By Christine Champagne

It isn’t easy to live with cable, and no one should have to. That’s the message cleverly conveyed in “Hold Please” (:30), one spot in a campaign for satellite TV provider DirecTV out of BBDO West, Los Angeles and San Francisco, that finds an average guy named Stan being annoyed and inconvenienced by his roommate, Otto, who just happens to be a cable guy.
    As we see in the spots, Otto (always in his cable company uniform) is unreliable and inconsiderate, failing to pick up his roommate at the airport in one spot and asking his roommate’s girlfriend out on a date in another.
    In “Hold Please,” Otto and Stan are in the living room–Otto is reading on the couch, Stan is at a desk working on his laptop–when the phone rings.
    Otto picks up, immediately says, “Hold please,” then puts the phone down and returns to his reclining position on the couch.
    Apparently, he has no intention of picking the phone back up, so Stan finally asks who is on the line. “I don’t know,” Otto replies.
    Stan picks up the phone and discovers it is his mother, who is obviously well aware of Otto. “Yeah, that was him,” Stan tells her. “He’s still living here.”
    A graphic appears on the screen that reads: “Nobody should have to live with cable.”
    Cut to the DirecTV logo.

THE ODD COUPLE
    In addition to delivering the message that no one should have to live with cable, BBDO West executive creative director Jim Lesser (who worked on the campaign with copywriter James Brown, associate creative director Tito Melega, and art director Jason Roberts) said it was also important that “Hold Please” and the rest of the spots in the DirecTV campaign entertain viewers, hence the creation of TV’s newest odd couple. “DirecTV’s reason for being is to entertain you, and every piece of communication they make has to live up to that promise. So we wanted the campaign to be as entertaining as the product,” Lesser explained.
    Lesser is a satellite TV convert himself, by the way. “You have to put up with a lot of b.s. when you have cable. I switched to DirecTV when I was tired of putting up with this b.s. several years ago, and then coincidentally got to work on this project,” he shared.
    As you might imagine, the client loved that Lesser had a real passion for its service and the project.
    In turn, the agency sought a director who would dive into the DirecTV project with enthusiasm, and they found that and more in director Michael Downing, who is represented by Harvest, Santa Monica, Calif. Downing not only brought a knack for humor to the job, according to Lesser, but a strong sense of casting.
    “The whole campaign lived or died on the casting,” Downing reflected, noting that it was crucial that the character of Otto in particular seemed not like a buffoon or a caricature but a real guy.
    After an extensive casting call, Lesser found a handful of actors who were possible Stans and a handful of actors who were possible Ottos, then in callbacks experimented with different pairings. Ultimately, Robert Bagnall was cast as Stan, and James Tilton won the role of Otto.
    With the actors cast, Downing and DP Anthony Wolberg shot a total of seven DirecTV spots, including “Hold Please,” on location in a house in Los Angeles over the course of two days.
    In terms of set-ups, Downing kept everything simple so that the focus would be on the performances, capturing all of the action in a wide shot, then going in for medium shots.
    After his actors nailed the scripted lines, Downing kept the camera rolling, feeding them ideas for improv.
    To help them get into character, Downing worked with the actors on creating backstories for their alter egos. “We decided that they had known each other for quite awhile, that the mother even knew who [Otto] was, and they were kind of just stuck together out of convenience,” Downing shared.
    While we know where Otto works, what does Stan do for a living? “As far as his job, we were struggling with it. Was he working in insurance? We didn’t want it to be super bland, so we were trying to figure out something that seemed a little cool,” Downing said. “We finally handed it over to [the actor who plays Stan] in the end to decide for himself what he thought, and he thought Stan was an editor at some kind of publishing company that publishes travel books.”

QUIET PLEASE    You’ll notice that there are silent moments in “Hold Please” in which we get to feel Stan’s frustration and the joke is allowed to breath. “There was consciously underwriting [with “Hold Please” as well as the other spots] so that there would be a lot said with [the actors’] facial expressions,” Lesser noted.
    Once the shoot wrapped, Lesser spent a day cutting “Hold Please” with editor Jim Hutchins of Los Angeles’ Hutchco Technologies, then the creatives came in to share their input. Of Hutchins, Downing praised, “He’s an editor who can find the tiniest little moments that are funny.”
    Looking back on the project, Downing said it would have been easy to churn out more then seven spots. “It was pretty collaborative. We were jamming ideas,” Downing recalled, adding, “I wanted to keep shooting them. I wanted to turn this thing into a TV series.”

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