Give us an overview of the campaign, what is it about and what was your role in the creation?
This campaign is about reintroducing an iconic, 80-year-old cereal brand in a big, visual way. "Full of Possibilities" is a demonstration of how simple and versatile every Chex lattice piece is, essentially turning each square into a story about all the ways to enjoy Chex. My role was to lead the creative from ideation to shipping, listen to our Chex partners and own their business problem with them, and help steer our team to a platform and executions that would stay true to what people love about the brand.
Was the brief for this holiday campaign any different than the usual? What challenges did that present?
The ask was, first and foremost, to create an ownable campaign that celebrated the taste, simplicity and versatility of Chex. So we went into this project with a pretty evergreen approach, but knowing the holiday season is big for them (a huge portion of Chex sales are in the last three months of the year). When it became clear we were launching our campaign during the holidays, we shifted our creative to be all holiday-focused. Fortunately, one of the strengths of the platform is its flexibility, designed to work regardless of season, use-case or flavor.
What inspired you to approach the campaign this way?
At Pereira O’Dell, we always want to make work that stems from a truth about the product and the brand. So the Chex piece itself was such a gift in that way. It’s got the square shape and the iconic lattice pattern, and the squares within the lattice felt like a wide open creative opportunity. Each square essentially gave us a blank canvas to tell a fun, simple, Chex-centric story.
What’s a “behind the scenes” story that only you know about?
We shot this campaign in Vilnius, Lithuania (“The G-Spot of Europe” — their slogan, not mine), which is apparently big into the hot air balloon scene. The Chex and POD team piled into two balloons and got to float 1,500 feet above the city and into their farm country, which was terrifying and incredible. I was lucky enough to be in the balloon without our chain-vaping line producer, whose vape smoke I believe has spread across 60% of Eastern Europe by now.
Are there any holiday ad tropes that you think should be retired by now?
This isn’t so much a trope as it is a generality about holiday ads recently, but I’m not a fan of seeing them before Halloween. This year, Crate & Barrel launched a Reese Witherspoon holiday campaign on October 10th. It was 70 degrees in New York City on October 10th.
What is your favorite holiday campaign of all time?
Man, there are so many good ones. For me, it doesn’t get better than the Harvey Nichols “Sorry, I Spent It On Myself” campaign from 2014. That one made me really jealous. It was all about encouraging people — in a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek way — to skimp on friends and family in order to buy themselves luxury holiday gifts. I love how they went beyond TV spots and video, and actually invented a line of cheap, Harvey Nichols-branded gifts to sell in-store (a wire sponge, toothpicks, a bag of gravel, etc.). The whole thing just felt super subversive and naughty at a time of year when everything else feels sappy and heartwarming.
What can we expect from your agency in 2019?
There are going to be a lot of big things dropping next year across all our clients, including our other General Mills brands, Annie’s & Yoplait, the 150th anniversary of the American Museum of Natural History, big new work for MINI, Jet, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and European Wax Center (two very different centers), and fingers crossed about a particularly big branded content project I’m not allowed to talk about.
What do you think the advertising industry's New Year’s resolution should be?
I really wish we would all collectively agree to stop turning pitch-strategy-manifesto-montage videos into consumer-facing spots.