 Very few people had really thought about the way that we worked, you know, you wake up in the morning, you commute to work, you sit down at your desk from nine to five. We really kind of had this inflection point that needed a pretty eye-catching person who better to tell us the old ways of working our dead than the dead guy. It's all made up. These old ideas, working in an office, nine to five. So, if it's all made up, what's stopping you from making up something better? I'm Hannes Jatti. I'm the Chief Creative Officer at Alto and the founder of Alto as well. Ivan Zakarias and I'm a director. I'm Nick Landon and I was the film producer. My name is Patrick Hawley and I'm the Executive Creative Director at Upwork. Tell us how this came about. This ad came from this realization that we hadn't rethought the way that we as a society have worked since the Industrial Revolution. This is how we work now. We wanted it to be as much an ad for Upwork as it is an ad for the new way of working that we're all going about nowadays. After the pandemic, there was a big question, how are we gonna like work together and how companies succeed? And so that needed to be solved. Ads during the pandemic were more somber, more earnest and as we kind of found our way out of that, there was almost this kind of time for a bit of elevity and celebration and humor. When the inception of the idea came about and with every big and scary and crazy idea you have this, oh crap moment, how are you gonna sell this to our client? We were kind of stopped in our tracks by a Jack the Ted CEO. That's always a good thing. When you have some kind of reaction where you're just like, what? Yeah, this could work. When you come to someone with a dead person being resurrected, not many clients say yes, but it also comes down to actually building a smart strategy behind it and having some clear cultural insight. And I think when you do that, great work can follow. What was the process like building this whole musical theme behind this kind of epic ad, as it were? When we looked at the scripts, there were some obvious challenges with it. That guy, a song, multiple sweeping locations and a lot of different characters. Bringing that all together needed a real master and creating a musical piece out of it that also told a clear story. And I think there's nobody better out there than Ivan Zacharias. Hanes from Alto and the guys liked some stuff we did before and they thought that we might be good with that people as well. We were extremely excited when he wanted to work with us and he just absolutely knocked out of the park. We started with daily Zoom calls. Normally it would be, oh, God, another phone call. But these guys were really funny. The amount of communication we had to have with them to put it together was probably treble what we'd ordinarily have throughout the process. But it was always a pleasure. It was great hanging out with Nicky Don and we really broke down the scripts. One of the things that drew us to the project were the lines in the music track. We soon found that connecting spaghetti Western songs with an Elvis voice really gave us that comedic relief. What we were trying to is try and make the track the length of the act that the film needed to be. It was a couple of hours every night this kind of ongoing musical development. That process with Walker Music took us two months to actually get to the song. To this day it is stuck in my head. I will find myself in the shower just humming along to it. And I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. I think it lives up their entry. We'd done a few musicals before. So we knew what you had to do to be ready to go and film it. What we didn't realize is that we couldn't really progress at all until we had the actor. Our main actor Ross Turner, who plays Jack, our dead CEO is an absolute professional. Once we had the actor, we needed to start with a prosthetic work. I've never, until this campaign had to think about what limb falls off the talent at any given time, what his eyeball should fall out, what that eyeball should look like when it falls out. There were lots of rigging involved in his suit and things like that. So it needed to be really thought through. Back when I had a working circulatory system, you had to give your right arm to find great talent. He needed to be in hair and makeup for four hours every day. He turned up at three in the morning and then got his prosthetics made up. There were different latex pieces that got put on to him. It was very, very hot in Portugal when we shot that. So I was really worried about him and he just managed everything perfectly. Shoot days were up to 15 hours. So this guy was there often for like 18, 20 hours a day for five days straight in foggy and full hair and makeup with the prosthetics and his suit. How long did the whole process take? Before we started shooting, it was probably like six weeks. We shot for a week in Portugal. We needed to create 30 pieces of content out of the five shoot days. We were basically fitting in a lot more than we would ordinarily kind of do on each day. I think at the end we shot like nine or 11 commercials in six days, which is something that we normally don't do. What's the reaction been to the campaign? This has been actually a wildly successful campaign for us. We ended up kind of crushing a lot of our metrics. There has been a lot of positive feedback. We also had some very visceral reactions from some audience members. Worst ad I've ever seen was my favorite. I take it actually as a positive sign that a campaign is actually out there and challenges the norms that we have that some people outrage. When you go the direction of zombie CEO who's lens fall off in the middle of a campaign about a freelancing and remote work platform, you're going to get some reactions, both good and bad. Putting your brand out there and having a take on the world will be more important than ever. I think that there's a lot of value in finding amazing creative partners and letting them do their thing. And we're really lucky to have partners like Alto and the folks over at Smuggler to help us do that. We tend to do quite classical narrative led pieces. So every now and then it's really good to kind of shake it up and throw something completely kind of eccentric and different. There tend to be musicals for some reason. I kind of hate musicals so I don't know why I'm doing it all the time.