BBDO New York has a big hit with its Snickers print ad—placed on the back cover of Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue—that shows a swimsuit model comically and disastrously Photoshopped by an apparently hungry retoucher.
AdFreak caught up with agency senior art director Florian Marquardt, who says he's thrilled that people are loving the "Photo retouchers get confused when they're hungry ad," as well as a second execution (which ran on the inside back cover) with another model getting buffeted by a hungry wind-machine operator.
"First of all, we are very happy to see how many people, not just from the industry, responded really well to both ads and shared them on their social media and blogs," Marquardt says.
The challenge of the assignment, he says, was to extend the now 6-year-old "You're not you when you're hungry" story to the swimsuit issue "in a new and surprising way."
"On the Retoucher ad, we were aiming to compile at least two handfuls of non-conventional retouch errors in a single photo without making the changes appear immediately silly at first glance. I admit, on a second look they kind of do. On purpose, of course," he says. "My personal favorites are the 'ghost hand' and the 'partly missing leg' mistakes."
Marquardt credits photographer Vincent Dixon and retoucher Philippe Lepaulard with realizing the concept perfectly, and Snickers for greenlighting it.
"Snickers was a really great partner in this," he says, "allowing us to raise the bar and create something that people would engage and interact with. It is amazing to see that print advertising still isn't dead."
See both full ads below. Click to enlarge.
