The challenge: To hitch the new Star Wars movie to three food franchises-Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and KFC.
Who do you call?
Chuck Bennett and Clay Williams, the TBWA/Chiat/Day, Los Angeles, creatives responsible for that adorable Taco Bell Chihuahua, an image and campaign with incredible staying power.
This isn’t the first time Bennett and Williams have linked food with film. Last year, they successfully attached Taco Bell to Godzilla. "The problem," jokes Williams, "was the commercials were actually better than the film."
The angle for the Star Wars campaign is highly classified information. "Well we could tell you, but then we’d have to kill you," says Williams, cracking wise about the secrecy surrounding the movie.
Bennett and Williams spoke with SHOOT from a speeding car-they don’t seem to be in any one place for any length of time these days-and when the cell phone connection cuts out, they redial, then joke, "George Lucas must have cut us off!" paying homage to the ubiquitous power the director supposedly wields.
To prepare for the campaign, Bennett and Williams read the script for The Phantom Menace last year. "We got the chance to go up to the [Lucas] Ranch, to see what’s going on," says Williams. "It’s really an amazing thing to see come together." Bennett and Williams were allowed to watch just 20 minutes of The Phantom Menace.
Was that enough? "Yes," Bennett says. "There are such global themes to Star Wars … So we can take those themes and run with [them]." Williams adds: "Our job was to take these three brands [Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC], and kind of bring them into the world of Star Wars."
"It was cool, because we had access to elements from the film, like the droids and weapons, which are cool things to get to use," says Bennett. "We also got to work with ILM."
Tied In
With Godzilla and Star Wars tie-ins on their resumes, Bennett and Williams seem primed to specialize in linking restaurants with movies. "I don’t think we’d want to get into specializing in promotions or tie-ins," says Bennett. "Or even getting into the area of promoting films. Why? Because you enter into a different world when you step into the entertainment and filmmaking industry. People say to you, ‘Well, what do you know? You only make commercials. I make movies. How could you possibly tell me what’s right?’ "
The two creatives, now handling multi-million dollar accounts, found careers in advertising by chance. "When I was younger," Bennett says, "I decided that I didn’t like school that much and I didn’t want to go to college. A good art teacher recommended that I go to art school."
After graduating from The Colorado Institute of Art, Bennett worked at the United Airlines Training Center in Denver where he designed instructional manuals on aircraft hydraulic systems. He quickly sought a more creative environment and landed work as a design director at Evans & Bartholomew Advertising, Denver. After "a lucrative freelance career," he connected with Stein, Robaire, Helm (now defunct) where he first met Williams. "We immediately clicked," says Bennett. They left Stein, Robaire, Helm and joined TBWA/Chiat/Day in ’94.
Williams graduated Cum Laude from UCLA with a degree in history and planned on being a lawyer. "But I didn’t really want to go to law school and woke up one morning and just thought, ‘advertising.’ " Williams found his way "straight to the bottom of the ladder" at a small creative agency in Santa Monica called the Shalek Agency. His copywriting for Shalek earned him a job at Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein (now Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco) where he spent three "virtually sleep-free years." Williams left Goodby for a job at Stein, Robaire, Helm, where he met Bennett.
What keeps these two together? "Clay picks up where I leave off," says Bennett. "We are two separate people, with all these limitations, but together we make one person who’s extra powerful." (They both laugh.) "We complement each other. We have the ability to build on each other’s ideas."
"We have a shorthand," adds Williams. "We have similar tastes and similar styles in advertising. We balance each other well. It works."
In addition to spearheading the Star Wars campaign, Bennett and Williams have yet another ongoing project: Keeping the Taco Bell Chihuahua fresh.
"The challenge," says Bennett, "is to limit the use of the Chihuahua image out there. People have this short-term mentality. There’s so much shit out there with Chihuahua images on it. People think, ‘Oh, if I put the dog on this car battery, we’ll sell more car batteries.’ People don’t realize that this is a rare, special thing. [The dog] is true to the core of the brand. It’s the personification of the craving."
"We want to keep him cool," says Williams. "We want to keep telling cool little Chihuahua stories. People are always saying, ‘Oh we’ll have him juggle.’ Or, ‘He’ll get invited to Hollywood Squares.’ People don’t realize that the dog doesn’t exist outside of the TV set. The dog is just a dog. We have the technology to give him emotion, and make him cool, and give him intelligence, but we have to keep him there. Otherwise, you have the dog doing all sorts of really stupid stuff."
One reason why it’s so important to keep "the dog" precious is because Taco Bell owns him outright. "In the past, Taco Bell has relied on outside sources for promotion," Bennett says. "They’ve attached themselves to any number of properties-NCAA, or this or that, or Star Wars. For the first time in their history, they have something that’s a piece of their own property. They don’t have to pay anybody to use [the Chihuahua], the way they have to pay the NCAA. They can use this Chihuahua to bring people into their stores. We think that’s really important."
Will the Chihuahua outlast the 10-year-old Energizer Bunny? "I think so," says Bennett. "And there’s the potential to last longer. The Bunny is limited on the surface. It doesn’t have a lot of emotion and can’t talk. It just kind of cruises around, which is fine, and cool. But there’s more room for a wider variety of stories with the dog. We treat it like a little sitcom, with the dog as the main character. And maybe we’ll do spin-offs later, with other characters. There’s potential to be entertaining for a longer period of time."
"When you step back and think about it," Williams says, "it’s a pretty open-ended campaign with just the right amount of discipline and constraint to it to open your mind to create funny, interesting situations where the dog can get the food."
"Remember the Budweiser frogs?" says Williams. "They eventually spun that off into the Budweiser lizards. Well, we’re thinking about having the Taco Bell ferret."
Ferret? Are you serious?
"No," they groan in unison as their cell phone cuts out again.
