Rats can be a big problem for anyone, but restaurants have an especially hard battle with rodents on account of having so much food around. So when BASF developed a new rodenticide, Selontra, with an almost unbelievable benefit, they tasked my team at their partner agency to tout it to their pest management professional (PMP) audience.
The hook: When presented with both side-by-side, rats prefer the taste of Selontra rodent bait over a gourmet steakhouse hamburger and will seek out the former over the latter. My writing partner and creative lead, Gary Bostwick, and I were assigned to create a commercial to be targeted at PMPs which would present this benefit clearly, but in a manner which deftly avoided overt references to death and poisoning.
We were assigned to create a commercial which communicates rodents' preference for Selontra rodent bait over a gourmet hamburger.
While concepting, I threw out an idea — why not lean into the "gourmet" aspect of the insight and create a vignette of a high-end, fine dining restaurant (with touches like linen tablecloths and moody lighting), only to pull back and reveal that it's actually a miniature set arranged in a dark alley next to a commercial dumpster, a common spot for rodenticide to be placed. It's an arresting, disgusting image to a human, but it shows how a rodent thinks about Selontra rodent bait. I drew up storyboards and some mocked-up imagery, the client signed off on the concept, and we moved into production.
Even though it was a relatively simple shoot as productions go, it was very unique and interesting. For one thing, taking place smack in the middle of 2020 and at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was a welcome chance to see coworkers and collaborators in-person and not through a computer screen. We also had a fantastic prop master who actually fabricated the dumpster in the video from scratch using mostly wood, which blew me away because it looked like a very real dirty and rusty commercial metal dumpster. And finally, there was our star — Samuel the rat, an experienced on-screen animal talent who was a total pro, cooperating and hitting his marks all day, thanks in no small part to his handler who had been clicker-training him for the previous month.
