Get ready for a crash course in stupidity. A young man is exhorting a car to go. But the male’s command is clearly ill advised in that his foot is in a makeshift noose—with the other end of the rope attached to the trailer-hitch post jutting out from the vehicle’s rear bumper. He again screams to the unseen driver, demanding that the car be started and accelerated—still, no response.
However persistence has its reward—or in this case, punishment. The driver finally obeys and the automobile takes off, dragging the man belly down along the pavement. Ouch! Even as a neutral observer, you can feel the road burn.
Cutting away from this madness, the spot goes black. A supered message comes on screen, which simply reads, "Get An Education. Please." A parting super identifies the ad’s sponsor: College of Marin, accompanied by a phone number.
The spot is one of several in which mindlessly lame stunts are being pulled by people who are, to say the least, intelligence- and judgement-challenged. Another spot, for example, shows a young man jumping from a moving van into a large bush. He bounces off the foliage, laughing—oblivious to the fact that he has just risked serious injury.
However, before you assume that these stunts were well prepped and professionally staged, consider the source—the Internet. This is not original footage shot specifically for the commercials. This is footage procured over the Web and licensed for the campaign. In the case of "Car Drag," the Web led agency creatives to Sean Mitchell, who in turn showed them the footage used for this particular spot.
Those agency creatives were copywriter Steve Howard, art director Rickie Daghlian and producer Tim Jacobs of San Francisco-based, part-time-usually-for-spec agency Daghlian, Howard and Jacobs. These three artisans hold full-time jobs in the same capacities at BBDO San Francisco. The trio came up with this Jackass-inspired campaign for the Bay Area’s College of Marin in order to reach high school graduates who want to attend community college, as well as young people who’ve been working for a few years and are thinking of going back to college. Since the aforementioned Jackass series on MTV has proven popular with this youthful demographic (a Jackass feature film is just on the horizon), the agency guys accordingly conceptualized a series of spots. Realizing they didn’t have the budget—much less the liability insurance—needed to stage and film ridiculous stunts, the agency creatives began to search the Web for existing footage.
"Car Drag" ran for a week on a Bay Area cable station, with permission from the College of Marin. Editor/Henry artist on the campaign was Brian Lagerhausen of Filmcore San Francisco. Sound designers/audio mixers were Joaby Deal and Eric Eckstein of One Union Recording Studios, San Francisco.
This spot’s principal actor was Sean Mitchell: The SAG/AFTRA Commercials Contract Standing Committee has granted a waiver to allow commercials to be available for viewing on SHOOTonline.com. The spots cannot be copied, downloaded or emailed.
