Collateral Stain Stories

Tide

Saatchi & Saatchi New York

Cannes, One Show, Clios, Effies

Every Marvel film is full of heroes. They're also full of innocent bystanders covered in dirt, slime, and debris — people just trying to get to work while the Avengers level their city block.

For the launch of Tide's most powerful detergent, we partnered with Marvel to shift the camera off the heroes and onto the people stuck dealing with the wreckage they leave behind. We watched seventeen years of the MCU — every film, every episode — cataloged every collateral stain in Marvel history, then tracked down the actual background actors from those scenes. From London to Atlanta, Vancouver to the mountains of Spain, we flew them to LA and made them the faces of the campaign.

The background actors starred in OLV, social, and digital outdoor. We turned them into a line of Collateral Stain action figures. We sent them — stained, of course — to the red carpet premiere in Los Angeles, the first time a brand had ever shown up on a Marvel red carpet. And to bring the full sensory chaos of the Marvel Universe to life, we built a custom cinema in a Brooklyn warehouse surrounded by 18 pneumatic stain cannons synced to the messiest moments in the film — the first ever 5D screening experience.

Within 24 hours of launch, Tide sold out at Walmart. Then Amazon. The campaign generated 1.6 billion earned media impressions and 417 million engagements — the most talked-about social campaign in Tide's history.

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I have spent twenty years making work that ends up on The Today Show, The New York Times, Variety and, occasionally, on South Park. The sales results aren't bad either...

I have spent twenty years making work that ends up on The Today Show, The New York Times,
Variety and, occasionally, on South Park. The sales results aren't bad either...