Alfa Insurance
"Transformation" won Best of Show TV in the 2010 Southeastern US Addy Awards, competing with agencies from Atlanta, Birmingham, Nashville, and New Orleans.
Alfa was an outgrowth of the Alabama Farmers Federation, and was viewed as old and stodgy. They faced aggressive competition from GEICO and Allstate, even as companies like Progressive and eSurance were luring younger customers to the web. Suddenly, having an office in every Alabama county didn't seem like enough reason for consumers to care.
People already knew their Alfa agent was close by; we wanted to convey that they were smart. We wanted to make them seem like people worth having a conversation with.
Most of the 30 spots we produced in our five year relationship were shot in Canada, Argentina, and South Africa. We gained valuable experience in working overseas in order to achieve maximum production value with smaller budgets.
The "Never Saw It Coming" series from year three was honored by an industry group as the 3rd best financial campaign in the US, behind E*Trade and Citibank.
"Speedbump" is definitely autobiographical, from my post-college years of living in garden apartment communities in Atlanta.
"Tanks" was one of the most interesting spots of my career so far. We shot this in the era when everyone seemed to be buying Hummers and Expeditions in the belief that bigger must be safer. We wondered, what if you took that instinct to its ultimate conclusion? It's not every day that you have the South African air force flying over your shoot, trying to figure out what in the heck you're doing and whether you pose a threat to national security. A great experience working with the folks at Brickyard VFX in Boston. We had six real tanks from a South African collector, which Brickyard skillfully turned into more than 20. A strategy change almost killed this spot the day before the shoot, so the script is a little wonky, but we still made it happen.
"Coming For You" is a spot we did on a project basis for Alfa, before we had the business. Shot in a peanut field in Atmore, AL, we used a half-crazy Korean war vet with a helicopter to create real-life winds and the CG talents of Joe Laffey in St. Louis to make the destruction happen on a fairly low budget.
I love "Couch," even though it's a cheapie. It was written to target all those young sports fans during ball games, and maybe it channels just a little bit of that Hardee's/Carl's Jr. mentality.
"Tomorrow" is the original anthem spot we used to launch the Let's Talk About Tomorrow theme.