"One Second Theater" (BBDO): The award-winning ecomagination commercial, "Singin' in the Rain," was transformed into a DVR experiment in which viewers could pause frames to get the Hollywood dirt on its dancing elephant star.
"I'm always challenging my agency people to come up with ideas they think I won't want, or that they think I'll think are too risky. Sometimes they are too risky for us, but the process still allows us to go further than we would have gone. In the 1950s, we sponsored a series of black-and-white TV programs that Ronald Reagan hosted, called General Electric Theater. A while back, we challenged our agency--whom we've been working with for 86 years--to come up with an idea that reinterpreted GE theater in a contemporary way. With DVRs, we also realized there was the potential for advertising in a new medium, and we wanted to figure out a way to engage people who were fast-forwarding through ads.
Our agency had been floating ideas for a couple of years, but nothing was really breakthrough or innovative. Then they came up with 'One Second Theater.' We could insert extra content into our very popular ecomagination spot that has an elephant dancing in the rainforest to Gene Kelly's 'Singin' in the Rain.' We loved the germ of the idea, but to be honest, the first couple of rounds they presented to us weren't that funny. They were just what you'd expect from a company like GE. We wanted to do the unexpected, because we wanted people to wake up to the things we were doing that they were unaware of.
It took us a while to get to where we are, but we were able to finally hit the perfect tongue-in-cheek humor. There are 10 extra frames inserted into the spot, and DVR watchers can pause them to find such ridiculous things as 'It was hard to imagine Elli [the elephant] ever recovering from... the peanut scandal.' When you're trying to do something new at any big company, there's always going to be some amount of skepticism. But part of the new culture here is you can't just sit back and do the same old."
"It" (BBDO): In this playful campaign, the everyday world interacts with "it"--the personification of everything from a skateboard to a designer dress.
"EBay has always been seen as an anti-retail way of shopping. The downside is that some people think of us for only the quirky or hard to find--not for practical things. We had to find a way to communicate our enormous inventory without getting too specific about any one type of product. We needed to find a metaphor that somehow represented everything without alienating anything.
The creative director at our agency is a copywriter by background, and he was just listening to how people talk. He kept hearing, 'I'm going to eBay to get it.' We would have meetings to discuss ideas for the new campaign, and he kept saying nonchalantly, 'What if it was just a big "it"?' We thought, 'That's kind of interesting,' but we weren't sure what to do with it, so we'd move on.
What we later realized is that it's not just the word--it's how you treat the word, how you bring it to life. Our agency presented us images of an 'it' in place of where an engagement ring or a steak would be, and you could start to see a commercial where people are interacting with the abstract object as if it were a thing. We all had the same gut reaction: We had just found lightning in a bottle. You get a little sweaty-palmed, your mind starts racing. There's a little bit of anxiety, doubt, and fear, too, when it comes to doing something that's so nonformulaic. That nervousness is important. It's actually one of my gauges.
After the spots started running, people immediately started creating their own 'it' models and selling them on eBay--everything from 'it'-molded earrings to a giant 'it' cake. For us, that's the ultimate test--for our community to feel like they own it."
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