We’ve been writing quite a lot about what we’ve been doing in 2018, so let’s start 2019 differently: today’s Office Bloggers is going to be all about our partner agencies’ ‘how-did-they-do-that’ projects of 2018 – and while there’s no definitive ranking, these are definitely the double-take moments that we loved.
Lewis Communications – Tiffin Motorhomes
A home is more than just a house – sometimes, it’s a house with wheels and 600 horsepower. Tiffin Motorhomes’ premium range of on-the-go memory makers are impressive in their own right, but when you combine the Class A Phaeton, or one of their other luxury motorhomes, with the creative powerhouse of Lewis Communications you get a result that’s designed to stun. Tiffin Motorhomes have used Lewis Communications for more than a decade now, and their latest campaign built on the Tiffin tagline ‘Made to Move You’ included a series of posters designed to remind people that a Tiffin Motorhome isn’t just any vehicle, it’s a luxury holiday-making vehicle, and the pinnacle of road-trip adventures.
Lewis Communications’ approach was a nostalgic, glowy campaign built around luxury and stunning natural environments. The sleek, silvery motorhome featured in a series of posters, highlighting what holidaying potential could really be like when you’re driving a vehicle designed to turn into a spa as soon as it was parked. The pictures selected and run aren’t just beautiful, they’re an ingenious ‘this is what you could have’ glimpse of the future for anyone in the market for a home on wheels. Bonus: The poster campaign was so universally well received that it won Platinum at Graphis’ 2019 edition of ‘Advertising Annual’.
Lopito, Ileana & Howie – AT&T
When it comes to brand rivalries, AT&T and Sprint are pretty up there, and earlier this summer, AT&T released three 90 second shorts to poke fun at their competitor’s single-track offerings – you can’t surf the internet or send data while on a phone call when you’re a Sprint client, which might work well for day to day life, but in the zombie apocalypse?
AT&T’s debut thrillvert (noun, an advert that also doubles as a thriller movie) starts out with a teenager running desperately for her life from a shambling mound of the undead. She desperately locks the doors behind herself, and stumbles into the bathroom to make what could be her final call and, well, we won’t spoil the ending – check it out below:
Why do we like this? Switch is all about a good joke and movie-slick photography, and highlighting a feature that wouldn’t normally be a problem using a ten-thousand-to-one scenario is the kind of ‘so crazy it has to work’ idea that we always love to go for.
Rethink Communications – IKEA
What can we say about IKEA’s 2018 campaigns? A lot! When IKEA retired their polished-to-a-shine ‘Long Live the Home’ campaign, they launched a search for the next brand agency to take hold and shape their new campaign. The theme was ‘a better everyday life for everyone’, and Rethink Communications saw the opportunity, grabbed it, and ran with it. Every campaign they’ve run under the ‘a better everyday life for everyone’ umbrella has been marketing gold, but the DRÄG campaign is notable just for the fact that it’s probably pretty difficult to make clothing out of a Knappa pendant light. More than that, though, IKEA and Rethink Communications took on the challenge of normalising and creating a better world for anyone, and everyone involved in the DRAG Pride advert looks like they’re having a blast. Check it out yourself below:
Artificial Group Boutique Creative – MOL
How do you announce a relaunching like MOL? You hire Artificial Group Boutique Creative to create an advert so poignant and universally adored that it won silver at the Cannes – yes, that Cannes – Corporate Media and TV Awards.
Hungarian gas and oil company MOL changed up their points programme Multipont, and they wanted to make a big announcement so current and new users would know about it. Artificial Group Boutique Creative scripted and shot the life and times of Arnold, a coffee addict whose world turned upside down when he discovered that – shock, horror! – he’d run out of coffee, and what was he to do? Multipont to the rescue!
‘Arnold’ isn’t just beautifully shot, it’s also genuinely funny and endearing – just take a look below, and see if you don’t root for Arnold to be united with his one true love by the end.
Brainwave Communications Ltd – Motorol
Good design is good design, and Switch loves an aesthetic, so naturally Brainwave Communications Ltd’s ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5 DRIVE’ campaign was a hot favourite in the office. It isn’t just the slick, smooth style – it’s the fact that Brainwave Communications Ltd worked in culture and background into their Kenyan-based campaign by basing their designs on the five most significant animals found in the Kenyan landscape. Going off the fact that driving in Kenya is legendarily difficult, Brainwave Communications Ltd built beautiful, glossy, animal-meets-machine contraptions that made tongue-in-cheek references to both Kenyan driving conditions and the fact that Motorol’s range of lubricants was designed for those driving conditions.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so if you’re ready for a magnum opus, check out these beautiful posters below:
Wait, what about—?
Look, if we had to write about every project that Switch watched and loved and dissected and rewatched and ranked up thousands of messages on WhatsApp for, we’d be here all of January and still wouldn’t cover the first week of 2018. Being part of an international network like ICOM means that we get more than just the bog-standard appreciation of something pretty; we understand, and we know, that behind a single second of arthouse-style film shouting is many, many hours of sourcing and prop sourcing and costuming and makeup, even more hours of storyboarding, so many more of post-production and reshooting and discussion over creative choices, and when one of our brother and sister agencies does well, we sit up and take notice, we take notes, we file it away under ‘I wonder what we can do about it?’
Being a part of ICOM means sharing in those ‘eureka’ moments that elevate a brand you were working with from garden variety to house-name, and this year, so many ICOM Network agencies went above and beyond what brand agencies normally do. Getting to see those projects take flight was insurmountably important for Switch, too – that’s what we aspire to do too, and the biggest takeaway of ICOM’s top projects is that it takes a village to build a successful ad campaign; no matter how minute a change is, it takes an entire agency to make sure that what they’re putting out makes the client happy, and themselves happy.
This year, that’s our resolution – but more on that later.
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