Here is the first product ad under the new ‘3 your mind’ campaign theme. With 3 you can do things that you just never thought possible.
In this instance the lady in the apartment has magically taken on the properties of the product ‘3Pay’. Now she can talk to anyone on any network for free at weekends. She can even talk directly to the characters in a dodgy soap opera!
We also launched with special outdoor formats including an Aircoach wrap and a special 240 sheet in Dun Laoghaire Dart station to bring the idea to life in larger high profile formats. Also take a look at our Luas domination which broke the standard formats of the tram!
240 Sheet in Dun Laoghaire.
3Pay Luas domination.
Our national press campaign also demonstrated the core campaign idea of doing things you never thought possible, and you can also listen to our radio ads below.
This has been such a fun project to work on from start to finish – beginning with the Thirst Never Wins Online / TV work last summer and now with this print campaign.
Creating an imaginary back catalogue for J.D. Quench just makes me laugh. I love the idea that this forgotten giant of D-Movies appears to have spent his entire career in a series of Sprite Film Productions with entirely similar plots.
‘Mouth of Fire’ takes J.D. to the Orient. In my mind the film was shot in Chinatown, L.A. in 1973; they never would have had the budget to travel. No doubt J.D. himself would have put in at least two days martial arts training in advance of filming (he was never a great believer in ‘method’ acting). The plot would have revolved around J.D. overcoming a nasty Chinese ‘T.H.I.R.S.T.’ gang with his specially adapted Sprite nunchuck - all accompanied by very, very loud; very, very badly synched sound effects.
‘The Elemonator’ would have been much maligned on release but then go on to be considered a hugely influential Sci-Fi classic when re-assessed years later. Here J.D. is sent back, from the future, to 1974 (conveniently!). His mission would have been to prevent an alternative global future where people would have been denied the thirst quenching qualities of Sprite forever: something just not worth thinking about.
I would guess there might have been some groundbreaking (read: really dodgy) special effects throughout.
Movie credits where they are due - these posters were illustrated by Bruce Emmett through the Folio Illustration Agency in London.
Working with Heineken Ireland over the past 7 years has given us at McCann plenty of opportunities to create some of the best ideas and campaigns in Ireland. So it’s no wonder that we’re delighted to launch our biggest ever campaign for the iconic Heineken Bottle.
The brief – how do we get men to engage with the Heineken Bottle and take on a category that has seen speciality bottled beers gain in popularity. Rather than look to solely create an ad campaign, everyone aimed for a big idea: a fresh new philosophy for the brand, one that consumers could share and identify with.
“Live Every Last Drop” is the big idea that captures this new brand philosophy where stories are told through the eyes of the Heineken Bottle.
First up is the “One Green Bottle” TV commercial. It’s often said that your life flashes before your eyes if you are unfortunate to be visited by a near-death experience. This is the basic idea behind our first TV commercial, where we see the flashback of the life of a Heineken Bottle as it falls to a seemingly certain end.
Stories told through the eyes of Heineken bottles that Live Every Last Drop is a big idea that can stretch across any touchpoint and “One Green Bottle” is only the start of a big idea that will run and run.
The idea behind the JD Quench campaign we recently created for Sprite, was born out of the global positioning of Sprite as “The Nemesis of Thirst”.
This seemed like a great starting point for a brand strong on thirst quenching and refreshment credentials. The challenge facing the McCann team, was how to make a brilliant brand story from it.
Armed with a simple but wide open idea, the creative team, closet fans of the world of 70’s Blaxploitation movies, imagined a world where a maverick cop (J D Quench) cleaned up the streets of 1970’s LA and took on the T.H.I.R.S.T gang with his trusty Sprite weapons.
The big leap they asked us all to take was that we had to imagine there was actually a movie shot in the 70’s based on this premise and that our entire campaign for Sprite would essentially be the film trailers for a movie that never existed.
Shot in LA by director Charley Stadler (who we actively encourage any of you to work with for his uniquely blend of German efficiency and chaos), the JD Quench campaign breaks every rule possible – Bad acting, bad camera work, awful direction, wooden casting, atrocious editing and a rubbish sound mix. It took some great work to make the finished product this bad.
But in the spirit of the idea it works and kudos to our clients Sharon Walsh and Aengus King who supported us all along the journey. The end product looks so dreadful that it’s something to be proud of.
Within a few months, the results are testament to a great effort by all involved.
Enjoyment scores for Sprite advertising jumped from 70% to 94%. “Makes the brand more appealing” indicators moved from 70% to 81%.*
61% of consumers felt that advertising made the brand more appealing (vs 51% norm).*
57% felt that it was a campaign you would talk about (vs 37% norm).*
The campaign has contributed to a 5.9% increase in Sprite growth by Q3 2008 compared to a 6% decline on the part of 7-Up.**
* Millward Brown ** AC Nielsen
And as if to prove effective work = creative glory, the JD Quench campaign was honoured with a Kinsale Shark award and three ICAD bells.
The Irish Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has a major problem: it simply cannot handle the number of calls it gets. Through our previous work with Cheerios sponsored Childline Breakfast Together Week, we learnt many of the serious issues facing the ISPCC on funding the Childline service, such as the fact that as much as 50% of calls to Childline go unanswered.
Simply put - serious cries for help tragically fall on deaf ears for no other reason than lack of funding. To help people understand this situation and dig deep for a truly great charitable organisation we made this film for them. Shot and produced for nothing, the idea is simple and extremely effective.
This is the ISPCC’s very first television commercial. Directed by Richard Chaney, the ad dramatises exactly what underfunding means to the ISPCC and the children who need its services.
Please click here to donate www.ispcc.ie We greatly appreciate your contribution. Dig deep people – charity begins at home.
Thank you to everyone who gave their valuable time; Speers Films, Jonny Speers and Richard Chaney and the guys here; Laura, Ray, Emma, Leona, Jono and Martina.
Developing a campaign to encourage the adult female population of the country to sign up for the National Cervical Cancer Screening Programme was a daunting task. So it’s fitting that the actual production of our ad was one of the most technically complicated productions of our experience.
The concept itself was a simple one, show a woman slowly changing on the outside, growing older, as she explains that she is also changing on the inside and as a result needs to be regularly screened by CervicalCheck.
The practice of aging someone on camera from 25 to 60 proved to be anything but simple. The director Simon Levene, brought onboard the expertise of post house Finish. The plan was to do it completely with CGI and not resort to make-up or prosthetics.
The first challenge was finding our woman. In reality we needed three women, who looked incredibly alike. We cast for families, we needed three generations of one family, who bore a strong resemblance to each other, and who were all also comfortable in front of the camera. The three women we finally cast were from the same family, a grandmother, daughter and granddaughter.
We filmed the ad on location in a park in Bray and also Ardmore Studios. We had to film the women speaking to camera against a green screen, as we needed to control their movements and distance from camera as much as possible. Finish took this footage and basically morphed the three women together, painstakingly painting out hair, and moving eyes, noses and lips between each frame. The face is constantly changing; it’s never any one of the women, but more a combination of all three.
We’re so pleased with the final ad, it’s just mesmerizing and more importantly it dramatically articulates the need for women to be regularly screened for cervical cancer.
Last year we created an integrated campaign for our client Tayto Crisps. By the end of the campaign, Tayto had sold close to 1 million extra packets of crisps. Here’s my version of how it all came to pass…
In 2006 & 2008, we produced a series of can designs for Diet Coke which expanded our creative thinking behind our campaign line: ‘Do your thing’. In effect, these four cans became mini-outdoor postings and helped to bolster the campaign on-pack.
One of the key learnings was the medium itself, designing on-pack has many more ink and print restrictions than traditional processes, simplicity is at the heart of a great can design that can shout louder than its competitors in the cooler cabinet. We also learnt that consumers each had their favourite design and would actively seek these out. Moonlight and Eye were the favourites. For Diet Coke drinkers, it is all about the can. They rummage to the very back of a cooler to find the coldest – and have a great deal of loyalty to its iconic design.
Moving into the second year, we took these learnings and created six new can designs that would each appeal to our audience in different ways. We treated the cans as fashionable accessories allowing the consumer to choose which can they prefer on shelf. The addition of the ‘Choose the look you love’ further strengthened this link with fashion. The can designs themselves were based on current fashion trends, for example lace and animal prints were very much in vogue.
The cans were an unbelievable success and created unbeatable coverage and talkability for the brand. People were actually collecting the complete set of cans which had a permanent home in the top of their fridge.
Outdoor to support the launch had immense cut-through and recall with consumers. Polka Dot, Zebra and Flock were used on 48 sheets, 6 sheets and Phone Kiosks.
The final year for ‘design can’ was 2008. With the introduction of new branding guidelines, the cans were simplified even further. A suite of six designs were created with the inclusion of the two most successful can designs from the previous year: Polka Dot and Zebra.
These designs really pushed what was achievable on-can with the print process. Metallic colouring was employed to great effect, especially on the Hawaiian Floral and Paisley patterns. An understanding of a restrictive print process and an insight into core drinkers made ‘design can’ hugely successful.
Here is the first product ad under the new ‘3 your mind’ campaign theme. With 3 you can do things that you just never thought possible.
In 2006 & 2008, we produced a series of can designs for Diet Coke which expanded our creative thinking behind our campaign line: ‘Do your thing’. In effect, these four cans became mini-outdoor postings and helped to bolster the campaign on-pack.
