Need a Website? Use WordPress, but Watch Out for Shrinkrays

Nobody’s really sure about the value of websites anymore. Everyone—clients included—spends all their time on social networks, scoping other people’s vacations and babies and food. 

It’s a credit to WordPress’s pluck that it’s taking the opposite tack. In “Do Anything,” its first national brand campaign since launching over a decade ago, the CMS worked with New York agency Interesting Development to tell us that achieving a dream starts with a website.

It opens with a spot. “What if you could do anything?” it asks. (The answer: “Build a website that can.” But interesting stuff happens in between.) 

The work is an inspirational voyage through others’ aspirations, in a fantasy-scape where they’re achieving the thing even as they’re talking about it. It opens with a fledgling female politician (of course!) and ends with a twist: All the dreamers you’ve just seen are captives of another dream entirely—that of a mad professor, whose one desire is to “make everybody very small.”

The story continues in two ads in The New Yorker that went out on Jan. 7. One, written by the scientist, is a mix between a statement of purpose (“I would shrink people because I want to care for them, like a gentle, silent beekeeper cares for bees”) and a marketing plan for his website, Shrinkify.com.

The second is the fruit of all that healthy ideating—a standard ad, featuring a cameo from the now-diminutive bird that starred in the hero spot. 

Like Chekhov’s gun, you can’t mention a website this many times without showing it. The last component of the campaign is Shrinkify.com itself, an amusing sales tool for both WordPress … and shrinking stuff. 

An interesting development, indeed. Speaking of, Interesting Development conceived of the idea and oversaw its cross-platform iterations. It worked on the microsite in collaboration with an in-house WordPress team, lending credence to an in-office theory that we’re going to be seeing an awful lot of agency/in-house collabs this year. 

The TV spot is running on national networks like A&E, AMC, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, CNN, The History Channel, MSNBC and National Geographic. Podcasts, including NPR’s “How I Built This” and The New York Times’s “The Daily,” will run an audio variant. 
  
CREDITS
Interesting Development (Agency)
Paul Caiozzo, Chief Creative Officer
Nathan Frank, Executive Creative Director
Johan Leandersson, Creative Director
Prit Patel, Copywriter
Mai Huynh, Head of Production 
Tamera Geddes, Managing Director 

Landia (Production Company)
Director: Miguel Campaña
Executive Producer: Juan Pablo Taylor and Julian Castro
DP: Emilio Valdez
Art Director: Claudio Castelli

No6 Editorial 
EP:  Corina Dennison
Producer:  Malia Rose
Editor:  Jason Macdonald
Assistant Editor:  Maggie Sloane
Flame:  Ed Skupeen
Flame Assist:  Mark Reyes

Sastre VFX 
Alejandro Taylor, Vfx Supervisor/Lead Compositor 

Owl VFX
Esteban Ponce, 3d Generalist