by Elaine Underwood
The "Be There" effort is by StubHub's in-house and Undynable, Portland.
Are people taking the old Christmas song, "No Place Like Home for the Holidays" too seriously?
StubHub’s new campaign of 20 short-form videos, including three holiday-themed executions, is encouraging people to get out and go to more live events.
The "Be There" campaign by StubHub in-house and Undynable, Portland, features quick-and-quirky vignettes that promote the joys and dispel the perceived pains of going to live events. The 6-to-16 second spots are pre-rolling online before videos now through the first quarter of 2020.
"StubHub has an impressive number of ‘reasons to believe,' so we asked ourselves, how can we tell all of those stories in the most compelling, entertaining and effective way possible?," said Justin Hooper, chief creative officer of Undnyable, in a statement. "We landed on using the short format of pre-roll to quickly hammer home each idea, which had the benefit of continued optimization through time as we learned which assets performed best among fans."
Hooper and StubHub dispatched production teams from 1stAveMachine and D.A.D.D.Y. to shoot the ads in multiple locations over four days, with a creative brief that mandated simple framing and few cutaways.
The holiday spots see live events as the ticket to holiday gifts and family escapes. In "Vase," mom hurls her kids’ classroom-project gift to the floor when she sees dad gets a last-minute, StubHub gift-card. Awkward holiday moments play out in "Tangsgiving," where everyone butts in on a private dinner-table conversation about Wu-Tang tickets, and "Holiday Sing-a-Long," where a guest ditches family caroling for some StubHub event tickets.