GROSSROOTS (2012)

For the second season of Ugly Americans, the deck was stacked against us.  The show premiered well and had a devoted fan base, but the ratings it was pulling were not high enough. It was a show on the brink. And we had been told that there wouldn't be much airtime available for promos, so there wasn't much in the budget to promote it: a measly $40K for the entire campaign.

But that's where we got to work. I reached out to Jake Wallace from our multiplatform/digital division and Shawn Silverman from our promotions marketing division, and we came up with a plan and a concept:

What if Ugly Americans (a show about monsters living in the big city) is only doing poorly because the Nielsen corporation undersamples monster-Americans in their ratings?

We could use the little money we had for one extravagance: Makeup and Prosthetics. Then we could let the monsters loose in the city and film a moody documentary about their feelings of marginalization, which we could seed out as web videos. The monsters would also start a facebook group (known as FUGLY: Friends of Ugly Americans) and maintain a social presence, letting people know about their plight. A protest of demons picketing with "NIELSENS: GO TO HELL" signs outside the offices of Nielsen communications was proposed but abandoned.

To film the web videos, I reached out to amazing makeup artist Soula Kalamaras, and started building a team and a shoot plan. We would make the monsters up in our studio, and then have them walk around the West Village while we followed them with a guerilla camera crew for our B-roll. Then we'd get them doing their testimonials in a studio.

A few stills from the makeup application table.

I'm going to show you what we got first, and then I'm going to tell you how we got it, because the process here was as important as the product.  But first, the product:

Since the budget was low, I used all the resources we had at Comedy Central: volunteer extras from around the office,  camera people from our digital division and graphics department, and all the equipment and camera kits we could muster. We ended up with 4 units operating simultaneously, each taking out a different monster on a different walk at a different time.  I pretty much had to work as my own AD, and not only come up with the creative but devise a detailed plan of how to make the creative come together.

We also had a bunch of fun making these things, and the importance of having a cross-departmental fun creative project cannot be undersold. Teams that had been separate from one another started working with each other and seeing what was possible if they combined their efforts. Connections were formed between departments and people became familiar with what other departments did, and everyone got experience making content. Show creator Devin Clark and Executive Producer Dan Powell got to see their designs come to life, and got a chance to see Comedy Central rally to their cause as well.

The spots performed incredibly well on Comedy Central's YouTube channel, especially when compared to other Ugly Americans content. We also made the front page of the pics subreddit for a while when people saw a fishman on their way to work.

We weren't able to save the show, unfortunately, the ratings were still too low to meet the third season benchmarks (except weirdly in Latin America, where the show was absurdly popular). But what we were able to do was make something cool, have fun doing it, bring people together, and communicate a soulful and playful brand image. Pretty good for a stacked deck.