This is a series on marketing solutions. Often the simplest solution is the best. Here’s one you might find interesting.

Are you surrounded by people who just can’t keep themselves from making things as complex as possible? They’ve got this idea that for something to be worthwhile it MUST be complex and very hard.

We don’t work that way.  Hey.  It may be our experience or we just like to have fun or some of both.  We think there is always a way to get what you want simply and easily.

This Norm Taylor spot is a good example. It was a difficult TV commercial to do.  The storyboard called for a distraught woman in a car which had broken down at night on the freeway.  She almost gets hit a number of times.  Her car’s a lemon and, as the narrator says, she needs to call Norm Taylor to get her money back.

Well, as you may know, it costs a godzillion dollars to close a freeway, plus permits, traffic cops, firemen etc. Even renting a piece of asphalt big enough for background trucks and cars to zoom past in the background was pricey and we would have to rent a generator to fake the lights overhead.

So, we decided to shoot the foreground of the woman in the car against green screen and then marry it to a background shot of freeway traffic at night.

We thought it’d be fun to shoot a time lapse of the green screen shoot so we didn’t bore you to death.

We call the time lapse video “Gone in 60 Seconds”.

Our pro’s really did an excellent job.  Better than some of the green screen in Die Hard 3.   If you want to see the final spot, click the picture below.

Written by: Fletcher Murray of The Association

Fletcher Murray