The spot opens with a young woman arriving at college. She meets her weird roommate. She buys her books, goes to class and studies. But an undercurrent develops as she works harder and watches her money even more than you and I ever did. This is the new normal. Yes, college is still fun and crazy, but now it’s a bigger financial burden. We see the good times, but we also see the struggle. We see our heroine working odd jobs and eating ramen for dinner. We see her studying in the library while streakers run by. We see her graduating and throwing her mortarboard in the air. We cut to the young woman in a business suit. It’s her first day at work. With a brave face, she reaches toward the camera as if she’s shaking hands with us. She did it to work for you.

In order to understand the product, we needed to show a student struggling to put herself through college, which is a huge financial investment in the U.S.

There was enough footage to make a feature film. The treatment read like a bible for a TV series. The characters were extremely fleshed out. The challenge was finding the story details in the scenes that communicated all that detail in such a short running time.