Farewell, Work Holiday Parties

About the Work Covid changed everything. The advertising that mattered in 2020 had to exist within that world. In a prescient reaction to the knowledge that holiday traditions would be cancelled, we injected Miller Lite's brand purpose into 2020 by saying something different and strange—there WAS something good about 2020. The end of work holiday parties. We worked with artist, Alex Prager to memorialize the work holiday party in a TV commercial. To create a party scene during Covid, actors were scanned with 3D photogrammetry, and then sculpted meticulously to look eerily lifelike. Hair, skin and makeup included details like freckles, skin moles, scars, teeth tartar, nose hair, shaving nicks, toes rings, lip-stick stains, running mascara and much more. It all came together to make viewers question whether the characters at this party were real and brought the most unnerving parts of work holiday parties to life. The artwork attracted the curators of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and ended up as a public art installation on view from Nov. 21-Jan. 3 2021. The exhibit became LACMA's most attended public art installation in recent years, earning over 400+ million impressions in earned media, including a full-page write up in the LA Times, and coverage from the 2020 Pulitzer Prize winning art critic, Christopher Knight. A Covid idea, an ad, a piece of art—Advertising will always sit at the intersection of art and commerce, but "Farewell, Work Holiday Parites" proved that if we make our commerce more artful, consumers will work harder to seek out our brands instead of our brands having to work harder to seek out consumers.