The three-part Eatons TV campaign consisting of ‘Dilemma,’ ‘Discovery’ and ‘Big Finish’ represents a commercial work of rare scope, and brings the 2001 On the Spot Top Spots overall award to The Partners’ Film Company out of Toronto and director Floria Sigismondi.

The magnitude of the production reflects the importance of the campaign to client Sears Canada. After Sears took over the failing Eatons franchise, it needed a powerful advertising push to relaunch the retail outlet in time for the Christmas rush. It entrusted this daunting task to agency Ammirati Puris, Toronto.

According to Doug Robinson, the campaign’s creative director and art director for Ammirati (which he has recently left), the agency set out to accomplish three objectives.

‘The most immediate was to generate traffic during retail’s peak season,’ he says. ‘We wanted to reposition Eatons as a high-end destination department store, and we wanted to clearly communicate that it would be a unique shopping experience.’

The jewel in the crown of the aggressive multimedia campaign would be the four-and-a-half-minute TV spot, sometimes shown in segments and sometimes in its entirety. The monarchy metaphor is particularly appropriate, since the theme of the campaign would be the introduction of aubergine, a shade of purple associated with royalty, as Eatons’ new corporate color.

Robinson says Eatons’ instructions were to come up with something ‘bigger than life.’ He and agency copywriter Tom Goudie then suggested a spot relating to fashion.

‘I’ve spent a lot of time watching old movies with Grace Kelly and stars like that, and thinking about Jacqueline Kennedy and how some fashion is timeless,’ Robinson explains. ‘And so [Tom and I] got onto an approach of ‘Why not a musical, kind of zig when everybody’s zagging?’ ‘

Ammirati had to find a director capable of delivering the big splash the spots required. Initially, Sigismondi might not have seemed the most natural fit. Although she has established herself as a force in the Canadian production industry – she was a Top Spots finalist last year – her reputation was built on dark, disturbing music videos for Marilyn Manson and David Bowie, pieces far removed from the innocence of old musicals. But according to Robinson, she won the job with an irrepressible pitch.

‘She absolutely blew me away,’ he says. ‘Her boards were amazing, and she basically showed us at least one-third of the finished spot you see today.’ The ‘third’ Robinson refers to is ‘Big Finish,’ the song-and-dance set piece that finishes the spot.

Goudie had already written the featured song and the opening narrative, which, with the substitution of a female character, mirrors the predicament in which he and Robinson found themselves – a couple of metropolitan agency folks trying to devise a marketing strategy for a department store. The characters’ solution – promotion of the aubergine hue. Upon that revelation, the dance number is introduced via a stunning transition starting on a close-up of the heroine’s pupil, followed by a spinning camera move and a dissolve to an aubergine staircase that the dancers descend.

The spot replicates 1950s Hollywood musicals so convincingly in terms of writing, acting, costumes, color, pacing, choreography and music that when it came on during the Canadian premiere of the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies on CTV, some viewers were reportedly confused, believing it was the start of another feature.

Much of the credit for the spot’s success belongs to Sigismondi’s longtime collaborator, cinematographer Chris Soos. Together they shot tests with various film stocks and lens and lighting techniques to find an accurate visual style, referencing several 1950s films. For the dance number, Sigismondi worked with award-winning choreographer Michael Rooney (son of Mickey).

With so many elements involved, one would think Sigismondi would have had to surrender a modicum of control, but that’s simply not her way.

‘We planned it so that I would be very hands-on with everything, because it was all about the details,’ she explains. ‘That’s what I get excited about, and I think it’s a place where you can really get lost. I just loved picking out a lamp or the colors for the set, deciding exactly when it would go to aubergine and what colors it would change from.’

For Sigismondi, the ambitious spot, which kept her busy for more than two months, represents the first time she has dealt with actors in a dialogue-driven narrative piece, serving as a warm-up for the jump into features she has been contemplating for several years. The campaign gave her a welcome taste of that level of production values.

‘It was fantastic, because we had the budget to create huge sets, like the massive office in the opening scene,’ she says. ‘The whole time I thought ‘Okay, I’m going to propose this, but [the client] is going to tell me we’re going to have to scale back, but everything was going through. It was a dream job.’

According to Robinson, the overall campaign, highlighted by the spot, increased Eatons awareness by 35% in two months, and store traffic exceeded client and agency projections by 800%.

-www.partnersfilm.com

-www.floriasigismondi.com