Secure Passage

The Chair

A new SOC hire meets a chair that bans blinking.

Watch the full campaign · 1:16

The Strategy

Secure Passage makes Truman, software that watches a company's cameras, badge readers, sensors and alarms all at once. It learns what normal looks like, filters out the noise and hands the security team only the few alerts that matter. The people it had to reach run security operations centers, or SOCs, for hospitals, campuses, casinos and cities. They are smart and experienced, and they spend their days staring at screens full of alarms that mostly mean nothing.

We brought Secure Passage four ways in. They picked the one that put the team first: Truman thinks like you, but faster. It isn't a robot that replaces the analyst. It's a partner that does the staring for them.

Our ads show only the problem, never the product fixing it. So we asked a different question: what's the worst possible fix for a team that can never look away? Security is a "blink and you'll miss it" endeavor, so we followed that thinking somewhere ridiculous. If no one can blink, someone has to hold their eyes open, the way Clockwork Orange did. Secure Passage's marketing director loved dystopian films like Blade Runner. She was on board right away.

So the spot opens on a warehouse wall, at a roll-up door with S.O.C. painted across it. Tim, looking like a mad scientist, stands proudly. Beside him, the new hire, Mark, stands in an ill-fitting suit and a yellow tie. Behind the door is a dark room full of old monitors and one chair, with straps and a helmet trailing wires. Josh, a veteran of the chair, is already strapped in, eyes held wide open, lit by a wall of screens we never see.

The 15-second teaser opens the door. The 30-second hero puts Mark in the chair, the 15-second follow-up checks back in on him later, and two short reminders return to the empty room. Every spot was delivered for widescreen, vertical and square feeds, and every one points to BlinkingIsBack.com, a web address made just for the campaign. Secure Passage ran the ads itself.

The Process

Our first drafts leaned dark. Brian, our director, read them and said so. When Secure Passage saw the scripts, they pushed the same way: less Clockwork Orange, more Back to the Future. So the room stayed cold and clinical, but the people in it got sitcom energy. Tim became a cheerful Doc Brown who treats the chair like a carnival ride.

One choice in a script can ripple out across a whole shoot. Real eye speculums meant real eyes at risk. Malcolm McDowell scratched his cornea filming Clockwork Orange, so only one actor wears them. Then we called eye doctors around Denver until we found one willing to spend the day on set, putting the speculums in and watching the actor's eyes between takes. It was a one-day shoot in an empty warehouse.

Every security company shows a wall of screens, and Secure Passage's own team pointed that out. So ours is never on camera. A bright projector throws its glow across the actors instead, which lets the wall feel as big as the warehouse. The Secure Passage team called it a classic horror-movie trick. Your imagination always builds a bigger wall.

Partway through, Secure Passage planned to sponsor events around the 2026 World Cup, where the ads could play on giant screens. They asked for a few soccer Easter eggs to suit that stage. That's where Josh's "SOC Defenders" team shirt came from.

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