When updating the work on our website we came to the discussion of what pieces of work we should include on the amended show-reel video and which ones come off?
I feel like the match committee of a footy club deciding who comes into the team and who goes out. Like the coach, it’s the creative director who has to make the final call. But unlike a coach, I don’t have to explain my decision face to face with a player who is pretty dirty with the decision.
I think I’ve worn out that footy analogy pretty quickly. Forgive my indulgence but as everybody knows, spring is here and that means footy finals, hay fever and overdosing on antihistamines is upon us.
Anyway, I digress. We stumbled across a 30 sec TVC we’ve been itching to put on the reel but hadn’t been able to because even though we shot it over a year ago the client hasn’t put it to air yet.
Originally, we were asked by Scotts to come up with 2 spots for their Lawn Builder Weed Feed Green Up. In other words weed killer.
The brief was a juicy one and single minded. The problem that had to be solved was that weed killer is poisonous and every spring many people in the course of weeding, inadvertently poison themselves. But Scotts Weed Feed Green Up already had a solution and that was it’s patented applicator which makes weeding the garden simple and safe.
Using that age-old motivator, ‘fear’, we showed the exaggerated lengths people go to avoid getting covered in poison. The original idea was to lower a guy in an ‘Exosuit’, a robot-style dry suit into the shot.
This eventually became the ‘Frog Man’.
The second character was always going to be ‘Decontamination Man’ but what was he going to wear? Initially I opted for the retro futurist heavy-duty green Hazmat suit that looked like it was designed for an early James Bond film.
Unfortunately, most of these suits only exist in the United States and our budget didn’t stretch that far. We ended up mixing and matching various Hazmat suits that ended up working perfectly for the idea as per the script.
You can view the final video here.
The question I want to ask you is – do you think the campaign suffered because we didn’t push the idea to its original absurdist level?