“Six Is A Serious Number”
Six is a serious number
Six is the fingers on your hand plus your thumber
There’s a lot of numbers it’s true
Like 8, 39 and 22
But six (seis) is a serious number
If you’ve ever been number curious
This number six stuff is serious
On the Run at Mobil created the hard-to-forget hip-hop jingle Six Is A Serious Number three years ago for their new summer promotion which featured twenty-ounce fountain drinks for twenty-five cents the day after the Cardinals scored six runs.
Over the next two years they took a page out of Madonna’s book (no, not that book) and reinvented themselves by creating two new versions of the song.
In 2010, Six Is A Serious Number threw on some stirrups and done went country. And in 2011, Six Is A Serious Number got back to its hip-hop roots.
But here’s the catch. The commercials only ran during Cardinals baseball games. So Six Is A Serious Number’s audience was limited entirely to those who watched Cardinals games on TV.
So, knowing that our audience had the same collective awareness about Six Is A Serious Number while non-Cardinals watchers didn’t, we decided to do something that’s never been done in advertising before: turn the ads into one big inside joke.
So we revisited the irrepressible Six Is A Serious Number commercials, this time creating a self-referential meta-campaign utilizing the talents of one of the guys who had been in all of the spots and a local comedian.
It would be a sort of Behind the Music-meets-Spinal Tap series allowing the audience a peek behind the studio glass to get a glimpse of what the Six Is A Serious Number duo discussed before making their next big commercial hit.
But what to call this new campaign. It took several brainstorms and the racking of our collective minds before ultimately landing on the ingenious name:
Six Is A Serious-er Number.
It made sense. This year’s On the Run promotion upped the ante by offering ANY size drink for 50¢ when the Cardinals score six. We needed to take the campaign to a place it hadn’t been. So we added an “er.”
After the dust had settled and the keytar had been put back in its keytar-shaped case, we believed that we had created the first inside joke television advertisements of all time for On the Run at Mobil.
Please have a look and let us know if you agree. Or if you can think of any other inside joke campaigns (spots that incorporate a national common knowledge don’t count!).
You can check out the rest of the work here.
