I am normally very cynical about values-driven advertising because I think consumers are too. It needs to be related to your product or based around something you are doing, or you look like you’re piggy-backing off the back of a trend and it looks hollow.
However, for this campaign, Jeff and I indulged in some for the oceans. We persuaded the ABI, the world’s largest beer company, that cleaning up and protecting 100 beaches around the world was more than just a good thing, and an important thing – but when it came to Corona, whose main brand asset is the beach, that it was a good branding thing.
We were not just saying it, but doing it, and the actions of the brand became the campaign.
I'm proud of this work because not only did we persuade Corona to do some real good, but we have sold them into a 4 year campaign, produced 200 video assets, changed their brand tone of voice, ran their Instagram and built this beautiful website. I even guest wrote this piece for the WSL despite never having said the word "gnarly".
It was a hell of a journey. This was no conventional ad campaign. This was a year long epic, with three months of shooting and nearly six months of editing and post to make nearly 300 assets, including 5 full length documentaries in two languages (three if you include “Surfer’s English”). My partner, Jeff, and I did half the shoot each: he filmed a bunch of it, and I conducted an absurd number of interviews.
We also…well, we also broke a number of rules.
We were supposed to just make this sort of infomercial-type thing, which we took from being a stiff VO to a naturalistic type piece with VO taken from interviews we conducted with talent and influencers.
But we decided that we wanted to do more than just make an informative mini documentary. No one had approved this: I had been told explicitly not to do it, but one lunchtime in Mexico, I took Diego Luna aside and asked him if he would read a love letter to the ocean I had written. We recorded it on my phone.
Then, we put it to picture, and recommended to the client that we should finish post production on it (and re-record Diego). They agreed, and not only that, but it became the focal point of their campaign.
We also got a bunch of surfers involved through Corona’s sponsorship of the World Surf League. I went down to Australia to interview them and we used their responses as the VO to Morgan Maassen’s beautiful ocean photography.
I also have all those documentaries subtitled on a hard drive. They’re not out yet. Shoot me an email if you want to see them.