Marketing Ghosts in the Commercial

By MICHAEL QUINN

Among the 100 or so actors wandering about a ritzy night spot in the latest TV commercial for Diet Coke are three with a very unusual item on their resumes: they're dead. Their faces are immediately recognizable. But just how Humphrey Bogart, Louis Armstrong and James Cagney were resurrected to shill for a soft drink with living songman Elton John is the story of "Nightclub" -- 60 seconds of inspired flackery that since its first airing two days before Thanksgiving, has become one of the most talked-about TV commercials of the year.

"Nightclub" is the creation of Lintas: New York, the ad agency that has handled the Diet Coke account since the product was introduced in 1982. Ten months ago, Lintas launched an effort to reinvigorate its "Just for the taste of it" campaign, at least partly in response to rival Diet Pepsi's "Uh-huh" ads, which feature the full-throttle voice of Ray Charles declaiming the now familiar slogan. By last spring, creative director Tony DeGregorio and his staff had settled on a new theme for Diet Coke: "There's just one." What they needed was advertising to go with it. By summer, Lintas got the go-ahead from client Coca-Cola for a spot featuring Elton John performing before an audience sprinkled with the actual images of famous Golden Age movie stars, courtesy of the latest in special effects.

DeGregorio's staff sat through more than 100 American films, looking for a few seconds of classic footage that could blend into the new Elton John material. The script for "Nightclub" was fashioned around the final choices: Bogie in All Through the Night (1942), Satchmo in High Society (1956) and Cagney in snippets from Public Enemy (1931) and The Roaring Twenties (1939). Director Steve Horn shot the Elton John nightclub footage with the same lenses used during the classic film period, but with live stand-ins for Cagney and company. The footage was taken to R. Greenberg Associates, who edited Woody Allen into old film footage in his 1983 movie Zelig. Through a process called "rotoscoping," technicians isolated the images of Bogart, Armstrong and Cagney from the vintage movie clips. Then the legendary stars were computer- stitched into the contemporary nightclub scene.

The work was painstaking. Cagney was shorter than the modern blond actress with whom he is seen ordering a Diet Coke. So the editors blew up the image until his height matched that of his co-star. The Golden Age actors were carefully colorized frame by frame to match the hues of the fresh footage. In the stunning final product, Bogart wanders among the nightclub clientele, exchanging greetings with a patron probably not even born when Bogie died in 1957. Louis Armstrong blows away on his trumpet, sharing a knowing glance with Elton John.

But not everyone is swept up in the excitement. A review in the trade publication Advertising Age, while admiring the special effects, argues that the commercial's hyperkinetic promotional jingle "obscures the lyrics and thus also the explanation for why -- apart from sheer gee-whizardry -- Cagney, Satchmo and Bogart are resurrected." In short, it's not enough for commercials to showcase creativity -- they've got to move the goods as well.