HI THERE
Firstly, thank you so much for connecting with us!
We can’t wait to meet you all and find out
more about your brief at Twitter.
It would be fantastic if you could watch the films on this site before we meet.
We’d love to talk you through these case studies on our call.
With thanks from The Generals!
Our elevator pitch is that we are “a creative company for people on a mission”. This is a simple but very deliberate statement of intent, made up of three distinct elements:
WE ARE A CREATIVE COMPANY... While we excel at advertising, we have set this company up to deliver a broader definition of creativity. If you get closer to the problem, the solution will reveal itself.
FOR PEOPLE... This may sound obvious, but in our technology-driven world it is all too easy to forget that people are still people, with human needs and desires. Everything has changed, but nothing has changed. Insight is still key.
ON A MISSION... We are all about behavioural change. We want people to do things, not just feel things, as a result of our work. We get out of bed to make a difference.
MAKING THE WORLD
SMILE AT CHRISTMAS
In 2017, Amazon asked us to create their first global holiday campaign.
As with most retailers, Christmas is Amazon’s most commercially important season. 40% of their total annual sales are made in December. It is a fiercely competitive and emotionally-charged time, when Amazon’s scale, speed and ease can actually be counter-productive in fuelling a wholly functional brand perception.
To make an impact, we knew we needed to get consumers
to see a brand role beyond the rational.
But the idea also had to work extremely hard across channels, occasion and markets. It needed to span a broad range of commercial objectives including sales events such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday and many different touch points from TV,
their website and app, social channels, print, and digital.
So we leveraged a simple and universal insight: during the holidays, Amazon doesn’t just deliver cardboard packages, it delivers smiles. We made Amazon’s iconic packages the hero of the campaign - it was an inherently well branded idea rooted in one of their most iconic assets - their logo. We animated the logo on the box (which had previously been portrayed as an arrow from A-Z) so that it became a human smile, and brought those smiles to life, singing feel-good songs that perfectly captured the sentiment of the season.
The singing boxes took the Christmas season by storm for three years in a row: in 2017 (above) the boxes brought the joy of giving to life, in 2018 the campaign focussed on enjoyment of the whole holiday season and in 2019 (below) we moved on to talk about the feelings of togetherness the holidays bring.
Finally, here are some examples of the thousands of
hard-working assets the idea was used to create.
WINNING THE SUPER BOWL FROM LONDON
In 2018, we developed our first Super Bowl campaign to promote Amazon Alexa, and have been chosen to take on this amazing brief for a second, third and fourth year.
Voice-activated tech was, and remains, a competitive market, with Google Home and Siri battling to knock Alexa off the top spot. One of Amazon’s most genius moves was to make Alexa female, giving her an affinity-boosting human trait, but we couldn’t be complacent. Our challenge was to help people appreciate the usefulness of Alexa in their lives and drive loyalty.
To demonstrate Alexa’s irreplaceability, we took the bold step to imagine what might happen if Amazon lost its most iconic voice, during the world’s
noisiest advertising event.
This spot was nominated for an Emmy, and it won the USA Today Super Bowl
AdMeter, the YouTube Super Bowl Adblitz, Ad Age’s Super Bowl ranking, and
Best Retail Brand in Twitter’s inaugural Brand Bowl competition and Kellogg’s
School of Management Super Bowl review.
We had landed the idea that Alexa was irreplaceable.
So, the following year, we asked ourselves, what else could we put Alexa in…?
It was the most watched advert on YouTube in 2019, and came 2nd in the USA Today Super Bowl AdMeter (the top spot went to an advert for the NFL itself, featuring a number of NFL superstars which seems a tad unfair..not that we’re bitter about it!).
Last year, to celebrate the launch of the new globe-shaped Alexa, we imagined just how good the device could look in another body…
This beauty of an advert was voted into the top 3 ads of the 2021 USA Today Super Bowl AdMeter, has already been viewed over 78 million times on YouTube, and it picked up the Super Clio award.
BUILDING A PLATFORM BASED
ON BRAND DIFFERENCE
Hostelworld is the world’s number 1 booking engine for hostels, but that meant they had to convince young travellers' to stay in hostels rather than budget hotels or Airbnbs.
To help Hostelworld achieve this, we created a brand platform based on the insight that hostels have a uniquely social nature, where you can meet and mingle with like-minded travellers. The idea that hostels help you “Meet the World” became our core organising thought driving everything we did. We even redesigned the logo to put the idea of socialibility at the core of the brand's identity.
Having set up the platform we developed a 100% mobile, 100% social, 100% content approach to change young people's perceptions of hostels and show them just how nice they are these days.
The creative expression of this strategy was ‘Unexpected hostel guests’. We invited famous people to come and meet the world of hostels, and discover how nice they were for themselves. Over the years we hosted guests such as Chris Eubank, Mariah Carey and even Charlie Sheen! But perhaps our most celebrated guests was the rapper 50 cent, who had recently declared himself bankrupt...
And beyond adverting, the 'Meet the world' platform has led to some amazing initiatives to help young travellers meet and socialise. For instance, we worked with Google to put a 'Speak the world' function into the Hostelworld app.
Users could hold their phones up to their face and instantly chat with a fellow traveller in any one of 23 languages!
AND FINALLY…
Twitter has provided us with a fantastic platform for lots of lovely work with our brands over the years.
The ‘greatest hits’ are below - from an iconic Paddy Power campaign to tackle homophobia in football and an initiative to tackle bigotry on social media (sorry for swearing!) to a pop-up shop in the middle of a forest for beer brand, Busch, a cheeky user-generated campaign for Yorkshire Tea and creating some mischief for the World Cup in Brazil…
THANK YOU.
WE SALUTE YOU.