Marmite Oxford Street interactive Christmas lights

December 21, 2012June 11, 2013 | Zapfly

Marmite sponsored the Oxford Street lights for Christmas 2012. Their active campaign at the time was based around the ‘you either love it or hate it’ concept.
My team had been challenged with coming up with an imaginative way to bring this concept to life socially, primarily based on Facebook. The conclusion was to invite consumers to take pictures, demonstrating their love or hate of Marmite, which was uploaded onto a digital interactive bus shelter on London’s Oxford Street, by Selfridges. This bus shelter, just below the interactive display, was fitted with a 55” interactive screen and camera that enabled visitors to have their photo taken.

The interactive Christmas Lights display was a first for Oxford Street.

Aside from public generated images, the giant digital display also featured a series of Christmas Characters including Father Christmas and his elves, revealing their passion, positive or negative, for Marmite.

After moderation of the face shots, we sent participants an email with a designated time for when their image will appear on the screen. For people who were unable to view their face on the Marmite banner in situ, we set up a Facebook CCTV feed and broadcast live footage to the Marmite FB channel as well as an online gallery.

In addition to Facebook design, build and installation, we also got involved in the physical installation, as the crews shut down sections of Oxford Street through the night and trucks moved in to hoist the displays into place. Based in a test booth on the rooftop of Selfridges, we uploaded images to the display below, hanging around 15m above the street.

With an anticipated 40 million visitors expected to shop at London’s Oxford Street during Christmas, the sign had a very significant audience.

The display won a Silver Creative Circle 2013 for Digital: Best use of DOOH.

Here are some images of the physical installation of the display.

Work begins on Oxford Street

The main display is hoisted into place

Camera 1 in place

View from the top

An eerily quiet Oxford Street

The Tribal crew still happy at 2am

Plugging all the wires in

Moments before the rain came

VW One Film shoot

September 10, 2012June 30, 2015 | Zapfly

Last summer, I executive produced a global campaign for VW around the launch of the new Golf 7. Part of the work created included a personalised film we shot out in the US. This film was known as the One Film and was based around choices that users entered on the www.onething.com website. Their input was then rendered in a personalised movie and served back to them as a dreamlike view of a journey through their one things.

We worked with JK and Todd Kellstein at Paydirt in LA, to capture a lovely 2 minute short film – our take if you will of the classic American road movie. The team also created two TVC commercials for global release. Below is one of those TV ads that aired in Hong Kong.

Below are some behind the scenes images from the 5 days we were shooting in California:

Big Sur

Day 1

Crew on Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Crew on Day 4

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Day 2

Launch of the new Corsa – Work from the archive

April 16, 2012June 17, 2013 | Zapfly

Back in 2006, whilst based at PCI Fitch as Head of the Web team, we worked on amongst other things, a large animation for the main screen on the Vauxhall stand, which sat behind a half-pipe. The animation was several thousand pixels wide and played on a screen around 11m wide.

Gathering design and creative input from our surround environment and internet research, we crafted a completely new alphabet for the Corsa launch, used in this animation.

This approach was such a resounding success that it was adopted unilaterally by Vauxhall on other Corsa release material creative work.

Below are some images from the motorshow in London, showing all the different eleemnts the new font was used within as well as the main event, which was the half pipe.

Large animation behind car

New Corsa with our creative graphics

BMX bikes on half pipe

Welcome to the Corsa stand

People on the Corsa stand

BMX on half pipe

Corsa reveal on stand

Same of new alphabet branding

End of the BMX and rollerblade session on te half pipe

Interactive table games

Graphic details on the car

HTC One global launch

March 19, 2012June 11, 2013 | Zapfly

During my time at Mother, I was the Head of Integrated Production on the HTC account and worked on the launch of the company’s latest and greatest smartphone, to combat top models from Apple and Samsung.

My production team co-ordinated the creation of all global launch material, ranging from a photo shoot of the new handset, the TVC of a photorgaphy student sky diving with the HTC One handset to collateral for all the subsequent digital channels with interesting behind the scenes material as well as social commentary and a PR event at the launch of the HTC One on the site of the TVC drop zone, in the desert around Arizona.

Here is how we made the TVC.

Honda at Frankfurt 2011 motorshow

September 16, 2011August 15, 2016 | Zapfly

For several months leading up to the Frankfurt 2011 motorshow, I executive produced the Honda stand with an excellent team at Wieden & Kennedy. Creative directing the stand was Tom Seymour and David Bruno. You can see more of their work on their website www.davidandtom.co.uk.

Collaborating with a production company just outside of Frankfurt, Germany, a Belgian artist based in Marseille and Honda clients based across Europe and Japan, we designed, built and implemented a stand for Honda in less than 4 months from start to finish. The design was meant to visual representation of the roads to zero emissions for the motor show, one of Honda’s key cornerstone values.

The stand was covered by the full breadth of auto press and design magazines, including Wallpaper (who used one of my images).

Here are more images of the stand I took for Wieden + Kennedy’s press releases.

Links for further information on the stand:

Where are the Joneses – Work from the archive

July 25, 2011June 17, 2013 | Zapfly

One of the most demanding projects I have lead was for Ford, whilst I was based at Imagination. I was brought on board to create a far reaching social media platform, at the time when WordPress and Wikis were still very much in their infancy from a public consciousness perspective.

Ford wanted to utilise social media to engage with people in a more genuine manner than just pitch sales messages and thereby establish a closer connection between audience and brand.

The aim of the project was to tell a story and inviting readers to contribute to it, thus making them feel engaged, rather than “talked at”.

The result was an interactive online comedy called “Where Are The Joneses?”, which followed the adventures of two characters, Dawn and Ian Jones, who were searching for siblings after learning that their father was a prolific sperm donor.

Accompanied by my film crew, the cast improvised an episode a day on a 3 month European road-trip. We asked Ford to provide a car fit for the journey and paint it in the pantone derived from the colour used by Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow, about transforming your business by being remarkable.

Each episode was uploaded to our WRTJ channel on YouTube and discussed in an accompanying blog, hosted on WordPress, which featured videos from viewers, images, diaries written by the characters and audience comments. (www.wherearethejoneses.com)

The wiki allowed the audience to help shape the storyline, write the script, create new characters and even cast themselves to appear in the show. It was distributed widely across social networking sites to maximise audience participation, utilising everything from Facebook to Twitter, GoogleMaps, Flickr, Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, iTunes and MySpace amongst others.

The result was extensive coverage in mainstream media, both UK national and trade press as well as national TV coverage. This helped to set the campaign up as a rewarding articulation of Ford’s brand positioning “Feel the difference. It also earned the project a Webby nomination.

This is Episode 1 that started the whole European adventure off and introduced us to Dawn and Ian.