Whet
6/2/2011, 11:17 AM
Some of the commercials are funny. It is a pretty long article that describes how the character came about and why.
www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-live-0602-allstate-mayhem-ads-20110601,0,5447528.column
Behind the scenes with Allstate's Mayhem man
A look behind the scenes at Allstate's wildly popular, locally conceived Mayhem ads, and the actor who calls them the best thing to happen to his career If you're enjoying Allstate's wildly popular, locally conceived Mayhem ads, wait until you see the one about the raccoon
The odds are stacked against advertisements. We might watch "Mad Men" voraciously, but we skip the 30-second spots that pay for this exploration of the fine points of the ad game. On a smaller screen, the Web throws ads at us and we tune them out like a fading radio station.
Yet despite all of this, despite all the competition for our attention and the increasing unlikelihood of any single advertising campaign catching fire, virtually everybody knows about Mayhem.
You might have discovered Allstate's gleeful creator of insurance-necessitating chaos by hearing a fragment of his exuberant laugh while fast-forwarding to the resumption of your show. Your kids may have warned you that "you've got to see this ad." Or maybe somebody sent you a clip via email or a social network.
When you did, you were likely as impressed as most people have been — from fellow commercial-makers on down to Mayhem's 550,000 Facebook friends — by this creation of two longtime local partners, Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett and the Northbrook insurance giant.
What you might not know is this: In the original pitch made by Burnett in March of last year, a suggestion of what the Mayhem character might be was represented by a photo of Harvey Keitel as the sinister Mr. White in "Reservoir Dogs." Or this: The actor who plays Mayhem, Dean Winters, is the same guy who plays Tina Fey's no-account boyfriend Dennis in her series "30 Rock."
"When I got offered the Allstate job a year ago in April I had kind of taken a step back from the business," says Winters. "Initially, I was hesitant. They kept coming at me. They showed me the teenage girl script, the one where I was texting in the SUV, and it made me laugh out loud. I had a good idea of what I could do with that."
Taking the gig, he adds, "may be one of the smartest decisions I've ever made in my life. It's become an iconic campaign."
Dressed, as ever, in a suit and some fresh wound suggesting he has just arrived from another job, Mayhem has been, among many other things, a deer chewing "leaves and whatnot" by the side of the road, ready to get caught in your car's oncoming headlights, and a renegade GPS unit insistently "recalculating!" — both before and after the crash it causes.
And soon, as the campaign enters its second year and the battle to keep it fresh continues, Mayhem will appear on TV as your vehicle's blind spot — a sort of human shield against being able to see passing cars — and he'll be a critter in an attic, romping in pink insulation, chewing an electrical conduit and describing himself as "the smartest raccoon I know."
Unlike so many funny and very well-made ads, which deliver a joke (man getting hit in the privates, e.g.) and then a product message, this one makes the humor integral to the pitch. Mayhem will screw things up, but if you have Allstate, rather than "cut-rate insurance," you'll be able to handle him better.
Mayhem — "Mr. Mayhem" in Burnett's original, slightly darker presentation of the character — is a shining example of Susan Credle's credo that advertising has to play on the broadest entertainment playing field. The chief creative officer at Burnett, Credle calls TV ads "film" and recently said in a public forum that "great creative doesn't come out of tight sphincters."
"We have to be as interesting and engaging as anything else that's competing for your attention," she says in an interview. "I get excited when you see something like Mayhem capture the public's attention in a way that any other (does) — a song, a piece of theater, whatever. It gets into the culture, and that's when I think we're doing our best job as a creative agency."
IN HIS SHORT LIFE SPAN, there has been a lot of Mayhem already. In addition to more than a dozen filmed spots, Winters has voiced dozens of radio ads, customized to reflect local troubles. There are Mayhem spots in which he embodies hail in Tulsa, Okla., the "Juicy Lucy" internal-cheese cheeseburger in Minneapolis-St. Paul and the infamous "Six Corners" intersection in Chicago.
Winner of some 80 industry awards, the campaign has played on billboards, in Internet banners and in Mayhem valentines you could send via the Internet. The question now is how to keep this big ball rolling. "Part of our job," Allstate senior marketing Vice President Lisa Cochrane says, "is to keep Mayhem cool and not let him get overdone."
To that end, some of the key keepers of the Mayhem flame are meeting in a video editing facility in Chicago's River North neighborhood. It is April. Two weeks before, in the Los Angeles area, the first new batch of TV ads since Christmas were shot: "Blind Spot," "Raccoon" and one pushing motorcycle insurance that has already started airing, featuring Mayhem as a guy who shows up to test-drive a motorcycle offered on the Internet.
For this meeting, the seven-person Burnett team on hand will show multiple iterations of the "Blind Spot" and "Raccoon" ads to Nancy Abraham, who oversees national advertising for Allstate, and a colleague of hers.
The mood is cheery and collegial, as you would expect from people who know one another well — Allstate and Burnett first teamed up in 1957 — and are trying to keep a winning streak going. The ad folk mostly push for creativity and risk-taking, the Allstate side for clarity of the ads' storylines and for, as Abraham says at one point, "making sure the message comes through": that buying cut-rate insurance will leave you exposed to the kind of damage Mayhem can do.
In each version of "Blind Spot," Winters is hanging on the side of a moving car, proclaiming himself "blind spot of the month," explaining that he can "hide big things," then delivering an almost playful "you're good," telling the car's driver she can switch lanes — just before the crash.
They get better with each successive cut the team shows, but Abraham worries that what is happening on screen is hard to follow.
And she wonders if the ad has that one, repeatable line that has been characteristic of previous Mayhem spots: "Shaky, shaky" in the windstorm ad, "OMG, Becky's not even hot" in the texting teen commercial.
"I yearn for more on 'Blind Spot,'" she says at meeting's end. "It's just not moving me."
But "Raccoon," in every version, rates with the best of the Mayhem ads to date. Winters playing a pesky creature who has taken up residence in an attic is funny to start with, and the script has the campaign's characteristic bite and flair.
The spot began in an in-house contest at Allstate offering its 20,000 employees the chance to pitch their own ideas and see the winner produced. Productivity at the nation's No. 2 insurer, it is safe to assume, took a hit. Within four days, more than 1,000 ideas had come in, everything from quick concepts to full scripts.
A woman from the company's special investigation unit in Michigan and a man from Allstate Roadside Services in Illinois suggested a mama raccoon in the attic. Burnett writers turned it into a polished script. And at a special company event in February, Allstate flew Winters in for the announcement.
He read his part while Matt Miller, Burnett's lead writer on the campaign and one of its creators, read the visual parts:
Winters: "I'm a raccoon, and this time in your attic has been the best time of my raccoon life. … The four major chew groups are right here: sweaters, wood, pink stuff and that silver thing."
Miller: "He's chewing on a thick electrical wire."
Winters: "I'm the smartest raccoon I know."
Miller: "The electricity goes dark."
Back in the Chicago conference room, that script, slightly modified and put on film, needs only minor adjustments. The producers promise to enhance the electrical "explosion" at the moment of the bite, and Abraham wants to make sure the hole in the house's roof that Mayhem peers out of will look less "processed" in the final version.
"Can you get tighter on him when he's in the roof?" she adds. "I want to get connected to him more."
The finished "Raccoon" ad debuts Friday on Facebook and in 12,000 theaters nationwide, an Allstate spokeswoman said Wednesday, while "Blind Spot" is being reworked.
Even as recently as 2007, another insurance company, Travelers, had a 60-second ad called "Risk Never Sleeps." To a lilting musical background, a dapper, sad-faced personification of risk, played by actor Richard Edson, roams about a city by night, leaving various forms of trouble in his wake: broken statues, overflowing sinks, a building piece that falls off.
The Mayhem campaign, more visceral and verbal as it treats consumer, rather than business, insurance issues, was the result not of advertising traditions so much as Allstate's desire to answer its rivals' heavy ad spending with humor and a direct, "disruptive" challenge, say Allstate and Burnett executives. The company is the U.S.'s No. 2 insurer, but ranks fourth in ad spending, says Cochrane, behind Geico, State Farm and Progressive.
Allstate, since 2003, has been represented by Burnett's well-received Our Stand campaign, featuring actor Dennis Haysbert calmly reinforcing the company's long-standing "You're in good hands with Allstate" slogan. But Haysbert's persona is pitched to older, more traditional customers. Meanwhile, Geico and Progressive have been selling price, price and more price, especially to the 25- to 35-year-old market of the newly insured.
"Progressive and Geico were outspending us, and they were talking to a younger target, and they were also changing the conversation to just go for cheap," Credle recalls. "Do we sit here and take this, or do we stand up and say, 'Wait a minute. Maybe there's a different kind of conversation.' That was the first thought: Let's change it from 'cheap' to 'value.'"
So on Feb. 9, 2010, Burnett sent an "assignment brief" to its creative teams asking for new ideas for a younger-skewing Allstate campaign. "We need to … make them think about whether (price) is the adult way to think about insurance," it said.
The way such assignments work is that, after they go out, "people would start walking into my work space and go, 'OK, here's what I've got,'" says Jeanie Caggiano, the Burnett executive creative director who co-leads the agency's 30-person Allstate creative team. "This young team, Matt Miller and Chris Rodriguez, came in. They have probably been in the business, between them, all of a year. They're brand new, young guys. They basically said, 'Well, we have this idea for a guy who's all the bad stuff in the world that can hurt you.'"
They read Caggiano two scripts, one for the distracted teen driver, one for a daylong windstorm. "And I'm like, 'OK, I love this guy, and his name is Mr. Mayhem.' That's who it is. I named him. We dropped the 'Mister' later, but he was Mayhem," she says.
In mid-March, Burnett presented eight campaign ideas to Allstate, four others, like Mayhem, on the "better value" theme, three on a "saves you money" theme.
Placed second in the processional, the Mayhem presentation said "Mr. Mayhem" on the first page. The second page showed a photo of Keitel's character from "Reservoir Dogs"; the agency also had a little John Malkovich in mind, Caggiano says.
Following that were watercolors of scenes from proposed ads, some of them remarkably close to what would be filmed, backed by scripts. That the scripts then were also close to what would soon be filmed tells you how it went over.
"It was me sitting in a room with my team," Allstate's Cochrane remembers, "and we saw a bunch of concepts. I was polite enough to let them sort of finish." But Mayhem, as Burnett had hoped, was the one. "I said, 'That's it. That's the concept. Let's go. No copy testing,'" says Cochrane.
She liked the humor of the character and his message, and she liked that he was "a villain to Dennis Haysbert's hero." As the ads have been shot, each follows the potentially jarring, destructive delight of Mayhem with the soothing tones of Haysbert speaking the company's name, making a softer sell.
But if selling the campaign was easy, casting it was not. With help from Burnett's in-house casting director, "We looked at about 350 no-name actors" plus some known people, Caggiano says: "We narrowed it down to, like, five guys you had never heard of and two people you had."
The known actors — Allstate and Burnett won't name the second choice — stood out, and then it was a matter of trusting a gut feeling that said Winters. In addition to the Mayhem-like qualities in his "30 Rock" role, the actor had shown an ability to play more purely menacing in the HBO prison drama "Oz."
Winters was just recovering from a serious illness and, he says, as an actor who looks at writing first, the scripts won him over. If he had any concerns about doing commercials, "the day I got offered the commercial, I was watching TV, and Robert Downey was selling Audis, Robert de Niro was selling American Express and Kevin Bacon was selling something about the Internet" (Logitech Revue).
So what began as a bit of chaos itself, a risk taken by a conservative advertiser, has turned into something else. The campaign's popularity has changed it into something more like the insurance products Allstate sells, a hedge against the ups and downs of the market.
"My job is really to attract the attention of the horse and get the horse to walk over to the water and go to take a drink, and that's all working," Cochrane says. "We're No. 4 in spending, and our share of voice and our attention factor have us higher than that."
In the cacophony of today's culture, Mayhem is being heard.
www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-live-0602-allstate-mayhem-ads-20110601,0,5447528.column
Behind the scenes with Allstate's Mayhem man
A look behind the scenes at Allstate's wildly popular, locally conceived Mayhem ads, and the actor who calls them the best thing to happen to his career If you're enjoying Allstate's wildly popular, locally conceived Mayhem ads, wait until you see the one about the raccoon
The odds are stacked against advertisements. We might watch "Mad Men" voraciously, but we skip the 30-second spots that pay for this exploration of the fine points of the ad game. On a smaller screen, the Web throws ads at us and we tune them out like a fading radio station.
Yet despite all of this, despite all the competition for our attention and the increasing unlikelihood of any single advertising campaign catching fire, virtually everybody knows about Mayhem.
You might have discovered Allstate's gleeful creator of insurance-necessitating chaos by hearing a fragment of his exuberant laugh while fast-forwarding to the resumption of your show. Your kids may have warned you that "you've got to see this ad." Or maybe somebody sent you a clip via email or a social network.
When you did, you were likely as impressed as most people have been — from fellow commercial-makers on down to Mayhem's 550,000 Facebook friends — by this creation of two longtime local partners, Chicago ad agency Leo Burnett and the Northbrook insurance giant.
What you might not know is this: In the original pitch made by Burnett in March of last year, a suggestion of what the Mayhem character might be was represented by a photo of Harvey Keitel as the sinister Mr. White in "Reservoir Dogs." Or this: The actor who plays Mayhem, Dean Winters, is the same guy who plays Tina Fey's no-account boyfriend Dennis in her series "30 Rock."
"When I got offered the Allstate job a year ago in April I had kind of taken a step back from the business," says Winters. "Initially, I was hesitant. They kept coming at me. They showed me the teenage girl script, the one where I was texting in the SUV, and it made me laugh out loud. I had a good idea of what I could do with that."
Taking the gig, he adds, "may be one of the smartest decisions I've ever made in my life. It's become an iconic campaign."
Dressed, as ever, in a suit and some fresh wound suggesting he has just arrived from another job, Mayhem has been, among many other things, a deer chewing "leaves and whatnot" by the side of the road, ready to get caught in your car's oncoming headlights, and a renegade GPS unit insistently "recalculating!" — both before and after the crash it causes.
And soon, as the campaign enters its second year and the battle to keep it fresh continues, Mayhem will appear on TV as your vehicle's blind spot — a sort of human shield against being able to see passing cars — and he'll be a critter in an attic, romping in pink insulation, chewing an electrical conduit and describing himself as "the smartest raccoon I know."
Unlike so many funny and very well-made ads, which deliver a joke (man getting hit in the privates, e.g.) and then a product message, this one makes the humor integral to the pitch. Mayhem will screw things up, but if you have Allstate, rather than "cut-rate insurance," you'll be able to handle him better.
Mayhem — "Mr. Mayhem" in Burnett's original, slightly darker presentation of the character — is a shining example of Susan Credle's credo that advertising has to play on the broadest entertainment playing field. The chief creative officer at Burnett, Credle calls TV ads "film" and recently said in a public forum that "great creative doesn't come out of tight sphincters."
"We have to be as interesting and engaging as anything else that's competing for your attention," she says in an interview. "I get excited when you see something like Mayhem capture the public's attention in a way that any other (does) — a song, a piece of theater, whatever. It gets into the culture, and that's when I think we're doing our best job as a creative agency."
IN HIS SHORT LIFE SPAN, there has been a lot of Mayhem already. In addition to more than a dozen filmed spots, Winters has voiced dozens of radio ads, customized to reflect local troubles. There are Mayhem spots in which he embodies hail in Tulsa, Okla., the "Juicy Lucy" internal-cheese cheeseburger in Minneapolis-St. Paul and the infamous "Six Corners" intersection in Chicago.
Winner of some 80 industry awards, the campaign has played on billboards, in Internet banners and in Mayhem valentines you could send via the Internet. The question now is how to keep this big ball rolling. "Part of our job," Allstate senior marketing Vice President Lisa Cochrane says, "is to keep Mayhem cool and not let him get overdone."
To that end, some of the key keepers of the Mayhem flame are meeting in a video editing facility in Chicago's River North neighborhood. It is April. Two weeks before, in the Los Angeles area, the first new batch of TV ads since Christmas were shot: "Blind Spot," "Raccoon" and one pushing motorcycle insurance that has already started airing, featuring Mayhem as a guy who shows up to test-drive a motorcycle offered on the Internet.
For this meeting, the seven-person Burnett team on hand will show multiple iterations of the "Blind Spot" and "Raccoon" ads to Nancy Abraham, who oversees national advertising for Allstate, and a colleague of hers.
The mood is cheery and collegial, as you would expect from people who know one another well — Allstate and Burnett first teamed up in 1957 — and are trying to keep a winning streak going. The ad folk mostly push for creativity and risk-taking, the Allstate side for clarity of the ads' storylines and for, as Abraham says at one point, "making sure the message comes through": that buying cut-rate insurance will leave you exposed to the kind of damage Mayhem can do.
In each version of "Blind Spot," Winters is hanging on the side of a moving car, proclaiming himself "blind spot of the month," explaining that he can "hide big things," then delivering an almost playful "you're good," telling the car's driver she can switch lanes — just before the crash.
They get better with each successive cut the team shows, but Abraham worries that what is happening on screen is hard to follow.
And she wonders if the ad has that one, repeatable line that has been characteristic of previous Mayhem spots: "Shaky, shaky" in the windstorm ad, "OMG, Becky's not even hot" in the texting teen commercial.
"I yearn for more on 'Blind Spot,'" she says at meeting's end. "It's just not moving me."
But "Raccoon," in every version, rates with the best of the Mayhem ads to date. Winters playing a pesky creature who has taken up residence in an attic is funny to start with, and the script has the campaign's characteristic bite and flair.
The spot began in an in-house contest at Allstate offering its 20,000 employees the chance to pitch their own ideas and see the winner produced. Productivity at the nation's No. 2 insurer, it is safe to assume, took a hit. Within four days, more than 1,000 ideas had come in, everything from quick concepts to full scripts.
A woman from the company's special investigation unit in Michigan and a man from Allstate Roadside Services in Illinois suggested a mama raccoon in the attic. Burnett writers turned it into a polished script. And at a special company event in February, Allstate flew Winters in for the announcement.
He read his part while Matt Miller, Burnett's lead writer on the campaign and one of its creators, read the visual parts:
Winters: "I'm a raccoon, and this time in your attic has been the best time of my raccoon life. … The four major chew groups are right here: sweaters, wood, pink stuff and that silver thing."
Miller: "He's chewing on a thick electrical wire."
Winters: "I'm the smartest raccoon I know."
Miller: "The electricity goes dark."
Back in the Chicago conference room, that script, slightly modified and put on film, needs only minor adjustments. The producers promise to enhance the electrical "explosion" at the moment of the bite, and Abraham wants to make sure the hole in the house's roof that Mayhem peers out of will look less "processed" in the final version.
"Can you get tighter on him when he's in the roof?" she adds. "I want to get connected to him more."
The finished "Raccoon" ad debuts Friday on Facebook and in 12,000 theaters nationwide, an Allstate spokeswoman said Wednesday, while "Blind Spot" is being reworked.
Even as recently as 2007, another insurance company, Travelers, had a 60-second ad called "Risk Never Sleeps." To a lilting musical background, a dapper, sad-faced personification of risk, played by actor Richard Edson, roams about a city by night, leaving various forms of trouble in his wake: broken statues, overflowing sinks, a building piece that falls off.
The Mayhem campaign, more visceral and verbal as it treats consumer, rather than business, insurance issues, was the result not of advertising traditions so much as Allstate's desire to answer its rivals' heavy ad spending with humor and a direct, "disruptive" challenge, say Allstate and Burnett executives. The company is the U.S.'s No. 2 insurer, but ranks fourth in ad spending, says Cochrane, behind Geico, State Farm and Progressive.
Allstate, since 2003, has been represented by Burnett's well-received Our Stand campaign, featuring actor Dennis Haysbert calmly reinforcing the company's long-standing "You're in good hands with Allstate" slogan. But Haysbert's persona is pitched to older, more traditional customers. Meanwhile, Geico and Progressive have been selling price, price and more price, especially to the 25- to 35-year-old market of the newly insured.
"Progressive and Geico were outspending us, and they were talking to a younger target, and they were also changing the conversation to just go for cheap," Credle recalls. "Do we sit here and take this, or do we stand up and say, 'Wait a minute. Maybe there's a different kind of conversation.' That was the first thought: Let's change it from 'cheap' to 'value.'"
So on Feb. 9, 2010, Burnett sent an "assignment brief" to its creative teams asking for new ideas for a younger-skewing Allstate campaign. "We need to … make them think about whether (price) is the adult way to think about insurance," it said.
The way such assignments work is that, after they go out, "people would start walking into my work space and go, 'OK, here's what I've got,'" says Jeanie Caggiano, the Burnett executive creative director who co-leads the agency's 30-person Allstate creative team. "This young team, Matt Miller and Chris Rodriguez, came in. They have probably been in the business, between them, all of a year. They're brand new, young guys. They basically said, 'Well, we have this idea for a guy who's all the bad stuff in the world that can hurt you.'"
They read Caggiano two scripts, one for the distracted teen driver, one for a daylong windstorm. "And I'm like, 'OK, I love this guy, and his name is Mr. Mayhem.' That's who it is. I named him. We dropped the 'Mister' later, but he was Mayhem," she says.
In mid-March, Burnett presented eight campaign ideas to Allstate, four others, like Mayhem, on the "better value" theme, three on a "saves you money" theme.
Placed second in the processional, the Mayhem presentation said "Mr. Mayhem" on the first page. The second page showed a photo of Keitel's character from "Reservoir Dogs"; the agency also had a little John Malkovich in mind, Caggiano says.
Following that were watercolors of scenes from proposed ads, some of them remarkably close to what would be filmed, backed by scripts. That the scripts then were also close to what would soon be filmed tells you how it went over.
"It was me sitting in a room with my team," Allstate's Cochrane remembers, "and we saw a bunch of concepts. I was polite enough to let them sort of finish." But Mayhem, as Burnett had hoped, was the one. "I said, 'That's it. That's the concept. Let's go. No copy testing,'" says Cochrane.
She liked the humor of the character and his message, and she liked that he was "a villain to Dennis Haysbert's hero." As the ads have been shot, each follows the potentially jarring, destructive delight of Mayhem with the soothing tones of Haysbert speaking the company's name, making a softer sell.
But if selling the campaign was easy, casting it was not. With help from Burnett's in-house casting director, "We looked at about 350 no-name actors" plus some known people, Caggiano says: "We narrowed it down to, like, five guys you had never heard of and two people you had."
The known actors — Allstate and Burnett won't name the second choice — stood out, and then it was a matter of trusting a gut feeling that said Winters. In addition to the Mayhem-like qualities in his "30 Rock" role, the actor had shown an ability to play more purely menacing in the HBO prison drama "Oz."
Winters was just recovering from a serious illness and, he says, as an actor who looks at writing first, the scripts won him over. If he had any concerns about doing commercials, "the day I got offered the commercial, I was watching TV, and Robert Downey was selling Audis, Robert de Niro was selling American Express and Kevin Bacon was selling something about the Internet" (Logitech Revue).
So what began as a bit of chaos itself, a risk taken by a conservative advertiser, has turned into something else. The campaign's popularity has changed it into something more like the insurance products Allstate sells, a hedge against the ups and downs of the market.
"My job is really to attract the attention of the horse and get the horse to walk over to the water and go to take a drink, and that's all working," Cochrane says. "We're No. 4 in spending, and our share of voice and our attention factor have us higher than that."
In the cacophony of today's culture, Mayhem is being heard.