Irreverent and quite frankly, ridiculous, the new campaign from Woot! and production company The New Blank is our Reel Ad of the Week. What do we like about the work from a first-time advertiser and its production partner? Did we say the two spots are ridiculous and irreverent? And pretty effin’ funny to boot. Which rhymes with Woot!
The low-budget humorous work has earned over 20 million views on YouTube to date.
“At first we were in full-on head scratching mode about how to do something interesting with a million constraints,” admits The New Blank’s Bobby Hougham. “After digging into the brand, listening to the thoughts floating around and a fair amount of brainstorming, we came up with an idea that would actually be augmented by a lo-fi production solution.”
The spots are a glimpse at what stretching the budget can do to the success (and humor) of a project. Woot’s own writer Matt Klan stars in the series of spots that lift the curtain, literally, on the concept of a slick-looking ad campaign.
“Honestly, we weren’t sure of how it would turn out–we just had an idea and put the faith in both the script and the production team. But now that they’re successful, I’m going to say we knew it all along,” deadpans Woot!’s Kirk Anderson. Watch below:
“It was a ton of fun to be the face of Woot!, even if it meant taking a lot of pratfalls,” explains Matt. “Thankfully we had some money for knee pads, and someone brought in their kid’s gym mat to land on.”
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To keep the budget tight, The New Blank pondered locations that included Hougham’s own kitchen and The New Blank’s parking garage, ultimately using a vacant space in a former bookstore downtown. There, Woot! and TNB came together and collaborated as a tight-knit team (but at a safe distance, given the times).
The end result is a quirky campaign that puts a clever spin on having to watch at least five seconds of a pre-roll ad. “It’s great to be able to drive brand awareness, but even better to actually make people laugh,” remarks Arsalan Ahmed, Chief Marketing Officer at Woot! “Now we have to come up with the next thing.”
Viewer response has been overwhelmingly positive:
“Just a general shoutout to this guy’s facial expressions throughout the entire video as well as the skill it took to pull this off!
“I wouldn’t be mad if YouTube took away the skip button but this was the only ad.“
I can’t believe I just watched an entire youtube vid that was nothing but a vid of a youtube ad that appears in front of other youtube vids. ….. And I did it on purpose!
Skippy broke the 4th wall into my heart.
We aren’t exactly sure what Woot! is. But the spots make us curious enough to find out.
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CREDITS:
Client: Woot!
- Chief Marketing Officer: Arsalan Ahmed
- Sr. Writer / Brand Manager: Kirk Anderson
- Writer / Production Manager: Matt Klan
- Social Media Manager: Rei Biermann
Production Company: The New Blank
- Executive Creative Directors: Bobby Hougham + Sevrin Daniels
- Creative Director: Bobby Hougham
- Director/Editor/VFX: John Jeffcoat
- Executive Producer: Andrew Kobliska
