How Dreams Created a 30-Metre Mattress Installation for Gillian Anderson
Lately, sleeping has become the new partying. Matthew Walker told us ‘Why We Sleep’ in his book, which went viral among millennials and gen z and ever since, the focus on sleep has been an irreplaceable pillar in our newfound love of ‘wellness’.
And while we’re happy to try out all kinds of essential oils to drip on our pillows, silk eye masks and soporific ambience stories told by Headspace’s storytellers, we rarely think about the most obvious pillar of sleep. A really good mattress.
The conundrum doesn’t end there though - a ‘good’ mattress varies from person to person, just as much as a good pillow does. Dreams, the UK’s most loved bed retailer, knows this better than anyone.
That’s why its latest £4m campaign starring Gillian Anderson prompts us to ‘Think what a Dreams bed could do for you’. Teaming up with M&C Saatchi London and Mindseye production, the brand created a world of 200 real Dreams mattresses.
In the ambient purple-tinted film we see the Sex Education star float through the mattress city, as she pushes one of the rows of beds to achieve a domino effect.
LBB’s Zoe Antonov speaks to Sophie Lewis, chief strategy officer and Guy Bradbury, creative partner at M&C Saatchi about what the ‘sleep paradox’ means for customers looking to improve their sleep, how the incredible mattress installation was built and enhanced with CG, and what happened to all the Dreams mattresses after the shoot.
LBB> Tell us more about the brief for this campaign and how you tackled it at the start.
Sophie> The brief from Dreams was clear. After an extended period of time investing solely in promotional communications (versus brand), key brand health metrics were in sharp decline. We needed to reinvigorate the brand and better align it to the primary purchase driver amongst our target audience: quality.
Dreams also knows that everybody is different and that people have different preferences when it comes to mattresses and sleep – it’s not a one size fits all solution. We therefore set out to create a campaign that would drive Dreams’ quality credentials, whilst highlighting the extensive range of mattresses on offer, to ensure you can find the perfect one for you.
From the outset, we understood that your quality of sleep has a big impact on your quality of life. But not everyone thinks of their mattress as being the key to a great night’s sleep. This led us to our role for communications: to elevate the importance of the humble mattress in relation to the quality of your sleep (and therefore life).
The winning creative idea was one of four early concepts we shared with Dreams, but it stood out from the outset for its simplicity and distinctiveness.
LBB> Tell me more about the tagline - "Think what a Dreams bed could do for you." Where did it come from and what is its main message?
Guy> The line was designed to get people thinking about their own mattress and what it does for them, and if they’re left feeling a little short changed, then they should find out what a Dreams mattress or bed could do for them. It was born directly out of our role for communication and acted as a strong call-to-action in the context of all the benefits we’d previously landed.
LBB> Was there a central research that informed the strategy and creative approach of the campaign and if so, what were its main findings?
Sophie> Fortunately for us, before Dreams even came to us with the brief, they’d already done substantial consumer research to inform their business strategy – a new five-year plan with marketing at its heart and a very clear direction for us to work with.
The insight that fuelled our creative strategy was already out there. The importance of sleep is very much in the cultural zeitgeist - it’s now widely talked about in relation to performance, health and happiness and is publicly acknowledged to be fundamental to our overall health and wellness.
And yet we know that buying a mattress is low on people's lists of things to do. We think about all sorts of other things we can do to improve our sleep, but mattresses and beds seem to be a long way down this list. A mattress isn’t very interesting and is an investment. This is the ‘Great Sleep Paradox’ - everyone wants to sleep better, but most of us don’t think about finding the right bed for us, in relation to this.
And of course, Dreams is best placed to help you find the right bed for you - there are 209 stores across the UK, and we think you can’t possibly buy something as important as a mattress without having a lie down on it, first. Dreams has experts in-store who can help you find exactly the right bed for you and they also have their ‘Sleepmatch’ technology which scans your body and suggests some possibilities to suit you.
LBB> Why was Gillian Anderson the perfect choice for the spot and what was it like working with her on it?
Guy> When we were looking for a brand ambassador, we wanted someone who could elevate the role mattresses play in our lives, connect with a slightly older affluent audience and also talk about all the mysterious, almost magical things that a mattress could do for us. So Gillian became an obvious choice.
When we tested Gillian against other celebrities, our intuition was right and she was way ahead on key brand measures.
The timing of the new season of Sex Education was a brilliant coincidence
LBB> Tell me about the art installation itself - are those all real mattresses? How long did it take to build? Why did you go for this approach?
Guy> A mattress is a basic white rectangle, which is pretty uninspiring. So, we knew we needed to elevate it by creating a new brand world.
To make mattresses more interesting we decided to bring hundreds of them together to create more scale and a more dreamlike world inspired by Monument Valley and Escher.
We worked with an amazing production designer called Mikey Hollywood who turned this vision into a working installation, which was made up of over 200 genuine Dreams mattresses.
LBB> What was the biggest challenge when it came to building the set? And how did you manage to keep it together while Gillian walks on it?
Guy> The biggest challenge was creating something that looked distinctive, premium and had enough scale to elevate the impact of the humble mattress. This was particularly difficult in the time we had available.
We also had to arrange the different mattresses in exactly the right position in time with Gillian’s choreography, all without Gillian on set.
This was all done using a timed animatic, measured to the inch.
LBB> What about the most fun part about building it, and overall in the production process?
Guy> I would say the most fun part of this as a team wasn't designing it on screen, but actually seeing it then recreated for real, at scale, turning six cm mattresses on screen into a 30-metre installation
LBB> What happened to the installation after the shoot?
Guy> A lot of the foreground mattresses were created in CGI to save on wastage. But to make it safe for Gillian to walk on (even with a wire) we couldn’t avoid rigging the mattresses with a skeleton steel frame. At the end of the shoot, all the mattresses were either sent to our third-party recycling partner or a recovery centre where they were thoroughly cleaned and recertified for sale. No mattresses went to the landfill. Dreams are zero landfill across the whole business.
