How Creative Bubble Did More with Less on this Web Campaign

Video advertising on the Web is slowly becoming more prevalent, with more clients and agencies looking to leverage all the tools that video on the Internet provides, namely the prospect that a piece of video content will go viral and be passed around to hundreds of thousands of eyeballs. But the growing willingness to advertise with Web video does not mean the budgets equal those of broadcast budgets and producers must find ways to produce high-quality work for less.

For a recent Web campaign for Head, makers of tennis racquets and accessories, ad agency A&S Berlin and production company CZAR in Hamburg, looked to Creative Bubble as the service production company and post house to shoot and post the campaign. The Web spots feature tennis star Novak Djokovic during a match going into the stands to hit the ball back. In between jumping in the stands and hitting the ball back he has time to flirt with a sexy blonde, perform tricks with some seals, make balloon puppets and dance with nipple tassels. We spoke with Paul Iannacchino, Jr., director/creative director of Creative Bubble about the evolution of this campaign and how they were able to produce a campaign, which has since ended up on television, for a fraction of a broadcast budget.

How did you land this job?
[A&S Berlin] has recently done a lot of great interactive work. It seems like their strategy is to go after new clients that typically that invest in traditional media and convince them to think about video on the Web and how to reposition their brand to reach consumers.

They have cultivated relationships and pushed clients in the direction of storytelling, even though it isn’t a 30-second commercial on TV. But these clients do seem open to dropping a little bit of money to do spots for the Web.

Was this the first time you worked with them?
We did a job for this agency for a brand called Native Instruments. They were launching a new product, The Machine for prosumer electronic music producers. They were one- to two-minute scripted vignettes that played like missing persons’ PSAs. The gag was that this guy got this new product and was so consumed by it that his girlfriend, friends, boss hadn’t seen him. That project went really well.


What was the concept the brought to you initially?
Head hadn’t done any advertising outside of print. I got a script from the agency in December, wrote a treatment, and then we bandied creative back and forth between the agency, the client, Novak and his management. So it grew and evolved over four months before we actually shot.

The one constant was that he was playing a regular match, he appears to lose the point but then the ball comes back. They sent me the scene from Ace Ventura Pet Detective when he is in the psychiatrist’s office and he does the slow motion replay. So that was the idea – a slow motion take on instant replay where continuity didn’t mean anything and it was just about this crazy stuff we see him do in the middle of a tennis point. You name it we had. I was amazed what we were able to get approved and get Novak to do.

How do you budget this? And how do you budget these viral Web videos in general?
I hate using the term viral because it is really a result and not a type of work. All these brands aspire to have these videos perform virally. Someone needs to coin a better term.

You’re never going to have a million-dollar budget on Web material, but I have done branded content for the Web that has been anywhere from 10 percent to 50 percent of a commercial shoot. I think as there is more success and clients see they can succeed and reach a broad audience [on the Web] the budgets will continue to go up. It’s really about educating clients at this point.

Usually [the budget] is about negotiation. They say ‘here’s the number’ and invariably a line producer freaks out and thinks it can’t be done for anything close to that figure. Then you adjust the budget and hopefully meet somewhere in the middle. That [negotiation] can go right up until the shoot. Even during shooting you are balancing whether you really need an extra set up. It often starts in a place that may be somewhat unrealistic and moves from there. I’ve sent the whole range. Projects have come to us that are just way too low to the point where we would lose money on it. But more and more these projects have budgets that you can work with.

The creative director on this Head spot really pushed the envelope in a good way. Every time we came to a situation where someone wanted to contract the scope of the project for financial reasons he would step in and not allow it to be compromised creatively.

It’s not a battle it’s just a give and take. It’s just about working together with the agency to make a great campaign. Head was a new client and if we didn’t all hit it out of the park they may not ever do something like this again.


Where are the corners that you cut to produce within a lower budget?
People. It’s really about having the least amount of people you physically need on set to accomplish the job. [Last year] we shot an international travel series that was branded content for Dos Equis. That had the smallest crew I’ve ever used on anything and it was for a multi-million dollar beer brand and one of the biggest agencies in the country. It was a producer, DP, second cameraman, sound and myself, and then some locals depending on where we were. We figured out how to make that work.

But you really have to be honest with yourself and figure out what you can get away with. Can we have just two grips and two electrics? Or is that going to kill us when we get to the shoot? And you have to be honest with the agency and client and tell them if it is an ambitious piece of work and what the hard costs attached to it. They know that. They know that you, me and a camera does not a successful piece of content make. I came out of promos so I never came from a world where it was ‘let’s pad the budget o we make sure we can spend it all.’ I came from a world where we had $60,000 to do the best that we can. That’s why I work the way I do. I try to get as much in-camera as possible, use a really great art director and a great DP. That goes a long way.

Then it is the amenities that go. You don’t stay in the plush hotel and take 20 people out to dinner out every night. We put the dollars on screen. I’d rather keep working on a lot of little jobs like this than do one huge one and never work again because you blew the budget out of the sky.


What about on the post side? Are there corners you can cut, say with color correction or the sound mix?
Not really, but that’s the great thing about being at a place like Creative Bubble. We have the infrastructure and talent in-house here to deliver a bigger bang for the buck. Where someone else might have to go outside just to do a color correct, I can just go down the hall. It was not that crucial on a spot like this because we wanted it to be a little gritty.

On these Web projects, does Creative Bubble get involved in distributing them on the Web?
No. Once we deliver we are hands off. [The agency] had a seeding company that deal with the distribution of the project. If you want to do something successfully, go to experts that know how to do it. There are people that know how to distribute these videos across the Web and are very good at it. I think in the past people have tried to do it on their own and got burned.