If you’ve ever watched a Johnson’s Baby commercial before, you are already familiar
with their dedicated advertising template: doting mothers and fathers sharing
precious moments with their offspring.
Cape Town advertising agency 140 BBDO and Johannesburg based Ola! Films recently
won the bid to shoot the latest multinational Johnson’s Baby campaign, right here in
South Africa. “The creative idea from 140 BBDO secured the job in South Africa. It
was then pitched to local directors, and Amy Allais of Ola! Films won the pitch.’
comments producer Brenda Wilson.
Wilson tells us that the campaign – which was shot from 27 June through to 3 July in
Cape Town – was shot three times, each time with a different cast for a different
region. “We cast for three sets of the same cast, one group for Russia and Central
and Eastern Europe, another group for Greece, Balkans, Spain, Turkey, and the
Middle East and North Africa, and a third and final group were cast for South Africa
and Sub-Saharan Africa,’ she explains.
“From a creative perspective, we had to balance the looks with the ability to
perform…In this kind of situation being a “baby-whisperer’ is at least half the job,’
adds director Amy Allais. “Normally the upside of vignette ads is that not every single
character has to represent “the brand’ in the most perfect possible way, so we get to
represent a slightly more diverse range of people, which I feel helps with the overall
credibility of the ad. In this case, however, all of the individual couples in the big
brand ad are the heroes of their own small product ads. I still tried to insert a bit of
personality and idiosyncrasy into the casting,’ explains Allais.
The campaign was shot with two Red Dragons, and features first-time parents with
their little ones in various parent-child scenarios: in the hospital, at bedtime, at bath
time, changing diapers and learning to walk.
“The traditional long lens, short depth of field approach to shooting babies has many
advantages, perhaps the biggest one being that it keeps the camera crew at a bit of a
remove. However, in the brief the agency requested that I look at a visual approach
that achieves intimacy by being more part of the action than voyeuristic, which
entails getting in there with a standard lens,’ Allais comments.
“We observed intimate moments between new parents and their babies, tapping into
the truth that once that tiny creature arrives, your life is never the same again. We
tried to keep it simple and honest and allow for obscurity and shadow, and to get in
there with a hand held camera where possible,’ she concludes.
Joining Allais and Wilson were executive producer Olivia Leitch, DOP Werner Maritz,
art director Marlene Ming and director’s assistant Amy Molony.
