Unless you watch your public-access channel a lot, the new campaign for Snapple is not the kind of thing you see on television every day. In it, real bottles of the beverage are personified. Well, not just personified. The lemon, lime and apple-flavored juices and teas are personified very poorly. But that’s the point. The ads—which feature bottles crudely dressed in tiny wigs and jewelry, acting out various scenarios—look like the work of a Snapple devotee who has way too much time on his hands.
"Snapple was looking to go back to [the brand’s original] quirky, homemade feeling," said David Rosen, VP/associate creative director/copywriter at Snapple’s agency, Deutsch New York. "We wanted to make advertising that looked as if two guys who worked at Snapple had to create the campaign, and did it by cutting wigs off Barbie dolls and gluing them on the bottles."
In the :15 "Skateboard," for instance, a male ice tea bottle rides his skateboard down a sidewalk to the tune of a hip-hop score composed by Pete Min and Carla Capretto of Duotone Audio Group, New York. As the skateboarder nears a couple of female Snapple hipsters, he tries to impress the babes, leaping up and skating down the handrail of a broad concrete stairway. But this is a dangerous sport. He loses control of his board, and we hear his off-camera wipeout. Then his board and helmet are thrown back onto the steps, followed by a large splash of ice tea. The Snapplettes peer down towards the accident scene as an ambulance siren is heard in the distance.
Cut to a scene inside a hospital room. It’s not a pretty sight: the skateboarder lying still on a bed, a bandage wrapped around his top where his helmet had been. A miniature bottle of Snapple, hung upside-down next to the bed, serves as an I.V., while a Snapple nurse, her hair in a bun, stands beside the injured bottle. She shakes her head at him despondently. As in all the spots, "Skateboard" ends with a close-up shot of a Snapple bottle cap, which pops in that familiar way that Snapple bottles do when opened. The cap logo treatment was done at Eyeball NYC, New York.
Directed by Dayton/Faris (Jonathan and Valerie, respectively) of bicoastal Bob Industries, Snapple’s "Real Experiences" campaign also comprises "Boy Band," "Shower," "UFO," "Breakdance" and "House Party." All the spots are 15 or 20 seconds in length; there are also 5- and/or 10-second versions of "Shower," "Breakdance" and "House Party." The campaign began airing April 15.
Part of the campaign’s genius can be found in the details—like the aforementioned Snapple I.V., or the miniature stickers covering the bottom of the skateboard. Many of these particulars, including the I.V. (actually a refrigerator magnet), were included in the original scripts. But, according to Deutsch VP/associate creative director/art director Scott Bassen, the agency and production teams "never stopped coming up with ideas." Added Rosen, "We realized Dayton and Faris were the right directors to do this because they went off and came back with more details and pop culture references. They were really into it. They’re a hip couple of kids." The creatives also already had a working relationship with Dayton/Faris, having teamed with the directors on an Ikea campaign in which sets from Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch are redecorated.
The Snapple campaign was shot over three days at Occidental Studios, Hollywood, but the outdoor sequences in "Skateboard" were filmed on location in Hollywood, near the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Vine. Agency producer Bruce Andreini and the directors explained that an optical illusion of sorts—a "classic forced perspective," according to Dayton—made the miniature stairwell appear to be part of the life-size landscape. "It’s the same way they did the old monster movies like King Kong," Dayton noted. To disguise the puppetry tricks used to manipulate the bottles, such as cables, rods and an occasional hand, frames were cropped as much as possible. A few leftover traces of the puppeteers were painted out in postproduction.
"Getting into the mind of an amateur filmmaker" is what most attracted Faris to the campaign. "We tried to make the campaign as if this filmmaker really put his heart and soul into it," she explained. "So it shouldn’t look too thrown-away, because he or she put a lot of care into making it." On the other hand, the spots wouldn’t ring true if they had high production values. To add to the campaign’s amateurish feel, the ads were lensed on digital video. Dayton also singled out freelance production designer Samantha Gore for doing "an amazing job" of finding the elusive middle ground between what’s good and bad, particularly given that "this wasn’t a job rolling in money."
The commercials also came with time constraints. Bassen and Rosen noted that the spots’ brevity serves three primary purposes. For one, the less-expensive media buy meant money that could be spent making additional ads. As well, the spots—particularly the :10 and :05 versions—will likely stand out in a landscape of :30s. Finally, their conciseness will, hopefully, leave viewers wanting more. Jonathan Smalheiser of 3 Fingered Louie, New York, cut the ads.
The tight edits were less hard to achieve than they might otherwise have been, however, because the Snapple bottles were featured in every scene. "Every shot was a product shot," Dayton noted. "So we could just concentrate on the story and not worry about the gratuitous product placement."
But working with bottles has its challenges. In "Skateboard," the most difficult aspect of filming involved the sequence in which the skateboarder bottle falls. For one thing, the miniature skateboard—of which the team only had two—kept breaking, and had to be jury-rigged back together, according to Faris. Precious time was also spent figuring out the proper way to puppeteer the bottle and skateboard onto and then off the handrail. Concerns that the bottle would break and soak the set added to the pressure. As well, the timing of the crash and its aftermath—the flying helmet, skateboard and splash of ice tea—had to be worked out. Then questions arose regarding how to splash the ice tea on the stairwell.
"You just don’t know how hard a splash is going to be," Faris explained. Through trial and error, she continued, they learned that "there was a certain way that was funny. Squirting it out of a bottle was funnier than tossing it from a bowl. Don’t ask me why. Comedy is so elusive."
