, so he wasn’t something you’d want to cuddle up to in bed." The creatives worked with Y&R art directors, who drew the alien, and puppet-makers at The Character Shop, Canoga Park, Calif., who actually created the extraterrestrial to make sure Plato wasn’t too cuddly for cynical college-aged consumers. (The Character Shop, which recently burned down, is in new quarters in Simi Valley, Calif.) "There were one hundred fifty designs for Plato," Martinez recalls. "It was difficult."
The final result, however, looks effortless. While Plato is clearly a puppet, he is, as Van Kleeck puts it, "an adult puppet." With his bedroom eyes and deadpan expression, he blends perfectlyaalbeit humorouslyainto campus life in four spots: "Spaceship," "Dog," "Language Lab" and "Dorm," directed by Phil Morrison of bicoastal Epoch Films. In "Spaceship"awhich earned Top Spot recognition (SHOOT, 7/7/00)aPlato listens to Cypress Hill’s "Rock Superstar" on his Walkman as he steers his spaceship towards Earth and touches down on a college campus. Despite his plush blue exterior, his female classmates are clearly smitten.
That theme continues in the campaign’s subsequent ads. "Dog" finds Plato immersed in reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, with the Johnny Cash tune "Ring of Fire" blaring through his Walkman headphones. As a coed makes eyes at him, a pooch mistakes his walkman for a frisbee and begins to chew on it; the song continues to play, uninterrupted by the animal. The spot illustrates the Sony Walkman’s anti-skip technology. In "Dorm," Plato listens to smooth Brazilian music on what is clearly the morning after a night of passion. As his bashful-but-adoring lady friend prepares to say good-bye, the alien creates a disc on his computer especially for her, titled The Audrey Sessions. He gives it to her as she leaves, so she, too, can enjoy music with Sony technology.
Because of the product and the target audienceathe spots were slated to air only on MTVaPlato’s musical tastes were key. For the first ad, the creatives opted for Sony artists Cypress Hill because, Martinez says, "we heard they might be interested in doing some stuff because they had a new song coming out."
"We approached them with the idea, and they loved it," adds Van Kleeck. "So we ended up using the song for the intro spot, which I think works really well for the idea of Plato."
For the other spots, however, the creatives opted for less trendy fare. "We went so many different ways with ‘Dog,’ " Martinez says. "We had Black Sabbath on there, Iron Maiden, all kinds of stuff. Then one of the guysaI think it might have been [Van Kleeck] actuallyacame up with Johnny Cash. And it stuck."
"For the ‘Dorm’ spot, we just wanted something cool and romantic," Van Kleeck notes. "So that’s why we ended up with Brazilian-style music with made-up lyrics." The tune for the spot was composed by Peter Nashel of Duotone Audio Group, New York.
Both creatives agreed that the spots should target youthful consumers without pandering to them. "There’s a cool factor to Sony’s having the guts to put Johnny Cash on a spot geared for that generation," Martinez points out.
The Plato campaignalike all of Martinez and Van Kleeck’s workawas a true team effort, with highly collaborative brainstorming sessions and lots of input from other creatives. "With our group, it’s very much a shared-credit experience," Martinez says. "In fact, with the Plato campaign, I think we had eight creative people at the shoot, all of whom contributed to the campaign in a big way."
Martinez and Van Kleeck have been sharing credit longer than most. "We’ve been working together for eight years now," says Martinez. "That’s actually just a little shorter than how long we’ve both been married." When their partnership began, Martinez had been with Y&R for four years, Van Kleeck for two. "As the story goes, everybody that Nelson and I [had previously] worked with somehow got canned," Van Kleeck laughs.
Their initial projects did not bode well for their future either, Martinez recalls: "We had a year where we couldn’t sell anything. It was probably the most discouraging thing that ever happened to us."
"We were like, ‘Maybe we suck,’ " Van Kleeck continues. "But then it finally turned around, and it’s been good ever since." Though it wasn’t their first successful campaign, the creatives agree that their work for Molson Ice in the mid-’90s was, as Van Kleeck states, "one of the most important things we’ve done.
"When Molson launched Ice, [sales] went through the roof, and then started to go down," he relates. "And in beer advertising, once a brand starts to go south, it’s almost impossible to turn it around. So we went out on the road, we did a ton of focus groups, found what we thought was the core of the brand, and developed work off of that."
Martinez and Van Kleeck turned to director Jeff Preiss of Epoch to shoot spots like "Couch," in which hip, music-video style footage of models in clubs accompanies a young male voiceover, talking about his desire to go out and flirt with "dangerous women." The striking spots, Van Kleeck remembers, got a very positive response and were an all-around "amazing experience" to make: "I think the most inspiring part of it all was that we had great people involved," he notes.
One of those people was Preiss, who has since worked with Van Kleeck and Martinez on a number of spots. Martinez says he loves collaborating with directors like Preiss and Morrison because they "bring something to the boards. There are plenty of directors who just shoot the boards," Martinez explains. "We want somebody who brings it to that next level."
At press time, the agency pair was bidding directors for an upcoming Sony Home Entertainment campaign. "Within the next three months, I think we’ll be shooting," says Martinez. "I think it’s going to be some really nice stuff."
As for Plato, he’s taken MTV by storm (Sony’s Web site, which is listed at the ends of all the ads, received close to a million hits the week that followed the debut of "Spaceship" during a televised Britney Spears concert), and will soon appear in a nationwide print campaign. Not bad for a little guy who was born on a midnight ride through the Cheddar Curtain.
