Diamond Foods Inc.’s Emerald nut brand is known for quirky, funny advertising. Remember that Robert Goulet spot from a few years back?
To leverage the equity Emerald has built with consumers through humor, Deutsch LA, which picked up the account last fall, chose to go for laughs in creating a new “Humanize Your Morning”-themed campaign for Emerald’s Breakfast on the Go!
The nut blend is a new entry in the consumer packaged foods category, offering a loose mix of granola, nuts and fruit in a pouch. The hope is that people who eat breakfast bars will make the switch to Breakfast on the Go!
“We did some research, and we found that people don’t really hate breakfast bars, but they don’t really like them. It’s mindless sustenance. It serves a utilitarian purpose,” according to Deutsch LA group creative director/copywriter Jason Elm. “So we wanted to come out with this strategy of: it’s a new way to have a convenient breakfast, and it’s a little more interesting.”
To nudge people into being less robotic in their thinking when it comes to breakfast, Deutsch LA employed robots as the comedic foils to humans who are enjoying Breakfast on the Go! “We had to set up the anti-hero in these spots, and it would be a little mean-spirited if you used an actual person,” Elm said when asked why robots got a starring role in the campaign. “The robot is a pretty easy metaphor, but it also gave us freedom to do something that was physically funny.”
These robots, none of whom can be convinced to eat anything for breakfast but their same old bars, are seen in three different spots–the :15s “Commuterbot” and “Mommybot” and a :30 titled “Cubebot,” which is SHOOT’s Top Spot.
The Perlorian Brothers, who are repped by Furlined, directed all three spots.
“Cubebot,” shot in an office building in L.A, finds an office worker named Steve eating a handful of Breakfast on the Go! when his colleague, a robot named Carl, sidles up to his cubicle. Carl offers Steve a breakfast bar, but Steve, who has clearly had this conversation with Carl a thousand times before, informs the robot that he is enjoying Breakfast on the Go!
Carl ingests yet another breakfast bar, and he’s a sloppy eater. When he shoves the bar into his woodchipper mouth, it gets chopped up into bits and spewed all over poor Steve’s face.
“Humanize your morning. Emerald Breakfast on the Go!” a v.o. intones.
Does not compute Carl is quite a character. (FYI: Carl is transformed into a she in the other two spots.) The robot was constructed by the artisans at Legacy Effects. The goal was to produce “an old-fashioned style robot that would show the awkwardness of the robot compared to the vitality of the actors and the Emerald nut [blend],” Legacy Effects producer Alan Scott explained. “The design and movement of the robot needed to convey the cumbersome and stiffness of an awkward character and needed to be clunky, noisy and mechanical.”
The robot was designed in 3-D modeling programs and custom fit to a digital scan of the suit performer. Once modeled, the parts were prototyped and then hand finished by the Legacy team. The robot is made from Vacu-formed plastics, fiberglass and rubber. The head had interchangeable mouth mechanisms designed to work with each type of breakfast bar that it needed to eat. (A roller mouth was used for the jelly-filled bars, a grinder-style mouth for the harder granola bar and a woodchipper mouth for the softer rice/granola bar.)
It took three puppeteers to operate the robot. Effects coordinator and puppeteer Lindsay MacGowan was inside the robot’s body. Her vision was restricted, so she wore video goggles with a feed from a camera so she could make sure she hit her marks. Three other puppeteers–model shop supervisor Dave Merritt, key artist Robert Ramsdell and mechanic Hiroshi (Kan) Ikeuchi–worked the external controls for the robot’s mouth and antenna.
Breathing room Editor Matthew Wood of The Whitehouse cut “Cubebot.” “We actually had a lot of options [in the edit],” Elm said. “The challenge was just making sure that you understood the story. We wanted to make sure people understood why the robot was in an office and that this wasn’t sometime in the future, and we wanted to get across that eating the granola bar was a mechanical action.”
The ad has less copy than originally scripted. “In the edit, we were able to remove a lot of copy, which is great because often you find yourself trying to squeeze 40 seconds of copy into a :30,” Elm said, “and here we were able to just remove stuff and let it breathe.”
