(Static)
- Wow!
- Wow.
(screams)
(lively music)
- Hi, my name is Tom and I am a copywriter.
I write commercials.
- I'm Kevin Weir,
I'm the creative director at Droga5 in New York.
- Hey, I'm Leigh.
- I'm Barrett. We have done four superbowl commercials.
- That's right.
- Hopefully we can give your some good advice.
- Just buying the space in the
Super Bowl is 4 million dollars.
- There is extra pressure to make it entertaining.
- You look at it as like, okay we have a captive
audience of hundreds of millions of people.
What is the craziest thing that we can do
just to get people talking?
- When the general public is judging your work
and not just advertising people.
- (interviewer) This is the people's commercial?
- Yes, exactly.
- (interviewer) Three ingredients to be an awesome
Super Bowl commercial, what are they?
- It's got to be original.
Super Bowls, they always have celebrities
- It's like magic
- Puppies
- Cute animals, cute babies
- It almost has to be a goal, like playing cheek.
What do you expect out of a Super Bowl commercial,
and kind of supert it.
They all have some product truth in them.
It was the Volkswagen The Force commercial
where the little kid dressed up as Darth Vader
and tried to make things happen with his mind
and he goes out and goes like that to the car
and the dad remote started the car and the kid
freaks out, it's really cute.
With a Volkswagen, it does sort of feel like the
force when you remote start a car.
The Snickers Betty White commercial,
that was a real classic one.
They're like playing tackle football.
- Better?
- Snickers hunger does transform you into
a different person.
E-Trade is less about a product truth
and more a media truth.
It's just a monkey dancing wearing
an E-Trade shirt for 20 seconds and it says
Well, we just wasted a million dollars.
How's your money?
People watch the Super Bowl very aware
of how much the commercials cost,
and they think about whether that was
worth that much money.
So, it's tapping into what people are already thinking.
- I think the biggest rule of the Super Bowl
is there's no rules except what works.
Surprising people is key.
- (interviewer)Talk about your current Super Bowl commercial.
- We did the Avocados from Mexico commercial.
It's this perfect world.
- You sealed the bad out and kept the good in.
- But, of course, they're just people so
we're going to screw it up.
- The chips are outside!
(screams)
There were hundreds of ideas pitched.
- Yeah, it just fluctuates for months and months
and months until finally we wind up with that
one idea that made it through.
- Using celebrities in ways that are expected
I think is a really good way to go at things.
There were a SquareSpace one last year
with John Malkovich.
He was very upset because someone else
had registered John Malkovich dot com,
and it was just a super simple idea.
It kind of hinges a little bit on star power
and believability and scale.
I was on a team that made the Tourism Australia
commercial which involved pretending to
make a movie called Dundee.
- Ha ha, that's me
- Brian Dundee?
- Hollywood is kind of rebooting every single
movie from the eighties.
Crocodile Dundee kind of stands out as one
that hasn't been brought back.
We wanted people to think that we were
actually making a real movie.
Danny McBride is such an unlikely choice
to play the son of Crocodile Dundee.
Which is intentional.
- You okay mate?
- Nothing to see here man,
just getting a clean shave with my machete.
- Really became the character on set.
He was just constantly riffing and improvising
and doing the lines better than we gave him.
A lot of the moments that ended up in
the final cut were him riffing.
- There's so much with Super Bowl spots.
The process of making one is kind of part of
what makes it great.
I mean look at the success that Doritos has had
for years just kind of like crowdsourcing.
(glass shatters)
- For big visuals, like drop people in
but you have to something that ends up with
some sort of substance and content.
- The key to making a Super Bowl commercial
is that if you haven't had fun making it
people certainly aren't going to have fun watching it.
- Totally.
- (interviewer) Making a Super Bowl commercial is
kind of like making a diamond?
- It's a really intense process.
It's months and months of work.
Because the prize is so great it so stressful,
but at the end you have a beautiful diamond
which is a commercial.
(lively music)