WINN-DIXIE / SOUTHEAST GROCERS
We worked closely with the Winn-Dixie marketing team to create a multi-year, multi-platform campaign, with seven major shoots and hundreds of deliverables, for broadcast, web, social, radio, in-store and internal use.
We first began working with Winn-Dixie when they were looking to re-engage with broadcast and reinvigorate their brand after a period of lower-key advertising. Through a months-long process we moved through multiple, very different, big-picture concepts.
Through a rigourous process of brainstorming and ideation, we landed on developing a new pair of brand ambassadors – the Winn-Win Twinns, a larger than life, enthusiastic embodiment of a shopper’s pleasure in finding great bargains on great food. We built their visual identity from scratch and launched and in-depth casting process which fed back into our refining of the concept.
The success of the first spots and the impact of the characters on brand recall and enthusiasm led to their visual cues being incorporated into the wider brand visual identity, and the actors would appear – in character – at store openings, promotional events, and on billboards across the Southeast over multiple years up to SEG’s purchase by Aldi.
As part of our work with Winn-Dixie, we challenged ourselves always to generate more material than needed on each shoot, in a mix of scripted “time permitting” scenes and on-set improv, making best use of our time with talent and on location. That gave us a rich bank of material that could be used between shoots for additional spots or the refresh existing spots – and gave us enough high quality footage that when Covid lockdowns closed down production, we were able to keep generating new commercials to fill the nine months between shoots.
H&R BLOCK
For the past two years, we’ve worked with H&R Block to generate the bulk of their annual tax season advertising. In this collaboration, we’ve mostly worked with scripts developed in-house by their marketing team but have also developed some of the scripts ourselves – fitting our own work seamlessly into the very clear creative vision they’ve developed internally, building on existing brand assets and look and feel.
With hard traffic dates and a very narrow advertising window for tax prep, we’ve been able to work to some very tight deadlines and give the H&R Block team the flexibility to react to newly identified marketing needs as and when they’ve emerged during tax season – going from first brief through ideation, writing, production, post and delivery of a full live-action broadcast spot in just over three weeks.
We’ve also focussed on generating permanent physical design assets wherever possible, which have helped us keep costs down for subsequent productions – and given the client assets they can use for other on-going social content in the run up to tax day.
