Ad of the Day: DirecTV

No, DirecTV isn't threatening to leave you in a ditch, blow up your house, fill your living room with cats, or sell your hair to a wig shop. It's just suggesting that these things might happen to you, through no fault of your own, if you were to stick with your cable provider for some inexplicable reason. The conceit is more or less as old as language, not to get unbearably pretentious about it. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost, etc. It's a great idea, and it's pretty much a gimme on film, since there's so much you can do by cutting from scene to scene with a voiceover explaining how what you're seeing relates to what happened (the narrator in the spots is gold, by the way). And these are seriously some of the purely funniest ads I've seen in quite a while. We've already written about the Charlie Sheen spot. Let's pick apart another great one, "Wig Shop," shall we? Our ringleted cable subscriber experiences a perfectly understandable depression when he can't find anything good to watch, so he goes to a seminar, receives a perilous boost in self-esteem, loses his shirt in Vegas, and must sell his hair. A terrible fate, indeed. I'd say a good half of this ad's appeal is its casting—the poor cable subscriber is such a doe-eyed, almost-smiling, hippie-ish naif that it's pretty much a foregone conclusion he'll have been pushed off something or embarrassed by the ad's end. Tom Kuntz, who directed all the spots, does a lot with a little: It's all about what you don't see, like our hapless television lover crying as he's shorn of his blond curls, betting three grand on a pair of deuces, or doing a trust fall. The focus is on what he's about to do, or, in the final shot, what he's just done. Mostly we get wordless reactions that say, "Hey, yeah, I am a winner!" or "Please just give me my money so that I can go home and cry." The sets are pretty great, too, especially in "House," which name-checks the Scorsese Cape Fear more than once. Now, if only we could figure out how all these incredibly coincidental disasters just happened to befall people who refused to subscribe to Direc… Oh my God. [jwplayer qmADrrtC-1kT9Z8rj] CREDITS Client: DirecTV Spots: "Stray Animals," "Roadside Ditch," "Dog Collar" Agency: Grey, New York President, Chief Creative Officer: Tor Myhren Executive Creative Director: Dan Kelleher Associate Creative Directors: Doug Fallon, Steven Fogel Agency Executive Producer: Andrew Chinich Agency Associate Producer: Lindsay Myers Production Company: MJZ, Los Angeles Director: Tom Kuntz Director of Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki Editor: Gavin Cutler, Mackenzie Cutler Assistant Editor: Ryan Steele Sound Design: Sam Shaffer, Mackenzie Cutler VFX: The Mill; Schmigital Spots: "Wig Shop," "House," "Platoon" Agency: Grey, New York President, Chief Creative Officer: Tor Myhren Executive Creative Director: Dan Kelleher Associate Creative Directors: Doug Fallon, Steven Fogel Agency Executive Producer: Andrew Chinich Agency Associate Producer: Lindsay Myers Production Company: MJZ, Los Angeles Director: Tom Kuntz Director of Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki Producer: Jeff McDougall Editor: Gavin Cutler, Mackenzie Cutler Assistant Editors: Nick Divers, Valerie Sachs Sound Design: Sam Shaffer, Mackenzie Cutler VFX: Method, New York "Platoon" Talent: Charlie Sheen VO Talent: Robb Webb

Brand Marketing

Ad of the Day: DirecTV

A fate worse than cable awaits TV viewers in Grey and director Tom Kuntz's deftly amusing ad campaign

Sam Thielman

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Sam Thielman