Lo the battered thumbs of a generation, so cruelly blistered on the unforgiving buttons of their Nintendo Gameboys. A bit dramatic? Probably. The issue at hand is, after all, a mere video game console. But in case you haven’t heard, video games aren’t just for kids anymore. The teens who took up Gameboys a decade ago have yet to put them down, leaving a horde of twentysomethings still hooked on the popular portable system.
It was with this in mind that the creative team at Leo Burnett USA, Chicago, crafted "Moth" for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP. The ad is imbued with wit and a sensibility designed to appeal to an older audience.
"Certainly there is the obvious market of teens and kids," says Dustin Smith, who served as art director on the spot with Mike Andrews. "I think this is starting to branch out and bring in new customers." Matt Horton, the spot’s copywriter adds. "It’s a much more techno-geek sort of product now, versus just a little kid’s game."
As a result, says Smith, "The commercials have become much more sophisticated. It’s not just over-the-top slapstick kid’s humor. It’s a little bit more intelligent."
"Moth" revolves around the notion of light as an attractive force. It begins with a single moth floating languidly through a forest at night. A spare, haunting score (composed by P.J. Hanke of Spank! Music and Sound Design, Chicago and Santa Monica), establishes a vaguely mysterious mood. As the moth drifts through the trees, it comes upon other moths, and they grow in number until the air is thick with the insects. A glowing white light appears at the far end of the woods, and the moths fly toward it. The light grows stronger and larger, finally consuming the screen entirely in a wash of white. Suddenly the light clears, revealing its source—a Gameboy Advance SP floating in midair. The screen fades to black and the tag "Brilliant" appears, followed by "Gameboy Advance SP." An eerie, childlike voice whispers the product’s name.
"The magnetism of light was the idea that we gravitated towards," says Smith, explaining the spot’s development. "We’re all drawn to light—in birth, we go to the light; in death it’s said we go to the light. People are drawn to light, moths are drawn to light, deer are entranced by light, flowers grow toward light. It just seems like there’s a natural attraction of all beings to light."
Conveniently, light also happens to be one of the new console’s primary selling points. The Gameboy Advance SP is Nintendo’s first handheld system to include an internal light, making it possible to give your thumbs a workout even in a darkened room. "That’s why we chose to focus on the light," Smith explains. "That’s the biggest [evolution] in this product."
Visual elements
To take the spot from basic concept to fully fleshed commercial, the agency brought in director Dante Ariola of bicoastal/international Morton Jankel Zander (MJZ), a decision Smith and Horton recount enthusiastically.
"We had looked at a ton of reels and he was definitely far and above our first choice," Smith says. "We were really fortunate that we got to work with him."
"We’d both admired his work," Horton adds. "He’s a great visual storyteller."
It was through Ariola that visual effects house Method, Santa Monica, was brought on board to give life to the moths seen fluttering across the screen. "We had always heard good things about them, but Dante had worked with them and highly recommended them," Smith relates. "You get a guy like Dante to work on a project with you, and you trust his opinion of the people he wants to work with. Pretty much across the board we took his recommendations, and went with them."
From there, the process was quite a collaborative one. "We had written up treatments that were loosely constructed—a basic idea of what the concept was—and then we basically just worked it out together," Horton recalls.
The creatives initially sent Ariola what Smith describes as, "the master plan about the magnetism of light—the notion that moths are drawn to light, and of moths being drawn to the product." Ariola then came back with a treatment, and the two sides went back and forth, hashing out the details. In the end, the final product was quite different from the team’s initial vision.
"Originally, the spot was seen as the product sitting on a picnic table with moths bouncing off the front of something that was glowing—something that looks like a light—and then you pull back to reveal that it’s the product," Smith notes.
After working this idea over with Ariola, it was decided that something more "epic and powerful," as Smith puts it, was needed. "We [came up with] the idea of having it become much more of a journey," he says, and instead of the original static spot, they created an ad where the viewer is carried along with the moth, floating through the trees, drawn inexorably towards the light.
"It’s not just, ‘Oh, this product was sat out on a bench and moths are flying around it,’ " says Smith. "It’s attracting this moth from miles away."
According to Smith and Horton, it’s a concept that will likely see further exploration in future ads. "The power of the light of this product—it making things happen—that’s something that flows into the other spots," Smith says.
Precisely what these other spots are, no one will say just yet. "I think we can say that there will be more work coming," Smith offers. Beyond that, however, the team insists on, as Horton laughingly puts it, "keeping things in the dark."
