This one’s brief until I can get more assets for my damn portfolio. But it’s a good story: Quaker Oats, a storied brand, needed to reinvent itself a bit. Juniper Park created a beautiful, iconic manifesto piece, and then the digital team was tasked with helping people get excited about oatmeal online.
No small task.
Fortunately, they gave us this guy to work with: Bob Harper, host of the mega-hit reality show “The Biggest Loser”. I wrote a bunch of online videos in which Bob would extol the virtues of oatmeal on Facebook. I had no access to Bob or his people, so I just watched his existing tape and wrote the way I thought he talked.
When I submitted scripts for approval, there was a lot of stress about whether I’d channelled him properly. Fortunately, Bob came back with surprisingly few changes (okay, none), proving that I either have an amazing ear for dialogue or I should have just pursued a career in reality tv I don’t like watching. I then became the Voice of Bob™ and was called in to write his dialogue for an international tv campaign.
Like I said, I’m looking for some of the video to share here. I have some to show you in person, but there’s nothing I can link to, and I don’t know about you, but I HATE posting fine cuts and then getting yelled at for copyright infringement.
Another thing I can’t post but would love to share: my Quaker blooper reel. Hit a feller up if you want to see me berated in a very loving way by a man with a Tennessee accent.
As a side note that was actually a lot of the work I did for Quaker at this time, there was also “Unlock Amazing”, an important campaign that saw Quaker donate meals to klds in need when they shared a custom cereal bowl design on Facebook.
(Yes, these were the days when people still regularly engaged with brands on social media, and brands got huge results doing it.)