Saturday.
Army/Navy game.
Commerical break.
Jeep commercial. Laugh out loud funny.
Checked YouTube: yup, it's a popular (146,000 views and counting). Getting buzz on AdWeek.
The commercial features Andy Kim's 1973 pop single "Rock Me Gently," a crop of CGI animals, and spot on comic timing.
I laugh every time I see it.
R has asked me not to laugh.
L keeps asking me why it's funny. And thanks to YouTube, I can pause, and go cut by cut to point out the visuals that take what could have been a cheese fest into brilliant comedy.
Spot produced by Cutwater, a brand new boutique creative firm in San Francisco (started by Chuck McBride (former Executive Creative Director at TBWA/Chiat/Day) which, thanks to McBride's credentials, stole the Jeep account away from some Detroit firm).
High res version available at Cutwater's website, if you can navigate through its ubercool interface. (Why do design firms always want to hide their work behind pages of flash animation?)
We now have (to Deirdre's dismay) added "Rock Me Gently" to the iPod to the kids' favorites playlist.
3 comments:
McBride, huh? That guy is a piece of work.
While at TBWA he was on the cover of like, three industry trades in one year, celebrating his awesomeness. The same year, I might point out, TBWA was fired from both the Taco Bell AND Levi's accounts.
McBride may not have been responsible for the Taco Bell loss--due basically to the fact that the stores were selling lots of chihuahua merchandise, but not much in the way of, oh: food.
But I will lay at McBride's feet the loss of Levi's. His last two commercials for them were: the creepy singing belly buttons (low riders) and the guy being chased through the woods by a badger (cords).
Like a lot of what Chiat does, these were both memorable spots (hence: the earworm you are currently experiencing) that build a relationship between the consumer and the *commercial*, not between the consumer and the product (or the brand).
I once worked on a McBride pitch to a coalition of California wine producers for a campaign designed to be the "Got Milk?" of the wine industry.
But instead of attempting to connect to the emotional reasons why someone might want wine for a particular occasion, McBride went in with: a rampaging wine gnome, who ran up behind unsuspecting idiots (e.g. a couple sitting at a picnic) and smashed a bottle of wine on the backs of their heads.
Could have been funny. Would have been memorable.
Could not possibly have moved the market.
Oh, and one of McBride's greatest "successes"?
The Pets.com sock puppet.
There's another Jeep commercial that goes with the urban outdoors dichotomy of the Jeep owner... the driver sees everyone through his windshield as wildlife: guys in three piece suits with reindeer heads, bison, fox, etc.
Creeped me out.
Memorable, sure.
But animal heads or bubblegum pop from 1973, I'm not buying a Jeep.
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