Back in March 2021, I wrote about an advertising trend that has a lead character meet his/her future self, in service of making a point about a specific product or service being sold. I had listed 5 ads that use the very same creative device, to sell products and services like health supplements, footwear, and three ads for three different financial services brands!
Here’s a new trend in the reverse – a lead character meets his/her own self from the past!
Was the Will Smith-starrer Gemini Man the first piece of popular art where a character met his (or her) digitally de-aged past self? To be sure, Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman had digitally de-aged Robert De Niro, Jo Pesci, and Al Pacino, but that was only for the scenes set in a different period in time, and the older selves did not meet their younger versions. Gemini Man’s main plot involved the present-day Will Smith meeting his digitally de-aged (with groundbreaking visual effects) younger self!
Both those films were released in 2019.
Then, for the 2022 Super Bowl, LeBron James 2022 met LeBron James 2003! Made by the ad agency The Mill (in collaboration with LeBron’s production agency Springhill), the creative device of the ad for Crypto dot com was simple – present-day LeBron offers words of wisdom to his own past, younger self.
Here is that ad, from February 2022!
And the behind-the-scenes!
Next up, we move to India – early March 2022: Salman Khan 2022 meets Salman ‘Prem’ Khan 1994!
Written by Devaiah Bopanna, Puneet Chadha, and Deep Joshi, and directed by Ayappa KM, the Pepsi ad uses the same creative device as the Crypto Super Bowl ad. But present-day Salman doesn’t offer any words of wisdom to his younger self – they just have a cheeky banter that includes younger Salman wondering if he gets married at least in the future. The response by present-day Salman is a fantastic, self-deprecating zinger 🙂
Then, in late March 2022, a very young Sachin Tendulkar has words of advice to everyone, to make a point about life insurance. Understandably, since the ad is for Ageas Federal Life Insurance.
The agency, VMLY&R India, doesn’t make young Sachin speak with present-day Sachin, though he does appear towards the end. The connecting link though is the digital de-aging process rendered on Sachin Tendulkar. Unlike LeBron and Salman, since this narrative involves young Sachin recording his own talk on a video cassette recorder, the agency has added extra on-screen effects to make the footage seem old and dated.
And now, May 2022 – the latest. Mastercard has Lionel Messi 2022 meeting Lionel Messi 2000, courtesy of the agency McCann.
The narrative is largely similar to the LeBron ad – where the LeBron ad had the 2 LeBrons having a direct conversation, young Messi gets his self-doubts addressed as a voice-over by present-day Messi, and they have a brief interaction towards the end.
That’s 4 ads in a span of 4 months that use digital de-aging as the technical device to power the creative device of bringing to viewers a sense of wonder about a popular person and how they may look when they are young. In the process, the digitally young celebrities have sold crypto, cola, insurance, and credit cards!
Even as the creative device has already been exploited 4 times, I feel the narrative potential is still open.
LeBron, Sachin, and Messi are in the inspirational and motivational zone with just different ways to articulate the sentiment to suit specific client services. Even Pepsi barely scratches the surface in terms of creative potential and seems content with making minor wisecracks at the expense of the star (which he sportingly joins). The field is open to a brand that can make more creative use of the core narrative of a famous person meeting her/his younger self from another period in time. It’d also depend a lot on who the celebrity is, of course, given that their personal background would derive much of the narrative thread.
The other interesting aspect is that of the audience’s familiarity with how a celebrity looked in the past. LeBron and Messi’s younger selves are not as familiar/popular as the way Salman’s de-aged version is – Salman’s de-aged version is immensely popular through the movie from which it was taken. Even Sachin is, to some extent, known and seen in his younger avatar given his prodigious talent at that age.
A celebrity who was not one when she/he was younger presents a cleaner slate both in terms of visual creativity—to showing how they looked when young—and narrative potential—to create an interesting younger self with quirks that may probably seem diametrically opposite to how they are now.
For example, imagine a young Rahul Dravid being brash and reckless while his present-day self meets him and advises the youngster to be calmer (this idea, however, is moot given his reckless antics for the famous CRED ad). Of course, this would require a context of why this conversation is even happening, in service of a product or a service that bankrolls the ad.
Or imagine Hrithik Roshan unsure of his style and clothing when his younger self joins him in the search and helps him pick the best from the brand he already endorses (say, Myntra) and is seen sighing that he didn’t have a place like Myntra when he was young.
The potential is immense. The costs and effort are quite big compared to an average ad film given the need for sophisticated digital technology to get the right result. But this is a starkly unique device that, despite 4 ads, could attract attention when handled well.