Saturn’s "Sheet Metal" has been lauded as one of the most innovative car spots in recent years. The ad depicts a series of automotive scenarios—children riding a school bus, a car backing out of a driveway, backed-up traffic on a highway overpass, a motorist receiving a ticket for a traffic violation—with nary a car in sight.
Instead, we see a man walking backward out of his driveway, uniformed kids moving in a double line behind a guy dressed as a bus driver, hundreds of people inching forward on an overpass, and a man patiently standing on the side of the road while a police officer writes a ticket. At the end of the spot—which is out of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (GS&P), San Francisco—a voiceover drives home the point: "When we design our cars, we don’t see sheet metal. We see the people who may one day drive them."
The spot’s director, Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks, Los Angeles, has praised the original concept. Indeed, the ad was instrumental in landing Murro his first nomination for the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Award for best commercial director this year. (Baker Smith of Harvest, Santa Monica, went on to win.)
Despite all the kudos, a car commercial without cars is a risky proposition—especially considering the fact that GS&P had won the ad account for the automaker eight months before the spot was conceived. (Prior to landing at GS&P, Saturn had been with Publicis & Hal Riney, San Francisco, since the early 1990s.)
Nonetheless, the client was supportive from the beginning. "I remember the very first time we presented [‘Sheet Metal’], the lead client said something to the effect of, ‘I really feel the bigness of that idea,’ " recalls the spot’s writer, GS&P partner/creative director Jamie Barrett.
But not everyone felt that "bigness." After Barrett finished the script, "it went into focus groups and effectively bombed." Still, the creatives—and Saturn—opted to go ahead with it. The spot was shot with a crucial nine seconds of automobile footage at the end, and an unusually creative client/agency relationship was born. "I think ‘Sheet Metal’ helped all of us understand what we were trying to do with Saturn," Barrett says. "It created a reference point for us."
Barrett’s 15-month history at GS&P began with Saturn. "I started Jan. 2, 2002, and that was, for all intents and purposes, the beginning of the Saturn pitch," he relates. "The first three-plus weeks I was here, it was morning, noon and night Saturn. And then we pitched them on Jan. 23."
A Caring Car
Barrett, art director Mark Wenneker—who is also an associate creative director—and the rest of the GS&P team worked to create a new brand identity for Saturn, while retaining what had made the automaker unique. "I think, in a nutshell, Saturn has always been well-loved as a company," Barrett notes. "Our goal was—and is—to make them well loved as a car. We inherited an interesting brand. I don’t think we could have done such well-received work if we had inherited, say, Mitsubishi or Toyota. Saturn had a heart, and it was up to us to try to figure out how to express that in a more modern way."
In creating "Sheet Metal," the team at GS&P took its cue from Saturn’s internal corporate motto, "People first." "We thought, ‘How can we bring that phrase to life, visually?’ " Barrett explains. "Then we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we took it literally?’ "
That literal approach—which comes across more whimsical than laugh-out-loud funny—carries through in later Saturn spots. "People Shopping," also directed by Murro, features driverless cars browsing through people dealerships, looking for their ideal owners.
Saturn’s originality comes to life in the recently launched "Box." Helmed by the directing collective Traktor of bicoastal/international Partizan, the fable-like spot depicts a neighborhood in which everyone drives cardboard boxes. No one seems to mind, until a Saturn drives by.
"Traktor does a lot of wild and crazy work, and so the perception of them is that they’re out on some kind of limb," says Barrett, who has worked with the collective on several spots. "In fact, they are incredibly disciplined and smart and thoughtful about the way they approach things. ‘Box’ was so thoroughly mapped out. They went to the [location] once we had found it, and created storyboards. Literally every limb of every tree that was going to be in the frame was represented.
"That was important, because we didn’t have a lot of time and, as it turned out, it rained for the first half of the first day," he adds. "Thank God they had mapped it out like that because everybody had to assume their positions and turn the camera on. You can’t have cardboard boxes in the rain for too long—they’ll wilt on you."
As much as Barrett enjoys working with Traktor and directors like Luca Maroni of Plum Productions, Santa Monica—who helmed the evocative Saturn L Series spots "Car Wash," "Video Store" and "Filling Station"—he reserves his greatest praise for Murro. "Noam is, simply put, the best director I’ve ever worked with," he states. "I feel we discovered him with the ‘Sheet Metal’ spot, and have formed a creative partnership that I’m really looking forward to continuing over the years."
Murro also directed the metaphoric "Childhood," "Prom," "College," and "Wedding," in which a group of young people drive a Saturn ION through various phases of life depicted as surreal neighborhoods. In "Childhood," for example, the group drives down a suburban street peopled solely by kids at play. And in "Wedding," the car passes through streets populated by brides and grooms dancing in their wedding finery.
The director has always collaborated closely with the agency team. "From the very first call [on ‘Sheet Metal’] he became our equal third partner," says Barrett, who adds that Murro helped devise many of the spot’s people-as-car scenarios during pre-production, and perfected them during the shoot. "On the bus scene, we had shot for about an hour and a half in a different neighborhood. We’d shot, overhead, the same group of girls with the bus driver. Mark, the art director, and I were feeling like, ‘This certainly isn’t the best scene we have, but it’s working.’ But it was the most frustrated I’d seen Noam on the shoot. He was just pacing around going, ‘This isn’t working. This is crap.’
"We broke that set and went on to the next location, and Noam went on ahead of us," he recalls. "When we got there, he was setting up the bus shot again. He had the camera down low and he was shooting up that hill as they crossed in front, and it was perfect. He has a relentless desire to make great images."
While he hopes to make more great Saturn images with Murro in the future, Barrett says, "We’re really just in the concept development phase of our next [Saturn spot], so it’s premature to say who we’re going to do it with."
But no matter who winds up directing the spot, it should prove to be intriguing. "We’ve been working with Saturn for fifteen months, and I haven’t once looked back and said, ‘If only we’d produced that idea.’ " Barrett says. "I don’t think there are any ideas on the table that this client failed to see the potential of."
