Creating a Comedic Marketing Video from Soup to Nuts

Have you ever been scrolling through your social media feed when boom, a video advertisement for something with absolutely no pertinence to you pops up? I’m sure just about all of you reading this have experienced being mistargeted by ads.

It’s annoying right? Sometimes it may even make you irrationally angry being bombarded with mistargeted ads. Maybe you’re a young guy who once looked up baby products to buy a gift for someone with a newborn, and now everywhere you seem to turn there’s an ad for a baby product. If only the formulas used to track and measure what you have searched could take into account the things you have only looked up once, and clearly not for yourself, then maybe the ads targeted to you could actually be pertinent.

That is exactly the premise of the video we just made for Nielsen, which helps businesses collect data from potential customers’ search history and filters out those things that have only been searched once or twice and targets their ads based on the things that have been searched for often.

When we started coming up with concepts for this corporate video marketing production, we knew we wanted it to be humorous and relatable. We agreed that the video could even play out almost like a sketch from a comedy show.

We came to the decision that the video should follow a the day in the life of a young guy who has probably just gotten out of school, has his first apartment and also his first job as he is basically stalked by ads for baby products.

Already that’s a funny concept to roll with, but we really had to sell it. The ads with which he would be bombarded needed to be really absurd and they needed to come through a variety of different mediums. These mediums included a tv, radio, print and a multitude of digital ads. This is where research into all products baby came in. If our character was to spend his entire day fielding a barrage of baby ads, then we needed to create ads for all different sorts of baby products. All in all we came up with six different baby-related ads. The ads were for diaper rash cream, potty training, pacifiers, children’s toothpaste, a mobile, and a breast pump.

Of course, absurd baby ads alone were not enough to truly create humor, but our young man’s reactions to these ads and the actress who would be in the video marketing, commercial and radio mock ads needed to really sell it.

Over the course of four days we auditioned around fifty men and fifty women for the roles and eventually cast Michael and Shannon.

Auditions for the male role were pretty intense, as this character did not have any dialogue. So instead of having the actors who auditioned for this part read sides our actors were given a couple of scenarios from the script that they then had to react to using physical comedy for our video production. The scenarios ranged from waking up to the sound of a screaming baby blaring from an alarm clock to being startled by a breast pump commercial while on a treadmill at a gym. What really landed Mike the part was when reacting to the breast pump commercial he very confusedly looked down and grabbed his own chest.

The auditions for the female role were more traditional. We had the women who auditioned read the sides for the breast pump marketing ad. We had a lot of great women audition that all brought something very different to the part. Shannon brought something fresh and fun to the part, she approached the role with such a sunny disposition that really made her stand out. Despite the absurdity of the script, Shannon really sold the product for the video production.

With both our script and cast in place we were ready to move on to filming. Well, we had a few other things that we needed to handle first. We had to solidify plans with Big Apple Studios, a New York City production studio where we filmed, we needed to order costume pieces, and lock down all set and prop pieces. Once all that was done, we were ready to begin our video production.

With a great cast and crew we filmed the commercial on January 28th and 29th. The shoot couldn’t have gone smoother. Because we shot in a production studio, we needed to be able to evoke the locations in which each scene took place using just a few set pieces and props.

Our set designer, Faye and her team really brought together some amazing pieces to evoke all of the different locations, which included a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, subway car, office cubicle, gym and a baby’s room.

We shot our scenes in an all white studio to provide a common thread among all of mock ads in our corporate production. Adding to the white studio, we used a dolly track to pan around each scene to provide similar movement and feel to each scene. With all of the scenes being shot using the dolly track and white background, the entire video production will come together and seamlessly transition from scene to scene in post-production.

The commercial is now being edited by our creative director Daryl, who also designed all of the print advertisements that appear in the video, and the post production will be done within a couple of weeks. From beginning to end, the entire corporate video production has been a great project for us here at ASL Productions. It has given us an opportunity to thrive in a creative and different environment within the corporate production field.