We here at the Pony blog are always on the lookout for ponies and we found one — literally — in the new commercials for Ally bank, the GM finance arm formerly known as GMAC.

Source: Ally/YouTube Ally's Pony girl commercial. Note the furniture in the background, where some of the hidden cameras—and cameramen were hidden.

A little girl is sitting at a small table in what looks like an observation room.

“Would you like a pony?” a man in a suit asks her.

“Yeah,” she replies.

He hands her a toy pony and she smiles big.

He turns to a second little girl, asks if she wants a pony, and she says yes.

He clicks his tongue and a real pony comes out.

The first little girl gives a look that could kill and says, “You didn’t say you could have a real one.”

“You didn’t ask,” he replies smugly.

This is one of three spots created by the Bartle Bogle Hegarty agency aimed at rebranding Ally and distancing it from the struggling automaker, General Motors. The other two are similar bait-and-switch themes using kids — one involving a boy and a truck, the other, a girl and a bike. The message: Other banks dupe you with the fine print — Ally bank wouldn’t do that.

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It's a brilliant strategy when you're trying to rebrand a bank in the middle of a recession blamed on banks: Bring on the cute kids—and the pony!

The true genius of the spots is how real the reactions are from the kids. Most of the time when kids act, it looks like they’re reading lines from a script. But when the pony girl realizes she got cheated out of a pony, she looks genuinely aggravated and ticked off — a complex reaction you’d expect from an adult, not a child. In the spot with the boy, when he gets handed a cardboard truck and says, "It's a piece of junk!," it’s raw frustration that we can all relate to, then laugh at because we’re watching it being acted out by kids.

Watch the ads on the next page

It’s “a purity of human experience that you rarely see in advertising,” said Barbara Lippman, a critic for Adweek. “It reminds me of the best stuff from the 60s,” like “Candid Camera” and “Kids Say the Darndest Things.”

As it turns out, the shooting of these Ally commercials was a lot like “Candid Camera.”

The kids walked into the situation blind. They didn’t know they were shooting a commercial. The parents told them only that they were going to a meeting with someone and that they were going to get to play. Director Hank Perlman of Hungry Man productions specifically asked the parents not to prepare the kids too much.

“It’s fun for me when kids just act like kids,” Perlman said. “I think people go about it the wrong way sometimes — they want kids to act instead of just being kids.”

The set looked like an observation room — a wink to the audience that let them in on the “Candid Camera” style.

“We wanted the audience to be aware that it was hidden cameras,” Perlman said.

The cameras were hidden all over the room — on the ceiling, under tables — and there were not only cameras, but cameramen hiding in those giant white blocks in the background. They had six cameras going at any given time.

There was no script. The man/interviewer/jerk, played by actor RJ Kelly, welcomed the kids into the room. He had Perlman on a bug in his ear, to help feed him a few lines and direction.

Perlman gives Kelly a lot of credit for getting a rise out of the kids, since he was the one “on the front lines” without a script. And, he said, it also has a lot to do with casting the kids.

“It kind of has to start with finding kids who are really funny and interesting — who have that spark that makes you want to watch them,” Perlman said.

The kids in the spots aren't your typical blond-haired blue-eyed Brady-type kids: The truck boy is chubby, the Pony girl is brunette and the bike girl is a redhead.

Perlman said that's because he gravitates toward the quirky, smart, sassy, chubby, skinny, nerdy kids — not the “cutesy wootsey” stage kids — admitting that one of his favorite movie was the original “Bad News Bears” because of the oddball cast of kids.

To find the kids for the Ally commercials, they did traditional casting of kid actors, but also did “real-people” casting, scouting schools and recreation centers in New Jersey.

During the “interviews,” they’d ask typical questions like “What’s your name?,” “How old are you?,” “Any brothers and sisters?” and “What’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?,” then threw them a curveball like “Ever been to jail?” or “Are you married?”

Some kids would sheepishly smile and say, “No, of course I’m not married.” The ones who stood out, Perlman said, were the ones who ran with it and said something like, “Oh, I’ve been married for three years now.”