Turn that sh*t off!

At the time of this event, ad blockers were just blowing up — melting brains in media departments everywhere, but making the internet suck a little less for users. Maybe that’s a lesson, we thought. Maybe brands should make things people want to watch instead of force-feeding them programmatic shitpixels like they’re foie gras geese. So we called the event Skip Ads, and made it our mission to reposition Digitas as the non-advertising advertising agency. The event was a huge success.

We knew the Skip Ads theme would be a hard sell to a room full of advertisers, so we started hammering the tough love message from the opening bell. We kicked off the event with this film, created with the team at Funny or Die.

How do you show the potential of brand content? Create a ton of it - really fast. During a quick 5-minute intermission, we solicited one-sentence briefs from our audience of 300 clients. Then we created dozens of one-off videos that were ready to screen an hour later.

We started writing during that intermission, and the videos already streaming in the lobby by the time the first drink was poured.

Topic: lung cancer. At first, nobody wanted to touch this one. But it turned out to be a spot-on description of the product, and the good it does for patients. Who’d have thought an improv troupe would be the best messengers for lung cancer medicine?

All in, we made about 25 of these videos in just over two hours.