Philips chooses Web for epic advertisement
NEW YORK -- Selling consumers on a $4,000 home-theater TV these days requires some epic advertising.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
The video highlights the key screen shape feature and a signature Philips backlighting feature called Ambilight. The screen proportion — known in home theater as its "aspect ratio" — is 21:9, the standard wide-screen cinema format. Watchers of the ad video can toggle between that and the standard flat-screen TV proportion of 16:9, illustrating the black bars or distortion of the movie. They also can view with and without simulated Ambilight.
