Droga5 launched the first national broadcast campaign for the 25-year-old sports supplement brand* MET-Rx this week with the ominous “I Love the Monster.”
Shot by T.J. Martin and Dan Lindsay, who directed the Oscar-winning documentary Undefeated, the spot focuses on a football player on the bus, psyching himself up for a game on an opposing team’s home turf. “Something bad is coming,” he says via voiceover at the beginning of the spot, adding, “I can feel it inside me, it wants out.”
It becomes increasingly clear that the “something bad” he’s referring to is the destruction he plans to unleash on the team on the field. “It’s not personal,” he concludes, “…but your town is going to be a very different place when I step out on the field and I let it out to play.”
While the horror-like aspects of the spot are an unusual twist, it’s otherwise not that far removed from the type of anthem ads Droga5 has created for athletic brands like Under Armour.
The allusions to the brand are not too overt, with the concept of the player letting out the monster inside him a nod to (and exaggeration of) the supplement’s performance-boosting qualities that might be easy for a casual viewer to miss…especially if they don’t sit through the whole ad. Aside from that, there’s only the MET-Rx label on the player’s water bottle to cue viewers in on what product we’re discussing here until the brand’s name appears onscreen next to the “Love the Monster” tagline at its conclusion. The ad will run in 80, 15- and 30-second versions, with the brand releasing three new products and unveiling new packaging in addition to the campaign.
“This isn’t another sports campaign about trying your best,” group creative director Matt Ian told AdFreak. “This is about celebrating the beast that lives inside the fiercest competitors: the heartbreaking, spirit-crushing monster who extinguishes all hope on the field and in the stands. We didn’t want to make another underdog story. We wanted something different: an alpha-dog story.”
*Read: protein powder for bros who don’t know better.