To get young adults to pass along a viral video, it needs to be super sexy, super funny or somewhat gory. GJP Advertising, Toronto, combined the latter two elements in a new online campaign for VEX, a Canadian hard lemonade beverage, to launch its killer new Strawberry Orange Banana flavor. The campaign, which consists of a website and banner ads, spoofs the horror film genre. At www.slicedthemovie.com, visitors can watch a faux horror movie trailer. But the actors/victims starring in the trailer are actually fruit, and the killer is a VEX bottle. Before watching the trailer, viewers are warned that it is rated R-19 for fruit torture and scenes of juice.
“The 19-28 year-old target group is gobbling up movies like Hostel and Saw. While horror has always been a big genre, it seems even bigger now. There is never not a big horror movie in the theaters,” explained art director Gerald Flach, regarding why the client decided to parody classic horror films in this viral campaign.
The trailer opens on a group of fruits as they celebrate the end of summer at an uncle’s isolated and abandoned cottage. As in most horror films, the visitors quickly become ill at ease as they realize something is not quite right at the cottage. Then wouldn’t you know it, the power goes out. One by one the fruit are found dead–blended, grated and juiced to death. Periodically throughout the footage, a silhouette of the killer, the Vex bottle, can be seen. Near the end of the trailer, a frightened strawberry cries out, “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I like your taste,” the killer replies.
Flach brought in Helios Design Labs, Toronto, to produce the trailer because of the company’s track record for doing cool viral campaigns. (Remember Virgin Mobile’s “Billy the Finger” from 05. The campaign consisted of a site featuring several videos in which Billy acts out various scenarios involving a shady cell phone salesman who attempts to convince him to sign up for one of those “bad” cell phone plans. The execution provides the viewer with the option to make decisions for Billy and view the various outcomes, which include a trip to prison, a threesome, a hot cheerleader, circus acts, unintentional rear entry and finger burning.)
Flach said the Helios team, including director Alex Wittholz, went above his expectations for the VEX campaign. What started out as a simple idea of having fruits on sticks turned into a full-blown production. “We really took it quite seriously. And the more serious we treated the material, the funnier it became,” Flach said, adding that the shoot lasted five days.
A few pieces of stock footage were used during production but the rest was shot in-camera. Miniature sets were built to create a “fruit world.” Minature newspapers were even created for the basement scene where news clippings hang on the walls. While most of the fruit was CG, the team sliced up some real fruit and ran it through a blender for the torture scenes, which can also be looked at more closely in the “Basement” section of the site.
Three banner ads drive traffic to the faux movie trailer site. One banner flashes: “When a killer comes knocking…how will you run…when you don’t have legs?” A second reads: “Unspeakable torture. Unimaginable suffering. And oodles of pulp.” A final banner says, “More horrifying than Hostel. More chilling than Saw. More disturbing than Britney.” The tagline for all the ads is: “Who Knew Fruit Could Scream?”
