Into the Library with Alexis Bronstorph

This was a spot from when I worked at Juniper Park (it’s since merged with TBWA), which, at the time, was a fairly small boutique Canadian agency that had many US clients This was the first time I had worked on a big campaign for the US market, and it was also my first big, big budget piece - I think it was a million dollars - which, at that time, was a lot rarer to see in Canada. 

Throughout the process, my partner at the time (Johnnie Ingram, who now lives in LA and creates the HBO show ‘We’re Here’) and I worked with a great director named Sean Meehan. He brought so much to the table. Before he started directing, he was a DP, and so the cinematography was beautiful, and all the thought that he and his team put into it really showed on the screen. 

We also got to work with Richard Jenkins as our voice talent, which was really cool. He was one of the first people we thought of, and he has such a beautiful, rich voice. It also taught us that you have to treat a VO like a main character. Working with an actor like Richard Jenkins just takes it to a whole other level. 

I can still specifically remember how I felt during certain moments of this production. We woke up every day for seven days at 4am to catch the sunrise. I was beyond tired! I remember coming home one day in the middle of the week - it was a seven day shoot - and just falling asleep at the dinner table. And then there was one morning where I got into a cab to go to set, and clearly someone had just thrown up from the night before. There they were just finishing partying… and I was going to work. It was wild!

This was a fun one! Not only was it one of the first pieces I did with Kelsey Horne (my longtime creative partner), but it managed to really land in culture. We did it with the HR department of Tim Hortons because they needed a recruiting campaign, and by the end of the day, it was all over the news and hundreds of people had come through. It even made BuzzFeed, which was a big deal back then! 

Creatively, the idea of turning a real house into a Tim Hortons (in order to establish that Tim Hortons is in everybody’s neighbourhood) really stoked my interest in the experiential side of advertising, and made me realise that we could do non-traditional work, and still go big. We really tried to make it look like the real in-restaurant experience, from the sign on the roof (which our producer helped nail onto the roof), to the fresh coffee. And the team at Tim Hortons was more than ready to go above and beyond. We'd asked them for something crazy, like the doughnut counter, and they would say, 'no problem!'. Finding a house to do it in though, was not easy. The house had just been sold (this took place during the two weeks before the new family took possession), and the new owners were not thrilled when they saw their new house on the news. 

Another one of the early projects Kelsey and I did together - here we were tasked with bringing the idea of 'stick together' to life. On the Kraft peanut butter jars, there are two little bears, and so we all thought 'maybe we can create a story around the bears?” I still have my childhood bear (don’t judge!), and I had just had my first kid. I had thought it would be really sweet to pass it onto her… but when I went to give it to her, I couldn’t quite part with it! So, this ad is actually kind of an autobiographical story. 

I still remember that right when we put it on the page, we both felt like 'This feels like the right one'. Sure enough, the client loved it. It was an awesome shoot with the very talented Yael Staav. We shot it in Argentina, and all in all, this was definitely a heartfelt experience throughout. 

This was a really fun one to bring to life! The clients were so on board to push the envelope and do something funny, and we worked really closely with our strategy partner to find an insight that felt so true. The campaign was based on the idea that you go to a lawyer when you need legal advice, you go to the dentist when you need your teeth fixed, so, why are we willing to let just about anybody do our taxes? As the ads point out, just because someone else can do your taxes doesn't mean they should - and once we had our script, what was on the page basically ended up being exactly what was made. 

Equally important in this process were our amazing directors, The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. They were incredible and super collaborative. Not only did they bring a beautiful eye to the work, but they have a really great sense of comedy and timing. It really was just an awesome process from start to finish! 

Working on Volkswagen is a dream for every creative person all over the world. So, being able to work on such an iconic brand was really special. 

For this, Volkswagen was launching its new electric vehicle in Canada, and although the brand has a long history of doing amazing advertising, we wanted to do something that wasn't necessarily traditional advertising. And we found a nugget: the internet creates a huge carbon footprint - bigger than the airline industry! So, from there we thought 'What if we could actually lower our carbon footprint online to launch this vehicle?'. The client was on board right away, and we actually did the production in-house, creating all of that ASCII text. It was a different way to look at advertising a car launch, because so often you want to show splashy images and beautiful car photography, and here, we did the opposite.

This came out right after Gwyneth Paltrow announced her ‘This Smells Like My Vagina’ candle. Everybody was talking about it, and one of our teams had this idea to create the opposite candle, 'This Smells Like My Penis' and charge more for it to highlight the gender pay gap. 

It was simple and smart, and it took on a life of its own. Gwyneth Paltrow even talked about it on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’, which was really, really cool for us. It's just one of those projects where everything kind of aligns, and where you just say ‘yes’ and trust the team and everyone you work with to make it happen, and make it great. We had an amazing producer, and honestly, it’s one of my favourite pieces.

This was one of the first pieces we did as CCO of No Fixed Address, and I love that it was for such an amazing and important cause. NFA has been working with the Canadian Centre for Child Protection for years, and for this project, we looked at an interesting data point: the proliferation and growth of child sexual abuse material online. The numbers are staggering, and so we wanted to dimensionalise that in an interesting way. Specifically, we realised this was bigger than any film festival - in fact, all of the world's film festivals… combined. 

Creating movie posters to reflect this statistic would have been cool, but given the sheer volume, it was impossible. Our head of creative technology, Darrin Patey, told us that we could use AI to build them, and literally made it work in days. This was my first time using AI to create work in that way, and it was so cool to see it come to life in real time. It really came together beautifully.

Questrade was one of NFA’s first clients, and had created a really strong, well-known platform in Canada over the last six years. But given the financial landscape and how Canadians are feeling right now, we all decided to pivot this year, and do something a little bit different.

We landed on the idea of using ‘The Impossible Dream’ as a song and worked with Grayson - an awesome audio house in Toronto - to reimagine, rearrange and re-sing that song, and they did a fantastic job of bringing that to life. We also worked with MindCastle as our directors. They had such a beautiful eye for detail, they were super good at casting, and were extremely thoughtful about the way they brought each scene to life. Sometimes everything comes together to make a piece really memorable, and between the music and the direction, this felt like one of those times. 

We just started working in partnership with CREA last year, and this is our first piece as AOR. To bring it to life, we worked with Pep Bosch who is an awesome director with a portfolio of great work. He really brought so much passion and ideation to this piece. We knew we wanted to create these larger-than-life characters who needed that little helping hand only a realtor could bring, and he and the team made it all happen with such ingenuity. They would shoot a scene nine different times in order to layer in each of the characters - ensuring they could actually size them for the final version. They also made a bunch of sets that were smaller, so that these actors would feel very big inside them. And, it was all worth it. I think the final spot just has such a beautiful charm to it, and it really jumps off the screen.