Here's some more gland-stimulating news from the
New York Observer for you Anderfans:
Bottle Racket
by Gabriel Sherman, George Gurley, Rebecca Dana and Michael Calderone
All those so-called hipsters fervently awaiting Wes Anderson’s follow-up to The Life Aquatic don’t need to obsessively check IMDb; starting next week, they just have to turn on the TV. Mr. Anderson’s latest oeuvre won’t be yet another campy comedy starring a morose Bill Murray—rather, he’s been enlisted by Coca-Cola to direct four 30-second television ads for their Dasani bottled-water brand.
In January, Mr. Anderson spent two days filming the $1 million project at the Silvercup Studios in Long Island City. And when the spots break next week, the series will enter regular rotation in prime time with such high-profile buys as the NCAA basketball tournament, broadcast on CBS.
The ads were created by independent New York agency Anomaly, a nine-month-old boutique firm based out of a Hudson Street loft. In a coup last August, Anomaly won the $20 million Dasani account—making it the youngest firm to get a slice of Coke’s $2 billion annual marketing budget.
"I wrote the spots intending them to be directed by Wes. We rolled the dice that he would direct," said Ernest Lupinacci, a partner and creative director at Anomaly who wrote and conceived the television campaign.
The commercials each star an actor clad in a schlocky animal costume shilling for Dasani. The spots unfold on oversized sets of Brobdingnagian scale and Andersonian attention to detail. In one spot, a guy dressed in a cocker-spaniel outfit flops through a dog door into a giant kitchen with a stove towering nine feet off the floor and discovers his first sip of Dasani water. With one swig, he immediately evangelizes the improvement in taste over tap water. In another spot, a Type-A woman in a hamster costume frenetically churns a hamster wheel with all the sweat-soaked fervor of a gym-addled Manhattanite. She crows about how she can’t drink enough Dasani. The third and fourth ads in the series star a bear who praises Dasani’s pure taste over the water he gulps out of his local mountain stream.
"You can’t believe the dry mouth you wake up with after three months of hibernation," he says as he takes a sip.
"The idea behind the spots was that if you found someone who only drank water, and if they drank this water, it would be so much better," Mr. Lupinacci said. "It dawned on me: My dog only drinks water. Animals are the perfect spokespersons for bottle water. Playfully, it’s like the classic testimonials. We liked the idea of being in your face. Except if we just had a person talking about the product, that would be a drag."
Mr. Anderson, now 35, leapt to auteur status as a 26-year-old budding filmmaker from the University of Texas with his 1996 cult classic Bottle Rocket. And purists who may accuse him of selling out should know that the Dasani spots are not Mr. Anderson’s first forays into advertising. In 1999, he directed a television ad for Sony, and he followed up that effort with a 2002 spot for Ikea. Mr. Lupinacci said that the Dasani spots will be the most recognizable examples of Mr. Anderson’s signature style.
"In the age of the cynical consumer who is overmarketed to, the best thing is to be very up-front. But you have to do it in a way that’s unexpected," Mr. Lupinacci said. "With Wes, maybe it’s just semantics, but this isn’t just a commercial—it’s a question of filmmaking. I optimistically and intuitively felt these spots are character-driven. There’s humor, but there’s also a heartfelt story."
Mr. Anderson was traveling in Europe and was not available to comment on the Dasani campaign.
—Gabriel Sherman
