With two gold wins at the New York Festivals for excelling in the usually staid categories of trucks and tomato soup, BBDO Toronto has garnered international recognition by creating unconventional spots in traditionally conventional categories. Both the Chrysler campaign and the Campbell’s spot use humor and situational familiarity to demonstrate the virtues of well-known products.

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For the two Chrysler truck spots, the agency’s primary objective was to demonstrate particular features of each truck while crafting a relatable humorous story around the demonstration, thus entertaining the viewer.

With ‘Moving Night’ for the Dodge Dakota, writer Neil McOstrich (who is now with fcb) says that in order to hit the rough-and-tumble truck market in a fresh and original way, he and art director Bill Newbery, along with Imported Artists director Gary Johns, had to show that the young skewed vehicle had both function and attitude.

‘Cars are badges,’ says McOstrich. ‘Trucks in the past used to be like work boots, just for work. Now they have evolved into more like Doc Martens – functional and a statement of who you are.’

Deftly bypassing the traditional route of showing a truck’s carrying capacity on a work site, McOstrich set the spot in a distinctly contemporary, after-work situation.

‘We thought that the best way to demonstrate what the truck could carry would be by putting it in a situation that all guys could relate to – being thrown out,’ says McOstrich, who was also aiming to create empathy for the guy being given the boot and show the reliability of his buddy and the truck by having it catch his stuff.

The biggest concern for McOstrich and the client was that the humorous situation of the young man’s things (including a sofa) being thrown into the back of the truck by his girlfriend (from the second floor), didn’t convey a sense of marital breakup.

‘The guys were cast young on purpose, it’s their young truck,’ says McOstrich. ‘We wanted to give the sense that the guy would probably be back in a day or two with some rock candy.’

The spot was shot over two nights on the Universal Studios backlot in l.a. The biggest challenge on the shoot was getting the foam couch to land correctly in the back of the truck. When the proper landing was finally achieved, sound design was used in post to give the necessarily light couch a heavier feel.

Director Johns is credited with bringing out the subtleties of the script and getting strong performances from the actors. ‘When the stuff is coming out the window, it gets pretty big,’ says McOstrich, ‘but the looks, the gestures and dialogue, were very well handled. It was a great job of setting up the scenario, you didn’t know where it was going.’

McOstrich also gets the writing credit on the ‘Bear’ spot for the Dodge Ram Quad cab, while bbdo’s Ken Morgan was the art director.

To demonstrate the Ram pickup’s four doors (a market first), McOstrich hooked up with Imported Artists director Richard D’Alessio. The duo had achieved great success and notoriety in the past for their Chrysler ‘Snowball’ spot, which demoed the minivan’s dual sliding doors.

‘We knew that during the spot we would have to have a great three-quarter overhead shot of the four doors opening,’ says McOstrich. ‘The trick was to create a context in which those doors could be demonstrated.’

A rainy camping scenario was chosen where two couples are chased out of their tents by a nasty bear and into the safe and easily accessed truck.

Like ‘Moving Night,’ ‘Bear’ was shot at night, showing the truck outside of work and in the context of the ever tumultuous battle of the sexes.

D’Alessio says two endings were lensed on the cold and rainy location shoot that took place east of Toronto. The first ended with the women scaring the men with their mud masks, while the ending that was used saw the women turning to look at each other, thus being frightened as well.

As per the international recognition and awards for the campaign, D’Alessio says, ‘Up here in Canada we’ve had to be a little bit more clever with car advertising. We can’t just do big executional-style visual pieces. We can’t morph the cars and do motion control because we can’t afford it.

‘I think that’s why these spots are doing well, because they’re clever pieces of writing, they’re good demonstrations and the consumer walks away with a good understanding of what the product is with a little bit of humor they can relate to.’

Campbell’s ‘Student Lone’

For bbdo’s ‘Student Lone’ spot for Campbell’s Soup, there was admittedly no new product or aspect to the product to build a spot around.

The strategy for the agency was to do equity advertising for Campbell’s powerful and well-known ‘Red and White’ soups. Writer Craig Cooper was new to bbdo at the time, as was creative partner and art director Briony Wilson.

For the winning spot, Cooper, Wilson and Avion Films director Mark Story used and subverted the traditional cozy and secure home feelings and images associated with Campbell’s soup.

‘We thought tomato soup most exemplifies the feelings of physical and emotional warmth,’ says Cooper. ‘So we came up with a student who’s on his own and the soup transports him home when he eats it. That’s a fairly conventional advertising device, so we wanted to throw the twist on that and have something that everybody recognizes.’

That twist is a hilariously oafish roommate who intrudes on the fantasy of our hero eating soup and thus transports him away from the bright and happy family dinner table and back to his dingy desolate hovel.

Cooper says the winning tomato soup spot as well as another spot for vegetable soup were produced in essentially the same form that they were written. ‘It’s pretty remarkable in almost any category, but especially packaged goods,’ says Cooper. ‘For us it’s quite satisfying, it’s picked up awards and Campbell’s is getting definite business results. It’s like, yeah, thank God we know what we’re doing!’

ALSO IN THIS REPORT

Winning isn’t everything. But it’s a really good thing.

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

– 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

– Gee Jeffery’s short-form meta-media features 37

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