Molson Golden: Boy Meets Girl

ADWEEK February, 1983

Client: Mart1et lmporting Co.
Agcncy:Rumrill-Hoyt Inc., division of Compton Advertising Inc.
Creative Director: Gene Novak
Performers: Garrett Brown, Anne Winn

"She makes me Iaugh and l make her laugh. We just start winging it." Improvisation was the creative strategy of Philadelphian Garrett Brown, whose radio spots with Anne Winn on behalf of Canada's Molson Golden Ale have won a handful of Clio awards and are perhaps the funniest of the year. Significantly, neither performer works full time in radio commercials. Brown, 40, is a commercial TV producer and the inventor of the Steadi-Cam, which takes the wiggle out of hand-held videotape. His partner, Winn, 41, raises and races thoroughbreds. Their Molson Golden spots are literally for the fun of it.

"We had done spots for various and sundry companies, like Kodak and Michigan Bell, and were contacted by someone at Rumrill-Hoyt to do these," recalls Anne Winn. "The way it works is that we ran down a half a dozen scenes after we started out with the basic scenario of a guy picking up a girl. The idea is to get something natural, so we got the idea to do something clumsy. We just throw all the ingredients in the pot and keep tasting it to see how it plays."

Winn adds: "The general strategy is to make it believable, to create something that seems to be appealing. The people in the spots are attractive and believable enough so that the listener says, 'I could see myself in their places and try what they like.'"

"It's breakthrough radio," crows Gene Novak, chairman/creative director of Rumrill-Hoyt. "They do ad-libby spots that are like over hearing a phone call. They step over each other's lines They cough, stumble, mispronounce‹that's the intrigue." Brown attributes the spontaneous sound to the fact tbat the commercials are often recorded on the very first take--a process made easier becsuse Brown acts as recording engineer while he and Winn ad lib.

The Molson spots got major play recently In California. The campaign upped wholesale orders by 100 percent, according to Rennie Solomito, ad manager of the Martlet Importing Co., which is trying to put the Canadian ale on the U.S. map. Says Solomito "We're confident that radio is a major force for us. The wholesslers say to us, 'Keep those commercials coming.'"