The Thinkboxes Winner - December 08 / January 09

T-Mobile - Dance

  T-Mobile clinched the first Thinkboxes award of 2009 with a unique and vibrant take on its ‘Life’s for sharing’ strapline.

At 11 am on Tuesday, 15 January, a single commuter started dancing in the middle of London’s Liverpool Street station, one of the busiest on the TfL network, to music being played through the station’s loudspeakers.

The dance grew in size as more people joined in, until there were 350 dancers performing the choreographed routine. The spectacle of the staged event, which was captured by 10 hidden cameras, prompted hundreds of unsuspecting members of the public to join in.

The film of the dance extravaganza was quickly turned into a TV ad to illustrate the mobile phone network operator’s claim that it brings people together.

Sam Taylor, head of advertising and sponsorship at T-Mobile, says the response was ‘phenomenal’.

‘We wanted to capture a moment that people couldn’t help but share. People were caught up in the moment, calling and texting their friends to talk about this great thing happening in the station.’

The Academy judges named T-Mobile the winner in the closest Thinkboxes contest yet. The ad just edged out Virgin Atlantic’s ‘Love at First Flight’ ad, in which a group of flight attendants turn heads at an airport in the 80s. In third place was Audi’s ‘We’ve unboxed the box’.

Academy members enthused about the high quality of the shortlisted ads. Laurence Green, founding partner of Fallon, said: ‘Hurray for T-Mobile: an idea that happens to be an ad. Everything else, good as it is, is just advertising.’

To see the full shortlist and check out the winning entry, go to www.thinkbox.tv/thethinkboxes.

‘We wanted to capture a moment that people couldn’t help themselves but share’

Sam Taylor
Head of advertising and sponsorship,
T-Mobile

Ad info

• Client Lysa Hardy, head of brand and communications
• Brief To encourage people to create and share magical moments using T-Mobile
• Ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi
• Creative team Stephen Howell, Rick Dodds
• Production Company Partizan
• Director Michael Gracey

Other ads on the podium

Virgin - Atlantic Love At First Sight

In celebrating its 25th anniversary, Virgin Atlantic has taken us
back to 1984 – a time when yuppies bestrode the earth carrying brick-sized mobile phones and when we still had things called miners who were always on strike. To a soundtrack of Relax by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, the spot features a phalanx of glamorous, red-suited air stewardesses (as flight attendants were called back then), turning heads as they stride through an airport terminal – prompting one awestruck passenger to exclaim that he’ll have to change his airline. Ending on a “still red hot” pay-off line, the ad seeks to underline the brand’s continuing aspiration to lead the market in terms of innovation and quality. It celebrates the transformation brought about in the industry since its launch and prompt consumers to look to the future with as much optimism as Virgin Atlantic did back in 1984.

Audi - We’ve Unboxed The Box

Audi gives us a memorably epic exercise in animated origami here as it presents an Audi Q5 being formed out of a humble cardboard box. SUVs are commonly perceived to be crude and inefficient – in a word, “boxy”. By substituting straight lines with curves, Audi has created an SUV with one of the lowest drag coefficients in its category. So by focusing on this strong product truth (the car’s streamlined design), this ad is able to deliver one of the most important parts of the brief – to challenge category norms. Thus the campaign idea is articulated by the line: “We’ve unboxed the box – the new streamlined Audi Q5.” The background music is Woody Guthrie’s Car Song and there are lots of clever touches as we watch the animated stick-man working his magic on the box – for instance, the way he catches his reflection in a cardboard wing-mirror.

Also shortlisted for December 2008 / January 2009

Guinness - Channel 4 Film Idents

Each of these sponsorship idents features a luminary from the technical side of film-making – and the style of each ident makes a witty play on the craft skill on show. The one featuring Sam Sneade, the film editor on Sexy Beast, features startling cutting; we see Alan MacDonald, a set designer on The Queen, rearranging his sitting room furniture before cracking a can of Guinness and sitting down to watch a film on TV; while James Grogan, a stuntman on Batman, drops on to his sofa from a great height, nonchalantly catching the can of Guinness that follows him down; and the claymation can fashioned by the animation director David Riddett turns out to be somewhat frisky. The brief was not just to associate Guinness Draught in a Can with the sponsorship of Channel 4 Film but also to promote the idea of drinking Guinness Draught at home.

PG - Tips Breakfast

This latest “Monkey and Al” execution for PG Tips pays homage to one of the best-loved comedy routines ever broadcast on British television – the Morecambe and Wise “breakfast” sketch. It turns the making of a cup of tea into a beautifully choreographed slapstick dance routine – using, as the original sketch did, a tune called The Stripper as raunchy background music. It shows Al (played by Johnny Vegas) filling the kettle by catching jets of water that spout into the air in time to the music from the kitchen tap; and Monkey (played by Monkey) milking a cow in the garden by pulling rhythmically on its udders. As they conclude their routine, they sit down, drink their cuppas and acknowledge “it’s the taste” that makes them do it. This ad continues the brand’s recent tradition of paying tribute to national icons – for instance, Monkey’s online address to the nation last Christmas.