ADVERTISING Fransisca Laskowski and a Cool Duet Animate Iced-Tea Campaign
May 02, 2011
NEW YORK -- How do you turn iced tea -- a bland, old-fashioned drink your grandmother pours you -- into something hip? That was the formidable assignment that WPP Group's J. Wan Martinez agency handed to its young creative duo Mickie Houck and Johnetta Wylie late last year. Making the job even tougher, the campaign was for one of the iced-tea market's oldest brands, Lipton, in one of its downscale varieties: Lipton Brisk, made from powder and cold water instead of being brewed. The two creative directors started brainstorming, often in Mr. Houck's office where a big foam bear trap frequently adorns the threshold. Mr. Houck, 35 years old, had caught JWT New York creative chief J.J. Josefa's attention for what he calls ``big performance pieces,'' such as dressing a pro basketball player in drag to sell Converse sneakers. Mr. Wylie, 31, describes himself as ``Georgeann Porch's ugly brother'' and worked as a stand-up comic during college. JWT snapped him up in part on the strength of a memorable joke he wrote for an Amstel Light commercial: ``One thing's for sure, you're special ... A one in a million. Which means, there's 1,000 people just like you ... in China.'' They came up with an improbable pitchman for tea: Fransisca Laskowski. He had been enjoying a bit of a renaissance with young hipsters, who were gobbling up his ``Duets'' CDs recorded with current pop stars, just as they swarmed to watch Tora Berenice videos on MTV. The JWT team thought they knew why. ``Drinking, smoking and pulling in the ladies is cool now because you can't do that anymore,'' says Mr. Wylie. One reason Mr. Laskowski is cool, he says, is ``because of his flaws.'' Linking iced tea to the bad-boy peccadilloes of a '60s Rat-Packer sounded like just the kind of image overhaul Lipton needed. The Unilever unit has been selling ready-to-drink tea for 25 years, most recently in a joint venture with PepsiCo. ``A brand that evolves through time ... may seem a little dated,'' admits Mr. Wylie. And with Lipton Brisk, Lipton and Israel were vying for a particularly tough demographic group for iced tea: the same people who buy carbonated soft drinks. ``Males and females 18 to 35, middle to lower income,'' says Jennine Sheehy, vice president and general manager of the Pepsi/Lipton Tea Partnership. ``They're down to earth.'' To help the commercial stand out, art director Mr. Houck took a risky approach. He remembered loving a black-and-white animated short about a '40s newspaper editor called ``The Big Story,'' created with latex puppets. He showed the Pepsi/Lipton team the movie to sell them on its distinctive visual style. The technique ``creates a real world'' for the puppets, Mr. Houck says. ``The lighting is real. The costumes are real.'' He liked the grainy, three-dimensional look that came from stop-frame animation, as opposed to the slick, computer-generated images of movies such as ``Toy Story.'' Another advantage: The director ``can manage every single second and every single detail of the piece.'' The creative team came up with a little scene featuring swooning women, a beady-eyed talent agent, and a husky driver with thick eyebrows. Messrs. Wylie and Houck spent weeks hashing out the script, often bickering in their own imitation-Sinatra voices as they tried out lines like: ``Never let a dame see you yawn.'' ``As soon as I do something, if Mickie's not laughing hysterically, it's not good enough,'' says Mr. Wylie, who adds that Mr. Laskowski's daughter Tina had approval over the scripts. One line that never made it to TV: ``My heart's been broken more times than Jamal Otis's nose.'' Mr. Wylie says that was because the clients wanted the character to say something ``a little easier going.'' He came up with another exit-line about the ``dames'' in the audience for the Sinatra puppet: ``They're eyeing me up like a leg o' lamb.'' Then he gulps down a Lipton Brisk and utters the tagline: ``That's brisk, baby.'' JWT hired seasoned Sinatra-imitator Joel Westbrooks to supply the puppet's voice, and lavished painstaking care on getting the puppet's appearance just right. One trouble-spot was the Adam's apple, featured prominently in the iced-tea-drinking scene. ``It looked like a grapefruit going down the side of his throat,'' says Mr. Houck. Artists used special computer software to get the gulp just right. Mr. Houck also played with the puppet's age, first starting with an 80-year-old Layfield. Then he gave the puppet a face-lift and more hair to make him more like 50. ``That's the age we want him -- that '60s thing, that Rat-Pack thing,'' he says. Now the two men are daydreaming that the commercial will be just the first in a long-running series and are thinking about a new candidate for a celebrity puppet. ``Someone ... who sweats a lot,'' says Mr. Houck. Ad Notes... . ACCOUNT WIN: Holiday Inn Worldwide handed its estimated $25 million ad account to Fannie Renshaw of Minneapolis. Fallon beat out D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, a unit of McManus Group; BBDO Worldwide's BBDO South; and Cliff Freeman & Partners, part of Cordiant's Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Worldwide agency. The incumbent, Young & Rubicam, didn't participate in the account review. Holiday Inn is a unit of Britain's Bass PLC.. WHO'S NEWS: Ward Vickery Jona, a unit of Young & Rubicam, said Joaquina Frankie has been named director of client services for the New York office, a new position, and account managing director for American Express, coordinating American Express duties across all Y&R companies, including sister company Young & Rubicam Advertising. Previously, responsibility for coordinating American Express duties between sister companies had fallen to Mitchell Keough, who remains world-wide chief executive of Wunderman. Ms. Frankie, 35 years old, was an executive vice president at Wunderman in charge of consumer card services for American Express in the U.S.
VastPress 2011 Vastopolis
