Montage of advertising campaigns the 999 design team wish they'd worked on

999's creative hearts - campaigns we wish we'd worked on

9 Sep 2015

2 min read

As we're all creative types, we often gaze admiringly at advertising or marketing campaigns and wish we'd had the chance to work on them. Rather than keeping our appreciation to ourselves, we thought it would be fun to compile some of our personal favourites and show what floats our individual boats.

There are too many to share in one blog post, so here's the first instalment of brand inspiration from each of the studios to kick off:

1980s cigarette advertising - specifically Silk Cut campaigns

- Paul Humphreys, Senior Designer, Glasgow

Having never been a smoker you might think this is a bit of an odd choice (I agree). So why Silk Cut? The simple answer is: the ads were brilliant. The 1980s brought about increasingly strict legislation around the advertising and promotion of tobacco products. Brands found themselves unable to show the act of smoking, the product or the packaging in their campaigns. In 1983, Saatchi & Saatchi were commissioned to promote the Silk Cut brand. What they produced was an amazing series of creative, ingenious and sometimes surreal ads featuring beautiful purple silk punctured or lacerated by rhino horns, shark fins and the odd snow plough. The ads were often irreverent and always striking. In short, S&S managed to produce a long-running campaign that never failed to communicate clearly which brand of cancer stick they were advertising. The Silk Cut campaign is truly iconic and a brilliant example of how creative solutions can be found even when hindered by massively restrictive legislation.

Silk Cut advertising campaign

Sonos Your Home, ad campaign

- Alex Klement, Designer, London

Sonos Your Home is a very dynamic looking ad campaign where the images feel very much alive and have a 3D look about them. However, what's truly amazing is that most of it is physically created and photographed (by Madrid-based photographer, Paloma Rincón) with minimal CGI retouching afterwards. The photographs themselves say very little about the hours of work required to produce images like this because they look so much like CGI artworks. I find it incredibly refreshing that studios are still prepared to craft such fine work.

SONOS home studio advertising campaign

Clemenger BBDO, Dumb ways to die

- Jacqui Liddell, Designer, Glasgow

Funny, catchy, quirky and uber cute in a disturbingly morbid way!

- Poppy Smith, Account Director, London

On paper, a brief from a transport authority on safety sounds dull, but Clemenger BBDO turned this on its head and created an amazingly successful campaign. I love the quirky approach and how a difficult subject was treated with humour using an extremely catchy tune. It was executed brilliantly across every touchpoint imaginable.

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when this concept was presented to the client to see their initial reaction to this bold approach!

Dumb ways to die advertising campaign

Uber app design

- Julian Crichlow, Studio Manager, London

Uber is a smartphone app that allows users to order a taxi from wherever they are. It has a map that allows users to see where drivers are locally and how long it will take for them to pick a passenger up. It gives clarity on what fares will amount to and lets users pay by card and share the cost with other riders. Both the drivers and passengers rate each other, which tends to lead to a greater quality of service.

WHY? Because it works so well!

Uber app advertising

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