One of my favorite write ups was done over at iMedia by Joe Jaffe called Harrisdirect Adds a Human Touch. The article highlighted our strategy for using people in their daily lives and how investing helped them achieve their goals. We knew we had a great strategy going and continued to prime the pump with new direct investors, so I fought to bring her back. The one caveat that I had with the second shoot was, I had to bring Megan W. along to make sure we had no eye-popping t-shirt issues again. So, we worked with Modem to come up with two ideas, Elsie golfing and Elsie performing yoga in the same loft again. On the way over, our photographer warned me not to mention anything about her online following or results we were seeing; he didn't want her to be offended and therefore ruin the photo shoot.
Right after the yoga part, Jamil came up to me and pulled pages and pages of printouts
from her fan following online. And, she was excited to meet with the marketing team. I was relieved to stop my acting and be myself again. After we chatted for a while and some photos were taken, we were off to Brooklyn for the golf shoot. BTW - my hug was more of a thanks for delivering on my account signup objectives and hopes for a great follow-up campaign. Fast forward to this call on the way over to Brooklyn when I realized that Jamil was not in the van with me and the photographer.
Eric: ModemAE, where is Jamil?
ModemAE: Ummm, she's with us.
Eric: Well, don't you think it is a problem that you have the model and I have the photographer? Shouldn't she be with the photographer?
Photographer: Wow, Eric and ModemAE are having an alpha male fight!
Eric: Yeah, I'm the client and she should be with me!
ModemAE: (realizing that I'm half-joking) No, she's with me....
Well, we arrived at the golf course without any real fights where we met up with another
Modem AE who had the golf clubs. When Jamil showed up, she of course walked over to him. He originally thought he was going to teach her, but sensing a once in a life-time opportunity for a happily married man,
I pulled rank on him and said "I'm showing her how to golf, you go over the shots we need with the photographer." Yes, rank has its privileges plus I extracted some amount of revenge over stealing Jamil on the ride over.
The photoshoot went very, very well and we had even more photos than we could have imagined. The photos spanned two online agencies and the campaign lived on. We used her in a number of creative executions and Elsie Lee remained the focus of our creative strategy up until the middle of 2005. It wasn't that the results still weren't very good, after all the ads ran for 3 years and were still consistently our most popular ads, but as they say, all good things must come to an end.
PardonMyFrench,
Eric
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