 going into the production, I knew we would be limited. A normal production was not going to happen. Hey there, Robert Larson here. You know, with SimplySafe, you get comprehensive, professionally monitored home security without having to leave your house or have anyone to come install it. You simply order it online. It gets delivered to your door and you can set it up yourself in just a few minutes. Mind in that. You know, the creative is the fun part, but a lot of it was like figuring out the logistics like we hadn't really ever done anything like this before. My name is Wade Devers and I am the creative director of Electromatic, which is the in-house creative marketing function at SimplySafe. My name is Aron LaBelle. I am the founder and an executive producer at Element Productions. I'm Peter Davis and I am one of the three directors for Callier and I'm also the actor that plays Robert Larson. Hi, I'm Hunter Schlesinger, also one-third of Callier. And I'm Eric LaPlante. I'm the third third of Callier. We're all one-third. Just sort of jumping into the campaign itself, this Robert Larson character, can you just explain how long he's been around for? Yeah, Robert has been around for a year, almost to the day actually. And Robert was concepted against a brief that asked us to develop a transactional brand-building idea. The brief kind of begged for a spokesperson. So then the remainder of that is, well, how do we create a spokesperson that actually sticks in your brain and builds equity in the brand and somewhat builds a bridge from that character to the brand? Wade came up with this concept and he wanted to make something that really resonated from a brand perspective but also was able to be leveraged in the conversion content that needed to go on social and digital. For the Robert Larson, was there ever a consideration of making him kind of more menacing? He's kind of a, say, a friendly personification of all that might go wrong or kind of danger and fear. One of the attributes of SimplySafes that it's pleasant to work with and it almost sort of, it gives you sort of a sense of calm and so it would be a little incongruous to have an overly menacing spokesperson or brand advocate that was kind of counter to those feelings because a lot of what we're trying to do is take that anxiety out of the subject. We literally started casting for this character and Peter, one of the directors, threw his hat in the ring and Peter set the bar so high we literally couldn't find anyone better than Peter for this role. And Peter's a natural at his performance so we didn't have to worry about that. There was no concern about performance really from the get go. We just dove right into it. Knew all your lines. Everything was like. Yeah, I knew all my lines. Take one. Didn't have to look at the page once. I think this started kind of when we all realized we were gonna be kind of trapped inside for many months and then I think Wade started a conversation with Iran like saying like we wanna like do something but we don't know what's possible. I wrote a script for them and then passed it off to them and we went back and forth on how we could do it, where we could do it, what they needed to do it but largely the approach here was to trust them to do it. He'll give us his script and say, if you have any ideas or anything you wanna add to elevate it, go for it. Here's a shooting board. Now go make it and make it awesome and send it back to me when it's awesome. And it came back and it was awesome. Luckily. So you have the script. What preparations do you take before going into the shoot? The advantage is we are able to wear a lot of hats so keeping it safe from a COVID standpoint was the main discussion point I would say. We're wearing masks the whole time. We're staying six feet away from each other the whole time. It's like these are all things like on set you're not used to doing. This project was atypical for production, right? So Wade wanted it to feel like either Zoom or iPhone so it didn't have to be polished. It was almost like this is Robert in the quarantine communicating to the world. Because we committed early to shooting on iPhone, there's a certain amount of it's not as art directed or we're not as precious as we would be a big full crew. And that was a big part of this. So that Wade was really fine with the rawness of it. So what was the first day like you three arrived at the house? Just can you walk me through the first hours of shooting? What was that feel like? It was the first time the three of us had got back together to work on something in quite a while. So it was great to just have the three of us back together and we were goofing around and it was just like putting on an old jacket. Like it really wasn't any, could just kind of dive right into it. You're just painting a picture of what it looks like. It's just you three walking around with an iPhone. We're often asked like how we work together on set and I think a lot of it is, we put a lot of value in like discussing things before we get on set. So we all kind of are of one mind. The only gag we hadn't fully worked out was probably the toilet paper gag. So like it was kind of fun to just like throw an iPhone in a cabinet and know it's gonna work. So take it from an expert. Get simply safe and protect your home, your family and anything else you need to keep close eye on. You know what's interesting about the toilet paper reveal is that the guys knew that was a key part of the comedic timing of the spot. And so we literally, they tested a bunch of different ways and they shot a bunch of different ways for that gag. And that's a big part of being lean and doing things remotely is that you can play around and we're not slowing anyone down. They're comfortable. The client's comfortable in their house watching through video village. What was it like communicating with Wade or the brand throughout the whole process? Was that a challenge to kind of keep them updated and get feedback and incorporate that? There wasn't a ton of back and forth with Wade once we got to the shoot day. The level of trust that he and simply safe had in what we could produce was just really nice and refreshing. I think people are gonna have to get used to that nervousness around not being on set and not being to be in the moment all of the time. Like there's gonna have to be a degree of trust that you give to that partner, which I think is really critical. And also I think makes better work, honestly. Did any other ideas come in a close second place? No, that's the only idea I had. You know, part of this was investigating how a production was gonna work going forward. If we couldn't produce a commercial under the normal production circumstances. What has the response been to this spot? The commercial, as far as the analytic team and the media team are concerned, is doing better than almost anything we have out in the market and anything we have done recently. It's really nice to see when great creative executed in a way that's authentic to the brand does work and deliver results. You couldn't hope for a better outcome under worse circumstances.