Ads Showcase: The Canadian IRS ads

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Who are the clients with great ads out there? Nike? Budweiser? Volkswagen? Target? Sony? Axe? ICBC? Richmond Centre?

Well, how about the Canadian Internal Revenue Service (Canadian Revenue Agency)?

DDB Canada (née PJ DDB) has long been one of the creative powerhouses of Canada, with the typically wonderful DDB culture, and now they've created some undeniably cool work for the the Canadian Revenue Agency.

I asked the art director Dan Strasser, who helped think of the Bud Light "Skydiver" Super Bowl commercial, how in the world did they think of origami heathen mini-demons to sell tax collection?!

"My ad partner, Kevin Rathgeber and I were sitting around trying to come up with an idea for SnapTax. We discussed how paper can be deadly, as in the case of extreme paper cuts. We explored that area for a while and that lead us to the thought that if paper kills, then it is evil. How can paper be evil we thought? We then decided to create this evil origami monster that would do 'evil' things around the house. And that basically is how it all went down. Not overly glamourous, but definitely a fun thing to produce. We used an origami master, Joseph Wu, to create our monster, and Alastair Bird to photograph everything. Oh and we did all this in about a week. It was one of the faster turn arounds I've had. It doesn't usually go that fast. "

Client: Snaptax.ca
Agency: DDB Canada, Vancouver
Creative Director: Alan Russell
Copywriter: Kevin Rathgeber
Art Director: Dan Strasser
Producer: Wendy Moriarty, Gary Taylor
Photographer: Alastair Bird
Origami Artist: Joseph Wu