Suse
Break Free From The Black Box
IT strategy depends on Chuck, locked inside a box.
Watch the full campaign · 1:18
The Strategy
SUSE makes open infrastructure software for big companies, the systems their apps and data run on. It sells to CIOs and the IT teams under them. Many of those teams are locked into one vendor's platform. It still works. But they can't move their workloads, add new tools or change much of anything without the vendor's okay. SUSE's promise is the opposite: open software, so the team stays in control.
Our first idea was a man locked inside a black box in the middle of the office. SUSE's team liked that nobody needs it explained. They steered us away from anything that looked like a jail or a cage, since the ads run around the world. A box reads as a technical trap, not a cell. They also told us the pain isn't that the old system breaks, because it doesn't. The pain is that nobody can change anything. So we cut our pillar about outages and wrote one about being blocked instead.
The spot opens at the office water cooler. Susan and John need an answer about moving to the cloud, so they ask Chuck. Chuck lives in a black box between the water cooler and the supply table, and he answers with a light: one blink for yes, two for no.
The two 15-second spots go inside the box. In one, every change is blocked, inside the box and out. In the other, Chuck counts down the days left with the vendor, on walls covered in crossed-out numbers. Every spot lands on the same line: break free from the black box.
The Process
SUSE's team helped shape the look. Our first lookbook leaned into a dated, slightly strange office. SUSE wanted a modern office its buyers would recognize. So we took a small studio in Denver, built cubicle walls and dressed it to look like a real office. The suits became polos and quarter-zips, and Chuck got a worn gray polo.
We first pitched a tall, slim box with Chuck standing inside. SUSE's team pushed for more of a cube, with Chuck sitting down. That was a small change for the design. It was a bigger one for getting the box to set, because we built it off-site.
So we built two boxes. We put both together to test them, took them apart for the drive and rebuilt them on set. One was the full box, for every shot from the outside. The other was just two walls and a top. That let us shoot Chuck without cramming a camera into a closed box, and it gave us room to light the inside the way we wanted.
The countdown wall is chalkboard paint. One of our crew wrote every number on it by hand. The lights, the lit sign and the switch sit flush in the walls. We cut them in with a circular saw and a router to save every inch inside the box.
We delivered a 30-second main spot, two 15s and two 6-second spots. They send viewers to FreeChuck.com, SUSE's campaign page.
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