Paint chip safari is a creative masterpiece

Sherwin-Williams has been a trusted name in the paint business since 1866, and thanks to McKinney, its Durham-based advertising agency, the new Sherwin-Williams ad campaign is creating quite a stir – both on Madison Avenue and on Main Street.

How so? David Gianatasio of Boston, a longtime contributor to Adweek, wrote: “In the latest installment of its ‘Color Chips’ campaign, Sherwin-Williams creates a captivating African jungle, one that is teeming with bright, bountiful, beastly life.”

“It took nearly 30,000 paint chips, along with 24 production artists working a total of 5,600 hours, to bring this majestic menagerie to life (for a 30-second television commercial),” he commented.

Jonathan Cude, who is the chief creative officer at McKinney, remarked: “People aren’t inspired by paint itself. What people really care about is the transformation a coat of paint can provide. Our ‘Color Chips’ campaign is about inspiring you with the possibilities for your home – in some 1,500 different color shades.”

Gianatasio said: “Crafting a jungle scene lets Sherwin-Williams’ full range of flavors really roar.” The safari animals that come to life are all crafted from Sherwin-Williams paint chips. Viewers can identify the spectacular colors of a mandrill, flamingos, zebras, giraffes, meerkats, leopards and elephants. All seem to be on their way to find the nearest Sherwin-Williams paint store.

McKinney selected Buck, a commercial production company with offices in Los Angeles and Brooklyn, N.Y., to assist with the animation aspects. The critics seem to be unanimous in their scoring…it’s a “10” for Sherwin-Williams. Full-page print ads are running in consumer magazines.

“We’ve got bold, colorful moments with the flamingos,” Cude said, “but there are softer, more neutral moments with the elephants and giraffes.”

The July issue of Southern Living magazine features the Sherwin-Williams zebra advertisement. He or she is shown close up with a brilliant yellow-orange sunset in the background.

The angle of the sinking sun causes the zebra’s stripes to magically appear to shift from black and white, appearing to the human eye as tones from a lilac-to-purplish palette. Among the dominant paint chips are “Vesper Violet” and “Grape Mist.” The tagline begs: “Where will color take you?”

The Sherwin-Williams Company was formed in 1886 in Cleveland, Ohio, a partnership between Henry Alden Sherwin and Edward Porter Williams. Both men were in their early 40s at the time, and they were savvy and hard-working entrepreneurs. They found a niche in paint products after dabbling for a time with other commodities.

Over the years, the company hasn’t drifted far afield, choosing to follow a conservative business strategy by engaging in the manufacture, distribution and sale of paints, coatings and related products to professional, industrial, commercial and retail customers primarily in North America, South America and Europe.

A major acquisition occurred in 2017, as Sherwin-Williams purchased Valspar, based in Minneapolis, for more than $9.3 billion. Other familiar brands in the Sherwin-Williams stable are Duron, Minwax, Krylon, Thompson’s WaterSeal, Pratt & Lambert, Dutch Boy, Easy Living and Weatherbeater.

Today, in 2019, Sherwin-Williams continues to duke it out with PPG to claim honors as the world’s top-selling paint company. PPG is kind of faceless and nondescript. On the other hand, Sherwin-Williams has one sorry corporate logo…if one listens to its army of critics.

Dagnabbit. The irony of it all is baffling. Here is Sherwin-Williams. the maestro of innovative advertising, displaying a stodgy corporate logo that “everyone despises” because the image of paint covering the Earth is soooooo politically incorrect.

The Sherwin-Williams logo dates back to 1893. It pictures a giant Sherwin-Williams bucket suspended in mid-air pouring bright red paint over a blue and white globe, with the words: “Cover the Earth.”

Brad Miller, who owns a graphic design firm in Chicago, recommends a total do-over. “Maybe something like ‘color your world’ would be better than ‘dump a can of paint on the planet and kill all who live there,’” Miller said. Beyond that, he says the Earth appears to be skewed off its vertical axis, with the continents jumbled.

Mike Conway, director of corporate communications at Sherwin-Williams, told David Griner, creative and innovation editor at Adweek: “The Sherwin-Williams logo is one of the most recognized in the world. It is not meant to be taken literally, rather it is a representation of our desire to protect and beautify surfaces that are important to people. At this time, there are no plans to redesign the logo.”

Consider the advice of McKinney’s founder, Charles “Chick” McKinney, who died in 2007 at age 75: “Creative is the one area where a single person can defeat an army.”