Hasta La Creative!

Chicago-based agency O’Keefe Reinhard & Paul has a new campaign for Big Lots, promoting its pet food and merchandise offerings with a focus group for pets.

Instead of writing a scripted ad, the agency got a group of pets together for “Pet Focus Group,” a digital video series. The videos feature moderators treating the group of pets like a focus group, with actors asking questions about Big Lots products and interacting with dogs, cats, and other pets. O’Keefe Reinhard & Paul chose to cast improvisational actors to interact with the pets, under the assumption that the animals would create funny situations on their own.

“We realized that instead of scripting this, it would be so much more fun to let pets be pets, and get really good improvisers to react in real time to whatever those animals are doing,” explains Sue Gillan, creative director at OKRP. And because you have these human facilitators in the room with the pets, they get to do the heavy lifting around uncovering the quality of the products without the event feeling commercialized. The result feels like a genuine discovery of the products.”

Stick around for “Cats Only” and “Pets with Style.” (more…)

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Less than three weeks after we first heard that Big Lots was parting ways with Barkley, which handled creative duties for the 1,400-strong retail chain for barely a year, the Columbus, OH-based brand has found a new agency partner in Chicago shop, O’Keefe, Reinhard & Paul. No word on who else participated in the review, but Big Lots chief customer officer Andrew Stein, who most recently led the development of “Ship My Pants” among other things while serving as CMO at Kmart, says, “Big Lots is engaging with our customer in new ways, and we were looking for an agency that understood our challenges and needs in a fast-changing marketplace,” noted Stein.  “We presented OKRP with a project, and they came back to us in a very short time with terrific ideas that aligned with our vision while proving their executional excellence and speed to market. They are a great partner for Big Lots.”

OKRP, if you recall, was launched by Draftfcb alums Tom O’Keefe and Nick Paul along with former Amazon exec Matt Reinhard nearly a year ago. Expect first work, which will initially be digital, from the agency for Big Lots to break in early February.

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Last week, a bevy of banana-filled images had us wondering whether this was an odd preview of the new agency formed by Tom O’Keefe and Nick Paul, who previously served as North American CD and chief global growth officer, respectively, at Draftfcb.

Well, thankfully their new, Chicago-based shop is not called “Whiskey Bananas,” but in fact the more pro-sounding O’Keefe Reinhard & Paul (though the imagery of both spirit and fruit adorns the walls as you can see here). The Reinhard in the mix is Amazon alum Matt Reinhard, who takes on the role of founder/CCO at the new shop while O’Keefe serves as founder/CEO and Paul, founder/president. Today marks day one at OKRP, which you can find out more about here.

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