Beware, gentle consumer. Danger lurks. But FOX Sports has taken the liberty of sending out a warning. In an ad campaign created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, San Francisco, and directed by Baker Smith of Santa Monica-based Harvest, FOX informs viewers that products made during the month of October are bound to malfunction. Why? Because assembly-line workers across the country will be watching Major League Baseball’s World Series on TV, rather than watching what they’re doing.
Take the :30 "Nail Gun," for instance. The ad finds a regular-looking guy at work in his garage. He cocks his brand-new nail gun and attempts to fasten two pieces of wood, but the tool doesn’t work. Seeking the cause of the problem, he pulls the trigger a few times, then turns the gun over, staring right down its shaft and clicking some more. Discerning nothing, he puts the tool down and picks up a sheet of instructions and the telephone, as if to call the manufacturer’s customer help line.
He doesn’t get very far, because the gun begins shooting nails willy-nilly, first shattering a series of mason jars hanging just past his ear. He dives to the floor, yelling, as the rapid fire of nails jerks the gun about, barely missing several innocent bystanders. Various articles in the garage crash to the floor. Frantically crawling away, the tool owner shouts a warning to his wife, who has opened the side door into the garage at the wrong time. Screams are heard as a neighbor and his dog walking past the house become part of the chaos.
Cut to a scene inside a factory, where an assembly-line employee inattentively screws parts into a nail gun—often missing the tool entirely—without taking his eyes from the television screen. As we close in on footage from the New York Yankees’ victory over the Atlanta Braves during the 1996 World Series, the supered tag warns, "MLB Playoffs are coming."
"Nail Gun" is one of three spots that broke nationally on Aug. 17. The campaign also includes "Boat" and "Leaf Blower."
"We wanted to get people really psyched about the playoffs, and so we decided to start the campaign earlier," noted Eric Margraf, senior VP of marketing at FOX Sports. "We found that people have really big memories of baseball, and that most of those memories are from moments that occurred during the post season. During October, the world stops to watch baseball, and we wanted to emphasize that through a fun campaign."
Much of FOX Sports’ advertising comes out of Cliff Freeman and Partners, New York, but this assignment went to TBWA/ Chiat/Day because, Margraf said, "We had admired their work for a while and we have a lot of projects to do."
The agency team, which included art directors/copywriters Eric King and Jeff Labbe and copywriter Scott Wild, built the campaign around people’s passion for baseball. "It’s about obsession with the game," stated Labbe. "When the playoffs are on, if you’re a fan, nothing stops you from watching."
That notion led the creatives to contemplate what would happen if a person had to do something during the broadcast. "If you had to brush your teeth, you’d probably miss your mouth," suggested King. "As we began exaggerating that idea, and seeing how far it could go, what occurred to us was that warning [commonly seen on pharmaceutical drug labels] about not operating heavy machinery." Hence the scenarios created by a malfunctioning nail gun, leaf blower and boat.
The creatives turned to Smith to helm the spots because, King said, "his sensibilities were a nice match to the mood and the tone of what we were trying to create. He’s really good at telling a clean, simple story."
The director wasn’t a hard sell. "I looked at the boards and said, ‘I’m in,’ " he told SHOOT. Of the three spots, he characterized "Nail Gun" as "more blatantly violent," and perhaps also the ad that rings the most true. "We can all visualize that—the tool that doesn’t work, so you bang on it."
When it came to finding the Everyman who would personify human foolishness, Smith pushed for actors who weren’t familiar to audiences. "His casting was dead on," Labbe stated.
"There were a lot of actors who perhaps could have made us laugh a bit more," added King, "but they were more familiar. Baker kept saying we had to have original faces that no one had seen before; that turned out great."
"The idea was for the campaign to be observational, and not try to become incredibly cinematic," explained agency executive creative director Chuck McBride. "We wanted to treat it as pedestrian as possible, to create a simple frame and then throw as much chaos into it as possible."
Not surprisingly, then, the production itself had moments of chaos as well. "It was fun and crazy at the same time," said Smith of the one-day shoot in Los Angeles. (The entire campaign was shot over four days, one day per spot, with an additional day dedicated to filming the factory interiors.) "We had a lot of physical and in-camera effects," the director continued. "There were explosions and animals. And when you combine all that—I don’t have a lot of hair, but what I do have I pulled at."
No nails were actually fired, yet there was a sense of danger on set. The nail gun was rigged to gyrate and flail about on its own—"You could really visualize a nail skimming across your head," recounted Smith—while squibs created the explosions and smoke effects, at one point prompting the dog to flee the set. It took the trainer two hours to find him.
But even before those scenes were filmed, tensions ran high on the set. "It was actually kind of scary," Smith recalled. Especially when the actor—ad-libbing for the camera—pointed the nail gun to his face. "That was a nice little find," McBride said of the performance. "When the actor did that, we all went, ‘Oh, my God. Are you sure that thing’s unplugged?’ "
