Selling consumers on a $4,000 home-theater TV these days requires some epic advertising.
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Ad agency Tribal DDB and the Stink Digital shop delivered just that with an ad to help electronics giant Philips roll out a new set in its CinemaOne line that has a 56-inch, high-definition (1080p) LCD screen built to movie proportions.
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The assignment was to own the idea of having a cinematic viewing experience at home, says Chris Baylis, executive creative director at Tribal DDB Amsterdam. From a production point of view, we thought it would suit the Web (rather than TV) and allow for better interaction.
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So the final ad is not epic in the sense of the traditional big-budget, celebrity TV ad. But it is epic in its ambition: create an online video with an engaging cinematic storyline that also shows off the features of the product, and do it in an interactive way to pull the viewer in.
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The story for the ad — a quirky tale of evil clowns and a hospital heist gone bust — was not the first choice. But the original idea for a Mission: Impossible rescue-theme story set at an opera house was deemed a little too ambitious. We had a script on the table, but it was too big to achieve in the time and budget required, so we had to rewind a bit, Baylis says.
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Instead, admakers went with the clowns and filmed the story as a single-shot, frozen-motion movie for the Web. The video, at www.philips.com/cinema, lets people click on the screen to move and manipulate the shot and view hot spots within the video. It was all designed to let people learn more about movie-making and movie-watching.
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The video highlights the key screen shape feature and a signature Philips backlighting feature called Ambilight. The screen proportion — known in home theater…