Act!

Law & Disorder

Detectives work a chaotic small business crime scene.

Watch the full campaign

The Strategy

Act! sells one thing to small businesses: getting organized, so the relationships that keep the business alive stop slipping through the cracks. Most of its advertising was built to catch people already shopping for a CRM. The owner it wasn't reaching was the one who hadn't gone looking yet, keeping a few hundred clients straight with a binder, a Rolodex and memory. Act! wanted an irreverent voice to reach that person, and one idea to hang it on: organization from chaos.

So the spot is a crime scene. A dim office, a phone that won't stop ringing, and a wall of Post-its, photos and business cards strung together with yarn. Two detectives out of a David Fincher film work the room, one seasoned and unhurried, one younger and struggling to stifle their gag reflex. The "victim"? A small business owner so overwhelmed by organizational chaos that he put his head through that wall, and is still in it. What's left of his system is cataloged as evidence: an overstuffed binder, a Rolodex, a shoebox of invoices, a Filofax.

The campaign plays like an episode. A 15-second teaser opens the case and leaves it hanging. The 30-second hero is the night it breaks. A 15-second follow-up picks up in the aftermath, and two 6-second reminders go back into the same room once the work lights are on.

The Process

The detectives concept won because everybody already knows them. Cop procedurals are a dime a dozen, and so is the pairing at the heart of every one: the grizzled veteran who has seen it all, and the plucky rookie who might be in over their head. Parody something that familiar and the audience is in on it from the first frame.

The first version was darker. It stopped at the crime scene, and Act!'s team asked the question that made it better: where's the happy ending? A small business owner shouldn't have to watch himself end up as the body. That note is where the rescue came from. It was typical of the team, too. They knew their product and their jobs, they cared about the brand, and they were still bold enough to try something this far outside the box. Their feedback came from expertise and pragmatism, never from fear, and that says a lot about the company behind it.

We came to this one as a small business ourselves, one that had already tried more than one CRM. So we used Act! for real during the project, and kept using it after the work was done. It has everything a small business needs and nothing it doesn't, which is exactly why an owner doesn't get buried in it.

The set was a bear to build and fun as hell. Se7en is a great film to borrow a look from, and putting an actor's head through a wall is every director's dream (kidding… mostly).

Act! was also one of the first clients to take a campaign all the way through its landing page, built section by section around the ads with stills from the shoot. They understood that a campaign doesn't stop where the video does.

The Reaction

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