Vol. 29
Stratospheric Super Bowl salesmanship and timeline-twisting technology: all in a month’s Cut Culture. We’ll also take you behind the scenes in the least tatty part of Scotland for our new Longmorn campaign before wrapping things up with an intro to our fixer for the week up in Speyside.
Cut Culture
Un-Bey-lievable.
We would be remiss not to feature at least one Super Bowl ad in this month’s Cut Culture. Because while most of us spherical football loving maniacs don’t give a shit about the NFL, we can still get excited about a multi million dollar bum-fight between anyone who reckons they’re anyone trying to capture a mass audience’s attention for the split second they deign to avert their gaze up from a platter of chicken wings. And if you’re trying to turn heads, putting Beyonce in a number of absurd scenarios isn’t a bad way to do it. That, presumably, was the strategy behind Verizon’s 2024 Super Bowl ad. Beyonce opens a lemonade stand? Check. Beyonce performs in space? Check. Beyonce runs for president? Sort of check. That last scenario was probably intended to be the most ridiculous, but I unironically think she would almost definitely win if she fancied it. Granted, this could have been the worst ad ever made and it wouldn’t have mattered because you’d still get Beyonce’s legions of rabid followers lapping it up. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case - so just sit back and enjoy the Queen Bey multiverse in all its glory.
Too Good to be True…
To give you a glimpse behind the Cut Culture curtain, we had originally intended to feature this LuluLemon ad as our second story, but then Open AI released Sora. And as fun as a load of blokes running through the streets in their pants is, we felt it probably didn’t quite stack up when compared to mind-blowing technology that will likely have epoch-altering implications for both our industry and the broader world beyond it. In case you missed the release from whatever rock you are presumably living under, Sora is a new AI model that uses text prompts to generate videos in pretty much any style imaginable, with the ability to serve up scenes with multiple characters, specific types of motion, and extensive background details. Now, is it perfect? Of course not. But is it a game-changer? Undoubtedly. And if you look at the state of AI videos from just 12 short months ago, the rate of progress to this point is nothing short of staggering, and we’ve been given no reason to believe that progress is about to slow down. Now it’s up to us to fight all of our perfectly reasonable Luddite instincts and choose to embrace an exciting new era for production in which the aperture of possibilities broadens by the day. And if that doesn’t work, that’s when we’ll start smashing things up.
BTS
Despite having earned its reputation over 130 years of ceaseless production as every distiller who is worth their barrels’ second favourite whisky (after their own, obvs), Longmorn had never really asserted their status as a Speyside single malt icon in a consumer-facing campaign. Until now…
We spent 3 days in the (periodically, between the heavy downpours) beautiful Speyside, traipsing about in mud finding different shooting locations each more stunning than the last. Those 10,000 steps were light work for a few days. From waterfalls to mountains, we wanted to create a campaign that captured the environment in all its glory, but staged in a way that felt sufficiently premium to land the brand message even to someone just passing by peripherally at an airport.
They even let us inside Lynn House for the interior shots, which is a centuries-old manor house where single malt aficionados go to visit for a whisky weekender. We’ve called it that, not them - and we apologise unreservedly for making it sound quite so Magaluf-y.
The goal was to create something that leveraged heritage but moved beyond category tropes of endless malted barley and old blokes with grey hair wearing tweed, instead evoking the sensorial feeling of the territory and the whisky. How’d we do?
Just to give you an indication of how highly we think of Rob, when we were debating how best to distill his multi-hyphenate skillset into just one job title, the first suggestion put forward was “all-round legend”. It’s unlikely to show up in many keyword LinkedIn searches, but the sentiment is pretty spot on. Whether behind the camera or behind the wheel of his pick-up truck scouting locations, Rob is indeed a uomo universale. We had the joy of working with him in Speyside, and after he scoped out the entire area in advance he joined us to shoot the stills of the bottle and to basically hold our multiple metaphorical hands throughout the entire trip. It turns out he also has connects with the Ghillies (if you know, you know - and if you don’t, Google it), which comes with its own perks. We won’t say too much but I doubt we would have been granted access to the premium fly fishing spots if it wasn’t for Rob. When in Speyside, init…
If you want to have a look at more of Rob’s “all-round legend”-ness, go check out his Instagram and website.