ArticleIP_1583.txt

   
   
      
         
            The Angelic Answer

            
               Angel , produced for
Life Insurance Foundation for Education by Carter Eskew of Bozell Eskew
Advertising.

            "Tears such
as angels weep ..."

            --John
Milton, Paradise Lost
            

            The angel weeps as the spot
opens, tears of rain apparently coursing down a soft-featured face. There is a
reflection in the water, a rumble of thunder, a sense of beauty and menace,
which the music amplifies. But there are no words. The images become all the
more powerful as the dappling of the water slows and the rain seems to
stop.

            Seldom in a political spot
would we experience so wordless a span. Survey research urges ad makers to use
every instant for explicit argument--even so, 30 seconds is never enough time
to convey all that needs to be conveyed.

            Relieved of those
constraints in Angel , Carter Eskew, who produced spots for the 1992
Clinton campaign, has sculpted a decidedly nonpolitical spot that evinces
clearly his sense of relief at having to make only one powerful point. The
screen isn't cluttered with chyrons, comparisons, and third-party
verifiers.

            The very wordlessness of the
opening draws us in: What is this, we wonder, and what will happen next? The
visual transition--water spraying in a fountain, through which we now watch a
child playing with a toy sailboat--brings us to the first words: "You've
thought about it." Indeed we have--at least for the last few seconds--and now,
the image seems almost the dreamlike product of our own minds. We see a
mother--the woman as provider (three decades ago, it would have been a man).
The narrator's worried tone fits this setting of a stone angel intimating
mortality: "What would happen if you weren't here?"

            At this point, the picture
shifts to the angel (tombstone or promise of heaven?), and the spot brings us
back to earth with an explicit, decidedly unethereal question about "money" and
where it would come from. Each successive question seems to echo the ones
forming in our minds. The one-time political ad maker is playing to a different
kind of responsive chord, appealing to a different family value.

            The mother touches the
child's hand, and then, as the words invite us to wonder what would happen if
she were gone, she apparently is. Through the splashing water, across the
angel's wing, we think we see the child alone, until the mother steps clearly
back into the picture. The narration gives the answer. Something needs to be
there--to step in--if the provider is ever finally gone: "life insurance."
"Life insurance" doesn't sound crass because the context itself implies not
self-interest, but a sense of caring literally beyond self-existence. The child
takes the boat out of the water, and mother and child head homeward. The sky is
cloudy; is the storm returning? They walk hand in hand down the path as the
narrator tells us, in effect, that if another storm comes--the storm of
death--life insurance should be there, "not for the people who die, [but] for
the people who live."

            The
subject is inherently unsettling. Death and life insurance are not the stuff
that daydreams are made of. But this spot is visually arresting, involving, and
dramatic. We want to see it again. By the end, we are left with the sense that
whatever angels we may go to when we depart, life insurance is the guardian
angel we should leave behind. The strength of the spot is that the fabric of
its images converts the actuarial into the nearly spiritual, and raises
numbers--money--to the level of moral values.

            --Robert
Shrum