What Could Have Been: 20 Years of Projects We Wish We'd Made
Two decades of pitches mean literally thousands of pitched concepts that never happened. As marketers you generally forget the failed pitch ideas because ultimately they were forgettable and that’s why they didn’t get approved.
However, many of those ideas that don’t move forward are really great, but get killed for any number of reasons, budget being #1. There are plenty of other reasons though. Too risqué, legal disapproval, slightly off the brief, talent isn’t available, or even, “our boss doesn’t get it.” When this happens it hurts a little extra. And some of those ideas stay with you forever as “What if’s.”
Being our 20th year in business, we felt like it was a great time to remember some of the very best ideas that could have been, but never were.
Get Your Hard On
Hard Rock Cafe — 2016
Yes, we pitched that. With a straight face. Well, we may have smiled a bit, but that’s because it was just too good of a title.
The brief was to create a viral concept. A stunt that stood out and would gain attention across the digital universe. We thought we had one big enough to raise a tent everyone could get behind. It almost worked.
In early 2016, 21 to 27-year-olds thought of Hard Rock Cafe the way they thought of an aging rocker — respect the legacy, skip the show. One person in our research put it perfectly: "Hard Rock Cafe feels like an old rocker like Bono." Our fix: introduce "Get Your Hard On" as a fictional tagline for the brand, then turn it into an over-the-top rap video created by a real rapper.
Our plan was to enlist Lil Dicky (aka Dave Burd, future star of F/X’s DAVE), then an up-and-comer with 625K YouTube subscribers, fresh off breakout music video "$ave Dat Money," described by YouTube commenters as "a cross between Macklemore and Lonely Island." His fans were literally our target audience. He'd write the video in his own voice, shoot part of it inside a Hard Rock Cafe, and launch it on his channels, spiraling into #GetYourHardOn social content, live appearances, and behind-the-scenes drops.
We thought it would be unbelievably funny. We still do.
WhatsLeft
Hard Rock Cafe — 2016
From the same brief: the world's worst, fictional food delivery app.
2016 was the peak food delivery-app gold rush — Seamless, Eat24, Uber Eats, DoorDash, GrubHub. It was time for Hard Rock to enter the game. Our differentiator? One word: leftovers.
WhatsLeft would let users browse reasonably priced, previously enjoyed meals — bite marks included — from their local Hard Rock Cafe, delivered straight to their door and ready to be popped in the microwave for some delicious, second-hand eats. We designed the logo. We mocked up the app. We wrote the packaging.
The campaign: a dead-serious, Kickstarter-style launch video featuring Hard Rock's "Chief Reimagination Officer" explaining their aha moment, cut with real man-on-the-street reactions of people slowly realizing what they're looking at. A mini-site with terrible testimonials presented as glowing. Pricing TBD based on portion size and timestamp, so you know they're from tonight. No second-day, second-hand food here.
And because food waste isn't actually funny, the punchline had a heart: the WhatsLeft Burger, where guests order "half" a burger and donate what's left to Why Hunger. A media plan, including a full takeover with comedy publisher Above Average, was ready to support it with millions of impressions.
We were told this one was one vote away from going forward. It could have been epic, but instead what was actually leftover were our broken creative hearts.
AMERICAN REUNION: GIF Creator
Universal Pictures Theatrical
Before giphy.com even became a thing in 2013 we were pitching gif ideas that were made for FB, Twitter, and Tumblr. Our favorite of those ideas that never got made was a suite of American Reunion gifs users could customize and string together into short stories. The beauty of it was that we were going to shoot videos of the AMERICAN PIE franchise actors doing the funniest, sexually explicit motions you could imagine. Remember, this was a hard R film. Don’t judge.
We planned out specific moves that were fit for the Stiffmeister and all his pals. The Bangkok. Big Balls. The Booty Slap (front and back). There were even Shake Weights involved, yes, shake weights. Epic barely begins to describe how glorious these gifs would have been. Seann William Scott, Jason Biggs, and the rest of the team would have smashed it.
The idea was approved! All of our prep work was ready. We did a photo shoot with our team so the actors knew exactly what we meant by gif names such as, Crotch Point and Motorboat. We were ready to go and pumped to bring these gifs to life.
And then, as is often the case, the talent couldn’t make it to the shoot. The reason why has been lost in the ether, much like R-rated theatrically released comedies. But schedules are tricky and back then, the stars (no pun intended) had to align perfectly to be able to pull off a digital only video shoot with cast from a film like AMERICAN REUNION. In this case, it was not to be, which means, it never was. We were stiffed by the Stiffmeister. Classic Stifler. ;)
Skyscraper Virtual Leap
Universal Pictures Theatrical — 2018
To promote Skyscraper, we proposed putting fans inside the film's most white-knuckle moment: Dwayne Johnson's leap from a crane into a burning skyscraper.
The concept: a room-scale VR walk experience built in a recreated Hong Kong skyline, with fictional skyscraper, The Pearl, as its centerpiece. Users ride an open elevator to the top of a crane, coached by Dwayne Johnson's voice the whole way, then step out onto a physical beam, 80 stories up. They have 30 seconds to walk the plank, navigating the height, the sights, and the screams for help from the building ahead. Whether they make it to the end or freeze halfway, everyone gets the payoff: an automatic jump sequence that sends them hurtling through mid-air and into the skyscraper.
Every scream, stumble, and jump would have been captured for a "best of" reactions edit, plus live social coverage, turning individual experiences into highly shareable content.
The pitch built on TVGla's Impractical Jokers Hi-Wire Hijinks VR experience at Comic-Con 2017, which put over 1,400 people through a VR world so convincing that some couldn't take a single step.
While we actually started this campaign, sadly, it was the client who got up to the edge but couldn’t take the leap.
The Gigantic Niantic AR Race
Niantic — 2023
5 cities. 10 challenges. One $50,000 grand prize. This was GNAR, the Gigantic Niantic AR Race, and yes, the winners would have been crowned the first official GNAR champions.
The pitch: The Amazing Race, rebuilt on Niantic's tech stack. Three teams of content creators race coast to coast through New York, Miami, Las Vegas, LA, and San Francisco, completing the wildest, weirdest, most epic AR challenges in each city. Every challenge was built on actual Niantic technology, from Lightship VPS to Scaniverse to Campfire.
And the challenges were good. Navigating an AR maze through a portal in New York. A Final Jeopardy-style wager to stack AR poker chips by the Bellagio fountain. An AR Red Carpet in LA challenged teams to design a dress out of unconventional materials, scan it with Scaniverse, and sell it to the judges. The grand finale: an Alcatraz AR prison break escape room in San Francisco. There was even a chaos mechanic known as the Captain Doty Crate, letting mini-challenge winners drop a rival team 25 points or roadblock them mid-challenge. Reality TV producers, take notes.
The whole thing would roll out as a 6 to 8 week episodic series on Niantic's channels, with fans voting, betting on teams, and playing the same AR activations from home for giveaway entries. A real show, at a real scale, showcasing AR the way it should be shown: out in the world, not in a keynote.
Unfortunately, the budget required to pull it off was not virtual or augmented and the client was forced to live in reality.
The Sex Toy Claw Machine
HBO Max: The Sex Lives of College Girls - 2021
Yes, it’s our third sexually suggestive, well, this one wasn’t even really suggestive, it was downright filthy. BUT, it was on brief. And it would have been great. Honestly, the title says it all. We’re not going to bother to explain it. Just know that when we finally realized the video it would have gone viral, and not in an STD kind of way.
Chuck Around and Find Out
Sony Pictures Television: Walker, Texas Ranger — 30th Anniversary, 2023
We’ll end this with a nod to the legend of Chuck Norris who sadly passed earlier this year. Because long before there was The Walking Dead, there was Walker, Texas Ranger. And if you had a run-in with Walker, you probably wished you were dead.
For the show's 30th anniversary in 2023, we pitched a Texas-sized celebration: stylized video compilations of the greatest, fan-favorite, most shareable moments from the series: 30 Times Walker Walked the Walk, 30 Kicks for 30 Years, 30 Classic Walker One-Liners.
But the real magic was the add-on: recruiting Chuck Norris himself to introduce the compilations and deliver a warning to bad guys everywhere — "Chuck around and find out."
Sadly this idea, along with our dreams, was chucked to the side, so we never found out how good it could have been.
While we never got to bring these ideas to life, we sincerely hope that somewhere in the multiverse, the stars actually did align and these concepts were created and enjoyed by many. Every agency has these stories. Clients too. Many a client has fought the good fight to see a great idea come to life only to lose the battle of the budgets or run into a lawyer with concerns.
It’s not always fair, but it’s the life we chose to lead and we will never stop fighting for the ideas we love. Don’t you stop either. Go hard, until there’s nothing leftover. Give it your best shot and reminisce about it at the reunions. Because if you never take the leap, or join the race, you’re just leaving your life to the whim of the claw machine, and you may never actually find out.