Celebrities such as Gene Kelly, Paul Newman, Christopher Reeve, Meg Ryan, Pierce Brosnan, Sharon Stone and Gwyneth Paltrow have appeared in ad campaigns for Spanish cava producer Freixenet over the years. For decades it’s been the most expected campaign every Christmas. ‘So who’s this year’s Freixenet star?’ was in everyone’s mouth every Christmas,” said Alex Martinez, creative director at JWT Barcelona, Freizenet’s advertising agency.
This year the creative team at JWT wanted a star behind the camera as the brand reached out to a new web-based audience with a short film that pays homage to Alfred Hitchcock and promotes Freixenet’s sparkling wine Carta Nevada Reserva. They aimed high and tapped acclaimed filmmaker Martin Scorsese to direct the piece. He also stars in the film.
In the nine-and-a-half-minute film entitled The Key to Reserva, which launched on YouTube, we see Scorsese discussing an apparently unfinished Hitchcock project, which he proposes to film himself. After some Hitchcockian opening credits, it cuts to a young man in a balcony box in New York’s Carnegie Hall as he attempts to locate a key that will open the briefcase he is carrying, which contains a bottle of the sparkling wine. Having secured the key, fought off a bad guy, opened the bottle and won over a beautiful woman, the young man gives way to Scorsese who talks about what Hitchcock would have made of it all.
The film has hints of The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, Rear Window and The Birds and features the sinister orchestral score of North by Northwest. The film, which can be downloaded from Freixenet’s web page marks a new era in Freixenet’s advertising. JWT wanted to place more value on the product itself and their intention is that Freixenet’s Carta Nevada Reserva cava moves on from being a mere advertising product to a position where it is seen in its true light: a top level cultural product.
“Never before has art been so close to and tied in with advertising,” said Martinez. “We wanted to produce something that would be pure entertainment, something that was true to our philosophy that it’s not enough now to ‘buy’ audience time–we need to create advertising that the audience chooses to spend time with. While working on a campaign for Freixenet’s brand Cordon Negro, the client asked JWT about its point of view about its main brand, Carta Nevada cava. JWT proposed to move the center of the campaign from TV to cinema and Internet, from a commercial to a piece of art Martinez pointed out that JWT developed a pre-campaign in order to manage and increase the expectation, including mailings to warm up media interest, events, etc.
For the mass media campaign they developed a poster for the film, two TV spots advertising the film and driving people to the Freixenet.es web site, a blog of the campaign (scorseseyfreixenet.com) and print ads. He admitted it wasn’t a piece of cake to land Scorsese, but it was well worth the trouble as it was rewarding to work with him.
“We all knew the only chance to get a master like Scorsese was to involve him in the creative process. We didn’t want a star to film our ad. We wanted a piece of his filmography, and we wanted him fully excited about that. I’m pretty sure what we’ve got excites equally JWT, Freixenet and Martin Scorsese. That’ what I call magic,” he said.
In terms of technical challenges, everyone involved was careful about every detail, according to Martinez. “It’s Scorsese’s way of working. We all knew the filmmaker, now I can say I know the film addict. It’s absolutely amazing the way the Technicolor effect has been done. Basically it’s about separating the essential colors in order to mix them two by two, and remix it all again. The result is outstanding. He also gave kudos to DP Harris Savides’ light. “And the editing is the wonderful work of her majesty Thelma Shoonmaker,” Martinez said.
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