When upscale department store Nordstrom set out to establish the world’s biggest online shoe store, relates Peter McHugh, group creative director at Fallon McElligott, Minneapolis, "they came to us and said, ‘We need this and need it quick’"-which is the way things work in the dot-com world.
"The women we talked to [for research] said, ‘Too many shoes are never enough,’" continues McHugh. "So art director Scott O’Leary and copywriter Mike Burdick had this very simple idea of ‘Make room for shoes,’ and we decided to make those visual stories. The notion of making room for shoes no matter where you are, when the urge strikes, seemed like a campaign idea that would have a lot of legs."
The result of that simple idea is the agency’s first work for Nordstromshoes.com, a three-spot package helmed by the directing collective Traktor of bicoastal/international Partizan. The ads feature the absurd lengths women will go to to make more room for shoes. For instance, in "Moving Van," a woman clears space for shoes in her new home by tossing large boxes and items off the back of the moving van onto the road, with no regard for the dangerous highway conditions she creates. Another spot, "Doorstep," depicts a woman carrying a sleeping man from the backseat of a car to the front door of a house. She gently places him on the porch and staples a note to his T-shirt that reads: "Hi. Please take care of my husband." She leaves and the final shot is of the woman’s closet with one side empty.
"Even though they’re hyperbolic executions," explains McHugh, "there’s a sense of reality about the people, the look of the film. Traktor had a really good handle on that. They didn’t play it too cartoony."
In McHugh’s opinion, dot-com advertising has revitalized creativity. While he believes there are a number of pointless and tasteless ads, the category overall seems marked by a "disproportionate" amount of good work. "Nordstrom has the advantage of being an [established] brand," says McHugh. "It kind of legitimizes Nordstrom.com in a way that some [dot-coms] aren’t able to." A new round of spots for Nordstrom stores, directed by Paul Gay of bicoastal Omaha Pictures, is slated to break in February.
Room Service
In addition to Nordstrom.com, McHugh-one of five creative group heads at Fallon-oversees the agency’s Holiday Inn account, which broke a new series of spots last spring featuring "Mark," a 37-year-old slacker who still lives at home with his parents. While Mark may seem an unlikely pitchman for the hotel, the humorous ads manage to convey the amenities the hotel chain offers with the tag line: "What do you think this is-a Holiday Inn?"
The campaign’s premise was introduced in the spot "Meet Mark," in which the deadpan Mark (portrayed by actor Ross Brockley) declines his family’s request to chip in, protesting that neither Grandma nor Larry the dog pays rent. His line, "I’m a kid and kids should stay for free and eat for free," is met with the tag line. In the subsequent "Mark’s Miles," Mark has agreed to pay rent and tells his parents that he wants airline miles in return, so he can eventually upgrade to Grandma’s room. Mark’s misguided sense of entitlement continues in other spots, in which he requests a skillet breakfast, meeting facilities and 24-hour catering (to run an at-home Internet business he dreamed up after quitting his job). McHugh served as copywriter on the spots, which were all directed by Jesse Peretz of bicoastal X-Ray Productions.
"In real life, you hear a lot of parents telling kids who want to be waited on hand-and-foot, ‘What do you think this is-a hotel?’" observes McHugh, who adds they discovered that the less Mark said, the funnier the spots were. "We wrote some scripts and set out casting. Ross was the only one who made us laugh. Up to then, everyone else we saw in casting made us think, ‘This is dreadful-why did we think of this? Why did we sell it? I want to go home.’"
Notwithstanding such doubtful moments, McHugh is very much at home at Fallon, which he joined as a group creative director in ’95, working on accounts such as BMW, Jim Beam and Ameritech. Before joining Fallon, he was the executive creative director of TBWA/Chiat/ Day’s Toronto office, where he created and oversaw work for clients including Toshiba, Nissan, Infiniti and Canadian Airlines.
Working in the Canadian ad industry was an interesting cultural experience, notes McHugh, whose challenges included retaining the nuances of English-language copy as it was translated into French scripts. "Their economy is basically one-tenth the size of the U.S., so budgets are shrunk accordingly," explains McHugh. "That’s something you take for granted in the U.S.-the scale is so much bigger here."
Before moving to Canada, McHugh worked briefly at TBWA/ Chiat/Day’s New York office as the group head on Reebok. "It wasn’t very long; Reebok fired them for the second time," he says. He spent part of the early ’90s at Young & Rubicam, Chicago, and prior to that, was at DDB Needham Chicago (now DDB).
Fallon’s former president/creative director Bill Westbrook lured McHugh from Toronto to work on some of Fallon’s new accounts. McHugh, who was eager to return stateside, settled in at Fallon, where he wrote ads for Prudential and Lee Jeans. His Lee credits include the stylized black-and-white spots "Fountain" and "Waitress," both helmed by Alan White of bicoastal/ international @radical.media. McHugh and Harvey Marco also served as co-creative directors on Lee’s initial "Buddy Lee, Man of Action" campaign, directed by Spike Jonze of bicoastal/international Satellite. The ’97 campaign transformed the ’20s-era Buddy Lee doll into a cult figure, who remains the spokesdoll for the company.
In early ’98, McHugh left Fallon for a three-month stint as executive creative director at Chicago-based Hal Riney & Partners/Heartland (now Publicis & Hal Riney). Disenchanted that the job "didn’t turn out to be what I expected" and, prompted by his affinity for Fallon and its newly named president/creative director, David Lubars, McHugh returned to Minneapolis.
"Fallon is an interesting, fun, challenging place that embraces creativity," says McHugh. "In that sense, it’s right for me."$
