Eon
Don’t Be a Hostage
Kidnappers demand backups nobody can actually access.
Watch the full campaign
The Strategy
Eon is a cloud backup platform. Big companies back up everything they run on Amazon, Microsoft and Google's clouds, and they pay a lot to do it. But most of those backups are hard to use. To get one file back, a team often has to restore a whole server first. Eon makes backups something you can search and open right away, across every cloud.
The people who buy it run cloud and platform teams. They've heard every scary pitch about losing data, and they're tired of it. So Eon's brand came with one firm rule: no scare tactics.
We brought three ways in, and Eon chose the one that asked what backups could be if they weren't just a safety net. Then we narrowed it to one message. Eon saves money too, but one ad can't carry two ideas. So every spot is about access. You pay for your backups, so you should be able to get to them.
Eon picked our hostage idea. Two kidnappers have pulled a Cloud Ops Director out of bed, and they want the backups. He'd hand them over in a second. He just can't get to them.
The 30-second main spot opens in an empty warehouse under one hanging light. Ski Mask raises a pair of pliers. Pantyhose Ted holds Greg's mouth open. Greg is still in his pajamas, sleep mask pushed up on his forehead and work lanyard around his neck, swearing he can't access the backups. Nobody can.
The 15-second teaser is the same standoff, up close. The 15-second follow-up picks up after the main spot, once the ropes come off, and Greg remembers he didn't come alone. The 6-second reminders catch the kidnappers packing up the tool table and the empty chair.
The Process
We shot it in one day in December 2025, in an empty warehouse in Denver. We brought in the desk, the table and every prop, and lit the space ourselves. Otherwise, we left it bare. That was the point. Kidnappers would take someone somewhere nobody would think to look.
We kept it out of the office on purpose. Almost every B2B ad on LinkedIn takes place in an office, so a dark warehouse looks different in the feed. It raises the stakes for Greg, too.
A hostage scene sounds like a scare tactic. Played for laughs, it's the opposite. The danger is played straight and the foolishness is played dry. Think of the two burglars from Home Alone, with a Bond villain in charge. Every face is well lit, even in a dark warehouse, so it always reads as comedy. And the tool table mixes real threats, like pliers and jumper cables on a car battery, with fluffy pink handcuffs and a rubber chicken.
Eon's team changed one detail that matters: Greg's job title. Our script said IT Director. Eon told us their buyers run cloud operations and platform teams now, so his lanyard says Cloud Ops Director.
Ski Mask is short. Ted is 6 foot 7. We cast them side by side so the brains and the muscle read in one frame. Ski Mask's accent wasn't in the script. The actor brought a big, over-the-top Bond villain accent to his audition tape, and we all loved it. It made the whole performance funnier.
Everything you see was done on set. Nothing was added in post.
We delivered a 30-second main spot, two 15s and a set of 6-second reminders, in widescreen, square and vertical, with and without subtitles. They send viewers to UnlockYourBackups.com. Eon ran its own media, starting in early 2026.
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