 When a man that big and that loud and deep is taken down by a sandwich company, it's just stupid. It's just funny. Stevie, in front of my bread-like product, honey, you're dead to me! I'm Josh Fell. I'm the CCO of Anomaly in Los Angeles. I'm Emma Wilcoxson. I'm executive producer over at MJZ. Darren Dugan, chief marketing officer of Jimmy Johnston. Anomaly just recently won the business, and I understand that this ad concept was part of their pitch. Tell me about that. The idea around the anti-hero and Tony Belonovich was their lead idea. Now, it represented very much a departure for the brand and a certain level of risk that we just needed to double-check the consumers. But we love, love, love the idea. They won the pitch. We bought that campaign, and we shot the work in early January over three days during COVID restrictions, obviously, in Los Angeles. Our attitude was with them, like most things. We're going to bring what we'd do if it was us. If it was our money, what would we want to do? We'd want to do this fun, stupid thing. I hope they want to do a fun, stupid thing with us. And they bet from the very beginning. So it jumped out at the Super Bowl, was our first big foray, and then it's been building and building ever since. Was the ad originally intended for the Super Bowl? No. That's the crazy thing. We produced the work over three days, as I said, and then the work came back, and it came back relatively quickly because we had a February start date. So Meet the King came back, and it was the long version. I think it's about 148, and then we obviously cut it down to a 60, obviously cut it down to a 30. And that was kind of our plan, right? We wanted a long form to sort of set the stage for the new story line and the new campaign idea. It's so breakthrough. It tested so well. Maybe we should think about a big stage, prime event, and Super Bowl was coming up. It was a really celebratory moment for everybody that the client wanted to take that step. So it really felt like a rightful home for the campaign launch, as these characters are amazing. I mean, to be honest, we kind of perceive this, and I know Craig had said this all through the process, as a mini TV show. It has to be like a TV show you want to watch. You mentioned that the tone of the ad was a risk for Jimmy John's. What was the brand's voice before, and why did you think this risk was worth taking? So the brand has always had an irreverent kind of collegiate feel. The brand was born on campuses. Thanks, dude. See you tomorrow. We're not a serious brand. You're not going to see hardcore serious commercials from us. But at the same time, we needed a campaign idea. So I wanted a campaign idea, the sandwich of sandwiches. I wanted a breakthrough creative strategy that really took the irreverence of the brand, but took it to a whole next level. The reason I thought it was a little bit risky is, one, it obviously represented a significant investment. Number two, the work is very different than anything that you've seen from Jimmy John's. And I wanted to make sure that it wasn't polarizing across a multitude of diverse individuals. And the research came back, thumbs up, fantastic breakthrough makes sense. So we moved. Let's talk about the production of the ad. Was pre-production different? As we said, we live in strange times. Tell me about what it's like to make an ad right now. It's not great, but this one was pretty great, which I think you felt in this on camera and in screen. We started filming this campaign in January. So that was a very tense time in LA. There was a surge of COVID at the time. And so we had to prepare very diligently and we didn't actually have too much time to get it done. Because the idea was kind of baking as we were moving along through pre-production and seeing ideas were coming to the fore. And so we wanted to constantly plus it was basically the goal. And that's why they came to Craig Gillespie. Craig and crew were really great about coming back to a virtual video village. And we got to do the things we didn't think we get to do. We got to riff bits. We got to throw pieces of dialogue at him. And Brad was a great collaborator. And so all of that stuff that you thought you'd miss, and often typically we do miss in this COVID shooting time, the stars aligned to let us have it. In the ad, Brad Garrett's character, Tony Belonovich, actually mispronounces the name of your brand. Tony Belonovich here with another reason not to eat the Jimmy's Johns. And he also uses some slightly spicy language. Sandwich bread don't come fresh. It comes from a truck, from out of state, baked once a week at exactly many a business. Was there ever a hesitation about that? He uses a character that is imperfect, like so many of us. And he uses language that is a little salty. I would say it doesn't cross the line. And then with regard to Jimmy's Johns, I will tell you like I never worried about that. You know Jimmy Johns, but when you hear that Jimmy's Johns, like it's so bloody funny. And it resonates with consumers. They play it back and they love it. Very early in the script writing process where we're like, what if you put the plural on bold names? And I sort of reference to mobster quirk of the old movies like A Scarface. They do that and the Goodfellas, they do that. He just happens to put plurals on the end of every name. So it's Jimmy's Johns. I think it's again another detail of character that's so important to really fleshing out this campaign and really cementing how funny he is. I mean, he sees just everything that he does is just that little bit off. It wasn't always very strictly scripted. You let these two actors kind of play with their roles. There's a picture in my mind. The picture it made the cut is of a salami flying through the air and it hits Stevie played by a gentleman named Sunny in the face and it stuck right on his head. We did that one time and it worked. And then Sunny's so genius that he took it down and took a little nibble of it. Obviously it wasn't scripted or maybe it could have been scripted, but if it had been scripted, it wouldn't have worked. I remember hearing that Brad just decided to stay in his pajamas. He was in character and he left and he went home, left set in his pajamas. And it was just, they were really, really tight group of people. The beauty of hiring actors of this quality is you can trust them to do it. We're getting shoot cut after cut after cut after cut and then let's go. Let's start going to ad hoc and see what we can get and that's the beauty of hiring talent of that caliber.