Last year, Santa freaked out when the North Pole’s only reliable laptop fell prey to a virus called the Bah Humbug, which proceeded to eliminate his all-important “naughty and nice list.”
His balding, tech-savvy son Kris Kringle Jr. then showed up to help fix the problem, but the three-part series continued with someone “leaking” the list to press, The North Pole running short on coal and Santa Senior revealing his true age (1,700) while acting like an abusive manager toward those elves.
If only he’d had Norton…
This year, the security company and its creative AOR Grey San Francisco keep things a bit more simple. Santa is still something of a curmudgeon, but now his laptop is safe and the North Pole has been completely digitized.
The final twist was fun, as was the return of Kris or Owen Wilson with an inch or two taken off his hairline.
But there’s something of a dark undercurrent about automation running through this latest spot, isn’t there? No matter what a fat, cheap businessman happened to say during an 18-month campaign that was 95 percent total crap, no one can bring those manufacturing jobs back to the North Pole.
Client: Norton
Sr. Director of Global Brand and Campaigns: Kathryn Kane
Global Campaign Manager: Angela Holloway
Global Integrated Campaigns Specialist: Irene Liang
Creative Agency: Grey San Francisco
Chief Creative Officer: Curt Detweiler
Creative Director: E Slody
Art Director: Alexandra Anderson
Copywriter: Emma Brooke
Director of Integrated Producer: Daniel Tuggle
SVP, Acct. Director: Will Egan
Group Acct. Director: Ben Warden
Acct. Supervisor: Genevieve Gray
Acct. Executive: Alexandra Hamill
Production Company: Slim Pictures
Director: Jason Headley
Executive Producer: Tom Weissferdt
Head of Production: Mamta Trivedi
Line Producer: Gary Kout
Production Supervisor: Scott Passey
Cinematographer: David Myrick
Post Production: Beast TV
Editor: Bob Spector
Executive Producer: Jon Ettinger
Producer: Vickie Sornsilp
Assistant Editor: Seth Andrews