Sonic bought an official tie-in with MTV's The Hills and turned its two-guys-in-a-car ads into a reality show of their own.
Role
Digital designer
Organization
Barkley
Sonic Drive-In ran a campaign for years built on two guys in a car. They sit in a Sonic stall, they order, they argue about nothing, and the whole bit was improvised.
In 2008 Sonic bought an official sponsorship of season four of MTV’s The Hills, and somebody had the idea to make a reality show for the two guys. The TV spots became serialized: Pete and TJ nearly come to blows over a girl, each thirty-second episode ends on a cliffhanger during a Hills commercial break, and the story continues on a website called The Stalls.
I designed the website for The Stalls, and the brief for it was simple: make the site look like MTV made it.
MTV's actual The Hills site, August 2008.
So I studied the actual Hills site. I rebuilt that skeleton exactly and swapped in the Sonic version of each part. The third column, where MTV ran its gossip blog, became What’s In/Out: “IN: Banana Pudding Shake. OUT: Grandma’s banana pudding mold (with raisins).”
The Stalls, built to match.
Adweek wrote it up at the end of September 2008, and Ad Age’s Creativity put the campaign in its weekly Top 5.
