Get Your Affairs in Order

Ray Winstone cries 18 times, there are 47 uses of the ‘c’ word and the cast share 15 BAFTA nominations between them. Malcolm Venville’s first feature, 44 Inch Chest, has an embarrassment of riches – but how could we best use them to promote the film?

Attending the screening back in July we had no idea what the film was about, so were coming at it totally fresh.

Over lunch the next day Malcolm asked if we wanted to create a campaign outside of the poster/trailer format.

There was no brief – just the movie and the screenplay.

As you’d expect of a man who’s been left by his wife of 21 years, Winstone’s character Colin Diamond cries a lot in the film. So we considered a campaign of weeping men in a Sam Taylor-Wood meets Jill Greenberg style. We put it up on the wall for a few days. Then one morning my creative partner Adam Scholes just said “This is all a bit miserable isn’t it” and down it came.

We read the screenplay and on the first page the words “Ever been unfaithful?” resonated with us. We’ve all thought about chatting up an attractive married woman, but after this film maybe you’ll think again.

“You’ll never talk to a married woman again” became our campaign thought and we started exploring the darker side of social networking, looking at seedy dating sites which encourage husbands and wives to cheat on their spouses.

We thought it’d be funny and a bit dark if we could catch some errant men with a fake online dating site to meet married women. We called it Diamond Affairs and made it feel as real as possible, right down to raunchy copy and naff tag line.

The real star of the film is the colourful dialogue, which we used as our main element of surprise on the site. When viewers click to read more about Coco or Suki or Liz, they are interrupted by tasty quotes such as “You should’ve got your own fucking wife to fuck”.

Being fans of the odd wind-up on work colleagues, we thought it might be funny to set up some prank calls from an angry Colin. After all, what does every angry husband do in this situation? He calls up the bloke who’s diddling his missus and gives him a right ear bashing.

We managed to add a touch of authenticity by giving people the choice of eight personalised insults Ray dishes out during the course of the call.

We covered all the bases, from “lanky streak of piss” to “ginger bollocks”. No one can quite get their mouth round the words “You speccy twat” like Mr Winstone. When he goes, he really goes. We expect complaints.

Hugh Todd
Creative director, JWT London

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