Synopsis: The following Antoaneta Metchanova interview is the unabridged companion to Jawbone.tv's featured article Scrabble's 'the Beautiful Word' Campaign True Collaborative Undertaking. Metchanova discusses the intentions and challenges of the campaign, focusing on the collaborative nature of the production.
Jawbone.tv: Where did 'the Beautiful Word' get its start?
"We’ve been working on it for a while now, and it started as a very basic idea. 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 what we wanted to do was re-inject interest in the game and get people, especially young people, to be more interested in the game. Scrabble is about words, and words are fun. So what can we do? 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 beautiful word’ came from."
Jawbone.tv: When you’re in discussions with Mattel over what the campaign is going to be, are they coming to you with a pretty wide open mandate, and essentially saying the problem is that we’re feeling a disconnect with youth and we want to try something a little different, and they give you a blank slate … or did they already have a notion that they wanted to go a bit unusual with this?
"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 know we could do something more fun. So in a way, that was a surprise that came proactively from within the agency, and the client really liked that it hit the spot, and everybody was very supportive, everybody really loved the idea and supported it, but it was proactive from our side."
Jawbone.tv: When and where do the actual broadcast spots run?
"They ran in France on a few channels, like Paris Première, I don’t know if you know that channel, it’s kind of a cool entertainment channel, lots of young people are watching. Good reference for what’s going on. They ran for the first time roughly end of March, 2009. But it started off last year with a print campaign. 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. And so we started with the print, and then a year later we did TV because the campaign got a lot of very good feedback. It made us go one step further, and create music and put the images to motion for these TV spots, which we’re also using for viral. And viola."