One of the most successful viral ad campaigns of recent times is Carlton Draught’s Big Ad. A spot so entertaining and effective that millions of people downloaded it or emailed it weeks before it ever appeared on air. Does this prove we just need to return to good ideas and great production values to be effective? We ask the spots visual effect supervisor Andrew Jackson, from Sydneys leading FX house Animal Logic.
While some people pay millions of dollars to show their advertising spot to an audience who may not even be paying attention, others produce brilliant shots that people enthusiastically show to friends and family – and often watch over and over again. Since Foster’s Australia emailed it to 4000 employees on a Friday afternoon in July, 1.7 million people worldwide have seen it. This includes 10,000 people in Hungary in one single record breaking day of downloading.
“We just thought we would put it out there to see what would happen and, yes, it has taken us by surprise,” said the spokeswoman for Foster’s Australia, Jacqui Moore in the Sydney Morning Herald Newspaper. She said it would be two months before she was able to assess its impact on sales of Carlton Draught beer sales. In the same article, Ben Welsh, creative director of rival advertising agency M&C Saatchi, is quoted as saying he is “insanely jealous”. “The genius of it is that it does all the things a good beer ad should do: it has a product shot, a drinking shot and it’s got loads of blokes in it.”
In this weeks podcast we discuss the Big Ad with Andrew Jackson the visual effects supervsior from Animal Logic in Sydney. The Big Ad is classy – funny and a huge success. Using Massive software and in house tools at Animal Logic – the spot runs against the grain of ‘edgy’ low budget viral campaigns and looks and delivers stunning visuals and crafted effects.
Click here to view the original viral spot
Below is a an exclusive quicktime download showing a turntable of a CGI Massive Agent used in the spot.
movielink(bigad/turntable.mov,Download quicktime turntable of one of the Massive Agents – 800k)