TV ads & Videos

This is a sampling of video work I’ve done in the last decade. Some of this work was done by agencies that I hired and managed. Other work I was created by my in-house creative team where I functioned as the creative director and co-writer. I’ve included credits so you can assign blame as you see fit.

I spent a decade selling satellite internet service under three brand names: first WildBlue, then Exede Internet, and finally Viasat. More recently, I’ve worked for ALC Schools which is represented here with one video. Here are my favorites.

Exede Internet Saves The Kingdom

This was an online ad that ran for several years. I wrote it as an homage to Fractured Fairy Tales from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The original cartoons were narrated by Edward Everett Horton, who died in 1970, but I managed to find a voice talent who sounded just like him… but then didn’t use him. I found this other guy who was born to narrate fairy tales. This is one of my favorite spots.

CREDITS: Creative Director & Writer Matt Farr | Art Director Nate Baldwin | Animation Ydraw | Sound Rocky Mountain Recorders

The Very Big Internet Company / Mr. Perkins campaign

We wanted to go competitive against, well, almost every other internet company out there. So we invented the Very Big Internet Company as a stand-in for all those companies out there with poor customer service, questionable billing practices, and limited coverage areas.

Brian The Alien

This work was created by the great Sukle Advertising, a legendary creative agency in Denver. The positioning was “Internet so good it must be from outer space.” I was the client: I approved and championed this campaign. The results were immediate: our dealer channel loved Brian, our employees loved him, and our social media channels lit up like crazy.

CREDITS: Agency Sukle Advertising & Design | Sound Rocky Mountain Recorders

True Believers – Alien Sightings

We followed up the big-budget Brian the Alien spots with testimonials from believers, created by me and my in-house creative team at Viasat.

The Space Race

Our first spot with the “internet from space” positioning. We had to license the rights to show astronauts.

CREDITS: Agency Sukle Advertising & Design

Direct Response TV with Zoe

Our media buying agency suggested that we develop some “direct response” TV spots. These are the type of ads that are formulated to get you to take action by picking up the phone and calling immediately. The worst of these include “…and if you call before midnight tonight, we’ll include a second set of Ginsu knives for no extra charge.” We thought we could do better.

We had no idea that we’d create the perfect formula with our first spot. As soon as we put the first ad on the air, the phones started ringing like crazy at our call centers – we actually had to decrease our media buy for a month until they could staff up. We cast Caitlin Geier in L.A. to play “Zoe” and used her in every one of these spots over five years. They all did great.

The original 2-minute spot is below. We cut this in multiple lengths and eventually discovered that the 60-second spot was the most cost effective. The following spot was from a couple of years later. We did at least a dozen of these.

Viasat Internet: branded direct response TV

We hired Havas Edge, a direct response agency under the Havas umbrella, to help us bring together media buying, creative, and digital marketing under a single roof. This lifestyle TV is not exactly fearless, but it does present all the benefits of the service in an upscale way while still keeping the phones busy at our call center. This is another example where I was the client, not the creative director — although there is plenty of my input in these.

CREDITS: Agency Havas Edge | Executive Creative Director Mary Webb | Writer Robert Borges | Art Director Scott Combs

WildBlue: Why Wait? animated TV

This was WildBlue’s first TV spot ever. The animation style carried over from our print campaign, and the voiceover was the same guy from our radio spots. We ran this spot for two years solid and it never stopped performing.

CREDITS: Agency Paulsen Marketing | Writer Katie Levitt

Exede Internet: Caveman – one of the cheapest TV ads ever

When people ask me to describe myself in three words, one of those words is “resourceful.” Here’s an example: this TV spot was created in 3 weeks, for a budget of less than $20K. It actually performed so well that our dealer channel used it for several years.

CREDITS: Creative Director Matt Farr | Writers Alex Miller & Matt Farr | Sound Rocky Mountain Recorders | Voice Talent Steven St. James

ALC Schools: a quick overview of the new VIP app

Since 2018, I’ve worked in Product Management and Product Marketing for ALC Schools, a company that provides transportation for students using sedans, minivans, and SUVs. This was a unique project because I was the product manager who led the project from start to finish: the creation of a brand new mobile app for the parents of students for whom we provide transportation. Then I created the marketing for it as well. I literally took every screenshot you see in this video on my own phone.

CREDITS: Writer Matt Farr | Editing and Sound Brian Malone, Malone Media Group