WHY THE DANCERS IN THAT FREAKY LOCTITE SUPER BOWL AD ARE WEARING FANNY PACKS How do you make an adhesive brand a household name? Throw a dance party during the Super Bowl full of people wearing fanny packs! That’s what Fallon did for Loctite with a spot called "Positive Feelings." While this is the first time the 52-year-old brand has run an ad during the Super Bowl, we have seen this weirdly appealing spectacle of movement before from Loctite—the "Win At Glue"-themed campaign launched last year with spots featuring people getting their groove on while wearing bright red fanny packs emblazoned with the Loctite logo. The debut Loctite spot, "Dance," racked up more than 1.3 million views when it was posted on YouTube last May.
Looking back on the creation of the campaign, Fallon chief creative officer Jeff Kling credits Julianna Simon, the agency’s strategic planning director, with sharing a valuable insight that sparked the creative execution. "She made it so simple that even morons like we creatives could understand it, and her insight was that the whole [glue] category is a category of fail. In other words, if you have something that breaks, that feels like a fail, and then when you contemplate your ability to repair this beloved or useful thing, you don’t feel great because you don’t feel like you have the competence to repair the thing. So you feel powerless, and we knew that if we could shift that and make people feel good, we’d get somewhere," Kling explains. That led to the fanny pack. While the fanny pack is a much-maligned fashion accessory, it serves a purpose
beyond humorous branding in this campaign. When a fanny pack has Loctite glue in it, it becomes a utility belt that enables the wearer to fix just about anything. As we see in "Positive Feelings," one man reaches into his fanny pack to grab a tube of Loctite, which he uses to fix his broken glasses. Seconds later, a woman uses Loctite to re-affix the horn on her beloved unicorn brooch.
That winking unicorn is pretty freaky, by the way. "The winking eye is the eye of the woman who is wearing that brooch. Students of the game paying very close attention will notice this," Kling points out. "We roughed it in during the edit, and then we finessed it in post at The Mill." Credit for directing "Positive Feelings" goes to Tim & Eric. Tim Heideker and Eric Wareheim shot the commercial in Los Angeles after rounding up a cast chosen to represent "the cul-de-sac in the neighborhood," according to Kling.
Not surprisingly, none of these people were professional dancers, though they did get some instruction from a choreographer during the shoot. "The funny thing about getting people to dance with fanny packs on is you can take almost any group of eight to 12 people, and they look awesome doing it no matter how horribly they dance," Kling says.