WIX.COM
Wix.com is the world's largest website builder/host with over 150 million users. The company was founded in Tel Aviv in 2006 by CEO Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami and Giora Kaplan with funding by Insight Venture Partners, Mangrove Capital Partners, and Benchmark Capital. When Wix launched in the USA in 2014 it had to compete with established companies like Square Space, Go Daddy, Weebly, and Word Press -- all of whom were well funded, and many of whom were already advertising on television's most expensive and highest profile media event of the year -- the Super Bowl.
THE SITUATION
In the Fall of 2014, WIX was ready to go head-to-head with Go Daddy and Square Space during Super Bowl XLIX. They had seen multiple rounds of creative from their NYC agency and hated it all. Knowing they were running out of time, Mark Zamuner (head of Wix's media agency Two Nil) arranged an introduction to CMO Omer Shai. In 72 hours we put together a small team of creatives, concepted 9 ideas, and presented scripts to Wix on Halloween Day. A day later Omer called and said, "We love the work. The assignment is yours." With less than 90 days to Super Bowl Sunday, we had a campaign to produce that required negotiating deals with 5 different NFL Hall-of-Fame players, launching 5 new small businesses, and shooting in 4 different cities.
THE CONCEPT
To inspire small business owners who would rather build a website themselves than pay a web designer, we created businesses for 5 recently retired NFL stars. Each of the ex-players (Emmett Smith, Terrell Owens, Franco Harris, Larry Allen) served as role models/inspiration for Brett Favre, the one player who seemed most reluctant to move on from football. To build anticipation for the Super Bowl spot, we created real-world websites and advertising campaigns for each of the players' businesses that ran throughout the month of January. In total, we created over 20 different pre-game videos, the broadcast :60, six websites from scratch, a six-minute cooking show with T.O. and internet chef Mattie Matheson, a humble-pie delivery service, and two real-time in-game contests -- all in less than 90 days.
SUPER BOWL 2016
Based on the success of our first Super Bowl campaign we formed an on-going, project-based relationship with Wix that led to Super Bowl L (50). This time around the client signed a co-op agreement with DreamWorks to feature characters from Kung Fu Panda 3 in the company's Super Bowl campaign. The creative process was a months-long, back-and-forth, consensus-building challenge to get Wix, the DreamWorks marketing team, and the movie's directors to align behind an idea. (Imagine the conversations about how/why anthropomorphized animals from ancient China would use modern-day computers to build websites, without undermining the "authenticity" and "integrity" of the movie's plot line. Sigh.) Fortunately for all involved, the audience didn't question the logic as literally or as obsessively as we did. The campaign drew over 49 million online views leading up to the Super Bowl and was the game's #1 viral/online campaign.
SUPER BOWL 2017
Given the success of the Kung Fu Panda campaign, Wix felt compelled to co-op with another movie franchise for Super Bowl LI. However, deals with Wolverine/Fox Studios and Spiderman/Sony fell through during talent negotiations. Once again we found ourselves concepting a Super Bowl campaign in late-October/early-November. We convinced Omer and his team that we didn't need a movie franchise to tell a story about disruption and the unpredictable nature of small business -- we could create our own action-adventure, business-is-chaos story using actors of our own choosing. Who better to personify chaos than Jason Statham? And what better side-kick to have than Israel's own Gal Gadot, soon to be known world-wide as Wonder Woman? For the second year in a row our campaign was ranked #1 in online views/engagement leading up to Super Bowl Sunday.
Credits: JEFF HUGGINS Creative Director, ANDREA JANETOS Art Director, YOAV BERG VP Advertising, OMER SHAI Chief Marketing Officer, FRANK SAMUEL Director, LOUIS LETERRIER Director, CONOR O'NEIL Editor, DOUG WALKER Editor, CONNOR MCDONAL Editor, LAUREN BAYER Producer, TINA HAM Producer, THERESA DARLINGTON Producer