by Patti Connor
Staff Writer
In an approach that borders on formula, car ads typically feature close-up shots of aggressive pitchmen standing alongside shiny new vehicles, boisterously exhorting consumers to buy.
Al Emerick is one who thinks the public is a little smarter than that.
“I have always believed that you can create excitement without having to resort to yelling and screaming,” said Emerick, owner of the Jacksonville-based production company, Another Cool Idea.
Emerick apparently is not the only one who thinks so. His campaign — Are You Serious? — for Key Hyundai was one of 25 campaigns chosen by a syndicator,
AdvantAge TV of New York, from thousands across the nation, to appear on a reel of ads to be shown to automotive dealers across the country. The dealers will then have the opportunity to purchase and customize them for their markets. “It will give me a massive amount of exposure,” said Emerick, adding that he’s far more proud of it than any work he’s ever done.
He produced, wrote and directed it for the dealership’s ad agency, the J. Headley Group. It was filmed by his partner, Kirby Hamilton of Kirby Hamilton Film and Television.
The advertising campaign features a total of five ostensibly serious spots, each revolving around a different vignette. In one particularly humorous spot, a matron in a beauty salon is complimented by her fellow patrons on her new hair style, a bouffant of electric blue, a man appears and demands incredulously, “Are you serious?” The commercial then assumes a serious tone as a pitchman in a quiet, low key manner, proceeds to enumerate the various reasons consumers should buy a Hyundai.
Emerick said his whole idea was “to create something a little different.” “Fortunately, Hyundai has an image that you can have a little fun with,” said Emerick, a former producer for FM-104.5 and an on-camera spokesman for Buddy Hutchinson Ford who over the years has produced a total of some 1,500 radio and TV spots for car dealerships throughout the country.
Because they’re so brief in duration, Emerick explained, TV commercials must grab the viewer’s interest almost immediately.
“You have the open and the close, and then the information which has to go in the middle. But, that part is so fast, only 15 seconds,” he said.
One thing advertisers tend to forget, said Emerick, is that in all good advertising, there is a goal.
“As a producer and director it’s important to know what your goal is beyond the obvious, ‘I want to make money.’ What I wanted to do, was increase floor traffic, and obviously, beyond that, create sales in a way that is entertaining, amusing and informative,” said Emerick, whose father was a broadcast announcer who did voiceovers for M&M’s and Ban de Soleil ads. His modus operandi, he said, is “to see and hear things that get stored, and then create them.”
For the campaign, “I went through every question you possibly could ask a car dealership,” he said.
The concept, though clever, is simple and direct. That’s no accident.
“An ad may be as simple as can be,” said Emerick, who created a campaign for the Brunswick-based Emerald Princess cruise ship, Your Winning’s Just Beginning. “But the message has to be simple, like Nike’s Just Do It or Coke Is It. I can dance around and give you flowers, but if I just say, ‘I love you,’ you can’t say it any better than that.”