Ogilvy & Mather’s new campaign for Time Warner Cable features three viral video ads that extend the TV campaign with longer form spots that provide the opportunity for “a little more fun,” according to Ogilvy’s group creative director Tommy Henvey. The spots were produced by Biscuit Filmworks, Los Angeles.
The fun revolves around the star of the spots, Mike O’Malley, a Los Angeles-based actor and comedian who generates laughs by playing with a stuffed monkey, a finger apparatus and a guitar while promoting Time Warner Cable benefits. O’Malley starts “Guitar” by saying he can’t write music or play a guitar, before singing an original song and jamming on the guitar, “Time Warner Cable doesn’t charge for HD, why would you want satellite TV?”
“We propped the house and wrote little bits and recorded them,” Henvey said of the shoot. “We found the monkey and wrote a script about a happy monkey and the finger was another bit.”
“Monkey,” “Finger” and “Guitar” are the titles of the spots, which run from 43 to 52 seconds, longer than the TV :30s. “It was great on the creative side, because you didn’t have to worry about cutting them to 30 seconds,” he said. “We said, should we cut them to :30, but you lose so much by cutting them so there’s no cuts in any of the spots.”
The agency shot seven TV :30s also starring O’Malley, which were “more involved, with other people in them,” Henvey said. “The web virals were different for the digital realm, not long-form TV spots.”
Clay Weiner, who directed the films for Biscuit Filmworks, said they were shot in four days in late March in Los Angeles with dual Panasonic HDX900 cameras that permitted a straight shoot. “In performance centric pieces I like not having to cut every :40 seconds, re-slate and reset,” he said.
The Monkey and Finger videos can be attributable to Weiner. “I brought a prop truck to set that was jam-packed with all these hysterical things. That insured we had a lot of funny to throw in the mix. I love improvisation, it’s part of my schooling, and of all of the spots we walked away with, the loosest ones worked best.”
The humorous viral videos present the cable TV product in a favorable light. “There’s a lot of competitive stuff on the air that is hard hitting and loses heart about why you care,” Henvey said. “These spots have style and humanity and a bit of fun. You get the message because O’Malley’s not talking to you, he’s telling you a story and it’s nice to see a happy monkey on his lap.”
The viral spots were posted on YouTube May 6 and the Timewarner.com home page May 9. They followed the TV spots, which went live April 18.
Raoul Peck Resurrects A Once-Forgotten Anti-Apartheid Photographer In “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found”
When the photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 at the age of 49 from pancreatic cancer at a Manhattan hospital, his death was little noted.
Cole, one of the most important chroniclers of apartheid-era South Africa, was by then mostly forgotten and penniless. Banned by his native country after the publication of his pioneering photography book "House of Bondage," Cole had emigrated in 1966 to the United States. But his life in exile gradually disintegrated into intermittent homelessness. A six-paragraph obituary in The New York Times ran alongside a list of death notices.
But Cole receives a vibrant and stirring resurrection in Raoul Peck's new film "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found," narrated in Cole's own words and voiced by LaKeith Stanfield. The film, which opens in theaters Friday, is laced throughout with Cole's photographs, many of them not before seen publicly.
As he did in his Oscar-nominated James Baldwin documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," the Haitian-born Peck shares screenwriting credit with his subject. "Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is drawn from Cole's own writings. In words and images, Peck brings the tragic story of Cole to vivid life, reopening the lens through which Cole so perceptively saw injustice and humanity.
"Film is a political tool for me," Peck said in a recent interview over lunch in Manhattan. "My job is to go to the widest audience possible and try to give them something to help them understand where they are, what they are doing, what role they are playing. It's about my fight today. I don't care about the past."
"Ernest Cole: Lost and Found" is a movie layered with meaning that goes beyond Cole's work. It asks questions not just about the societies Cole documented but of how he was treated as an artist,... Read More