M.E.A.T. director Stephen Markle has followed up last year’s highly successful Showcase ad campaign with a new pool of promotional spots that target movie buffs in a funny, punny kind of way. Much like the first pool of quiz-style ads, this new batch of eight 30-second spots out of Harrod & Mirlin/fcb is designed to make you ‘Think.’

Spawned from the specialty’s outdoor campaign featuring questions like ‘Think Lost Highway is the 407?’ (with the answer in every case being ‘Then you need Showcase’), Markle and Showcase’s in-house creative services team had to take the smattering of text off the boards and translate it into something visual for television.

‘While the outdoor billboards say ‘Think Trainspotting is a cushy ttc job?’ we actually show a guy on a train track with a pair of binoculars on tv,’ says Markle. ‘For Reservoir Dogs, we show a bunch of dogs sitting in a reservoir. That’s the nice thing about television, in 30 seconds you can really let an idea evolve instead of being limited to a headline of six or seven words.’

Filmed around Toronto in early August, Markle shot the eight new spots in two days on a budget of $65,000.

‘We really had to shoot efficiently because of the low budget,’ says Markle. ‘The locations were all close together and the crew was wonderful. I think the challenge of shooting eight spots in two days created a real sense of teamwork.’

The movies and television series featured in the spots are Trainspotting, Party of Five, Cracker, Reservoir Dogs, Short Cuts, Drugstore Cowboy, Lost Highway and Naked Lunch. The latter depicts an outdoor scene where a man and a woman are eating lunch in a park at a picnic table, both completely naked. Markle says casting the woman in this ad was quite last-minute moment of brilliance on Bloor Street.

‘I spotted her [the nude woman in the Naked Lunch spot – clothed at the time] outside the Alliance Atlantis building,’ says Markle. ‘It turned out that she is a nurse and was on her way back to the hospital from her lunch break. She was reluctant to talk to me at first, but within 10 minutes I had convinced her to show up the next day to appear in this commercial, which required her to be completely naked.’

Markle says the woman was understandably shy at first about her sudden brush with nudity, but once on set and out of her clothing, he says she seemed to enjoy herself.

‘Perhaps because she is a nurse she is more comfortable with nakedness,’ he says.

Markle, who also directed last year’s quiz-type promotional campaign for Showcase, and says in the past year the specialty’s adult 25-54 primetime audience has risen 60% and its movie viewership 40% . The campaign also won the Best Overall Promotional Campaign Galaxi Award.

The new ads began airing nationally late last month (the same night Showcase launched the new season of Oz) on Alliance Atlantis Communications-owned specialties along with The Comedy Network, The Weather Network and Headline Sports.

‘Showcase is a great brand to advertise,’ says Markle. ‘Selling great movies is a lot more fun than selling dishwasher detergent.’

Ryan McMaster served as the dop and Laurence Robinson edited at Showcase.