Budweiser’s Puppy Love commercial earned the #1 spot on the USA Today Ad Meter for Super Bowl this year. This metric is used by advertisers to measure how well the average viewer likes a commercial, on a scale of 1 to 10. Puppy Love clinched the top spot with a score of 8.29 so it’s a pretty safe bet that doing something similar will be well received.
Our good friends down the street, Red Hare Brewing Co., commissioned us to make a spot parodying this Budweiser Puppy Love commercial.
We thought it was a pretty brilliant idea because Budweiser released this commercial on YouTube a few days before airing it during the Super Bowl. During that short period of time, it went viral and amassed more than 35 million views. After seeing how successful this commercial already was, Red Hare wanted to jump on the opportunity to parody it in time for Super Bowl Sunday. Red Hare’s concept for the commercial is clever because it is a classy and mature style of parody. Rather than making a cheap knockoff with low brow humor, Red Hare wanted the commercial to have good cinematography and sound design similar to the Puppy Love commercial but with a message that conveys the fact that they spend the majority of their time and money making darn fine beer – as opposed to making over the top commercials that cost millions to broadcast. Their goal was to release their commercial on their social networks on Super Bowl Sunday in order to be as relevant as possible. Since Red Hare first told us about their idea just one day before they wanted to release it, we had to jump in order to make it happen. Doing a commercial like this is all about releasing it while the topic is still relevant. For us, this meant having to take a few shortcuts in order to ensure a timely completion. We decided not to storyboard, to shoot using available light, and to shoot everything with a handheld camera rig in order to optimize efficiency without sacrificing too much quality.
We immediately drove out to the beautiful farm location that they secured in Suwanee, Georgia. The weather was mild and overcast so the available light was nice and soft. I wish we would have had a nice blue sky for the opening shot but we had to make due with what we had since this was the only shooting day option available. We shot it on a Canon 5D mark III using Magic Lantern RAW video in order to take advantage of the superior video quality that shooting RAW offers. The entire commercial was actually shot with available light in order to get it done on time and to still leave time for the additional hours of post processing that shooting RAW on a 5D entails. As expected, the biggest challenge during the shoot was trying to get the animals to cooperate with our desires. Neither the dog nor the horse were interested in interacting with each other. In order to get Nacho, the great dane, to walk over to the horse’s stall, we had to place a piece of meat on the stall door. He was very smart and quickly learned how to hit his mark in order to get his treat. Majestad, the horse, was mostly interested in apples so Roger, the owner of Red Hare Brewing, would hold an apple just out of frame in order to get Majestad to look towards Nacho. After an hour of trying, there was only one moment where it appeared that Nacho and Majestad interacted in the way we wanted them to. The only problem with this take was Roger’s hand was in frame, so we composited his hand out in the final version of the ad. Check out the before and after still frames:
We were able to get all of the shots we needed in 4 hours so we wrapped the shoot and headed back to the office to DIT and prepare the project for editing. The next morning, on Super Bowl Sunday, we began editing at 9am and had picture lock at 1pm. We took a quick lunch break and then worked on creating audio for the spot. We had already selected the music track we wanted to use so we spent the next couple hours bringing the commercial to life with the sound design and Roger’s voiceover. I really like that Roger, the owner himself, was willing to perform the voiceover because it brings a more personal touch to the spot. He is passionate about the quality of the beer they brew and about anything related to the Red Hare brand and it really came through in his voiceover. With the audio complete, we color corrected and then gave the spot a warm grade similar to the Puppy Love commercial. Then we exported and started sharing the completed spot at 3:30pm. We were happy to have achieved our goal of completing it in time and we were quite pleased with how the spot came together. Take a look for yourself:
After sharing it on our social networks, we eagerly awaited to see what kind of reception the commercial would receive. So far, the ad has been pretty successful because it amassed over 10,000 views and 75 likes within it’s first week. The Atlanta Journal Constitution even wrote a nice article about it. Most importantly, fans of Red Hare Brewing have been sharing the commercial on their own social networks, which is the highest compliment to any advertiser.
In summary, piggybacking off of big brand success is a good way to gain extra exposure because it allows a smaller brand to become a part of the larger conversion. In Red Hare Brewing’s case, it allowed them to be relevant during the Super Bowl while still delivering the message they wanted to deliver – that they make a darn fine beer.
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