Chevrolet’s ‘Real People. Not Actors’ Campaign Is a Fresh Take on Staying at Home

Social media users are no strangers to seeing the symbol for ‘Stay Home’ appearing in purple hues all over their feeds. The message represents safety to billions across the globe and stands for unity as we all face the fight with Covid-19. To highlight the importance of staying at home, while also making sure the message sticks, Chevrolet America’s latest instalment in the ‘Real People. Not Actors’ campaign centres around one person’s bewilderment at being left alone.

Chevrolet wanted to encourage people to ‘stay home’.  This was made all the more difficult given the whole country was in self isolation, including both the Detroit-based client and agency - which was Commonwealth//McCann - as well as the campaign’s long running LA-based director Zach Merck. The agency team, lead by Gary Pascoe and Duffy Patten with key creatives Victor Quattrin, and Scott Wolf, realised that an abundance of footage already existed to create something special.

The concept was quite simple, showing the campaign host Potsch Boyd alone in multiple sets created over the years.  The campaign thrives on the voices of the "real people" that participate in each fun experiment to make this series a viewer favourite.

Zach, who is repped in the US by Supply & Demand, says: “Every moment we see in the commercial was filmed practically! I always film my rehearsals with Potsch before our real people arrive, just to block out the key conversation points and where I want him to be in the room, because we film everything live.  We realised we had this great library of clips on a drive someplace that spanned a lot of our cool sets.”  

The breadth of the campaign meant shots from all around the country with a range of vehicles could be used. The real message was more important than cars.  “In order to truly get in front of this thing effectively, the smartest and easiest method is to simply stay home,” Zach added.