In case you forgot, Barton F. Graf (no more 9000) won the entirety of the Scotts Lawn Care business last summer, beating out incumbent The Richards Group for the full account after creating the famous-in-advertising “Dead Mouse Theater” series for the company’s Tomcat product.
This week BFG’s first campaign for Scotts debuted, and the anthem spot “It’s Good Out Here” is relatively tame for Barton.
It’s all about the unique sensory stimuli that can only come from a healthy, green and (we assume) freshly-mowed lawn.
So everyone knows that it’s good out there…but only when you have a well-manicured lawn. This one is particularly timely given the fact that we had snow in New York over the weekend, ugh.
We are partial to the dog and the guys who were rolling across the lawn with no hill in sight.
There’s more: turns out deer know, too! (This one is much more in keeping with the Barton F. Graf aesthetic.)
The next one doesn’t really feel like the BFG we know at all. It involves a backyard softball game which miraculously didn’t break anything…unless you count pulled hamstrings.
Regarding the theme for the campaign, the client’s VP/GM told AdAge, “We’ve got to get people to care about the lawn before we get them to care for it.”
The ads are also targeting younger people, who still nurture totally unrealistic dreams of having a mortgage and the free time to take care of their own lawns. Hence the surreal CGI deer.
Graf also created some billboards for Times Square, and Gerry Graf explained that most people who don’t avoid that area like the plague aren’t from anywhere near New York anyway…so it will make them wax nostalgic for all the grass back home.
We must have missed them last time we walked through the hood. Maybe we were distracted by the 15 “Buy Authentic Italian” billboards, a 50-foot Nas hyping Hennessy and, of course, the ubiquitous “No Butts About It'” signs for YMI Jeans.
No self-respecting person would ever admit to working on those.