Norman Rockwell once said, "If your image does not work, put a dog in it. If it still does not work, put a bandage on the dog." Minus the bandage, the same argument could be made for putting kids in advertising. For one, the spontaneity derived from uninhibited wee ones makes for some classic, unscripted moments. And two, anyone under three feet tall is just plain cute.
Take, for instance, the recent campaign for Northern California-based Berkeley Farms Dairy, out of Rick Johnson & Company, Albuquerque, N.M. The 25-year-old ad agency has had the Berkeley Farms account for two years, handling advertising for the dairy’s full line of products, including cheese, cream, yogurt, eggs and milk. This was to be the agency’s first television effort for the dairy’s milk, focusing on the fact that Berkeley Farms milk is produced naturally, without rBST, the synthetic bovine growth hormone.
According to Scott Johnson, the creative director at agency Rick Johnson & Company, the ad shop tested every possible idea before deciding to use kids as the focal point for the spots. "Kids drink a lot of milk," he noted simply.
As associate creative director/copywriter Sam Maclay explains, "Kids are the toughest consumers of all; that’s why we have them interrogating the cow. It’s about getting to know the milk." The resulting campaign, produced by agency producer Sterling Grant Jr., was conceived by Maclay and art directors Mike Penn and Tim Galles (Galles has since left the company), under the creative direction of Johnson.
Each of the three :30s—"Mallory," "Casey" and "Ulpiano"—features a child between the ages of four and six asking a cow questions such as, "How do you say ‘moo’ in Spanish?" "Do you snore?" "Do you wear pants?" and "Can you make me a milkshake?" The latter question, posed by one young actress, Mallory Tutton, came accompanied by an all-over body jiggle that would put Elvis to shame—a move that was completely improvised. "That’s the kind of magic moment you’re hoping for that you can’t really coach the kid in," relates Johnson. At all the spots’ conclusion, there is a quick product shot and a voiceover explaining the milk’s purity.
Director Bob Ebel, who helmed the Berkeley Farms package, has his own production company, Ebel Productions, Chicago, which specializes in kid-oriented commercials. He says that, generally, he looks for kids that are not just cute: "We want the ones who have a curiosity and a wealth of personality."
When it came to casting the commercials, the agency deferred to Ebel, whose company has its own in-house casting arm, called Bass Casting. "[Ebel] has a lot of experience and we put our trust in him," says Maclay. "He could look at a kid and say, ‘I know that kid and he’s not going to do well with a cow.’ "
Ebel notes that he’s constantly looking for new talent, even if he and his staff don’t have a specific project in mind. Once a month Bass Casting holds open casting calls, and advertises on local radio and in newspapers to get people in the door. When Ebel is working on a particular commercial, Bass Casting will look at up to 1,500 kids to find the right one. This process has enabled Ebel to build a roster of children he knows he can call on when the right job comes up, as was the case with Berkeley Farms. "We already knew most of the kids we brought out for Berkeley Farms," reports Ebel.
While a child’s personality is, indeed, important, it became apparent to Ebel two days before the shoot that a certain amount of fearlessness among the tykes was going to be required for these spots, mainly because the cow they had cast weighed 2,300 lbs. When Ebel and his crew headed out to do a tech scout of the barn where they would shoot, just northwest of Chicago, he made sure the cow was there and took a seven-year-old with him to gauge the boy’s reaction. "He was terrified," says Ebel. "Once I saw the cow, I completely changed my thinking. It was huge."
While the agency had prepared questions for the kids to ask the cow, in the original plan there was room for improvisation. But after seeing the creature’s intimidating size, Ebel asked the agency to pull out the list of questions it had prepared for the kids, and he directed the children so it would appear that they were asking these questions for the first time. "Bob [Ebel] became the truth barometer for what we’d written. He knew what a kid would and wouldn’t say," recalls Maclay.
Leaving nothing to chance, Ebel brought eight kids with him on the day of the shoot and set them up to play in a RV outside the barn. Then he began prepping them for their encounter with their bovine co-star. "Bob told all these kids that this was a talking cow and you had to speak to this cow just right to get it to talk back to you," recalls Johnson. The kids were also given cow toys and children’s books about where milk comes from to get them fired up to meet the animal.
But you know what they say about the best-laid plans … According to Ebel, three out of the eight kids walked into the barn and walked right out. "To Bob’s credit, he’d tell the mom, ‘Thanks a lot, go pick up your check,’ and he sent them home. He doesn’t want to traumatize them any more," says Johnson.
There were other unforeseen factors to deal with. It was January in Chicago, and the temperature the day of the shoot was literally 10 degrees. "We’re shooting for a Northern California client and there’s [steam] coming out of the kids’ and cow’s mouths," Johnson recalls. According to Ebel, it took 12 torpedo heaters to warm the barn to a point where the cow’s breath was no longer visible. "You learn a lot about anatomy when you’re doing something like this," relates Johnson, who laughs about it now. "Cows are so much bigger than us that they will continue to produce [steam] at a higher temperature because the air coming from deep within the cow is so much warmer. It became enormously difficult and time consuming to heat this barn."
Once the logistics of shooting with a 2,300-pound cow in a freezing cold barn with kids who were a fraction of the animal’s size were worked out, the shoot itself went smoothly. Ebel stood behind the cow, next to the cameraman, and played a game with the youngsters that he calls "parrot," in which he feeds them a line and they have to repeat it back to him.
One would think that after a long day of shooting in the dead of winter, the kids would get restless and cranky, but Ebel insists that these children are tough. "They’re attention span is really long and they’re pretty sharp," he notes. "That’s part of the reason why we go through such extensive casting—because we’re looking for the kids who will last."
While there are no definite plans in the works to continue with the Berkeley Farms campaign, which is currently airing in Northern California, Johnson is quite willing to do it all over again. "We thought it was a lot of fun to work with the kids. The client likes them and we expect them to get good results, so there’s a good chance we’d do more of these in the future," states Johnson, adding that the one thing he will not miss is standing around in that cold barn.
