LINCOLNSHIRE, Ill.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Quill.com, a leading business to business office products provider, will air the first-ever commercial for the once-fictional Dunder Mifflin brand from NBC’s “The Office” during the big football game on February 3.
The spot, “Paper War,” was created via a contest on the Tongal crowdsourcing platform by Freddy Rabbath of Tallahassee, Florida, who won a $15,000 prize for making the winning ad. The selection committee included the executive producers of NBC’s “The Office” and executives from Quill.com and NBCUniversal.
The spot can be viewed online at: http://www.quill.com/dundermifflin.
“Dunder Mifflin products allow people to bring a piece of ‘The Office’ to their office, and this spot shares that in a very unique and very funny way,” said Paul Bessinger, Director of Innovation for Quill.com.
Quill.com began offering Dunder Mifflin paper in late 2011 through a licensing relationship with NBCUniversal. The paper quickly catapulted into the top five of Quill.com’s 65,000 SKUs, inspiring a line extension late in 2012 that included Sharpie pens, self-stick notes (yellow and assorted colors), premium facial tissue boxes, coffee cups, storage boxes and legal pads. The new products, which began shipping in December and January, are currently available at www.quill.com/dundermifflin.
The 30-second spot will promote the entire line, air in Scranton and go wide via extensive social-media and public-relations initiatives. Scranton viewers will see it live early in the big football game’s third quarter.
“This is not a typical crowdsourcing campaign, because the ad must live up to the very high standards that ‘The Office’ has set over the past eight years,” said Kim Niemi, Senior Vice President, NBCUniversal Television Consumer Products Group. “The show’s producers insisted that the ad be true to the spirit of the show in a manner that was completely original, and we’re proud of the outcome.”
About Quill.com
Founded in 1956 and headquartered in Lincolnshire, IL, Quill.com serves the needs of over a million small to medium sized businesses. As a premier business to business office products provider, Quill.com sells everything from paper and ink and toner to cleaning supplies and technology with 24-hour-a-day access to more than 65,000 business essentials. Introduced in 1996, Quill.com was one of the first successful Web sites launched in the office products industry and has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of Staples, Inc., since 1998.
Quill.com is committed to supporting breast cancer research. In addition to raising money during the month of October, they also offer a full assortment of pink products all year long, with a percentage of those product sales being donated to this cause. In the fight against Breast Cancer, Quill.com has raised more than $600,000 since 2006.
About NBCUniversal Television Consumer Products Group
NBCUniversal is a leader in providing entertainment programming to the domestic and international marketplaces. NBCUniversal Television DVD, Music, and Consumer Products Group manages all global ancillary television business endeavors for the NBCUniversal Television Group, including third-party home entertainment distribution, consumer products, musical soundtracks, special markets projects and the NBCUniversal Online Store. For the latest product updates and an overview of the properties managed by the group, visit the NBCUniversal Television Consumer Products portal at http://nbcuconsumerproducts.com.
About “The Office”
From Deedle-Dee Productions, Reveille and Universal Television comes the multi-award-winning comedy series "The Office," the hilarious documentary-style look into the humorous and sometimes poignant foolishness that plagues the world of 9-to-5 in the half-hour. A fly-on-the-wall "docu-reality" parody about modern American office life, "The Office" delves into the lives of the workers at Dunder Mifflin Sabre, a paper supply company in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
"The Office" is executive-produced by Ben Silverman, Greg Daniels, who developed the series for American audiences, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, Howard Klein, Paul Lieberstein, Brent Forrester and Dan Sterling.