National TV · Corporate cbiz × a brand goes national

CBIZ had never run a national television campaign. They were a growing professional services company with a strong regional footprint but no national brand presence. The brief was to change that, and to do it in a way that would make people remember who CBIZ was and what they did.

the concept: men in black, but for accountants.

The idea came from the elevator scene in Men in Black, where Will Smith steps into an elevator that drops straight down into a secret world most people never see. The original goes down. We flipped it. For CBIZ, the elevator goes up, rising above the clouds into a place their clients reach that their competition cannot. That inversion, taking a recognizable image and redirecting it toward aspiration rather than secrecy, is what gave the campaign its visual identity. We took that starting point and built everything around it.

We wrote the scripts, developed the concept, designed the production, and cast the spots from scratch. Two spots, one for accounting and one for insurance, each built around the same visual language and the same core idea: CBIZ gets you to a place your competition can't reach.

the production: building the elevator.

We built the elevator set in studio from scratch. The practical set gave us a real physical space to light and shoot, and the green screen behind it let us put anything we wanted above it in post. The crowd of people at the top, floating in the clouds above the elevator as it rises, was composited entirely in post, shot separately on green screen with a large cast and then layered into the final frame.

The logistics of shooting two finished spots with a large cast, multiple setups, built scenery, and a green screen compositing workflow in a single production window required the kind of planning that only works if everything is locked before the crew call. We ran it as a tight multi-setup day that left enough flexibility in post to hit the visual we'd designed from the start.

the result: a national brand launch.

The spots aired nationally during PGA Tour coverage, putting CBIZ in front of exactly the professional and executive audience the campaign was designed to reach. It was the first time the company had aired on national television, and it landed. CBIZ grew significantly in the years that followed and eventually went public, a trajectory that the national brand visibility this campaign established helped set in motion.

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