Working from home: How employees' iPhones and Samsungs were put to a new use
One way of doing it.
It's a fluid situation, this COVID-19 crisis, but it's not exactly dynamic.
Some people are stuck at home trying to do jobs that may not be entirely conducive to being stuck at home.
You might think ad agencies can peddle their pitches and use old footage to cobble together their wares from the comfort of their own computers. But it's not always quite as easy as that.
Some projects require shooting new things and how are you going to do that when you're stuck at home?
How, for example, are you going to do a new ad for IKEA when your employees are separated and confined to their homes?
A Singapore ad agency -- a branch of Omnicom-owned TBWA -- decided there was only one thing for it: the employees would have to pick up their iPhones, Samsungs and other gadgets and shoot the darned thing themselves.
But what sort of script would it be? Well, something spontaneous to feature the creative things you can do at home. While stuck at home.
So here we have something that's meant to uplift at a time when so many people need it.
Here are people having meetings, entertaining their kids, exercising, and generally trying to stay sane. All from the confines of their sometimes not very large apartments. (Disclosure: I once lived in Singapore, and it's even more cramped now than it used to be.)
Of course, people are used to shooting ads on iPhones and the like -- Apple, for example. But for a big brand client to allow ad agency employees to star in their own ad -- something many agency employees long for, of course -- is an indication the brand understands our times.
Naturally, I suspect not all the furniture in this ad came from IKEA (If it did, questions may be asked in high places). I also find myself wondering how big the talent budget was for this oeuvre.
Still, pride of place must surely go to one specific individual working at their computer. The poor person who had to cobble the footage together to make some sort of coherent whole.
In the credits, that person is referred to by just one word: Indefatigable.