Over my two decades at J. Walter Thompson, Kellogg’s spent millions of pounds and played a huge part of the working day. My creative partner Nigel and I, would often have 2 or 3 briefs for various cereals on the go at all times. All of which needed multiple executions for client to choose from. Needless to say we wrote, possibly thousands of scripts and at a rough count, we produced well over a hundred TV ads.
KELLOGG’S - They’re tasty, very very tasty.
These few are favourite survivors of multiple format changes, a burglary and a small fire. Some followed famous campaigns, others new takes on an old product. Usually we had proper budgets and, if we were clever, we got to shoot in some lovely locations with talented actors and directors, including Aardman, The Simpsons and Spike Milligan, which made up for a lot of the frustration. We managed a few awards too.
My second ever shoot was The Special K ad set on a beach (below). We filmed it in the Cayman Islands. Just before the first day filming, the director went awol and, after an extensive search we decided to press on without him. As a 20 year old art director, it was a scary moment when the crew of about 40 people all looked at me when someone asked who will direct?
Thanks to a fab DOP (Award winning Howard Atherton) who was very patient and a great production company, we got it done and wrapped. The director was never heard of again and certainly never worked for JWT again.The second one was shot in Spain, mostly underwater and after that we were taken off Special K as we were having too much fun and selling too much cereal.
Neither of these Rice Krispie ads are particularly great, but were both fun to do for very different reasons. The one below was a long shoot working with the magnificent Aardman in Bristol. They were working on Chicken Run at the time and we took every opportunity to go down and watch the latest 3 seconds of film and have a tour around. The Wallace and Gromit sets and figures were still there and Nick Park was charming over a quick cuppa and showed us his recent first Oscar..
The second ad was going well until the sound session. Then it started to unravel. The main reason is we had booked the late, great Spike Milligan for the VO. What should have taken an hour took over 5 because we couldn’t stop laughing. Spike managed about 2 words before he set off laughing which in turn set the rest of us off. We had to edit it together one word at a time. My proudest moment was making him laugh in reception when he shyly asked why we had picked him? Apart from him being a comedy legend, I explained that Judie Dench wasn’t available. That set him off.
Here are a couple of stories that sum up working on major brands. We worked on a massive campaign for Frosties to re-vamp Tony. After a year of scripts and approvals, we went into production, using, at the time, ground breaking computer animation. Think Monsters Inc. Tony had an adversary, The Evil Doctor Cheetah (geddit?) voiced by the marvellous Tim Curry, and was a cross between James Bond and Batman. Cheetah wanted the Frosties formula, Tony used all his gadgets and vehicles in his Tiger Cave to stop him.
We shot on real sets to mix animation with real actors. Tony had a butler, Diddit (think about it) and some glamorous assistants and we used models and practical effects, including a retractable swimming pool. As we finished the filming and began sticking everything together, the USA client stepped in and stopped the lot, before we could finish anything, reasons unclear, hence the rough stills. Thankfully every sign-off had been strictly logged so we didn’t get fired. The director was Alex Winter of “Bill and Ted” fame and we had toys and merch all lined up, long before those pesky Meerkats!
Kelloggs did a tie-up with The Simpsons for a seasonal cereal call “No Problemo”.
Again scripts approved after much back and forth between us, Kelloggs and Gracie
Films (or so we thought) and off to LA we went to start animating and record the Voices. After a few days our producer informed us that the actors had been pulled
out by their agents so we couldn’t use the recordings we’d done. Neither could we
use the music, as agreed. After a few more days, it got sorted, all without mobile phones or email too, but our producer aged visibly.
It’s really tough re-writing scripts that have started animation, especially sitting around the pool at The Sunset Marquee, celebrity spotting and drinking beer and don’t let anyone say otherwise. But we soldiered on and got new scripts approved and the animation finished. The producers at Gracie were very helpful and said this battle between agents and production company was nothing new and often happened on the show. We finished up back home with a sound-alike music track. I can’t find the ads but the signed animation cell still hangs in my studio so not a total loss.
