Valspar is the only paint brand in the market with the ability to match every colour visible to the human eye.
Our job was to make this incredible colour-matching USP resonate for UK consumers, on a shoestring budget.
Our insight was that, from feeling blue to seeing red, people have always used colour to express themselves. And how Valspar has always inspired people to be true to who they are and what they believe, through their tagline “Trust Your Colours”.
So, rather than just creating a press ad, we harnessed the news itself and invited the nation to embrace their diversity of opinion – showing that, as masters of over 2.2million colours, however you feel, Valspar has a colour to match.
To bring this idea to life, we just needed a news story that everyone had strong feelings about. Enter the newly appointed Prime Minister, Boris Johnson.
Brought in as the man to deliver Brexit, they don’t get more divisive than Boris. We used his ‘love him or hate him’ persona to launch our idea – using Valspar’s fun, evocative colour names, to express the nation’s divided feelings and opinions towards him.
To get reach on our limited budget, we entered the idea into the Evening Standard cover wrap competition. And won. Earning Valspar, and our idea, £175K worth of media.
Launching on 3rd September 2019 – Boris’s first address back to Parliament after the summer recess – we brought colour and lightness to one of the UK’s most emotionally charged debates, reaching 2.4 million people and inspiring them to express their own opinions through Valspar colours.