Carl's Jr. gets around sexy TV ad ban with descriptive radio spot

You've got to hand it to Carl's Jr./Hardee's — they just won't give up using sex to sell their burgers, no matter what gets in their way.

In New Zealand, according to the National Business Review, the barrier was a broadcast TV ban on their "BBQ's Best Pair" ad by the Commercial Approvals Bureau for using "sexual appeal in an exploitative and degrading manner" and "using sex to sell an unrelated product". (Makes one wonder how many consumer ads from the Americas, Australia, or Asia get approved there.)

Rather than give up the brand's international creative, national owner Restaurant Brands just hired an American actor to supply a play-by-play description of the banned video. It ends up being, thanks to the imagination, even dirtier:



Sticking it to advertising regulators probably scored the brand lots of points with their target market, who they describe as "young hungry guys.”

The radio version was done by NZ's Special Group. Creative Director Tony Bradbourne boasts, “it’s just great humour which is on tone and on brand for our audience.”

I guess we'll see what fallout — if any — happens next over this public baiting of the regulator (and New Zealand women). But at least they were creative about it.

The most beautiful car ad you will never see in the United States

Because, you know, "won't somebody PLEASE think about the CHILDREN!"



Being a French ad, it also has a little sex in it.

Wonderful work by Euro RSCG.

Via Illegal Advertising

What's wrong with this vampire ad?

When I first saw this billboard, I thought "cool idea to show the two bandaids on the vampire bite, but they look like nipples".

Then I noticed that the name of the submission to Ads of The World is "boobs". It was intentional.

Which is fine, from a "people will look" point of view. But the concept bugs me.

Here's why — the thought process here is two parallel ideas:

"Trueblood is about vampires, they bite necks, two circular bandaids is a cute way of showing that."

"The bandaids look like nipples, and that says "adult"

The second idea is actually the concept. But it requires us to accept the two bandaids as something so common as to be a universal symbol for vampires, requiring no interpretation.

The second ad is much better:

The "sex" read is instant, and the patches add vampire, so the connection is much clearer.

There was also a novelty outdoor installation, which was quite clever:

Graceful sexploitation?

It's a very cool ad, actually, even though its anonymous sexuality evokes the James Bond era of the original series. But hey — the ad's made in Montreal (by BBR). And it's actually a lot classier that the usual exploitation of the series' Canadian female lead, Grace Park.

There's another ad in the campaign, but it's not that notable.

Via Ads of The World

Brought to you by the letters "H", "I" and "V"

Sesame Street has always been about inclusiveness. And it will be even more so on May 21 (assuming the world does not end as scheduled) when Nigerian Kids are introduced to Kami, an inquisitive female Muppet living with HIV.

She's on the left.

According to MTV Canada reporter Aliya-Jasmine Sovani,

"Nigerian Sesame Street (Sesame Square) will address the biggest challenges faced by Nigerians…in addition to HIV/AIDS, also religion, gender inequality, AND Malaria. In one episode muppet ZOBI gets caught up in a mosquito net to teach kids how to use them and prevent a malaria infection because according to the World Health Organization, a child dies from the disease every 45 seconds."

Zobi, by the way, is an African version of Cookie Monster — except that he craves yams.

Kudos to Sesame Street for continuing to address uncomfortable issues that kids nonetheless have to deal with (I still remember when Mr. Hooper died). Although I was a little disappointed when they caved to uptight parental pressures on the bouncy Katy Perry musical number.

Simple, smart, and effective

I love the power of a single-minded idea:



This ad, by Rethink for Canada's own Predator Watch (site "under construction" ?!?) turns the tables — almost literally — on anonymous perverts looking to exploit minors on the Internet. (via @AdFreak)



What I like about this ad is its simplicity. The pure idea, grounded in reality, allows the spot to build a proper story and hit home with a punch.

I also love the casting of the predator as just an ordinary guy, husband —and even father. After all, the hardcore creeps living in vans down by the river are not going to be affected by social marketing, while the opportunistic skeevos doing "research" could be scared off by the idea that they are essentially cruising schoolyards in public. And they have a lot to lose.

The only thing that disappoints me about this campaign (besides the Web site fail) is the print. That stuff is just plain creepy:



Should I mention one more time that the call-to-action goes to an "under construction" page? Kind of undermines the whole "we're omnipresent on the Internet" thing. (The client, Children of the Street Society, should've just sent people straight to their homepage.) Oh well, I still love the spot.

The other creativity

I'm sitting here this morning putting together a puzzle. No, it's not a scene from Star Wars (I wish!). It's just a normal part of my job.

You see, yesterday we received a request to re-script a commercial that has already been shot and edited. For those of you who have not been involved in TV production, this is kind of a big deal. Weeks of planning and hard work, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, go into producing a 30-second spot based on an approved script. It's usually step one. (Luckily, there's nobody speaking on camera!)

So here I am, figuring out two options: re-edit existing footage to match the new script, or edit the supplied script to existing footage. Both require a fair bit of resourcefulness.

Resourcefulness is not always given due credit in creative circles. We thrive on inspiration, resourcefulness' celebrity older sister. But as exciting as inspiration is (what could be more scary thrilling than a blank page?), resourcefulness deserves its due.

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
- Ecclesiastes 1:9

We have a joke among Copywriters, "I need a new word for 'new'". The desire for novelty is what keeps us fresh. At the same time, once you've been doing this for a few years, "Seen it!" becomes a more and more frequent reaction. That shouldn't mean we give up trying, but realizing that inspiration is just recombining — or building on — many other people's ideas is actually liberating. Knowing that inspiration is not magic, but rather natural evolution of ideas, removes the fear of that blank page. You just let the ideas happen. And if they don't, you start looking around for inspiration.

Understanding that you never really have a blank page also gives an insight into the nature of inspiration. It's really just unconscious resourcefulness.

On the other hand, when faced with challenges like today's puzzle, the unconscious just isn't enough. Instead of inspiring myself, I'm problem-solving.

We've all been there. The super-awesome, brilliant, earth-shattering idea that you had at the brainstorming pub lunch five Fridays ago has now been reviewed, approved with changes, focus tested, and generally altered. Some Creatives give up and bemoan the loss of their prodigal daughter. Professionals get resourceful.

Resourcefulness is about taking what you have, evaluating the situation calmly, and using every skill, tool and talent at your disposal to come up with the best possible solution for the situation.

It may not always be art. But resourcefulness is what let humans take over the world.



Now, back to work...

Behind the scenes at the flu shot shoot

Last Friday, I posted our latest TV campaign for the Public Health Agency of Canada.



For those of you who aren't in the advertising or production world, it would be quite an eye-opener to see what actually goes into making those 30 seconds.



This ad was shot over three separate days in two cities — Ottawa and Montreal. The main reason for this is that Dr. David Butler-Jones, Canada's Chief Public Health Officer, is himself extremely busy managing Canada's response to H1N1. So we had to shoot him in his Ottawa office on Saturday morning, just as he was about to catch yet another flight.



A funny 6 degrees of separation thing happened to me at the shoot. The night before, I was talking to my Mom on the phone and mentioned we were shooting Dr. David Butler-Jones. She said, "there can't be two of them — ask him if he ever lived in Kingston." So I did, and it turned out he was a friend of the family when I was just a kid, attending my parents' church and even visiting us at our cottage. Small world.

The balance of the commercial was cast, shot, and produced in Montreal, where the production house SOMA is located. We do a lot of shooting in Montreal because it's handier to Ottawa than Toronto, and its homegrown movie industry means that it's brimming with talent and resources.

Shoot day two was the following Monday, in a house in the north end of Montreal, for the scene between the man and his pregnant wife. This was an important human touch for the ad, since all the other scenes were in a more clinical context. It was also the one where the interplay between the actors was most crucial.

This is why it might be kind of surprising that the husband-wife scene is the only one in which there is a different actor in the French and English versions.

Most of our government ads are silent shoots, since the verbal information is dubbed in voiceover. But this one had actors speaking on camera. Usually, that would require double casting of each speaking role. But Montreal is different. All of our roles but one were filled by fluently bilingual actors. The sole exception was the husband.



See if you can see a difference in the way the actors play the scene together:



Day three was the "clinic" scenes of a doctor's office, and a public immunization clinic, both shot in a vacant office building in downtown Montreal. I wasn't present for this day of shooting, but it looks like the team was getting pretty tired by that point.



Following the actual shoot, the offline edit was done on Wednesday. This is the point at which the commercial actually comes together in recognizable (if rough) form. Acart people are both on-site at the studio, and watching cuts remotely, to approve the edit for client consumption.

Following the offline, new edits had to be made before the commercial went to final colour correction and online (broadcast-ready) approval. We also had to brief a composer for original music, and get every aspect of production approved.

It's great to have this ad on the air in time for the Christmas season, which is a particular concern for public health officials during a pandemic.

Check out more production pics here.

The genius box

In a news release that shocked nobody, The Nielsen Co. reported that young children are watching more TV now than in any year since 1995. This includes DVDs and PVRed shows. Thirty-two hours a week, on average.

Now, I don't pretend to be the world's greatest parent. Like everyone else, I'm making it up as I go along. We have certain things we are careful about: nutrition (mostly homemade food, organic when it counts), physical safety, streetsmarts, exercise, athletic skills, socialization. But on other things, we are more like our parents. And TV is one of them.

At Four years, 11 months, and change, Ladman loves to watch television. I don't think he's up to 32 hours a week, but he does love to tune in when he gets up in the morning, and right after school. I did the same, when I was a kid, so it doesn't seem that harmful to me. Hell, I work in advertising. I'm cynical that way.

What's different with my son is his viewing habits. When I was a kid, I loved nature and science documentaries. So did my wife. And so, naturally, does he. But while we had to wait for our weekly dose of Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, he gets his shows on demand, recorded on PVR, or purchased on DVD. Over and over again.

Some favourites have been the whole BBC Walking With Dinosaurs franchise, as well as the many nature shows produced and/or narrated by David Attenborough (Blue Planet, Life in Cold Blood, Planet Earth). Recently, he has started to gravitate towards nature adventurers like the Crocodile Hunter (we don't tell him how that one ended), Snakemaster, Nigel Marven,Jules Sylvester, and Rob Bredl.



One that I'm not entirely sure of is "Bite Me" with Dr. Mike Leahy. This guy's a masochistic virologist who allows himself to get bitten, stung, envenomated and parasitized by some of the world's creepiest crawlies. Considering Ladman managed to get stung by a jellyfish and bitten by a garter snake this summer, I'm not sure this is a great influence.

But what I'm getting at here is that TV is like anything. It's the content that matters. My son exercises, socializes, gets read to, plays imaginative games (with rubber snakes or live bugs, of course!)... but he also enjoys his shows. And, as a result of watching guys with PhDs and nature nuts run around in khakis, he has a picked up a surprisingly rich scientific vocabulary for a kid his age.

The downside is that the TV shows on National Geographic and other channels are full of commercials, so we get constant advice from the boy as to which brand of yogurt or paper towels we should be buying. He's a sucker for ads. Karma's a bitch.

The thing that really amazed me happened just last night. He insisted on taking a small plastic baggie with him into the bath. (He loves playing with water.) He kept filling it up, and squeezing the water out, over and over again, until he turned to me and said "Dad! Look! This is how my heart works!"

You win this one, television.

A Message From The Government of Canada

Today I'm supposed to speak to a class at Algonquin College about "writing for television".

Now, I've worked on quite a few TV spots over the years, and I've learned quite a bit. But most of it is really "how to write a 30-second spot that fits within a competitive budget and government policies and still not have it suck".

This is not meant as any slight to the clients. They're working under the same constraints, which are forced upon them by political realities and the extra scrutiny the public turns on when they see an ad they've paid for in taxes. Our best government clients act more like partners, working with us to navigate the barriers and pitfalls throughout the process.

Working together, we manage to create good work. Just last month, our campaign for Public Safety Canada's 72 Hours Emergency Preparedness packed a good amount of information, drama, and motivation into 27.5 seconds (leaving the mandatory 2.5 second "A Message From The Government of Canada" tag).

How we got there was an exercise in knowing our client's internal audiences as well as we know the public ones.

Budget

On every government job, we have to write a detailed proposal outlining our skills, experience, approach, and budget. Even if we don't go with the spec concept pitched, we are usually tied to those numbers.

Since talent tends to be our biggest production cost consideration on a national campaign, we try to keep it minimal. No casts of thousands for us.

Language

All Canadian government advertising has to be equally effective in English and French. No hiring separate agencies to regionalize the message; we need an almost identical spot. Most times, this (as well as budget) means we end up shooting a silent spot with voiceover added in post. This has become even more common now that many of our spots get dubbed into multiple "ethnic" languages. (LGT a CFIA spot we did, coincidentally, with the same Quebec Director as 72 Hours.)

Inclusivity

We must always represent "all Canadians". This means showing representatives of lots of visibly different populations within Canada. If we're casting an unrelated group, the challenge is just to make the mix not looked contrived. In a family situation, however, we have two choices: show a family of mixed origins (as in the 72 Hours spot); or else cast people who are more ethnically ambiguous ("Mediterranean" is a popular catch-all.)

Beyond ethnic inclusivity, we also have to consider age, income, region... within the most targetted audience, there can still be a fair amount of diversity. So we usually shoot for averages.

Focus Groups and Committees

Finally, our work is scrutinized by two rounds of focus groups across Canada, as well as two or three high-level decision-making groups within government who we never get to meet directly. We have to anticipate the objectives of policy-makers, as well as the subjectivity of members of the public willing to give up their evening for fifty bucks and a stale sandwich.

And yet somehow, we do it. I guess all agencies have similar challenges with other sectors. Our particular constraints would probably frustrate a consumer agency... but at the end of the day it's just nice to get our work on TV. Plus, we actually might help some people.