Woolmark needed to shatter millennial’s misconceptions about wool. In consumer’s minds, wool was for suits, formal wear and winter, but too hot and itchy for warm climates or sports.
Woolmark wanted a film that dramatised wool’s unexpected benefit - breathability. So we worked with TBWA to tell the story of a woman who is suffocated by an artificial world of stifling clothing made from the coats of strange synthetic sheep. A filmic approach to storytelling and a visual style that appealed to millennials elevated the idea.
The hero begins by fitting into her artificial world, yet to discover wool. She is clothed in plastic and repairing pipes at an apartment building, yet to be gifted the merino wool clothing. This ensures the audience feels what discovering wool means to her, experiencing what it’s like to touch wool having known only synthetics. To further her journey from fake to natural, she lives in a constricted artificial-looking apartment.
Our production design was designed to add scale and cinema, while appealing to Woolmark’s target for this campaign; millennials. The character lives in a superficially bright world, mashing up colour and plastic in a decaying neon Soviet Futurism style. Featuring disintegrating space-race-era facades smeared in Miami pastels, flamboyant but phoney, suffocating and desperately oversaturated. Pipes of lurid liquids run through the city, leaking puddles of toxic colour.
It was important to us that the film wasn’t too bleak, and lightened by a playful tone. The film is a dialectic, setting the natural, authentic, and functional against the fake and surfacey.
To make it cinematic and emotionally engaging, the audience had to believe that the world could exist. Authenticity came from texture and detail so it feels like a place you could actually visit.
The people are as important to the fabric of the film as the art direction and lighting. They are as phoney as the world they live in; over-coiffed in sweaty plastics, with too much makeup and plastic surgery. In a world where everything is about appearances, it is hard to have genuine human connection, so they seem blind to each other, lost in a malaise of self.
The PVC haze lifts as she wears Merino wool activewear, jogging past synthetic sheep and up a mountain. In a rugged and muted landscape above the neon smog, she encounters Merino Wool sheep for the first time.
The campaign resulted in $2.25 million worth of global media coverage, and all with only a small global media spend.
The global online film captured over 6.6 million video views and was supported by large-format and street OOH across New York, San Francisco, London, Shanghai and Tokyo with a total campaign reach of 161 million impressions worldwide.
Activations drove over 500, 000 interactions and included influencer-led fitness classes and Merino Wool capsule collection launches from brand partners, including P.E. Nation and Erin Snow, highlighting ‘breathability’. The campaign shifted purchase intent through over 84,821 Amazon landing page visits driven via digital media.