It was 1997 and snowboarding (action sports in general) was on the brink of becoming an extreme sport. The magazines at the time we're filled with white powder, blue skies and athletes bursting out of half pipes. Airwalk included. When we were given the assignment to come up with a campaign they gave their normal direction, which was vague, let us know there was no budget to go shoot anything and that we had to use the existing assets from the snowboard photographers, which was 6 oversized binders with 35mm slides, messy and unorganized.
Days and days of searching for anything good amounted to a short pile of images, most of which were blue skies, white powder, etc. until we found this one. At first we weren't even sure what was going on, but knew it was worth checking into because it was the only red colored image out of thousands. When I blew up the image I showed it to my partner and he mumbled "gasoline and fire". We talked for a few, thought it was a nice metaphor for the snowboards vs the snowboarders. You get these two together and shit happens. We comp'd it, threw it in the pile of blue, snowy ads and wrote it off as the soon to be slaughtered sheep of the bunch thinking it would never see the light of day. In the end, for obvious reasons, they chose this as the first ad to run. Maybe we zigged when everyone else zagged. Maybe we got lucky. Who care's really. The fact that we were able to spend someone's money to run an ad with a bunch of snowboards wreaking havoc was fun. Isn't that part of the reason we're advertising anyway?
– Chris Caparro www.caparro.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment