Pothole Dummy was a creative goldmine and the ultimate content making machine. In just 5 days, our creative team cranked out over 50 videos, all in real-time. With one camera crew following the Dummy and three other cameras mounted to the vehicle, all the footage was sent to the cloud so our team could concept, edit and upload on the fly. We edited everything from a tiny hotel room in Chicago. It was wild and spontaneous, but that's what made it so fun.
Twitter...Facebook...Insta...Pothole Dummy was on top of his social game. This meant we were pushing out hundreds of tweets and posts throughout the 5-day event. We kept things light, dumb and fun.
Daniel Strauss, our Dummy, was an improv actor from Second City in Chicago. He was an incredibly talented and funny dude, but also a great sport to put himself through this 5-day experiment. The role was physically and mentally taxing, but Daniel was a champ and played the role to absolute perfection.
In order to keep our audience engaged, Pothole Dummy invited various Chicago luminaries along for a ride. Michelle Williams from Destiny's child, a pair of Chicago Bears football players and various Chicago TV and radio personalities all rode shotgun. The conversations were as wild and crazy as the pothole pounding.
Lastly, and maybe most impressively, was the technology we created for this project. Developed in-house, the car was outfitted with custom pothole detection technology. Not only could it detect a pothole, but it plotted each one on a map. Additionally, we were able to detect the size and severity of each pothole using a custom gyroscope-based algorithm. All this data was plotted and published live on PotholeDummy.com.
Pothole Dummy was easily the most fun I've ever had in my professional career. It was an ambitious idea, and one that we poured our heart and soul into in order to execute. Watch the "Magnum Opus" video below.
Agency: Mono Role: Creative Director, Art Director Designer: Tony Buckland Copyriter: Chris Yocum
