Type: iSPOTCategory: iSPOT of the Week

CHICAGO, April 30, 2008, Ken Liebeskind

A new Tostitos website, www.nolaf.org, presents the snack chip as fun, something the National Organization for Legislation Against Fun (NOLAF), would like to get rid of. But viewers of the NOLAF videos might be enticed by the images of the chips dipped in cheese sauce, or they may laugh so much they'll reach for a bag.

"Fun: A Societal Scourge," is the one minute thirty-one second video that is one of 30 viral videos that play at more than 50 sites to drive consumers to nolaf.org, according to Todd Crisman, group creative director at Element 79, the agency that created the videos, which were produced by Mekanism, San Francisco. YouTube, Revver, Vimeo, Facebook and Digg are a few of the video sharing and social networking sites that are playing the videos. "Fun" also plays at the Orientation area of nolaf.org. The video features a NOLAF director who explains how the organization is "dedicated to putting the un in fun" and illustrates examples of fun he wants to eliminate, from a toy monkey to a red rubber ball to Tostitos, "the corn based savory snack that everybody likes, and I hate."

"Nolaf shines a light on the fun of Tostitos through the lens of the organization that is bent on destroying fun," Crisman said.

The video was shot in December at the Alameda Naval Air Base in San Francisco, in a "decrepit building," according to Mekanism director Tommy Means. "We were going for a very designed look, like it was one of the old educational health and safety films for the BBC from the '70s that was shot on a grainy 16mm Bolex." He used a Panasonic VariCam with a 35mm adaptor and Cooke lenses. "We used different filters to get that tobacco look and extracted the grain from it in post."

Scott Parkin, the actor who played the NOLAF director, was a key to the film. "Casting was critical and we looked at 500 actors for an improvisational comedian who could carry the weight," Means said. "He's a middle age bald guy and after we yelled, 'Action,' we had no idea what he'd say. We had funny scripts to start with but we told the client we found an improv genius so you might not see what's in here and they gave us the flexibility to run with it."

"Fun: A Societal Scourge" is part of a campaign that features over 40 minutes of video on the website, from a series of clips featuring Parkin to others focusing on seven consumers in a classroom who ask Parkin questions about how they can assist in the unfun campaign. Visitors click on each consumer to hear the questions.

The website and a series of Free the Fun TV spots are elements of an integrated campaign that "gives consumers a different involvement with the Tostitos brand than they've ever had before," Crisman said."The videos were created to immerse consumers in a brand experience and engage them immediately, so they don't run away. We wanted to be as funny as we could and fresh, making sure at the end of the experience people walk away smiling and understand that Tostitos was behind it."

The campaign also included print, with both TV and print starting in early January before the web videos began playing April 18.

Credits

Client: Tostitos

Production Company: Element 79 PartnersTodd Crisman, group creative director; Dennis Ryan, executive creative director; Max Stinson, creative director/ad; Jim Paul, creative director/cw; Katie Juras, producer; John Noble, head of production; Kevin Mulroy, copywriter; Mike Lyons, art director; Lisa Groot, vp, management director; Jill Holmstrom, account director Mekanism (no contact info)Tommy Means, director; Peter Rhoads, creative director; Velvy Appleton, exec producer; Lindsay Fa, producer; Andy Lilien, dp; David Daugherty, art director; Chris Aysta, wardrobe stylist; Mike Cavanaugh, TM Faversham, Caitlin Parker, editors; Richard Krolewicz, Emmet Feldman, design/graphics; Jeremy Leeds, interactive producer; Jamal Berkeley, Dave Cole, technology developers; Marcelo Viana, interactive designer

Categories Media Type: Video Genre: Comedy Delivery Type: Online Content Type: Food SHOOT Category: iSPOT of the Week Release Date: April 18, 2008 Duration: 30 seconds

Step Inside the NOLAF Facility

Element 79 and Mekanism guide us through their Tostitos campaign for fun.BY: KIRAN ADITHAM PUBLISHED: APR 22, 2008

Veering from the standard "this is why we're awesome" pitch for clients, Chicago-based agency Element 79 decided to flip things with its new, full screen video-enhanced site for Frito-Lay brand Tostitos. Creating a fictitious sourpuss outfit called NOLAF, or National Organization for Legislation Against Fun, Element 79 cleverly made the bad guy the main character and the fun-loving brand the subtle good guy.

"We thought a really cool creative opportunity for us would be to tell how fun this product is through the other side of the lens, through an organization against all things fun that just happens to include Tostitos among other things," says Element 79 interactive GCD Todd Crisman. "We knew we needed to engage people immediately and also make sure Tostitos gets credit for it. Above all, number one, we needed to be funny, number two, we needed to be funny and number three, we needed to be fresh and funny. It's not secret that you want be able to give consumers an opportunity to spend a bunch of time with the brand and actually go really deep. One thing led to another and through this idea of NOLAF, we brought it to life."

With a roly-poly, middle-aged and highly charged spokesman for NOLAF as your guide, the site takes us inside the fictional facility which offers several areas to roam. Visitors can watch an orientation video that examines when fun goes too far, a conference room where our spokesman preaches NOLAF to an audience of "fun" people. Here, via mouseover, you can raise each individual's hand and hear their questions, which the NOLAF guy answers with un-fun

suggestions in his overly enthusiastic tone. Or you can stroll over to the R&D room to watch several videos of how to discourage fun brought on by items from Tostitos and more.

To produce the considerable amount of content found inside NOLAF, Element 79 enlisted the services of Mekanism and director Tommy Means, who translated its concepts into a full-screen interactive environment. "In order to do it the way we imagined it, we wanted something really arresting to look at so it'd stop you in your tracks and you would pay attention," says Crisman. "Working with [Element head of production] John Noble and [producer] Katie Juras on this project, we knew there were only a handful of people in the country that can pull off this sort of thing. We knew we needed to hook up with the right kind of partner."

According to Means, who started collaborating with Element 79 early in on the project, it was not only the agency's templates for the site that appealed, but the copywriting skills of Element's Kevin Mulroy. "You look at the writing and it's so damn funny and just spot-on. What I loved about the writing is it didn't try to hide the brand and got it so up front in a way that was so unexpected and clever. I just really love subversive comedy, and there's so much of that in here. I think Kevin is a bitter man and it comes through in his writing."

With the working relationship established, the idea of full-screen interactive video implementation quickly came to fruition. "[Element] really wanted to convey a sense of place in that this organization is real, there's a building and you can go inside it and walk through it," says Means. "When they started talking about wanting to insert the user into this environment, it got the wheels turning. We thought let's do some full-screen stuff and make it feel like the user can actually walk into these rooms and make it feel like they're inside this building. We've done full-screen video in the past but it's been like fits and starts. We have definitely learned from our mistakes and it's been great to apply all that learning to this project."

The section that seems to fall most in line with Means' sentiment is the aforementioned conference room, which took a lot of technical planning and calculation to execute. "We actually had our user interface designers and engineers on the set of this shoot collaborating with us on how we were going to set up each shot," Means says. "[For the conference room], we had a big hi-def monitor, a wax pencil and the [technical] guys were talking about how nobody could overlap each other and just all the elements I never would've thought about. It's almost analogous to having a visual effects supervisor on the set and it really created for a super-seamless experience."

The site did have its share of hurdles, Means admits. "When doing a full-screen interactive video site, you have absolutely no room for revisions, just like a regular website. We had three editors working round-the-clock full time and we had 50 scenes that had to be signed off on and approved before we could actually start building the site. You're building a site in video and if there's a change or a tweak, you seriously have to go back into the edit suite and do major programming around it. I think Element 79 did a fantastic job in the pre-production of really conveying exactly what this thing looks like as a site. Looking at it on paper, it's really confusing and hard to understand. So we had to be pretty courageous with this client and say you cannot make any changes once we sign off on the rough cuts, but at the same time, we're going to be improvising like crazy and taking advantage of this [actor's] talent."

To further the lifespan of NOLAF, Mekanism and Element 79 are sensibly taking advantage of multiple channels, seeding what will be over 20 pieces of video content culled from the site. "Frito-Lay was looking for this to really feel grassroots," says Means. "So, we had a really great opportunity to think about all of that before the shoot and actually storyboard out how we can lift standalone viral pieces of content for a comprehensive syndication program."

This resulted in a three-pronged approach to what Mekanisn calls the "network effect." "We want to infiltrate all these different networks with the content we create. It's the 50 video-sharing sites out there—obviously there's YouTube—but there's definitely a long tail of video-sharing sites that if you add them all together, you can get about the same audience as you can at YouTube. We then established a network of digital influencers and at this point we have about 150 of them that are just super-hungry for content. The more good content they have, the more visitors they have coming to their blogs or their video sites. Then, we've got a little secret recipe for social networking and creating the network effect throughout the social networks. We actually have a couple of these Stanford engineers that have really cracked the code on seeding content through social networks."

But the willingness of a brand like Frito-Lay to green light such an expansive and edgy approach to marketing surprised even Means. "I have to give credits to those guys. I just can't believe some of the stuff that was sold through. At some point, we've got to do an outtakes video of some of the stuff we couldn't sell through, it was outrageous."