A little weird, edgy and entertaining may not by synonymous with words typically associated with insurance companies, but they accurately describe the new viral campaign for Allstate created by Leo Burnett Chicago. The short comedic films directed by Jim Tozzi of T.H.E.M., which can be seen on youtube and www.bergwood.net, star a thirtysomething aspiring college football hero named Bergwood. His dream is to become a star kicker and the films capture Bergwood doing everything from toe exercises and ballet to simulating game day wind conditions in pursuit of his dream.
“The agency came to us with a project for Allstate that was committed to an entertaining story rather than an ad for insurance,” recalled Tozzi. “Obviously the logo and name are all over this, but it’s atypical in my view, and the association is that insurance is entertaining, which is a nice thought.” Tozzi added that in today’s adspace, “everybody is still trying to figure out what works, and I think this does.”
Birth of Bergwood
The evolution of this campaign dates back to 2006, when the team at Leo Burnett produced some TV spots featuring the Bergwood character as a way to advertise to college football fans.
“His love of college football got him into some unfortunate situations where his car ended up getting wrecked. People seemed to like the character and we had the idea to extend the character online,” explained Tony Pawela, agency writer. “So we also put together an animated series online following the Bergwood character.”
For this year’s viral campaign, Allstate was looking to take the Bergwood character to yet another level and do something to promote its sponsorship of college football and the championship game. The insurance company also has its logo on nets behind field goal posts inside stadiums and wanted to somehow work them into this year’s campaign. “So we had the idea that Bergwood used an Allstate net as one of the devices to help him train to become a kicker,” Pawela said.
Agency producer Vincent Geraghty had worked with Tozzi on an award-winning TV campaign in the past and got in touch with the director about the new viral campaign.
The agency sent Tozzi four scripts and he added some of his own ideas to the mix. He dove deep into the world of Bergwood, fleshing out the character and developing a backstory involving his parents, complete with archival footage of him from the ’80s, and introducing a super fan he never knew he had.
“We really clicked with the agency. We got comfortable with each other pretty quickly. We could throw ideas out and not worry about stepping on each other’s toes. It was really satisfying that we could pretty much try anything. That was nice,” said Tozzi, who shot the films on HD with a Panasonic P2 camera. The three-day shoot was tight but left room for improvisation.
“Andrew Hawtry, who plays Bergwood, was so good,” assessed Tozzi. “He’s very professional but so good at improv. We would come up with things and throw it at him. He would not only do it but add some kind of weird spin that made it even more ridiculous. It turned out very well because of that.”
Just how well did the films turn out. At press time, “Intro,” the first of the six films, was currently ranking in the Top 10 Comedy Pieces on YouTube and it received 10,000 hits the first day on the website.
Tony Harding, founder/executive producer of T.H.E.M., pointed out that one of the complaints industrywide currently is that the viral platform by default compromises the production value.
“We’re not of that mind, and our experience with TV has allowed us to disprove the theory,” he said. Since its inception last year, T.H.E.M. has been developing its own longform content, shooting reality series teasers, pilots and documentaries, and pitching shows to several networks including NBC, VH-1, TLC, SPIKE and FUEL.
“Producing reality TV offers great synergy to what we are doing in viral marketing,” Harding added, citing Mission Manband (VH-1) among other examples. Beyond his endeavors with T.H.E.M., Tozzi’s longform work extends to Wondershowzen (MTV2) and Xavier: Renegade Angel (which premiered Nov. 1 on Adult Swim).
Team spirit In addition to having experience with TV, Harding believes the project turned out as well as it did because of the team spirit that everyone involved exuded, which was even evident on the eve of a full weekend of editing at the T.H.E.M facility. Agency creatives arrived in New York Friday after shooting through Wednesday and when Tozzi suggested a “Kicker in Training” title sequence using an old school magnetic football game, they jumped on board.
“They were hoping to have stuff they could approve Monday so the films could be posted online Wednesday. So Vincent Geraghty and I are online trying to find a place locally to get five football games so we would have enough players. We finally found it at a toy store in Wayne, New Jersey,” Harding said. “We ran out there and picked out the game elements we’d use, spray-painted the figures white, with the Allstate logo, and shot it in our office.
“It was so cool to have all hands on deck. It lends to the realness of it and it lends to the reason why people might actually look at films on the site and say, ‘let me forward them to a friend.’ It was just a fun idea to add more challenges to a 72-hour postproduction marathon. But we were all in and it shows.”
He added that they could never have pulled the project off without producer Gary Kout and gave kudos to Tozzi for being ” a budget-friendly director who knows how to keep it together. “So this was a good team for this type of project,” Harding said.
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