'Oyster-Cam' Drives This Jazzy Credit Card Campaign

Warning: CIBC’s new credit-card campaign is NSFM—Not Safe for Molluscs.

A :60 from Courage opens with a view of the world from inside an oyster—as it’s pried open by human hands. Later, we get a similar jewelry-box shot. It contains a pear bauble, of course.

In between, it’s all sun-soaked quick cuts, sparkling neon, upscale delights and oysters aplenty.

“The brief was to show that the CIBC Aventura Card gives you the flexibility to travel the way you want,” says Dhaval Bhatt, partner and CD at Courage, which developed the work with director Mark Zibert.

On the surface “that can seem like a pretty open brief,” Bhatt says. “So, we had to find a sticky way to land that point. ‘The World Is Your Oyster’ became a simple yet charming device to drive home that message, both creatively and strategically.”

Courage surely makes good use of such plastic for its glamorous global sojourns. Nice work if you can get it!

For CIBC, the team shot footage in Greece and Dubai. Vermeer’s “Girl With the Pearl Earring” cameos (she’s always an ad fave).

Those “shell-shots” are eye-popping. They were filmed with a special “oystering-rig that Mark’s team custom created to get the oysters POV,” Bhatt says.

“We weren’t sure how it was all going to work or how it would look, but went with it. One of those is the opening shot of the ad. Guess sometimes you just gotta trust the process.”

On OOH and in print, kaiju-sized oysters seemingly take their revenge: