Talkbacks to the Israeli video were quick to come. Bystanders don’t take the bait so Buchatsky presses the red button. In the Israeli send-up, the ‘quiet square’ has been replaced by bustling Magen David Square in Tel Aviv. “It is not hard to notice that drama and action are part of our daily experience, whether it is on the news or on the street,” says Buchatsky. No one needs to push a red button to add drama in Israel. But anyone who has lived in Israel will immediately find the original wording of the advertisement not quite in synch with life here. ‘A DRAMATIC SURPRISE ON A QUIET SQUARE – ISRAEL’ starts off the same way.

“In a flash of a second,” he tells ISRAEL21c, the idea of a parody came to them. Spoof video artist Roman Buchatsky and his brother Vitaly are surfing the web when they come across this video. Which brings us to the Israeli connection.

There’s a sign that reads “Push to add drama” pointing at it.Ĭuriosity eventually overcomes passersby and once the button is pressed bystanders unsuspectingly find themselves in an action-packed Hollywood scene. Without giving too much away, a red button is placed on a podium in the middle of a typical Flemish town square. It’s called, ‘A DRAMATIC SURPRISE ON A QUIET SQUARE.’ To promote the launch of a new cable channel in Belgium, they create a brilliant viral video campaign featuring – you guessed it – a red button. It’s 1997, and Men In Black‘s Tommy Lee Jones tells Will Smith: “Don’t touch the red button.” Which, of course he does, because who can really resist a red button?įast forward to 2012, and Belgian ad agency Duval Guillaume takes the ‘red button’ theme to a new level.

Don t touch the big red button