By Jeff Goss, President/Creative Director
The Virgin Islands Telephone Company had been our client for about 3 years. Our focus was a print, TV and PR campaign focused on stemming complaints about the quality of service in the U.S. Virgin Islands, as the weather, humidity and annual storms, wreaked havoc on above-ground lines.
The biggest challenge for me was keeping the swaying palms, breeze, and turquoise Caribbean ¬ — not to mention lapping the alluring local rum — from washing my mind out to sea.
The campaign was a success in touting “although we’re not perfect, the lengths to which VITELCO goes in the storm for its customer.” The campaign included a very notable TV spot that became known as “live wire” with a dancing phone cord plugging itself into the wall and being connected to the phone service.
The success of the campaign created the opportunity and budget to have some fun. You can imagine the holding of breath when Katrina, the director of advertising and PR, said, “I have some good news and some bad news. The good news: We want you to do a TV spot for the Super Bowl. The bad news: We have a $5,000 budget for the production.”
Well, our approach is always to come up with a compelling idea within the budget vs. trying to do an idea outside budget. So here is the spot, a use of animated type to achieve a surprise ending and “feel good” spot for VITELCO. We are proud to say we have had a spot on the Super Bowl — a feat accomplished by a small percentage of advertising professionals.
