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This hit me as ‘Well Played’…
I remember watching ‘Saturday Night Live’ as a teenager when most of the episodes were new. One of my favorite bits was ‘The Mr. Bill Show”. Cracked me up every time. Since my name is Bill, I’ve walked into a room or situation thousands of times, only to be greeted with ‘Oh, No, Mr. Bill!!!!’.
I love that. I absolutely love that.
It’s a lot better that the things that you normally hear when your name is Bill (or even worse, when I was younger, it was always ‘Billy”). ‘Which way you going, Billy’, ‘Billy, Don’t be a Hero’, and no, I can’t bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy. Getting asked where the other the Billy Goats were at. There were many, many songs and nursery rhymes where being Bill or Billy wasn’t very cool.
Then along came Mr. Bill. Suddenly, and for maybe the first time in my life, it was cool to be a Bill. Or, make that, Mr. Bill. Sweetness.
Read today in the New Your Times Online that my friend Mr. Bill is making a comeback. Here’s the link, and here’s the article:
Mr. Bill Returns (in One Piece) to Pitch a Debit Card
MasterCard executives have found a new poster boy for the angst-ridden economy: Mr. Bill.
The small clay figure that appeared in “Saturday Night Live” short films three decades ago — being dismembered, pulverized and humiliated to his falsetto cries of “Oh, nooooo!” — will be the latest star of MasterCard’s “Priceless” campaign.
He is being revived as a debit-card holder who gets roughed up but keeps on going. The 30-second spot, to start airing next Monday, casts Mr. Bill as an urban professional on his daily routine:
Mr. Hands pours hot coffee on him (“coffee: $2”), a personal trainer launches him off a treadmill (“gym: $59/mo.”), and an opened briefcase flips him onto the windshield of a city bus (“briefcase: $120”).
Mr. Bill, rolling with endless punches, just enjoys the ride home: “Making it through the day: priceless.” A voice-over adds, “For whatever comes your way, there’s debit MasterCard.”
The spot is meant to tap into the current “unsureness about what’s going to happen next,” said Joyce King Thomas, executive vice president and chief creative officer at McCann-Erickson, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, which created the “Priceless” campaign for MasterCard in 1997.
“This is the sunny Mr. Bill,” she added. “We wanted to make him a character who can handle things beyond his control and stay optimistic.”
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