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More than 50 million Americans have chronic sleep disorders, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, while as many as 84 million adults routinely miss out on the recommended amount of shut-eye.
But the folks who star in the new Mattress Firm campaign are not among that crowd. In fact, they sleep like the dead, even though they’re objectively terrible people.
For instance, a grandma character gleefully catfishes her potential dates with a fictional online profile, a traveler doffs his socks on an airplane and a guest commits the ultimate party foul—a grossly unsanitary double dip—without a shred of remorse.
The brand’s message: If we can help these garbage humans catch some z’s, think of what we can do for the rest of you.
Three ads, launching today, center on the rhetorical question, “How do you sleep at night?” It’s an accusation—because of the aforementioned rude, crude and obnoxious behavior—that gets turned into a clever product pitch, with Lionel Richie’s pop classic “All Night Long” as the perfectly timed needle drop.
The work comes from Fallon based on a brief that challenged the agency to jazz up a snore-inducing category where “buying a mattress isn’t often something people dream of,” according to chief creative officer Leslie Shaffer.
Starting with an age-old insult and developing a concept around it felt like a risk worth taking, Shaffer said.
“It’s one of those ideas a creative team brings early, and you all kind of have a chuckle and say, ‘Well, we can’t really do that,’ and move on, but we didn’t let it go this time,” Shaffer told ADWEEK. “I’m always a fan of taking the familiar and twisting it, which gives you a shortcut and a surprise all at once.”
‘A different flavor’
Fallon, which took over lead creative and strategy duties about a year ago after the brand’s micro-stint with R/GA, “sweated the tone of these spots from the beginning through to the very last shot,” Shaffer said.
