Last year we had a very timely message for an economy that seemed headed for bad times: every penny counts.
We hired a very talented improv actor and standup comedian, Matt McCarthy and we roamed the streets of Manhattan trying to pay for stuff with pennies. And secretly filming the transactions. It was a lot of fun (and extremely nerve-racking) to shoot. You can rely on New Yorkers to have great reactions. They DO NOT keep it all in.
This year we revisited this theme. it’s even more applicable this summer. This past year has been a complete disaster on the economic front.
So this time we stepped it up a notch. One thing we learned from last year was that the stories were more interesting when there was something at stake. And the person selling was involved emotionally in what they were doing. Torturing New York deli owners usually results in just swearing. And that’s not good viewing.
We went back to the bottomless creative well that is Matt McCarthy and gave him a lavishly opulent setting: a huge mansion on the upper west side of Manhattan. A breath-takingly big place. It is owned by the guy who wrote the computer software that enabled the selling of shares electronically. And he’s as rich as you imagine he is. But a cool guy too.
We also gave Matt a straight man. An amazing ten year old actor named Nicholas Sireci. On two separate days they posed as Scottish royalty (Crown Prince Nicholas, 16th Earl of Doonamara, Lord Protector of the Outer Isles) and a Texas oil billionaire heir. We put a Scrooge McDuck type vault (thank you Scott Smith!) in one of the basement rooms and filled it with gleaming pennies where there should have been gold coins.
A veddy English butler (played impeccably by Noble Shropshire, his real name!) and a big-lunged bagpiper named Jonathan Baker rounded out our cast.
The campaign was orchestrated (and that’s the correct term) by Anonymous Content director Justin Reardon. The funny bits were his ideas. Editorial was handled by our cousins over The White House/Chicago. Matt Walsh and Meg Kubicka, we love you. And you too Carrie! All sound sculpting was done by the scrupulous Peter Erazmus at APG.
We hope the fun we had doing these comes through. Kudos too to amazingly brilliant and awesome client OfficeMax once again.
Scottish prince buys spectacularly ugly painting
texas oil baron buys a rare book based entirely on how it smells
new yorks premier boutonnier takes pennies. and jerky!
radio executions feature our flame-haired penny prankster get into a froth over the humble penny.
Highly targeted rich media banners lie at the heart of this campaign. so they have to be appealing. Design by The Escape Pod’s amazing Dana Krzysztofiak with back-end execution by the supercool cats at Sabertooth Interactive. you can see them here.
