Final draft
It’s a Hollywood truism that a first draft rarely resembles the final cut—just ask anyone who has ever stumbled upon a George Lucas script entitled Adventures of the Starkiller and then immediately cued up Star Wars. Similarly, Parkinson recalls that Disney CreativeWorks’ initial vision for the Prudential campaign lacked a certain… well, force.
“It felt like what every other financial services company might do,” he says, recalling that those earlier versions largely stood alone as stories. “Brands and advertisers can’t be part of the wallpaper—they need to be part of the discussion and part of the culture. Our partnership with Disney works really well because we challenge each other in terms of how we want to show up versus how the initial concept was.”
One thing that remained the same as the concept evolved was the idea of making movie stars out of below-the-line movie creatives. To that end, Disney CreativeWorks assembled a cast that includes set decorators Kelsi Ephraim (Sorry to Bother You, Everything Everywhere All at Once) and Jan Pascale (Argo, Top Gun: Maverick); choreographer Fatima Robinson (Dreamgirls, Anchorman 2); and film editor Myron Kerstein (Garden State, Wicked).
Each spot allows each artisan to tell their own story in their own words, starting with Ephraim and continuing on with Robinson and then Kerstein before ending with Pascale. But as you watched the ads over the course of the Oscars, you might have noticed that they cross over almost as often as the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (And if you didn’t, you can rewatch each spot in this article.)
For example, Ephraim is seen decorating a set in her spot where Robinson later leads two dancers through their steps—and footage of that routine is glimpsed on Kerstein’s monitor in his ad. It all comes to what Parkinson describes as a “crescendo” in the final installment, which finds Ephraim and Pascale embracing on the soundstage where this movie has been put together.
“The person that you see at the end meets the person from the very beginning,” Parkinson says of the full circle moment. “The creative really plays to our brand essence around living a better life longer.”
Meanwhile, Campbell ensured that the spots would be threaded throughout the Oscars for maximum impact. “They start right at the beginning of the show and go all the way through the last pod break, like you have closure through the show. We wanted the audience to have that full experience.”
