Southwest Recovery Services wanted to move upmarket, into bigger accounts with more revenue behind them. They knew the safe version of a debt collection ad wasn’t going to get them there.

Nobody in this category takes a swing. Every ad is a handshake, a skyline, a line about professionalism. So we started somewhere else: what does a business owner with unpaid invoices actually watch? Not commercials. Sports, stunts, dry internet comedy, the stuff that gets sent to a group chat.

So we made one of those. A business owner pitches a tent outside his client’s office and camps there waiting to get paid. The client finally walks out. They lock eyes. Quick zoom on each face. The client sprints, and our guy chases him down with a full layout tackle.

That’s the fantasy, not the pitch. It’s every frustration of chasing your own money, played straight, which is exactly what makes the turn work: there’s a better way, and that’s the business SWRS is in.

We shot a second, safer concept the same day. An old-school collector yelling into a phone about what he’d do, cut against what SWRS actually does. One riskier concept, one safer. Two concepts built to test against each other instead of one ad everyone hopes works.