Maidenform’s “This Feels Right” campaign, which launched yesterday, includes a video ad running at MySpace and a series of fashion and lifestyle sites that combines live action and animation to show a dog delivering a flower to a young woman wearing a Maidenform bra. It’s the first time Maidenform has used an online video ad.
“This Feels Right,” dubbed the “Affection” video by Maidenform, is a love story about a chalk artist who draws a dog on the sidewalk, which crosses the city to deliver the flower to the woman in her apartment.
“The campaign is about reintroducing Maidenform to a younger generation,” said Greg Smith, chief creative officer at The VIA Group/Portland, ME, which created the campaign. “They spent the past five years retooling the product. It’s still highly functional, but it’s more youthful and appealing. It’s where young women are at, so ‘This Feels Right’ is the theme.” The video was produced by Hatchling/Portsmouth, NH.
The video plays as a :45 at MySpace, which features a Maidenform landing page where the video plays and a contest that will award $20,000 and a role in the 2009 ad campaign to the member who submits the best original picture that captures the “This Feels Right” theme, according to Sally Skidmore, Maidenform’s VP of marketing and advertising.
Thirty-second versions of the video play in-banner at a range of sites, including Style.com, Lucky.com, Allure.com, Cosmopolitan.com, iVillage, AOL and People.com.
“We wanted to use the Internet for flexibility for timing with the :45 and :30s,” Smith said. “We wanted to take advantage of the in-banner video, with a PointRoll unit that can be rolled over to play the video. In-banner pushes content out faster than other media and drives them to the microsite. MySpace repurposes it to leverage the content.”
As for the video, which tells the story without dialogue, Smith said, “We wanted to do something that didn’t depend on copy. It’s very visual and has a sense of wonder. The simple story about the artist who draws the dog that delivers a flower is a powerful way to relaunch the brand.”
In the video, the artist draws the blue dog on the sidewalk and smiles as it emerges from the pavement and begins walking down the street. It passes a number of buildings, crosses a street with a walk light, and delivers the flower to the woman’s apartment. After she opens the door and sees the flower, the dog returns to the sidewalk, becoming a static blue image as the artist walks away.
The soundtrack is a song called “This Feels Right,” with music written by Janno Deily, who also performed it.
Hatchling shot the video in December in Austin, TX. “It had to look non-seasonal, so it can play year round, with lots of outdoor shooting and Austin is a great film location,” said Tris Fowler, Hatchling’s animation producer.
The live action, which included shots of the artist and the Austin street scene, was shot with a Panasonic AJ-HDX 900 HD camera. “We shot 24P and converted the file into Adobe Premiere using Focus HD. Then we dynamically linked these files with the Flash animation files to Adobe After Effects,” Fowler said.
The animation was done in Flash with hand drawn images of the dog. “We laid it on flat surfaces and let the animator animate freely to get the dog to move naturally with personality,” he said.
After Effects was responsible for helping set the tone of the film, including the chalk and grain effect that was applied to the dog.
The role of the dog was the key to the video. “They identify with the dog, it pulls them into the piece,” Fowler said. “People look at it like a journey. The dog isn’t walking across the street, but across town on a mission.”
Of course, the point of the video is to promote a bra and the woman is wearing one when she opens the door to get the flower. “She gets dressed in the morning, so she’s in her bra and senses something at the front door. She opens the door and sees the flower and the dog runs back to his original drawing,” Skidmore said.
The video is included in a campaign that also includes print and out-of-home, from magazine ads to New York City billboards. The video is “captivating and delightful enough to become viral,” Skidmore said. “It reaches women where they are these days.”
She also said, “The video isn’t product centric. It’s more about the look and feel of the brand and how Maidenform has far reaching emotional benefits to the woman in the video, who represents the consumer.”
Review: Director Joe Carnahan’s “The Rip”
Lines between cop and criminal get murky in Joe Carnahan's "The Rip," a crime thriller set across one foggy Miami night, starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Damon and Affleck, of course, are so closely associated with Boston — most recently they produced the 2024 heist movie "The Instigators" there — that a detour to South Florida puts them, a little awkwardly, in an entirely different movie landscape. This is "Miami Vice" territory or Elmore Leonard Land, not Southie or "The Town." In "The Rip," they play Miami narcotics officers who come upon a cartel stash house that Lt. Dane Dumars (Damon) says may have $150,000 hidden in the walls. It turns out to be more than $20 million, though, and their mission immediately turns from a Friday afternoon smash-and-grab into an imminent siege where no one can be trusted. "The Rip," which debuts Friday on Netflix, is a lean and potent-enough neo-noir where almost all the characters are police officers, yet it's a mystery as to who's a good guy and who's not. It's a nifty and timely premise, even if "The Rip" literally tattoos its message across itself. When Dane sits down with the young woman (Sasha Calle) at the stash house who seems plausibly innocent, she looks at tattoos on his hands and asks what they mean. On one: "AWTGG": "Are we the good guys?" As much as the answer might seem a foregone conclusion in a movie starring Damon and Affleck, who are also producers, "The Rip" plays with and against type in ways that can keep you engrossed. (The cast also includes Teyana Taylor, Steven Yeun and Kyle Chandler.) However, the exposition is so light and hurried in "The Rip" that that's almost all it plays with. We know almost nothing about our characters outside of the action in the movie, making all the... Read More