Earlier today, a casting call posting briefly appeared on Craigslist seeking actors for an iPhone 5 Commercial. The ad seemed to have been only up for a couple of hours, but long enough to get indexed by Google and screenshot'd by one of our readers.
The ad was looking for both Male and Female commercial actors. The role was described as "Happy, Smiling" and they were looking to cast 5 people in a range of ethnicities, ages and sexes. The payment was curiously listed in british pounds.
It's certainly strange that such an ad was posted in the first place, explicitly mentioning the "iPhone 5". It may have been a mistake or a hoax. Arguing against a pure hoax, however, is the fact that a very similar ad ran in New York about a month ago, but that time just for the "Apple iPhone" (not the iPhone 5):
Commercial Casting Notice for Apple iPhone:
Location: NY
Employer: TIGER PRODUCTIONS
Duration: 1 DAY, starts MAY 4TH.
(Non-Union artist contracts)
Director: H. GOLAN
ROLE: family oriented happy, male and female
AGE: 18-50 - huge range
RATE: $3000 +10%
Apple is known to film commercials ahead of product launches. In fact, last year at about this exact time (May 24th, 2010), Apple was casting commercials for FaceTime in their then-unreleased iPhone 4. That said, we were unable to find any further online information on casting director H. Golan or the production company listed.
Top Rated Comments
The shoot is set for LA (I'm assuming Los Angeles, California) but the payment is in British Pounds. Hmmm....
Tomorrow on Macrumors:
Nigerian prince will trade $26 million dollars for an iPhone4, if you would please do the needful and please be open to providing your financial information and locate a Western Union near you.
:rolleyes:
:confused: Why? Because they conveniently provided two links as examples of who they're 'interested in'. Notice that both links are identical aside from the trailing '/' sign, which effectively does nothing as far as hyper-linking goes.
:rolleyes: Why did they post both variations of this guy's link? Clearly for search engine spider indexing purposes. They knew how much crap would be generated from this chatter and how many times his link would be mentioned all over the web that it would naturally make his IMDB traffic up there next to Harrison Ford. Believe it or not, casting companies using IMDB actually consider an actor's page traffic when searching. Meaning, if an actor's IMDB page has recorded more hits than others, they immediately assume that there's a reason this actor is getting so much 'attention' by other casting agents.
:cool: In a nutshell, while I don't have proof that my theory is correct, I'm willing to bet on it. The first thing I thought when reading the initial posting was why they'd need to say "we're looking for someone like him". If we're talking about an ad for a product that has over $1.5 billion dollars in revenue, you'd think that they could figure out a way to afford that guy instead of posting a casting call looking for his cheaper look-alike. :apple:
I would say with almost 100% certainty it is. Many times the Casting Directors when hired by the client (Apple) are required to sign NDAs and are prohibited from listing product or company details when posting the breakdown online for the agents to submit their talent to for auditions.
Legitimate casting directors won't post on craigslist either. If they are looking for someone very particular and they don't get the right submissions from the agents, they can release a project publicly for actors themselves to submit. But that is very rare, and usually only seen when casting for something like an obese person that is a professional bird caller or something super-specific like that, but that is the only time that you will see publicly listed submissions for big time commercial roles.
But I can guarantee they won't be risking being fired by a client for posting a project on craigslist.