Fox Sports - "Magnet"

7859

Brand: Fox Sports
Country: United States

Advertiser: Fox Broadcasting Company

Title	Magnet
Campaign	Magnet - Fox Sports
Advertiser	Fox Broadcasting Company
Brand	Fox Sports
Posted	July 2009
Product	2009 MLB All-Star Game
Business Sector	TV/Radio Programs & Stations
Story	The brief called for us to make St. Louis (site of this year’s All Star Game) central to the concept we would use for this campaign. So we cycled through “St. Louis” ideas and naturally kept focusing on the Arch. After several weeks of banging our heads against the wall coming up with pretty weak Arch ideas, we finally figured out that the Arch looked an awful lot like one of those magnets you got in 5th grade Science class. And since magnets are really good at picking things up, we could have the Arch pick up All-Star players and fans and bring them to St. Louis for the game. “We were really excited to have finally nailed a concept that tied St. Louis and the arch and the All-Star Game together.” said Robert Gottlieb, Fox Sports Marketing SVP/Creative Director, “But pretty immediately the excitement gave way to the realization that, great, we sold the idea, now how in the world do we actually pull this off?”
Problem	Step one; we called on our friends at La Huella in Madrid to handle the VFX. They must have been knee-deep in Mojitos when we called, because they agreed to do it. Step two; get MLB stars to agree to let us shoot them (no small task since the baseball season had already started and we were repeatedly told by The Powers That Be “There is no way you will get players to film with you during the season!”) But with a huge assist from the MLB Marketing team, our VP/On-Air Bill Battin somehow moved the mountains, shook the trees, and managed to convince a host of MLB superstars, agents, PR people, Club officials, and Stadium Operations personnel to allow us to film the players…at the stadiums…on game days. So we packed up the green screens and headed out to St. Louis, Philly, Boston, and New York to shoot the players while Mark Simmons and his plate team darted in and out of various stadiums filming all the plates we would need for compositing. We finished up back home in LA with a location shoot day and a stage day for stunts, threw it all into a blender and…voila, another All-Star extravaganza.
Media Type	Television & Cinema
Length	60 seconds
Market	United States
Creative Director	Robert Gottlieb
Creative Director	Mark Simmons
Editor	Kirk Smith
Sound Design Company	Mic Brooling
Production Company	Marsha Hunt Productions
Producer	Marsha Hunt
Producer	Lissa Weiss
Director	Robert Gottlieb
Director of Photography (DOP)	Tom McGrath