Brian Cox Offers Tough Love as DIRECTV’s New Overly Direct Spokesperson

This April, DIRECTV is launching its newest brand campaign titled, ‘Overly Direct Spokesperson,’ starring Emmy and Golden Globe winner Brian Cox.

The campaign is a debut of DIRECTV’s all-new brand strategy platform, ‘Entertainment Without Compromise.’ 

Throughout the campaign, Brian Cox will interject in various common consumer pain point scenarios where people are compromising on their TV experience and give some ‘direct tough love to encourage people to switch to DIRECTV as the solution. 

The creative inspiration was bringing 'entertainment without compromise' to life via an uncompromising tone through a character who borrows ‘directly’ from the brand’s name - for a campaign only DIRECTV could create.

This work aims to showcase DIRECTV’s superior customer service experience along with its latest functions and features - especially its access to the most local MLB games of any TV provider - just in time for baseball season. 

Though this is an entirely new campaign approach, the connective tissue lies in how the brand positions its superior experience - from 'the best of live and on demand' which focuses on DIRECTV’s content offering to opening up the aperture to the slew of functions/features and customer service accolades that make up its superior experience. 

Created in collaboration with creative agency TBWA\Chiat\Day LA, the 360 campaign includes one 53 second (longform film), one 30s, and eight 15s for TV, OLV, social and digital channels, which will run for nine months, and four radio spots.

“I thoroughly enjoy being the Overly Direct Spokesperson in the new TV campaign for DIRECTV,” said Brian Cox. “The main broadcast spot is truly an ode to all that DIRECTV is doing to simplify their TV watching experience.”

“Other than being an incredibly seasoned and accomplished actor, we knew Brian could really pay off a ‘direct’ character and deliver on the type of tone we wanted our direct spokesperson to communicate - stern but still accessible and relatable.” said Jason Karley, executive creative director TBWA/Chiat/Day