On 6 November 2005, the entire two-and-a-half minute ad break before a key Premier League match – Man Utd v Chelsea – was booked out. And what did the audience see? The very first showing of a film that captured 250,000 coloured bouncy balls descending the steep hill of Filbert Street, San Francisco. The digital perimeter boards during the match showed more balls, and a 60-second cut down aired in the half-time ad break.
Agency: Fallon, London
Art Direction: Juan Cabral
Copywriter: Juan Cabral
Production Company: MJZ
Director: Nicolai Fuglsig
"A very basic brief, no amazing insight, but the most perfect piece of advertising craft that I was compelled to buy a Sony TV a couple of weeks after I first saw it. Not because I needed one, but because I needed to reward this work."
- John Mescall, Creative Chair, by The Network
Quite a way to communicate the image quality of the Sony Bravia range of televisions. However, the global audience already had more than an inkling of what had been happening in San Francisco. While good quality video on phones was yet to arrive, there were plenty of home video users around for the prep and then the one-time, main ball drop, keen to capture what was on the street. As a result, the shoot for Balls was itself an early global viral phenomenon long before the likes of Instagram or Tiktok.
"Epic, thanks to the music. Music and sound in advertising: so, so important."
- Debby De Ridder, Creative Content Director, VML Belgium
Had this film not been shot “for real”, in one key take with street closures and all those balls, had this been a CGI extravaganza, then it’s highly unlikely it would be featured here. But this film holds up, there’s no intermediate technology to let it down in production terms … just the quality of your own color TV. The decision to use slow motion, and to add the track Heartbeats by José González (the first broadcast version using almost the whole song), the change of viewpoints, the sunny day … Well, it’s a magic few seconds that lasts. It’s so far from being an ad and is yet like a product test, not a product demo. It’s got staying power, as many of our nominators have said.
