SKY VOD AND WT ADS
In 2017 Sky partnered with Illumination’s Despicable Me 3 to launch a 55Mb minimum speed guarantee on its fibre broadband: a guaranteed 55Mb minimum download speed to the hub within the first 30 days, or your money back. Working with the agency WCRS, I designed and animated the campaign’s digital advertising, a family of motion and static ads that ran on digital TV, on video on demand, on WeTransfer and on the digital screens in rail stations, across the London Underground and at the roadside.
I was responsible for the motion design, layout and typography across every execution. I generated the Despicable Me 3 character footage myself from the supplied toolkit and key art, so each ad could have its own character moment: Minions binge-watching box sets, heading off on holiday and behind bars, and the film’s villain Balthazar Bratt dancing with his boombox.
The challenge was making one idea work across very different screens. Portrait digital six-sheets are silent and give an ad a slot of around five seconds, so the message has to land visually, with one line and one character. The landscape TV spot has sound and 15 seconds to tell a longer story, and the WeTransfer takeover has to work around the upload panel that sits on top of it. A fixed layout system (the hanging Sky Fibre Max sign, a big headline, the character, then the guarantee, logos and legal line) kept every format recognisably part of the same campaign.
Services
Motion design, animation, graphic designClient
Sky (Sky Fibre Unlimited)Agency
WCRSDIGITAL 6-SHEETS
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Digital 6-sheets are the portrait digital screens found on railway concourses, along London Underground corridors and platforms, at bus shelters and in shopping centres. The name comes from the traditional paper six-sheet poster, roughly 1.2 × 1.8 metres, that the screens replaced. Each one is a 1080 × 1920 pixel display running a loop of ads, usually silent, with a slot of only a few seconds per ad: five seconds on the Underground, six on the national rail network.
The four executions were built to that spec as 5-second, 25fps films. They share one locked layout (the Sky Fibre Max sign hanging from the top of the screen, the headline, the character, and the Despicable Me 3 and Sky logos anchored at the foot with the legal line), so only the headline and the character change and the ads read as a series when they follow one another on a concourse. Each lands one idea, from Minions binge-watching box sets to Balthazar Bratt and his boombox, before closing on the 55Mb minimum speed guarantee and the call to action: search Sky Fibre Max.
DIGITAL ESCALATOR PANELS
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Digital escalator panels, or DEPs, are the portrait screens that line the walls beside the escalators in London Underground stations, one after another from top to bottom. Each is a 1080 × 1920 pixel screen, and the run can play in sync, so a single ad repeats down the whole escalator as people ride past. Slots are longer than on a D6, at 10 seconds, but the audience is moving, so the ad still has to read in passing.
The DEP versions extend the D6 films to 10 seconds with a structure built for the escalator: they open on the 55Mb minimum speed guarantee, cut to the headline and character, and close on the call to action to search Sky Fibre Max, so whichever moment someone catches, the offer is never far away. The series also swaps holiday movies for a fourth scenario, a Minion “Gaming with no glitches”.
VIDEO ON DEMAND
The 15-second landscape spot for digital TV and video on demand. It opens on the 55Mb minimum speed guarantee, cuts through the streaming scenarios from the D6 series, and closes on the Minions holding up their “No To Slow” placards alongside the call to action to search Sky Fibre Max. Because the TV spot and the D6s were built from the same assets and type, the campaign stayed consistent from the living room to the station.
WETRANSFER ADS
Static
WeTransfer sells its homepage background as a full-screen ad, with the upload panel sitting on top of it on the left. The static execution is designed around that panel: Gru and his spiked rocket car fill the space beside it, the “Superfast speed guarantee, or your money back” headline takes the right-hand side, and a single “Find out more” button sits at the foot of the screen.
Animated
The animated version brings the Minions’ “No To Slow” placards to life next to the upload panel, with the 55Mb guarantee and offer copy beside them. Someone waiting on a file to upload is exactly the right person to hear about faster broadband, and the animation gives them something to watch while they wait.
