current work

Babies R Us is a national big box retailer of, you guessed it, baby stuff.  BRU are a corporate sibling of Toys R Us. They have been around for quite a while now, but haven't done a lot of advertising.  The audience here is expectant mothers. A very motivated bunch indeed. They are already keenly interested in what we are selling.  So there was no need to get too dramatic here.

This idea was inspired by Escape Pod MD Norm Bilow's real life experience as he and his wife did what the couple in the ad are doing: registering at Babies R Us in preparation for the birth of their first child.  Norm commented that as he was registering at BRU it all suddenly became real for him.  Not that it wasn't before.  This just helped bring it home in an experiential way. Scan item, imagine item in your home. Wow.

Here's how registering at BRU works. You scan all the stuff you want to get and your family and friends go online and pay for it all.  It's a genius scam! I wish I'd done it when I was having my first child.  It's like shopping, but it's essentially free!  Not a tough sell then.  So we leaned into that and created a demo of this baby registering process.

This was a breeze to shoot, thanks to director Phil Joanou and MJZ being the pros that they are.

And you have to be made of frozen granite if you don't smile at the baby at the end.  That little dude was a find. He loved all the attention.