by RICHARD EARLE, Regis Group Affiliate
I don’t know if you’re like me, but when I hear a special piece of music, it stays inside my head for days. I play it over it in my brain as I’m falling asleep at night, and I wake up the next morning humming it.
In the Branding workshops I run, I make the point that if you are to be properly branded, you should appeal to as many of the five senses as possible, with sight and sound being a strong #1 and #2. Therefore, if you’ve got a song that’s special, combined with some killer graphics, you’re well ahead of the curve. And AT&T has it bigtime in their current commercial “Re-think Possible: Birthday.” And from observing the amount of media weight they’re buying to support it, I would say they know what they’ve got. It is run in the major network shows several times each night.
The cell phone world is dog-eat-dog, with each large conglomerate striving to own the “most innovative” brand, and this spot accomplishes that by placing a 30-something having his lunch atop an LA skyscraper and re-imagining the fanciful and innovative drawings he used to create at age 5. Each graphic is a marvelously drawn creature that is electronically inserted in the cityscape scenes, until it runs out of steam and curls up and flutters to the ground. It’s all tied together and edited to this mind-sticking song that I found to be so different from the standard commercial sound track that I had to search it. I discovered that it’s called “Pure Imagination” from the 1971 film “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” It’s performed by Gene Wilder as Willly in a true movie-musical rendition. Unique for a TV spot. The song stays with you.
I have one minor quibble: the creators of this piece of unique work obviously got so involved with the song and the unique graphics that they simply ran out of screen time. The “product shot” at the end, showing all the “i” gadgets designed for AT&T by Steve Jobs (their very own Willy Wonka) is allotted only 2 seconds at the end, and the logo and tag line flash by in 1 second. Probably conscious of that, they actually prepared a :60 which gave them room for a proper ID space at the end, plus lot more graphics which you may also access here. Both the :30 and the :60 are accessible below. (Be warned, the song will stay with you!)
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