Gee Jeffery & Partners’ cinema effort was the first in a series of mock-movie spots. The long-format, edge-of-your-seat drama sends a long-awaited and welcome message to a captive audience.

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If it’s the ultimate multimedia advertising experience you’re looking for, Robin Heisey, creative director at Gee Jeffery & Partners, suggests cinema. With its captive audience, 6000 watts of Dolby Surround Sound, and a 50-foot screen, ‘you know it is going to be one hell of a grp.’

Still a relatively young ad medium in North America, cinema commercials have been seized by many in the advertising world, particularly those going after a young, mobile, affluent target group.

And if you have been to a Cineplex Odeon theater lately, chances are you were deceived into believing ‘Phone Bomb,’ a two-minute dramatic spot directed by Radke Films’ Eddy Chu, was a trailer or even a film, when in fact it is what could be dubbed a common courtesy announcement for Cantel at&t and Cineplex reminding moviegoers to turn off their cell phones and pagers during the film.

The film-spoof, long-format spot features a young action hero and his computer-genius counterpart attempting to diffuse a sound-sensitive nuclear bomb which will blow from anything louder than a whisper. When a cell phone rings from what sounds like the back of the theater (recorded on two surround channels in Dolby sound), the intense computer hacker peers out into the audience, a 10-second countdown begins, and the place blows – but not before the tag line ‘What kind of an idiot leaves their cell phone on in a theater?’

Heisey attributes the success of the spot, which picked up a first-place Mobius Award, to the fact that it was strategically right and creatively unusual as well as dramatic and engaging – all the necessary ingredients for award-winning advertising.

‘You don’t get a chance to see television advertising that has a combination of long-format and high-envision subject matter, and I am talking about a nuclear bomb defusing,’ says Heisey. ‘It’s not something you would see in a normal mass-media broadcast television commercial.’

A number of factors set the spot apart from the crowd, he says, one of them being a strategy which was welcomed by the audience: it’s selling respect for people in cinemas. It’s long format with a point to it, and it’s current.

‘We are in a business of fashion,’ says Heisey. ‘There are great spots produced that never win awards because they are not in fashion. I think spots win awards because of their media interaction; they are meta-media, they comment on themselves a little and break the reality between the medium and the audience.’

And while others will disagree, Heisey believes that having commercials refer to themselves or to the concept of media or advertising – which happens in this case when the cell phone rings – is a perfect example of a new trend in advertising.

Chu feels the best thing about ‘Phone Bomb,’ which was lensed on a low budget, is that while it is advertising, it isn’t trying to sell a product; it communicates something that people like to hear.

Chu first heard about the campaign while he was a producer and although he thought that Gee Jeffery would be crazy not to go ahead and find someone to direct these spots, not in his wildest dreams did he think he would be behind the camera calling the shots.

Originally the campaign was supposed to kick off with a spot involving a bunch of gangsters sneaking into a warehouse where some drug lords were sleeping when a cell phone rings and wakes them up. Next, a romantic spot was developed. And while neither ended up hitting the screens, bits and pieces of each were thrown into the two that did, ‘Phone Bomb’ followed by ‘Cell Block.’

‘Cell Block,’ directed by The Players Film Company’s David McNally and now playing, involves a convict about to be executed who’s awaiting a phone call of reprieve from the governor.

The third spot in the pool, directed by Avion Films’ Martin Granger, will make its debut on Cineplex screens March 6. While the message is the same, it will be lighter than the previous two and is rumored to be a martial arts scenario.

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Playback goes behind the boards on recent trophy-winning spots:

– BBDO puts the Doc Martens to truck touting, shows the doors to the pickup pitch, and subverts safe soup spots 29

– Y&R colors outside the emotional lines 30

– Burnett’s bait-and-switch gambit 31

– Marshall Fenn’s low-rollers gamble pays off 32

– PNMD bellies up to the international bar with milk boards 33

– Saatchi’s shadowplay and wordplay win for simplicity 35

The year is 2035, and executional enablers dig up a dangerous advertising artifact: Instinct. A cautionary tale by Randy Diplock 34