A new ad for Hulu launched to leverage the start of the 2020 NFL season on 10 September starts with the Cleveland Browns’ Baker Mayfield and the New York Giants’ Saquon Barkley on the field ready to start the season, but as the quarterback passes to the running back the ball travels an embarrassingly short distance as the camera opens up to a wide shot which reveals the players’ heads on incongruously scrawny frames.
“We can’t shoot commercials right now,” says Barkley. “So Hulu put our faces on some other guys’ bodies,” replies Mayfield. “You all said I should spend less time doing commercials, so Hulu got some random to do it for me.”
The spot then closes with a shot of a NBA star and Philadelphia 76er Joel Embiid in his living room watching the ad event unfold on his TV.
The Disney-owned video on demand media company and IPG agency Big Family Table used artificial intelligence technology, better known as Deepfake, to create the commercial.
To achieve the Deepfake tech, the marketing team worked with VFX company Tribbo and the ad was directed by Hungry Man’s Dave Laden.
Outside of the location shoots, the production also involved Zoom shooting sessions with the athlete ambassadors during which they used their smartphone cameras to shoot their own faces at various angles to capture that image data that would be superimposed on the body doubles.
“We felt the cultural truths around the inaccessibility of the athletes, and the different type of football season that is about to be upon us would really resonate with football fans at this point in time,” commented Hulu VP Brand Marketing Michael Schneider.
Big Family Table Chief Creative Officer Guto Araki added that the campaign evolved organically after seeing fans’ reactions to the first spot.
“After Lillard shared [our last] ad on social media, followers called out the bizarre-looking effects. The second we saw people couldn’t tell what was going on but knew something was going on, we said, ‘Let’s embrace it,'” Araki explained.
“That’s when the campaign turned a really interesting corner and everyone jumped into the joke.”
Outcome:
Since it was launched on 11 September, the spot has generated 268k views on Hulu’s own YouTube channel alone.
Comment:
Following on from Hulu’s radical transparency and honesty positioning, as illustrated in its ‘Money/Sellouts’ campaign from early 2019 (see case study).
The new ad unabashedly admits to using the tech and is even called ‘Deepfake’ (a tech tool mired in much controversy since it emerged into the mainstream).
This September campaign followed on from August’s Hulu ad which celebrated the return of sports and which ‘visited’ Hulu endorser athletes – including Portland Trailblazers’ Damian Lillard, New York Yankees’ Aaron Judge and WNBA star Skylar Diggins-Smith – in their homes to spotlight their ‘quarantine hobbies’.
At the time the spot was shot, COVID limitation were in effect limiting the brand’s ability to shoot live with the sports stars, so to create the spot Hulu used body doubles and superimposed the athletes’ faces onto them using ‘digital face replacement technology’.
Links:
Hulu
https://www.instagram.com/hulu/
https://www.youtube.com/user/huluDotCom
Big Family Table
https://www.bigfamilytable.com/
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