The assignment
To describe the assignment, I'm simply going to pull straight from the RFP we received as our roadmap.
"For the sake of this agency shoot-out, we are pretending that shortly after winning the 1943 Academy Award for Best Picture, all the prints of 'Casablanca' were mysteriously lost. Although many stills, newspaper accounts, magazine articles and subsequent interviews with the stars of the film have long been available, nobody has seen 'Casablanca' since 1943.
"Then, in January 2008, an archivist stumbled across the prints in the Warner Bros. Burbank, Calif. lot. Excited by this discovery, Warner Bros. has chosen to do a limited theatrical re-release of this great but long-missing film."
This was our mission.
The hypothetical re-release would be for Valentine's Day weekend, 2009. The budget to work with was $350K-$500K for creative development and non-paid media, and $1,000,000 in paid media.
We were also given details on the competitive landscape:
- A Matthew McConaughey/Kate Hudson romantic comedy opening on the same day and date
- A Michael Bay war-action-adventure flick, set in Iraq in a bit of counter-programming; same opening day and date
- A long-awaited two-part "More Sex and the City" is airing on TNT, part one on Valentine's Day eve
And that's where it all started.
In the seven business days between the RFP arriving and our stepping up on stage, we created the following pitch. Here, as I track the general flow of the presentation we gave, I will make references to slides shown in the presentation, which can be seen in its entirety here. I'll indicate slides by a (S-#) insertion.
