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.
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…
We’ve just got the results of a tracking study for a Whiskey Brand we have been working with in European markets. It makes very satisfying reading.
Three years ago McCanns got together with C&C after a pitch for one of their portfolio spirit brands. It was a singularly interesting project. The brand in question was number 3 in its category in the global market in 2005 and C&C wanted to make its move – charging the C&C marketing team and McCann with the rather onerous task of bringing a brand of doubtless possibility but very limited awareness to the success levels of its main competitors.
Its competitors are huge global brands – Jack Daniels, Johnny Walker, Jameson – with budgets matching these huge reputations. Simply put; it was a David v Goliath project. On top of that, any communications had to work in markets as diverse as Latvia, Bulgaria, Sweden and South Africa. If that were not challenging enough, each market has widely differing rules as to how we could advertise.
We aired the first campaign across Europe in the Autumn of 2006.
If you’re having any problems with the end line it means “Rough Country – Smooth Whiskey.” It was the start of something of a phenomenon. When McCanns and C&C’s senior international brand managers met just over a year after our launch commercial, the brand was something of a new superstar. Irlande…douze points…Irland…12 Points; Írsko…12 Bodov; Irlandia…Dwanaście Punktów; Irland…Tolv Punkterna.
We aired the follow-up commercial in Autumn 2008.
As a result of a simple, uncomplicated but thoroughly worked out creative strategy, Tullamore Dew has become the fastest growing whiskey – Irish, Scotch, Bourbon, any whiskey – in the world. After just 12 months total sales were up 19% versus market growth rate of 6% - the charts were and remain off the scale. Absolute credit where credit is deserved, Ann O’Leary who heads the C&C Tullamore Dew team, picked an AIM award and IAPI Adfx award in the campaign’s first year.
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.
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.
