What’s cool about it is that it came right out of the product," says Joe Sweet, co-group creative director/copywriter at Fallon, Minneapolis. Sweet is referring to the idea behind "Kung Fu" and "Mannequin," two action/ adventure-themed ads that promote the new i-Control setting system for Timex watches.
The cinematic-looking ads were helmed by feature director Tim Burton (Batman, Sleepy Hollow), who is represented for spots by A Band Apart 35mm, Los Angeles.
"I think we found ourselves saying, ‘[The watches] are ridiculously easy to use,’ " explains Sweet. "It occurred to us that if we showed people in difficult situations, easily setting the watch, that could make for a campaign. You know it’s a good idea when suddenly you can think of a thousand cool executions right off the top of your head." The campaign began with print ads, and Sweet and art director David Carter then created the commercials along the same lines.
"Kung Fu," which is currently airing on TV and in movie theaters, opens with a young man in a suit being pursued by a pair of vinyl-clad villains with long claws. The man leaps off a building into a dark alley, and the bad guys follow suit. He uses martial arts-type moves to battle them, and at one point, he is able to break away from the fighting and quickly set the alarms on the bad guys’ watches. When the alarms go off, the evil pair become distracted, allowing the man to vanquish them. A moment later, another baddie shows up, only to be similarly defeated. Victorious, the man coolly blows some dust off his timepiece. The ad’s tagline: "Ridiculously easy to use."
"Mannequin," which will air in September, finds a woman being chased by a villain. She runs into a room full of dummies, places the Timex watches on their wrists and hides in plain sight. When the villain hears watch alarms go off, he turns and swings, sure he has captured his quarryabut winds up only decapitating two mannequins. Suddenly, he hears another alarm and spies the watch on the woman’s ankle. But it’s too late: she takes care of him with one swift kick, then smiles as she readjusts her watch.
Why the action movie setting? "That came out of us asking ourselves, ‘Who’s the audience?’ It’s young MTV guys, eighteen to thirty-year-olds. What are they into? They’re into action/adventure films. There are all kinds of absurdly difficult situations that heroes get themselves into in those movies," Sweet explains.
Fallon put together a special presentation to get the right director interested in the project. "We were speaking to several directors," Sweet says, "and we took extra care to make the storyboards appealingawe had a whole booklet. It needed to be a self-contained advertisement to get a director excited."
The creatives went with Burton, who has directed only one other spotaHollywood Gum’s "Gnome" via Euro RSCG, Paris, and produced by A Band Apart 35mm and Hamster Publicite, Paris. "He said the right thing," explains Sweet of Burton. "He said, ‘I think it’s a great idea. The story beats are all there, and I don’t want to reinvent your wheel. I just want to make it as cool as possible.’
"Some of the other directors were rewriting the story," he continues. "It was a little disheartening to hear some people rewriting the spots. Sometimes you want that, and you leave it vague, and you want the director to fill in the gaps. [In this case] we thought the major story beats were pretty solid, pretty efficient."
