Celebrity Cruises: Bad Date Night
Overview
Our longtime partners Celebrity Cruises called us up one day and said they wanted to try some comedy for their next commercial campaign. This was a total departure for them stylistically and strategically, but it made a lot of sense. They had testing data that suggested their spots needed some type of hook to improve engagement scores and had the perfect opportunity to connect that with their product experience. Working together from their storyboards, we were tasked with producing and executing Bad Date Night, comparing miserable on-land date nights with the perfect date night experience onboard a Celebrity cruise.
The strategic basis for this approach was twofold. First, Celebrity had found previously that some of their greatest traction was gained through content that centered on onboard date nights, suggesting interest from the customer base. Secondly, we had two very talented actors, Jered and Jessica, featured a great deal in the product and lifestyle footage already. They could more than capably carry the acting requirement for the comedic intros, which would allow for a seamless connection point to the product.
Process
The storyboards we received had a lot of baked-in production and creative challenges, including a fire-sprinkler water gag inside of a house, a packed traffic jam on a major highway, and a truck-puddle-splash gag on the side of a city street. Needless to say: homes do not generally allow you to spray water all over their high-end kitchens, traffic jams on major highways are major production nightmares, and any gag featuring moving vehicles barreling past actors on a sidewalk introduces a lot of complexity between safety, timing, and practical effects concerns.
For the traffic jam, our approach was to shoot the scene on an LED Volume Wall with Unreal Studio. This allowed us to create the traffic jam in 3D during preproduction, meaning we only needed four or five cars in the studio to make everything seem realistic.
One of the spots has our couple burning a rack of lamb in the oven and setting off the fire sprinklers. This seems pretty straightforward until you need to find a homeowner willing to let you build a fake sprinkler system in their kitchen and wet everything in sight with it. In order to secure permission for the gag, we had to cover every kitchen surface tightly with plastic and shot the gag in three different shots: one with no water to capture the uncovered kitchen, one with water and everything covered in plastic, and one with the oven open and smoke pouring out.
These three shots had to be combined in post-production and then we had to add CG water to the surfaces around the actors, to the door of the oven, and behind them in the background.
Our final spot had us situated in front of a restaurant, the securing of which was another challenge—as it turns out, local restaurants don’t love being portrayed as turning guests back at the door or having sassy hostesses greeting guests.
In this most miserable of date nights, our couple not only gets turned away at a restaurant on their anniversary, but they also get a huge puddle splashed up in their faces thanks to a speeding truck. This gag required us to create a little system of dams in the street so that the water could puddle sufficiently to create the desired effect. And while we had planned a number of approaches for catching their close-up splash, it turns out that nothing beat just running the truck over the puddle at them over and over again. Thankfully, Jered and Jessica are great sports, and we have an aces makeup and wardrobe team to help us re-set the looks in between attempts.
One final crucial element was our amazing cast. Jered and Jessica crush it in both the narrative and lifestyle halves of the spot, balancing comic timing with lively improvisational authentic moments onboard.
Results
This campaign aired during 2026 during major sporting events and other high-profile, high-eyeball media buys.
Brothership was responsible for the creative treatment, production, execution, and post-production of the spots.
We look forward to continuing to cranking out more Bad Dates in the future!
