Ad firm aims for more global success

By PETER GRIFFIN

Advertising agency Whybin TBWA will pitch for more international work as it tries to repeat its success of a global campaign for Sony.

The agency dreamed up the concept for the Sony Playstation 2 game Ratchet and Clank 3 campaign.

As the local arm of the global TBWA advertising agency, Whybin is able to tap its international network for work.

It is an advantage shared by the likes of Saatchi & Saatchi, Colenso and DDB, which are part of global advertising behemoths or have international allegiances.

Whybin's creative director, Andy Blood, said putting together pitches for global strategies created locally was becoming a fact of life.

"There's more briefs early next year that are open for an international pitch. We'll be having a crack at those."

Quality commercials and print advertising could be made cheaply here in a trend towards lower-cost markets that the film and software industries were already exploiting.

"If the commercial was going to cost £150,000 [$396,830] in London, you can get a good commercial for that money here. In England, you'd get a half-day shoot for that," said Blood, who has just returned to New Zealand after an 18-month stint in Singapore working on Singapore Airlines' global advertising strategy.

He said the local advertising industry was in good shape and willing to try new things.

"There's a bit more risk-taking. It's less conservative than Singapore."

TV commercials are occasionally shot locally for overseas clients but Republic Films' Simon Mark-Brown, the director of the Ratchet and Clank 3 advert, said there seemed to be a growing willingness to give the entire job to local production companies.

"The global agencies are increasingly throwing briefs open to the world. In some ways, economies and exchange rates work in our favour."

Apart from work for some Asian clients, Republic mainly worked for local companies in Australia and New Zealand.

In making the Ratchet and Clank 3 commercial, Mark-Brown had to deal with three potential film-making nightmares - children, animals and explosives, and all in pouring rain.

The two-day shoot went off without a hitch, with Mark-Brown describing the end result as depicting "kids in suburban-hell backyards having a full-on war with ridiculous weapons from Ratchet and Clank 3".

But the idea of adverts depicting children wielding powerful guns did not go down well with everyone in Sony's target markets.

"It nearly fell over a week out from the shoot when Spain pulled out after the bombings there," Mark-Brown said.

While most of the commercial was shot "in camera" with real explosions, some shots were given a wash of special effects to emphasise the "otherworldly" aspect of the game and make it less realistic.

"We had to go more cartoony," Mark-Brown said.

Collaborating with the London-based Sony people had been straight-forward.

Republic had had a "bumper" year with back-to-back projects filling the schedule.

"It's the cycles of being in the limelight and not."

The Ratchet and Clank 3 adverts will screen in Britain, Australia, South Africa, Scandinavia, New Zealand and on the Fox Kids Network.

The locally created tagline "Settle scores ... nicely" will also be used around the world in promoting the game and the print adverts put together by Whybin will appear in magazines.

Putting the advert campaign together was a major coup for Whybin creative staffers Scott Kelly and Bob Kerrigan.

But there's little sentimentality among the two who dreamed up the idea. Kelly and Kerrigan are trying to sell the elaborate guns used in the TV commercial shoot on auction website Trademe.