This work required an intense 1880s era historically accurate set build for the Mayoral office, featuring period architecture and set dressing and extensive period costuming. The France scene involved constructing a historic port and ship, elaborate crowd casting and choreography, period costuming and even acrobatics and mime performance. Additional CGI was crucial in bringing this to life, including a historical scene of 1880s era Paris and the Port of New York.

It’s hard to find a great gift. And in our bespoke research for Etsy, we discovered that 71% of Americans have experienced gifting anxiety in the last year. And when that anxiety is surging, you feel desperate and stuck for ideas. As part of a larger strategic shift to become a brand known for gifting occasions, Etsy created a new feature for gift seekers, a novel piece of tech that blends generative AI, human curation, and machine learning to help users pick out the perfect present from over 100 million unique and handmade products on Etsy. To introduce this new feature, our film took the authentic feelings around gift shopping—panic and anxiety—and used them as a relatable lens through which to reimagine history. Imagine the pressure the United States must have felt when receiving one of the most monumental gifts of all time. But with Etsy’s Gift Mode, that panic was answered with Gift Mode…And the people rejoiced.

This film depicts a hapless group of American officials attempting to reciprocate one of history’s greatest gifts, the Statue of Liberty, while dramatizing the relatable feeling of anxiety about finding a great gift. As they all panic and stammer, a calm General suggests that all they need is Etsy’s new gift mode. And with a little bit of knowledge about the French and a few clicks of a smartphone, America easily turns the “oh crap” anxiety of reciprocal gifting pressure into a riot of hearty “ooh la las” from their friends across the pond.

While Etsy is known for holiday gifting, the brand needed to position themselves as a resource for year-round gifts. So, for their first-ever Super Bowl ad, we were tasked with launching a brand-new, AI-powered feature called Gift Mode that helps you find great gifts based on personas. The job was to make Etsy known as a place that can help solve even the largest gifting conundrums. We took the very authentic feeling of gifting anxiety and reimagined a key moment in history, when France gave America one of the best gifts of all time, the Statue of Liberty. And we positioned new Gift Mode as a solution to even the most monumentally-daunting gifting challenges.

This script could easily have led to direction that cheaply telegraphed “comedy” but instead visually, the direction treated its subject very seriously. Romantically lit with extensive historic set builds, period costuming and historic hair and makeup, the film brought the finest craft to its story. The revelry in the finale was an intricately choreographed scene that involved simulating a historic 1880s French port, acrobatics, horse drawn carriages, mimes, poodles, and approximately 100 flying baguettes.