The latest Serena Williams sports and entertainment spot for DirectTV sees the streaming service team up with Warner Brothers to leverage the launch of the latest film in The Matrix franchise via a TV spot called ‘The One’.
Taking a similar tactical and tonal approach as previous spots in the brand’s ongoing ‘Get Your TV Together’ series, the commercial spoofs familiar tropes and themes from the Matrix franchise and features Neo’s iconic sunglasses, martial arts hand gestures, bullet time and red and blue tennis balls as tennis super star and athlete ambassador Serena Williams aces out a replicating rival.
The ‘Get Your TV Together’ campaign, created by agency TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles and helmed by the Stink directing collective Traktor, promotes DirecTV’s blend of sports and entertainment and seeks to drive viewers online to find out more about more about The Matrix collaboration at https://www.directv.com.
Launched on 29 November, ‘The One’ rolled out ahead of Warner Bros’ release of ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ which hits cinemas and HBO Max on 22 December.
“The Matrix is truly an iconic franchise, and so many moments from the films have become part of our lexicon,” explained TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles Associate Creative Director Mark Winters. “It’s also a story about digital worlds colliding and merging—which is a great backdrop to show how DirecTV Stream is bringing together live TV and On Demand content.”
“The new release is a great cultural signal boost—but really, once we imagined Serena diving towards a bullet-time tennis ball, we knew we had to see it,” Winters added. “We borrowed specific effects from The Matrix to get the right look. Digging back into that aesthetic was a blast, from the bits of code raining down to the way we achieved the lighting in post for our dystopian tennis court.”
The campaign was created for DirecTV CMO Vince Torres, VP Advertising Kendall Thaker, AVP Marketing Mandy Martin, Director Of product Management Sheri Holmes, Social Media Director Nick Bianchi, Lead Product Marketing Managers Jenn Wang, Jessica Elizardo and Tracy Threlkeld by TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles.
The agency team which worked on the project included President Erin Riley, CCO Renato Fernandez, Creative Directors Ariel Abramovici and Bruno Acanfora, Associate Creative Directors Mark Winters and Ryan Buckley, Art Director Will Holmes and Junior Art Directors Andrew Baeu and Yashashree Samant, plus Copywriter Tyler Archibald, with head Of Design Bruno Regalo, Senior Designer Jake Skirving, Junior Designer
Andrea Nazarino, Director Of Content Production Guia Iacomin, plus Senior Producer
Jack Cutler.
Other’s working on the campaign included Critical Mass, production house Stink, VFX specialist JAMM, with mix handled by Lime and music by South.
Comment
This Tennis-Meets-The-Matrix commercial follows previous spots in the series starring Serena Williams including ‘Wonder Woman’ and monster mashup ‘Quiet Please’.
Leave a comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.