A :60 for Google Play called “New Me” finds someone on a quest to get in shape and eat better in the New Year. We don’t actually know who that someone is through much of the spot because all of the action takes place on a computer screen.
A cursor is seen moving about on digital download platform Google Play, downloading everything from the theme song to Rocky and tunes like Olivia Newton John’s “Physical” to the film Run Fatboy Run and apps like Workout Trainer and runtastic PRO.
A Google+ status update declares, “New me start today.”
But good intentions are quickly derailed. Triggered by the sight of a book titled Martha Stewart’s Cookies, whoever is controlling the cursor goes on a cookie binge, rapidly downloading all sorts of media related to cookies.
So much for a healthy start to 2013.
A follow-up Google status update reads, “New me start tomorrow.”
Then comes the reveal: We finally see that it was Cookie Monster who was sitting at the laptop, and it all makes sense.
Bigger idea “New Me” is part of a larger campaign out of Mullen SF, Mullen’s San Francisco office, promoting Google Play. “As far as the bigger idea, it is really about letting people know about Google Play. The button is there on everyone’s Google home page, but so many people have no idea that it’s there or what it is, and they never click on it,” explained Mullen group creative director Paul Foulkes. “So we wanted to let people know there is this amazing world of content right there, two inches north of where they spend so much time on their search queries.”
While Cookie Monster is the star of “New Me,” other celebrities will be featured in future spots. “What we’re hoping for is now that people have seen this video and understand how this construct works, they’ll be guessing along the way about where this is going [when they see the subsequent work],” Foulkes said.
Mullen began working on the Google Play campaign last year, and putting “New Me” together has been an intensive and time-consuming process. For starters, permissions had to be attained for the use of the media properties featured in the spot, and there are quite a few. In addition to having to secure the rights for the more prominently featured elements like “Gonna Fly Now,” the iconic theme song from Rocky, and Cookie Monster, the agency had to obtain okays to use everything from Rancid’s Let’s Go and Ke$ha’s Warrior (the two albums seen on either side of the Rocky album in the music section of Google Play) to the art for Chariots of Fire and Food, Inc. (the films flanking Run Fatboy Run).
“Some partners are very amenable to it. They see it as promotion, and they hop on board because they realize Google commercials tend to get a lot of attention, and they realize album sales or book sales can get a spike because of that. But others are protective of their content,” Foulkes said.
Google has done previous projects with Sesame Workshop, so the agency was confident a deal could be worked out quickly for the use of Cookie Monster, and it was. But they did sweat it out over whether they would get the rights to the Rocky theme. “There was a time when we didn’t know if we were going to get the Rocky song, and so much of the personality of the spot comes through it,” Foulkes shared.
Sans a director As for the production process, it wasn’t what you’d typically see for a commercial. The most glaring difference: There was no director on “New Me.” Mullen produced a rough cut of the commercial in-house, relying on its internal production team to put together a series of motion grabs.
Once the agency and Google were satisfied with the cut, Mullen engaged with outside vendors, including New York’s Lost Planet to craft the actual spot. Chris Huth was the editor.
“When we got to Lost Planet, they rebuilt everything from scratch. It’s a complicated process in that sense,” Foulkes said. “Chris–as well as the other editors there–have worked on Google projects before, so they know this process. They understand there is a lot of iteration.”
One of the biggest challenges was ensuring that the spot was expressive and engaging, which isn’t so easy to do when you don’t see the main character until the last few seconds. But Mullen was able to instill a sense of personality as well as humor into all of the interface interactions that form the narrative. “When Cookie types [the Google+ status update that reads], ‘New me start tomorrow,’ there is a pause before tomorrow and a definite punch of the period. It’s a subtle thing, but it’s a different type of storytelling, and you have to know how to communicate in that way,” Foulkes said. “Even when he is choosing between the healthy cookbook and the cookie book there is indecision that you sense in his mind by the way the cursor is moved. That’s the sort of storytelling that the creatives at Mullen have learned as well as editors like Chris, and it’s a style of storytelling that’s improved through practice.”
