Honey, I’m home!" For most of us, the phrase brings to mind warm and fuzzy images of Ricky Ricardo, Ward Cleaver or Ralph Kramden greeting his TV sweetheart after a long day at the office. But for John Borchardt, senior VP/executive producer at Campbell Mithun, Minneapolis, "I’m Home" signified many long days at the office.
An Andersen Windows spot entitled "I’m Home" features nine clips of classic TV characters uttering variations of the phrase. The project took about eight months from start to finish, noted Borchardt, adding that much of that time was spent negotiating rights. "To try and coordinate all the pieces, to get the contracts all signed in time, to have everyone agree to the same usage for the same amount of time—to do all that within the budget, and then to make something that was presentable and memorable on television was quite a challenge," he relates. "I’m proud of what everybody here did to make it work."
Conceived by art director Kelly Gothier and copywriter Bill Johnson, and cut by Dave Bratter of editorial house Electric Eye, Minneapolis, "I’m Home" begins with a clip of I Love Lucy’s Ricky, and includes footage of such small-screen icons as Ralph Kramden (The Honeymooners), Herman Munster (The Munsters), Fred Flintstone (The Flintstones) and Louise Jefferson (The Jeffersons).
The ad also incorporates some self-referential nostalgia: images from the 1991 Andersen Windows spot "Experience of Light," directed by Jim Giddens, who is now a director at bicoastal Villains. At the end of "I’m Home," a voiceover states that for 100 years, Andersen Windows has helped make houses into homes.
"It is a brand commercial," explains George Halvorson, Campbell Mithun’s executive VP/deputy creative officer, of "I’m Home," which was launched in conjunction with Andersen Windows’ 100th anniversary. "The genesis for the idea came as we looked at the importance of the home. It’s very deep, and I think it’s something that’s universal. It’s woven throughout our pop culture, and it plays such an important role in our lives. When people are dying, what do they want to do? They don’t want money, they don’t want to go to the Riviera, they want to go home. So that was where the idea came from—how powerful [home] really is, and ultimately the role that Andersen plays in that."
Johnson, the spot’s copywriter, came up with the idea of using clips from classic TV shows. "The germ of the idea was Desi Arnaz saying, ‘Lucy, I’m home,’ " Borchardt recalls. "Bill Johnson thought, there’s got to be a lot of other programs where [characters] have said something like that."
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Finding those programs, however, was very hard. "You can go to video stores and rent a few of them, but where else do you find them?" Borchardt says. Fortunately, he found Historic Films, New York, instead. "They have a library of feature films, so we called them and said, ‘How do we find television shows?’ " he recalls. "[Historic Films president] Joe Lauro offered to get involved in the project. Joe got his researchers to go through old television shows and old movies as well, and they sent us clip after clip after clip after clip. We looked at hundreds of them."
Borchardt says the Historic Films staff "found a range of material—not just people saying, ‘I’m home,’ but phrases like ‘Hi everybody,’ and ‘What’s for dinner?’ It was just about anybody walking through the door of a house and giving some kind of greeting," he relates. "We weren’t sure, at that point, how much we were going to find and what was going to work, so we started painting with pretty broad strokes. Then we narrowed it down."
"We wanted to create a montage of images and give it an eclectic feel," Halvorson adds. "Part of that was making sure we had black-and-white film, as well as color film. We also wanted animation, as well as photographic treatment, and we wanted to make sure we had men and women [delivering the greetings]. And then all those clips had to be quickly identifiable."
As soon as a clip was chosen, Borchardt began to work on securing the rights. "It was kind of a double-edged sword," he remembers. "We had to negotiate not only with the producers, who owned the show, but also with the talent—or with the estate of the talent—featured in the clip."
Those negotiations were often time-consuming. "Estates are in no hurry to negotiate things like this because they don’t get approached that often," Borchardt notes, adding that negotiations didn’t always come to fruition. "On Father Knows Best, they opened every show with Robert Young coming through the door and saying, ‘Honey, I’m home.’ It was a perfect clip to use," he says. "The producers gave us permission to use it, but the estate of Robert Young said, ‘No, the family’s agreed that we would never let [Young’s image] be used for commercial purposes.’ So, poof, it was out."
For the producer and the creative team, flexibility paid off. "It was a montage that was changing until it was done," Borchardt reports. "We didn’t set out in a specific direction and go, ‘We’ve got to get that.’ It was more like, if we had the piece with Jackie Gleason from The Honeymooners, we knew we didn’t want to get something else just like it because we’d covered it already. As we found pieces that worked, and pieces that didn’t or pieces that we couldn’t have, we put the combination together."
Halvorson was pleased with the results. "There’s a classic, timeless quality to many of the shows and the performers in the spot," he points out. "I think that, by using those images and associating them with Andersen, it elevates the brand to a sort of classic status as well."
According to Borchardt and Halvorson, "I’m Home" wouldn’t have been possible were it not for the patience of the client. "We told them going into this that it was going to take time," Halvorson says. "We said, ‘If you’re expecting answers tomorrow morning, we probably should not do this project.’ But they were really good about it. I’ve got to give them a lot of credit."
"When the project first started, we didn’t know what was available," Borchardt adds. "We didn’t know if it was all going to be affordable and produce-able into one package, so it was really a leap of faith on [Andersen’s] part. We met with them weekly for months and said, ‘Here’s what we’ve got, here’s what we’re trying to get, here’s what we didn’t get,’ and they were great about it."
While there are no plans for similar spots in the future—"Not unless we want John to commit suicide," quipped Halvorson—the deputy creative officer says that it was, all in all, a good experience. "We knew going into this that it was going to be challenging," he notes. "But I’m very glad it worked out as well as it did."
