“What if furniture could be better for the planet? What if there was a chair that would always be there?”
Hearing these words spoken in a whispery, dramatic voice, one must expect that the ad is about an eco-friendly chair.
“What if we made thousands of chairs with style,” the voice goes on. “That brought people together.”
Not only is the chair eco-friendly, but it’s also apparently a very sophisticated chair. The chair in question is shown as a simple yet complex structure made of wooden sticks. While avant-garde in style; functional, it is not. It doesn’t even look like it can hold up someone’s butt.
Actors in the ad start slowly dancing, whispering, and even breathing on the chair and the trees it was supposedly made of. The scenes are reminiscent of a horror film recently released, Midsommar, which is about a cult with strange rituals. Like the experience of watching that movie, you can’t help but ask in the midst of the ad: “What the hell am I watching?”
As the viewer, we accept this chair made of sticks because the ad seems to be advertising it. However, at the end of the video, the dream-like yet strange happenings come to an abrupt stop when we are pulled back to reality to see a woman and her child staring at the weird chair from outside a store window—revealing that the ad was actually a spoof on how companies make use of the green angle to sell their products.
Instead of a chair, the campaign created by Morgenstern Oslo and Bacon’s Matias and Mathias was advertising a Norwegian online marketplace called Finn. As the woman walks away with her child, the ad reminds us: Buy second-hand. Or nothing at all.
Credits:
Agency: Morgenstern
Creative team: Anders Holm, Sebastian Prestø
Account director: Ole Hustad
Project manager: Mona Larsen
Production Company: Bacon
Directors: Matias & Mathias
Executive producer: Magne Lyngner
Producer: Øystein Dyb
Director of photography: Andreas Langeland Bjørseth
Post production producer: Eli Mari Sandal
Post coordinator: Markus Tangre
VFX: Ola Jacob Nestande
Colorist: Julien Alary
Sound design: Andreas Waag Martinsen
Composer: John Erik Kaada
