Synopsis: Jawbone.tv looks at the collaborative nature of Scrabble’s highly successful ‘the Beautiful Word’ campaign, which utilized creative storytellers from around the globe. The piece includes quotes from many of the artistic contributors, including Art Director Antoaneta Metchanova of Ogilvy Paris. (For a complete transcript of the Ogilvy agency interview, see Interview: Ogilvy Art Director Antoaneta Metchanova on Scrabble's 'the Beautiful Word'.)
North American television doesn’t often see ad campaigns like Scrabble’s ‘the Beautiful Word’. Thank god for the Internet. And the French.
Mattel’s Scrabble is the most popular ‘word’ board game in history (deal with it Boggle). It’s traditional, family friendly, and, some might say, even slightly intellectual. So when their new ‘the Beautiful Word’ campaign aired this spring on French television (stations like Paris Première), it raised more than a few lustrous European brows, and soon made its way across the pond and everywhere else, thanks to the Internet, to become something of a viral hit.
In the spots, seemingly random sketches connect together as though the words themselves spawned from the game, rooted and gave birth to their own interconnected yet disassociated story threads. It’s kooky to be sure, but it holds attention with its strange-factor alone, finally delivering a bit of an ‘ah-ha’ moment when the product is revealed. Looking back, the spots do mirror the flow of a Scrabble game, albeit through the lens of brown acid.
Any reasonable person might ask himself, how in the hell does something like this get made? Mad Men’s Donald Draper would never have come up with this sort of beatnikery. And the modern ad world isn’t much better, playing it safe even when pushing product to repressed alcoholics and sexual impotents, never mind a board game. So who did make it, and how? A convoluted list of agency credits provided the starting point: Ogilvy Paris.
(Disclaimer: Campaign credits were provided by Ogilvy Paris, and were likely translated from French. Where possible, Jawbone.tv has verified who did what. If your name is incorrect or the credits are misleading, please let us know and we will update. Also, feel free to give us your contact information and we’ll include a link to your site. Check out the complete credits as provided by the agency for yourself.)
It should be explained, before going any further, how agency work typically takes place (ad folks, forgive the simplicity). A huge company hires an equally huge agency and pays them huge amounts of money to handle pretty much anything to do with marketing and advertising. The agency spearheads creative development – amongst other things – often on a conceptual, or ‘pitch’, level. Once the huge company affirms a pitch, the agency feeds the work down to production companies and contractors for actual execution.
In the case of the Scrabble campaign, Mattel was the huge company and Ogilvy was the huge agency.
“It started as a very basic idea,” said Ogilvy Art Director Antoaneta Metchanova. “We have Mattel/Scrabble as a client, so we have the usual day-to-day work that was happening, but there was thinking also that we knew we could do something fun … that came proactively from within the agency.”
“Everybody knows Scrabble, it’s one of those iconic games, and over time it became maybe, in a way, a little bit old fashioned, so we wanted to get people, especially young people, to be more interested in the game. We wanted to do something very visual, and very self-explanatory, kind of bringing the words to life, and make them as fun as possible, so that’s where the ‘the Beautiful Word’ came from.”
Call it a perfect storm. A product anchored to creative wordplay needing to reconnect to youth markets, and an agency with eyes wide open, able to recognize an opportunity and leverage client trust to get the trigger pulled. That, and of course, they’re French.
So with approved concept in hand, Ogilvy reached out first to a small group of illustrators to commission original art for a print campaign that ran last year.
“We worked with six different artists all around the world, and created six beautiful posters, all in different styles. There was a guy in San Francisco, in Russia, in France, in Sweden, and all of them super talented and very fun to work with.”
The results were almost unanimously positive. People loved it. Mattel loved it. And after winning a Silver Lion at Cannes in 2008, the mandate broadened. The print would leap to broadcast. And that’s when things can start to get interesting … and confusing … and difficult to manage.
