Our launch campaign for Absolute Radio breaks today.
The brief was to demonstrate their ‘discover real music’ proposition, in a way that stands out enough to instantly establish the new brand in the public’s mind. We also wanted to let people see behind the scenes at Absolute, continuing the ‘open rebranding’ strategy we developed for them.
So we’ve created a campaign that’s more like mini-series than conventional advertising. It centres around Doug, the fictional security guard at One Golden Square, and the self-appointed guardian of real music.
Doug is played by Jordan Prentice, who last week picked up a Loaded Lafta for the brilliant dark comedy In Bruge, in which he stars with Colin Farrell.
We worked in a really collaborative and agile way with production company Hungryman, director Stephen Pearson, and Jordan. Instead of setting out to film just a set number of highly scripted spots, we instead filmed as much as possible while the actors improvised around some pre-planned scenarios. We have also been filming extra online stuff with Bonney & Klein to capture even more content.
This means that we’ve got a load of content. The Guardian say there are “9 ads”, but there’s more. In fact we’re still shooting today and tomorrow. All this will be released onto the YouTube Channel in stages.
We hope the ads shown on TV are funny enough that people will want to go online to see them again. And when they do they’ll be rewarded with alternative versions, and extra content that deepens the characters. Real fans should have a good search around online; there are some hidden surprises out there.
You can see the media schedule for the first weekend here.
Thanks to Steve and Nick who created the idea, and Petrina, Simon, Sarah and Kevin who made it happen.
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